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News Of The Weird

by By chuck Shepherd

October 05, 2006

EXPENSIVE LESSONS



It’s usually in Florida where one reads of lonely widows persuaded to pay extravagant prices for dance lessons, but Mimi Monica Wong, 61, is a different kind of dancing widow, according to an August Wall Street Journal report. A Hong Kong private banker with a top-drawer client list, Wong contracted to pay US$15.4 million over eight years for cha-cha and rumba lessons from two world-class instructors so she could excel on the international championship Latin dance circuit. However, she soured on their motivational approach (“lazy cow” and “[move your] fat arse” were allegedly part of their dialogue) and sued. In September, a court ordered Wong’s $8 million advance returned, and she has since signed on with another instructor whose fee is a bargain: $21,000 a month.







JUDGES GONE WILD!



Trial judge Florentino Floro was fired by the Philippines supreme court in April, and his appeal rejected in August, after investigators found that he had claimed to rely on three mystic dwarves—named Armand, Luis and Angel—for psychic powers and the ability to write while in a trance. Floro protested media accounts of his firing to The Wall Street Journal in July, denying that dwarves helped him decide cases and writing that Armand, Luis and Angel are merely “spirit guides” and that he himself is “gifted” from God “to heal and to prophesy.”







UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT



In July, according to a Canadian Press report, a Wal-Mart in St.-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, received a bomb threat and immediately dispatched about 40 employees on duty to look through the store to find the explosive. Customers were allowed to leave, though, and ultimately, it was a false alarm.







UNINTELLIGENT DESIGN



A puppy with six legs and two penises was reported outside the Kwang Sung Temple in Malaysia in June, according to that country’s Star newspaper. And a kitten was born with two faces in July in Grove City, Ohio, and another with just one eye and no nose was born in Syracuse, N.Y., in April. And the World Aquarium in St. Louis, Mo., ran an exhibit in August featuring 10 two-headed snakes and turtles. And a 24-year-old businessman, in a hospital in New Delhi, India, in August, was reported to have two functioning penises.







YIKES



Sanju Bhagat was admitted to a hospital in Nagpur, India, in August, where doctors expected to find a very large abdominal cyst, but instead, said surgeon Ajay Mehta, “To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside.” Bhagat was a victim of fetus in fetu, in which his birth twin had migrated to the inside of his body and continued to leech off of him. Mehta extracted feet, hands, hair and jaw.







THINNING THE HERD



Reuters reported in August that a man was killed in his workshop on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro when he tried to open a rocket-propelled grenade—probably to recover scrap metal—with a sledgehammer. And two days before that, in the Indiana town of Brazil, a 31-year-old man was accidentally killed in the explosion of the pipe bomb he was carrying—probably to be used to help him catch fish in Birch Creek. MTW