xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

In a still largely underreported 1996 study by St. Louis University (revealed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in January), researchers concluded that at least 40 percent of Catholic nuns in the United States have suffered either sexual abuse, sexual exploitation or sexual harassment, with nearly half of the instances perpetrated by priests or other nuns. The results were published in two obscure journals in 1998, but the study's sponsors otherwise squelched the news out of a desire not to harm the church's then-still-virtuous reputation.

The late composer John Cage's "As Slow As Possible," now being played once, lasting 639 years, at a church in Halberstadt, Germany, has so far taken 17 months just to get the organ's bellows inflated and now will take 18 months more just to play the composition's first three notes, according to a February BBC report.

Former stockbroker Warren D. Matthei, 51, who has sat in jail in Philadelphia since 1996 rather than pay his first wife child support that now amounts to about $350,000, declined federal judge Jerome Simandle's offer of release in January, claiming that he did not want to put pressure on his 82-year-old mother (who would have to sign over a security interest in her home as a condition of release); Matthei lived it up in Europe with his second wife but then inexplicably returned home in 1996.

The burglar who apparently broke in to the A Little Bit of Country western emporium in Mineral Wells, Texas, on Feb. 8 was arrested shortly after the store opened at 9 a.m., in one of the state's easiest collars: He had fallen asleep on a bed in a furniture showroom. It was an interesting caper: A few coins (the only money on the premises) were scattered on the floor; he had left his gun in the store's restroom; and anyway, of all the places in town, he had picked a store owned by the wife of the Palo Pinto County district attorney.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd

NEWS OF THE WEIRD