Fun_People Archive
9 Mar
Weirdness [471] - 14Feb97

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sun,  9 Mar 97 13:02:28 -0800
To: Fun_People
Subject: Weirdness [471] - 14Feb97

Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.471 (News of the Weird, February 14, 1997)
		by Chuck Shepherd

* In January, Jack Petelui, 43, claiming to hear God, stripped down to his
underwear, climbed the ornate facade of the Ansonia Hotel in New York City,
resisted police efforts for more than an hour to talk him down, and finally
jumped.  Cynical New Yorkers were said to be astonished at the dozens of
bystanders who were actually yelling "Don't jump!"  (Petelui was spared
serious injury when he landed on a police department rescue airbag.)
[As an ex-New-Yorker I was tempted to point out that the ones yelling "Don't  
Jump" were probably the ones who hadn't finished setting up their tripods,  
but that would give you the wrong image of New York... -psl]

* Armed and Dangerous:  A man robbed a variety store in Guelph, Ontario, in
December wielding only a three-foot-long tree branch.  And in Columbia, Mo.,
in December, Eric O.  Criss, 31, fortified only with a socket wrench, failed
in his alleged attempt to rob a grocery store.  And in Calgary, Alberta, in
December, a man brandishing only a bottle of household cleaner robbed a Bank
of Nova Scotia.

* A 21-year-old, allegedly intoxicated man was spotted by police on an
Austin, Minn., street in January urinating on a car but was let go with a
warning when he persuaded police it was his own car.  A few minutes later
police returned and arrested the man for DUI, having figured out that he
was urinating on the car's door lock to melt the ice so that he could get
in and drive away.

* Roger Augusto Sosa, 23, was charged with burglary early on Christmas
morning in Chevy Chase, Md.  Scott Kane and his wife had heard a prowler in
the house and called 911.  Despite the clamor of several squad cars arriving
and seven officers rushing into the living room with guns drawn, Sosa by
that time reportedly was seated under the tree, blissfully opening the
Kanes' presents.

* In October in Great Falls, Mont., Tina Rae Beavers, 19, was arrested on
the lawn separating the jail and the courthouse and charged with indecent
exposure.  According to a sheriff's deputy, she was energetically complying
with her jailed husband's request to remove her clothes, lie down in the
grass, and make suggestive movements so that he could see her from his cell
window.

* The town of Colma, Calif., just south of San Francisco, has a population
of 1,000 in an area of about 2.2 square miles, but three-fourths of the land
consists of cemeteries in which a million people are buried.  In October
citizen Robert Simcox announced he would gather signatures to secure a
ballot referendum for 1997 that would impose a municipal tax on the dead,
in the form of a levy on cemetery owners of $5 per grave per year.

	Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

© 1997 Peter Langston