News of the Weird

The entrepreneurial spirit

Earlier this year in separate incidents, two physical education teachers at Ernest Ward Middle School in Pensacola, Fla., were arrested and charged with bribery for allowing students to avoid gym classes by paying the teachers money. Tamara B. Tootle, 39, charged in April, allegedly gave students credits at $1 per student per class, and Terence Braxton, 28, arrested in February, pleaded guilty in May to a similar scheme, admitting to making at least $230.

¢ More side businesses: (1) A highly publicized attraction of the Isdaan restaurant in Gerona, Philippines (according to a March Reuters dispatch) is its “wall of fury,” against which diners can vent frustrations by smashing things (with fees ranging from the equivalent of 30 U.S. cents for a plate up to $25 for an old TV set). (2) In July, according to BBC News, British farmer David Lucas will be forced by European Commission rules to give up his lucrative sideline of building gallows for Zimbabwe and other governments that still employ hangings. Lucas’ single gallows sells for the equivalent of $22,000, and the Multi-Hanging Execution System, mounted on a trailer, goes for about $185,000.

Science on the cutting edge

In April, noted surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub and a team at Ormond Hospital in London re-started and re-inserted the original heart of a 12-year-old girl after it had been in storage for 10 years while she lived with a donated heart. Because the donated heart was finally showing signs of rejection, Dr. Yacoub decided that the original, which was removed because of acute inflammation, might have repaired itself enough to work again.

People with too much money

Women’s handbag designers, uncertain about the effect of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana’s alligator habitats, spent the winter searching for new supplies of hides, according to a March Wall Street Journal report. The fall gator harvest saw prices rise 50 percent from two years earlier, forcing Ralph Lauren, for example, to raise the price of its most prestigious alligator purse to $14,000, and hide prices were expected to rise another 50 percent this summer. (Alligator shoes, shirts and coats also have soared in price, and the alligator-paneled piano sold by Giorgio’s of Palm Beach now costs $950,000.)

Least competent people

Chesterton, Ind., high school student Michael Morris was hospitalized in May with a broken leg and broken arm after being run into by a friend driving an Acura at about 25 mph, but it was consensual. The friend described Morris as an adrenaline junkie who had had the friend run over him before, but Morris told the Times of Northwest Indiana, “I won’t do this no more.”

God’s will

More than 90 people were killed while observing their religion in three incidents in April. A stampede by thousands of women at a religious gathering in downtown Karachi, Pakistan, resulted in 29 deaths; a packed bus speeding home from a religious festival went out of control and plunged into a ravine near Orizaba, Mexico, killing 57; and a few days later in Santa Maria del Rio, Mexico, five were killed by lightning, which struck the large metal cross before which they were praying.