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thE waR against “doing thE Right thing”
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by Chuck Shepherd
Prefecture, Japan, that he was going the wrong way on the Takamatsu Expressway only because he had missed his exit 1 km back and thought it best just to turn the car around and retrace the path to the ramp. Police said his short September jaunt had caused a collision that didn’t involve his own car. Lame: Riverview, Fla., schoolteacher Ethel Anderson, 31, was convicted in September of having sex with a 12-year-old boy she was tutoring, despite her assertion that her hundreds of sexual text messages were merely “rewards” to get his attention and encourage progress in math.
teach our children well: (1) Officials at Milford Haven School in Pembrokeshire county, Wales, punished Rhys Johnson, 14, in October for violating the dress code against shaved heads. He was helping raise money for an anti-cancer charity after a third relative of his contracted the illness. (2) North Andover (Mass.) High School punished honor student and volleyball captain Erin Cox in October for giving a drunk classmate a ride home. Cox was clean and sober but violated the school’s “zero tolerance” attitude toward alcohol users (even though more student drunkdriving might result if sober friends fear school punishment). • Walter Dixon knew he was about to be relocated last December from a Joliet, Ill., correctional facility to begin serving a new federal drug conspiracy sentence, but state officials mistakenly freed him instead. Dixon protested but said he was aggressively dismissed from the premises. It wasn’t till September that he was finally re-arrested and began his new sentence. (Dixon was easily located because, though free, he’d met regularly with his parole officer and was taking several vocational courses.)
Land developers for the iconic Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo. (famous as the inspiration for the hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining) announced recently that they need more space and thus will dig up and move the hotel’s 12-gravesite pet cemetery. Neighbors told the Fort Collins Coloradoan in September that they feared the construction noise, but somehow ignored the potential release of departed spirits (though an Animal Planet “dog psychic” who lives in Estes Park seemed to volunteer her services to calm the pets’ souls).
adVicE of counsEL
LatEst human “Right”
In September, landlord Elwyn Gene Miller, 64, went on trial in Iowa City, Iowa, for spying on tenants in the small apartment building he owns, after apparently having constructed peepholes allowing him views into bathrooms and other areas, and having been spotted climbing from a crawl space after accessing one peephole. Nonetheless, as Miller’s lawyer pointed out, the law applies only to peeping for “sexual gratification,” and there is no “firsthand knowledge or observation” that Miller was “aroused” at the time he was spotted. (At press time, the judge was mulling a decision.)
In September, an appeals tribunal reinstated Gwent, Wales, police officer Shaun Jenkins, 36, who was fired in 2010 for having sex with a woman while on duty. The head of a police court concluded that Jenkins was on an authorized break at the time — making the infraction no more improper than stopping for “a spot of tea.” (Investigators originally found it appalling that Jenkins was out of uniform during the escapade, but he pointed out that his gun remained on his person at all times, albeit down around his ankles.) X
compELLing ExpLanations perfect sense: A 77-year-old motorist told police in Kagawa
imminEnt swiRLing VoRtEx of damnation
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REad daiLy Read News of the Weird daily with Chuck Shepherd at www.weirduniverse.net. Send items to weirdnews@earthlink.net or PO Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679.
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octoBER 30 - noVEmBER 5, 2013
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