Metro Pulse Online - Strange Events - Strange People

LEAD STORY
• While Congress and the sports world are busy condemning the use of steroids as “cheating,” golfer Tiger Woods and other athletes have already artificially enhanced their natural abilities with impunity through Lasik eye surgery (improving vision to 20/15 or 20/10). More ominously, according to a Wired magazine story in March, the time will soon come when perfectly healthy baseball pitchers and other athletes choose so-called “Tommy John surgery” (until now performed only to repair ruptured arm ligaments), which can make an elbow even stronger than it naturally was, allowing pitchers to achieve higher velocity than ever. Other predicted enhancements include the removal, re-engineering, and re-insertion of leg, arm and shoulder muscle cells to add strength.
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"LEAST COMPETENT PEOPLE
• Burglars who fall asleep on the job is a retired News of the Weird category, but Steven Jakaitis, 42, was arrested in Quincy, Mass., in March outside a CVS pharmacy, where police said he fell asleep while preparing to rob the place. His car was idling; a stocking was on his head and a pistol in his pocket; and the piece of paper beside him read, “I have a Gun DO NOT Press any Alarms or let Custermors (sic) know Empty the All (sic) the register.”"

• A 24-year-old woman was hospitalized in April in Nassau County, N.Y., after her boyfriend, tossing sticks to his dog, decided to toss his knife, instead, but the knife’s handle loop caught on a finger when he flung it, and it snapped back, lodging in the woman’s neck. She corroborated the story, and the man was not criminally charged. (An officer asked him, “When you threw the knife, what did you expect the dog to do?”)
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THIEVES WHO THINK BIG
• Management at the Globe Hotel in Topsham, England, reported in February that a guest had dismantled and removed the entire shower unit out of his room. And Norwegian Arild Nicolaysen told reporters in February, after arriving at his mountain cabin for the weekend, that the in-ground swimming pool was missing (steel lining, plastic liner, filter, hoses and pipes). And in March, police in Lindale, Texas, arrested two men who they said had taken a house apart, brick by brick, board by board, over a three-month period and sold the materials for drugs.
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INEXPLICABLE
• John W. Hill of High View, W.Va., was arrested near St. Louis in March after sheriff’s deputies had stopped to investigate why he was parked alongside I-70. He was shirtless, wearing an Indian vest, cargo pants and combat boots, had several loaded pistols, an assault rifle, a two-shot Derringer, two long rifles, a serious knife, 400 rounds of ammo and various drugs. He said only that he was headed to South Dakota Indian country to deliver supplies and a sack full of Bibles to children, and that he was armed because the West is “dangerous.” He was charged with possessing a loaded weapon while intoxicated.
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PEOPLE WITH ISSUES
• Gasoline-sniffer Brian Taylor, 36, was sentenced to three months in jail in March for violating a UK “anti-social behaviour order” by loitering around the pumps at a gas station in Middlesbrough, England. According to evidence of multiple such incidents, Taylor often dangerously reeks of gasoline fumes and is sometimes aggressive in his pursuit of a fix, including jostling gas-pumping customers. Once, he was filmed on a security camera doing an uninhibited dance after taking a huff. He apparently prefers unleaded but will settle for diesel, and denies that he drinks any of it: “I’m daft but not that daft.”
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SURREALITY
• Tennessee state Sen. John Ford testified in a juvenile court hearing in January that his child support payments should be reduced, in accordance with a state law that he had introduced on behalf of fathers with many children. Ford owns two homes, lives part-time in one with his ex-wife and their three children (with another on the way), and lives part-time in the other with an ex-girlfriend and their two children. Hence, he said, he should have lesser payments to a third woman, who is the mother of his 10-year-old daughter.