Lead Story
More than a halfmillion children in the U.S. take antipsychotic medicines and (reported The New York Times in September) “(e)ven the most reluctant (doctors) encounter a marketing juggernaut that has made anti-psychotics the nation’s top-selling class of drugs by revenue, $14.6 billion last year, with prominent promotions aimed at treating children.” In one psychiatrist’s waiting room, observed the Times reporter, “(C)hildren played with Legos stamped with the word Risperdal” (an antipsychotic made by Johnson & Johnson). (The company, which recently lost its patent on the drug, said it has stopped handing out the toys—which it insisted were not toys at all but advertising reminders for doctors.)
The Litigious Society
Three self-described bisexual men filed a federal lawsuit in April against the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance for disqualifying them from the Gay Softball World Series in Seattle in 2008 because they were not sufficiently gay. Teams were limited to two heterosexuals, and when the men’s team won second place, questions were raised about the three until organizers took them aside and asked “intrusive” questions about their sexual attractions and desires. Ultimately, they were disqualified as being too straight. (The alliance acknowledged that it has no standards for judging gayness level, but explained, as a private organization, that it is not subject to federal law.)
Craig Smallwood of Hawaii filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year against the makers of the online virtual-world game “Lineage II” for failing to warn him that he would become so addicted to playing it that he would be “unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends.” (He claims to have spent 20,000 hours over five years playing.) In August, Judge Alan Kay declined to dismiss the lawsuit and set it for trial.
Ironies
Between suicide, murder, assault, drunken driving and drug use, the soldiers of the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division, at Fort Bliss, Texas, have been statistically in greater peril while stateside than while deployed in Iraq. “Being back (home) is what we don’t do well,” Lt. Col. David Wilson told The New York Times in July. During the last year in Iraq, the brigade lost only one soldier to combat, but in the previous year stateside, seven were killed and four people died in crimes committed by brigade personnel.
Challenging Times for Labor Unions: At a rally in Washington, D.C., in July denouncing employers who hire nonunion carpenters, many of the chanting protesters were nonunion day workers hired by the carpenters’ union to make the demonstration look bigger, according to a Wall Street Journal report. In August, Jim Callaghan, a longtime writer on the headquarters staff of the United Federation of Teachers, was fired after trying to organize his colleagues into their own union local. Callaghan said that UFT staff deserve the same protections as the teachers they represent. (A UFT spokesman said most UFT employees are already unionized.)
Compelling Explanations
The New South Wales (Australia) anti-corruption commission, at a hearing in August, got engineer Don Gamage to admit that he “exaggerated” his credentials to get a series of government contracts. Nonetheless, Gamage was defiant: “If I didn’t exaggerate,” he explained, “the people of NSW… would have missed (out on) the service and the benefit that I delivered.”
Bruce Tuck, who confessed in December to a series of rapes in Martin, Tenn., and was sentenced to 60 years in prison (and who faces still more charges), tried to withdraw his confession in June, complaining that he was not of sound mind at the time because, though weighing 275 pounds, he was being held in jail on a “lettuce-only” diet. Thus, he said, he was unusually vulnerable when a detective offered him a bag of chips to admit to the charges.
Least Competent Criminals
Lame: Gerald Maxwell, 39, a convicted burglar who was caught in August breaking into the same Sarasota, Fla., home he had broken into last year, quickly tried to explain his innocence to officers. “I was going back in there to leave a thank-you note, because I’m the guy who burglarized this place last year (and) I just got out of jail.”
Update
Michael Peterson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife, Kathleen, and sentenced to life in prison in North Carolina, but T. Lawrence Pollard, who was one of Peterson’s lawyers, has relentlessly offered the alternative theory (though not during Peterson’s trial) that Mrs. Peterson was instead killed by a rogue owl one night in her home. Earlier this year, Raleigh’s News & Observer wrote a series on deficiencies in the state’s original investigation (though not about owls), and Pollard filed affidavits in August—one by an owl expert that Mrs.
Peterson’s injuries were consistent with an attack by “a large bird of prey” and the other by scientists who offered to DNA-test what investigators say might be a faint microscopic “feather” from the crime scene.
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe. Send your weird news to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or visit www.newsoftheweird.com.