Lead Stories
Susan Smith, a professor of health and safety sciences at the University of Tennessee, found in July that people who use sign language have a risk of hand and wrist injuries up to five times greater than people who don’t. Zoologists at the University of Kerala in India noted in the July Current Science that after eight impotent gerbils had alcohol injected into their eyes to blind them, five of them began to copulate, possibly due to the release of melatonin.
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After 100 employees complained of dizziness and nausea at the National Pen Corporation offices in Rancho Bernardo, California, in September (24 of them were sent to the hospital), white-suited hazardous-materials crews combed the building from top to bottom, looking for gas and chemical leaks. The official cause, determined the next day by the San Diego Fire Department, was the exessive number of urinal cakes in a third-floor men’s room.
In July in Ponta, Texas, Charles and Jennifer Smith purchased a new Dodge Intrepid, which was totaled in a collision the next day. In August a fire destroyed their trailer home and Jennifer drove over the family dog, whose leg is now in a cast. And in September, after the community banded together to get the Smiths a new trailer home, a storm totaled that one, too.
Send your weird news to Chuck Shepherd, Chicago Reader, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611 or to weird@compuserve.com.
