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News Of The Weird

by By Chuck Shepherd

January 11, 2007





BUNGEE BABY



Nick Fennelly, 31, was rushing his in-labor girlfriend, Sharon

Taylor, into the parking lot at Calderdale Royal Hospital in West

Yorkshire, England, just as their baby’s head started to appear, and,

in a corridor inside, little Ashleigh shot out of her mother so quickly

that Fennelly couldn’t grab her in time. She hit the floor, skidded,

and then came back on the umbilical cord, according to a December

report in the Halifax Courier. Except for a bruise, Ashleigh is fine.





LATEST RELIGIOUS MESSAGES



Checking a boy just before his bar mitzvah, Orthodox rabbis in

Sydney, Australia, found that his rabbi-supervised circumcision had not

quite been “complete” and ruled that it must be done again because,

officially, the boy was not a Jew. The boy’s mother objected and

instead found a Progressive synagogue for the bar mitzvah, though the

Orthodox rabbi, Moshe Gutnick, said she is “fooling the child” into

believing he is Jewish.





POOR BILLY GRAHAM



Ruth Bell Graham, the frail wife of evangelist Billy Graham, has

split with her elder son Franklin by rejecting as her burial place

Franklin’s planned memorial library for Billy near Charlotte, N.C. (in

favor of her mountaintop retreat west of there). According to a

December Washington Post report, Ruth’s long-time friend, the crime

writer Patricia Cornwell, told Ruth that the largely bookless “library”

is “truly tacky,” featuring for example a mechanical cow that greets

visitors, and straw on the floor to resemble the barn of Billy’s youth.

Franklin’s thinking is that the memorial should draw a new generation

of worshipers and donors, including kids who would be attracted by the

farm motif.





FINE POINTS OF THE LAW



In October, Judge Robert Armstrong of Riverside, Calif., dismissed

an indecent exposure charge against a woman solely because a state

statute makes criminal only a person who “lewdly exposes his person, or

the private parts thereof,” which to Judge Armstrong clearly limited

the law to males. The prosecutor quickly filed an appeal.





LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS



Morgan Conatser, 29, was arrested a short time after making his way

awkwardly out to the parking lot of the Guitars and Cadillacs store in

De Queen, Ark., in November, with a guitar stuffed inside his clothes.

The manager initially stopped Conatser, recovered the guitar, and let

him go, but decided to call the sheriff’s office when he realized

Conatser had probably also hidden a wireless sound system in his pants.

And Derek Pierson Jr., 21, was arrested in Shreveport, La., in November

after allegedly attempting to rob a convenience store. He was an easy

collar, as he had somehow not noticed that among the customers waiting

in line at the cash register was uniformed police officer L.J. Scott,

of the armed robbery task force.





COUNTRY LIVIN’



Jeffrey Turpin, 41, was arrested in August in Wytheville, Va., for

malicious wounding of a woman after chasing her across two farms on a

tractor. According to a witness, when the woman fell, Turpin dropped

the tractor’s bucket to the ground and rolled it over her, breaking her

leg. And three women were arrested in Columbus, Ga., in September and

charged with forcing a pregnant teenager to drink turpentine, which the

three (and several other family members) had heard would induce an

abortion. MTW