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In January, News of the Weird reported that a legally blind man had qualified under North Dakota law for a concealed-weapon permit by satisfying the state’s reasonable shooting test, hitting a human-sized target ten times out of ten from a distance of 21 feet (after taking practice shots to get his bearings). According to a February report in the Louisville Courier-Journal at least two legally blind people have obtained licenses in Kentucky after hitting the target only 11 times out of 20.
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In December the Myrtle Beach fire department received a $2,400 donation from a civic group that for four years straight has held an annual fund-raising event at a strip club, the motif of which is that dancers have their bare chests rubbed with a ham. (The fire captain declined the gift as inappropriate.)
According to a February dispatch from the Associated Press, London’s Museum of Natural History contracted with Dale Air Deodorising Ltd. to produce a “dinosaur scent,” but the product turned out to be too disgusting. “The T-rex would have to be the most putrid, foulest thing that ever lived,” said Frank Knight, owner of Dale Air. “A hyena times ten would not even get you close.” The odor would have been due to chunks of rotted meat caught in the dinosaur’s teeth, he said, and probably a few pus-filled wounds as well.
News of the Weird has reported on studies claiming that certain types of water pollution are causing simpler forms of marine life to change gender. Now Kelly Munkittrick, a researcher at the University of New Brunswick, reports in the December 2000 Science News that most of the large female chinook salmon around Washington State appear to have been born males, though he doubts that either nuclear materials escaping from the Hanford plant near Richland or estrogen-rich pesticides common to the area account for the phenomenon.
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