The News of the Weird

by Chuck Shepherd, Roland Sweet, John J. Kohut

For news junkies and fans of the bizarre-but-true, here is an outrageous collection of all-real, all-weird news stories culled from the nation's mainstream newspapers. Line art throughout.

Genres: Humor

176 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 1989

Reviews

[Trin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of these are just examples of bad human behavior which, sadly, is not all that weird.

[Carson hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun book of supposedly true strange stories taken from newspapers around the world. Now that the internet is a source of all information I marked some of the pages to see if I could, in fact, find anymore on some of the stories. There are a few that just seem impossible. The one that I find to be most likely to be false is a snippet of a man who was not a doctor and operated on himself for 8 hours. There were two stories in the book that I had heard on the news in the late 1980s and I don't know if they are true, but I found it kind of cool that I had heard of them before. There is also a source list at the back of the book as to where the authors found their information.

[Douglas Reedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plenty of odd and hilarious information for those with a shirt attention span like myself. Definitely a good book to read and share with family and friends.

[Mark Saha · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bus carrying five passengers was hit by a car in St. Louis, but by the time police arrived at the scene, fourteen pedestrians had boarded the bus and began to complain of whiplash.

* * *
A man entered the Union Commerce Bank in Cleveland in 1986 and demanded that the teller open the vault. When she explained that the vault would not open because it worked on a timer […] he changed his mind and ran. After he stood pushing on the front door for several seconds, someone yelled “Pull!” and he escaped.

* * *

The Washington Post printed a story about policy changes being proposed for the U.S. Department of Labor. Beneath a man’s photograph accompanying the article was the caption: “Labor official who briefed reporters under a condition of his name not being used.”

* * *

A British medical journal contained a story about a spinal deformity that causes victims to stand like apes. The story was illustrated with side-by-side photos of an ape and a slouching human. As is common practice, the human’s identity was protected by a black square superimposed over his face. There was also one over the ape’s face.

* * *

An Arizona jury awarded a Tucson woman $356,250 in damages for injuries she suffered when she fell out of the jury box while serving as a juror.

* * *

Police in San Jose, California, charged a 220-pound woman with crushing her 8-year old son to death. The woman said she had been punishing the boy by sitting on his chest for three hours because a counselor advised her to “use her weight” to discipline the boy.

* * *
In Bedford, Texas, a 16-year-old boy and two companions held up a 7-Eleven in 1984, brandishing only a snake. They made off with three six-packs of beer as the clerk wrestled with the biting but non-poisonous snake the youths tossed at him.

* * *
Thinking he was on an interstate highway, Jack Comiskey, 87, drove his rented car down an airport runway at 50 miles an hour, then went off the runway and over a seawall into Tampa Bay. A group of firefighters training nearby rescued Comiskey and his wife from the water.

* * *

The winning entry (among 500) in the Army Material Command contest to name its new national headquarters building (and a $100 prize) was “The AMC Building”.

* * *

Gordon Pickrell of Kingston, Tennessee, who was pinned under his wrecked sports car for six hours with a broken arm, said the worst part of the ordeal was having to listen to the British group Wham! playing on his tape recorder the whole time. “I never want to hear it again,” the teenager told Roane County deputies who pulled him from the overturned car. “I swear I don’t”.

* * *

[Jenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun, quick little read. All the stories are short, so it's something fun to pick up when you need a quick laugh.

[Jean Doolittle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truth is truly stranger than fiction!