News of the Weird

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

A 41-year-old engineer in suburban Toronto has accumulated, and worn, about 800 pairs of sports socks over 15 years (half of them off the feet of professional athletes), according to a lengthy profile in Canada's National Post, which did not reveal his name. The worst part of his hobby, he said (besides having to keep it secret from his wife), is that he is often contacted by foot and sock fetishists, which he denies that he is, preferring to think of himself as sort of a "custodian of history," wrote the Post. (A more conventional fetishist, Masashi Kamata, 28, was arrested in Nagoya, Japan, in October after police found about 5,000 pairs of used girls' and boys' shoes at a rented warehouse. "I was enjoying their smell," he said, according to Mainichi Daily News.)

Noel Methot, 24, was cited for inattentive driving after her car wound up half-submerged in a pond near downtown Orlando, Fla. She was driving down a street but apparently missed the signs warning of the end of the road, and according to witnesses, the most likely reason for that was that she was arguing loudly with her boyfriend over her cell phone. The car went airborne about 20 or 30 feet before splashdown, but Methot was not seriously hurt.

In yet another case of a person practicing what is allegedly acceptable in another country but illegal in the United States, a 28-year-old woman from Cambodia was arrested in Las Vegas, Nev., in October for kissing her 6-year-old son's penis, which she said was simply an expression of motherly love. An official in California's Cambodian Association of America confirmed the custom to the Las Vegas Review-Journal but said it never extends past age 2.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD