News Of The Weird-973

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Veteran criminal George Kaminski, 53, complained in March to a Sharon (Pa.) Herald reporter about his most recent prison assignment, to a minimum-security facility in Mercer, Pa., because the grounds were short on clover. Kaminski has collected 72,927 four-leaf clovers in the last 10 years, entirely on the grounds of various prisons, but he is alarmed that an Alaskan man now claims to have 76,000 and has applied to the Guinness Book for recognition. “The (Alaskan) guy’s got the whole world,” said Kaminski, “(but) I have two or three acres.”

*The Netherlands Healthcare Inspectorate issued a report in March accusing some dermatologists at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam of concealing the local outbreak of a sexually transmitted disease in 2003 just so they could publish a first-in-time article about it in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases later that year. Infections of lymphogranuloma venereum went from 14 at the time of initial outbreak to more than 100 now. (The EMC doctors acknowledged not reporting the initial outbreak, but said the disease was not at that time on the list of diseases required to be reported.)

A 24-year-old woman was hospitalized in April in Nassau County, N.Y., after her boyfriend, tossing sticks to his dog, decided to toss his knife, instead, but the knife’s handle loop caught on a finger when he flung it, and it snapped back, lodging in the woman’s neck. She corroborated the story, and the man was not criminally charged. (An officer asked him, “When you threw the knife, what did you expect the dog to do?”)
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected]or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD