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Have yourself a weird weird little Christmas

December 9, 1990

NO NUT IS TOO TOUGH FOR THESE BROTHERS

Jose Luis Astoreka, 34, won the annual nut-cracking contest in Kortezubi,
Spain, by cracking 30 walnuts between his buttocks in less than a minute.
His brother, Juan Ramon, came in second and attributed the brothers' skill
to a "peculiar physical characteristic" in the family.

UNUSUAL EXPLANATIONS

James Darby, 81, was arrested in Sebring, Fla., in May for the fifth time in
three years on cocaine trafficking charges.  He told the police chief he
needed to supplement his Social Security income.

Robert Percy went on trial again for rape in Elmore, Vt., in October after a
1982 conviction was overturned.  Percy is using an insanity defense,
claiming he had a flashback to his time fighting in Vietnam and mistakenly
thought he was raping a Vietnamese woman.

Lawrence Smith, convicted of dealing stolen cars in a Hartford, Conn., sting
operation in June, defended himself at trial by claiming that he had known
the buyers were police officers all along and he thought selling the cars to
police officers was the best way of getting the cars to their proper owners.

In October, the Oklahoma Department of Human Services began to publish a
monthly list of the "worst" excuses received for non-payment of child
support.  Among the first winners: (1) "I can't afford to pay child support;
I've got to pay my cable TV bill." (2) "We only had sex one time; I couldn't
be the father." (3) "I will not allow my ex-wife to get rich on my money"
($25 a week).

ADULT BEHAVIOR

In May, Los Angeles Philharmonic bassist Barry Lieberman was suspended
without pay for assaulting colleague Jack Cousin as they were leaving the
stage after a performance.  Lieberman alleged that, because of an ongoing
dispute, he was justified in shoving his bass into the back of Cousin's legs
to trip him as they were filing off stage.

At the October wedding of Sandra and Carmine Cenatiempo in Milford, Conn.,
the father of the bride and other members of the wedding party brawled with
the owner of the wedding reception hall and several of his employees about
the disposition of three leftover cases of wine.  By the time police halted
the free-for-all, the cases of wine had been smashed to pieces, along with
various wedding gifts.

VOLATILE REACTIONS

In Philadelphia, Charles Keller, 55, was convicted in July of wounding his
neighbor by gunshot the year before.  After Victoria Troutman snipped some
weeds for Keller's yard, Keller told her he would sit on his porch with a
gun, wait for her husband to come home, and settle the matter.  At 11:45pm,
the husband arrived.  Keller yelled, "I'm waiting for you..." and fired at
Troutman.

Newton McWilliams, who defeated his boss, Kenneth Boyer, in the Democratic
primary for Grant County, Okla., commissioner in August, was fired by Boyer
two days later.  Boyer denied malice, even though he told McWilliams it was
"time to pay the piper" when he fired him.

In October, ex-paratrooper Ieuan Bullivant was riding on a London train that
stopped because a 23-year-old woman was on the bridge threatening to jump
onto the tracks below.  After 40 minutes, he tired of the delay and yelled
at the woman, "Either jump or get down."  When police did not stop him, he
walked up to the woman and pushed her off.  She fell 20 feet, suffering
various fractures.  Said Bullivant, "Nobody seemed to be doing anything.
I've been jumping out of airplanes all my life.  I thought I was doing the
bloody right thing."

Denver police charged a 16-year-old girl with stabbing her 14-year-old
brother in April after she accused him of taking her cookies.  The boy
responded to the accusation by throwing his shoes at the girl, then punching
her.  Their mother said she then "tried to separate them" by beating both of
them with a vacuum cleaner hose, before the girl took a knife to her
brother.

December 16, 1990

THE HORMONES OF THE FISHERWOMAN

Professor Gary Behan of Glasgow University reported in September that he
believes the reason women hold most major records in dolphin fishing is that
dolphins - which are noted for their rampant promiscuity - are attracted by
female hormones.

MATTERS OF JUDGMENT

In Bossier City, La., on Sept. 9, Terry Polk, 26, got into a dispute at a
party.  He challenged his adversary to settle matters with a head-butting
duel, and the two banged each other several times.  Polk died from a
cerebral hemorrhage.

Army Sgt. Faagalo Savaiki of the 501st Signal Battalion shipped out for
Saudi Arabia in August but left behind his three children (ages 13, 12, and
9) in Clarksville, Tenn., unattended and without food or clean clothes.  He
had put a note on the wall explaining to the kids how to use the automatic
teller machine and which bills needed to be paid.

FIRE!

A 26-year-old woman, in surgery at UCLA Medical Center as a result of an
auto accident, died in May when, during the operation, the sheets of her
gurney burst into flames.

Brazil's president, Fernando Collor de Mello, had his hair, ear and forearm
singed by an explosion when the wind shifted just as he dropped a lighted
torch on a pile of gasoline-soaked cocaine and marijuana at an anti-drug
rally in western Brazil in June.

A 28-year-old man fell 100 feet to his death at a park near Grand Junction,
Colo., in June.  He had told fellow campers that he would show them "an old
Indian Trick" by jumping over their campfire.  He misjudged the jump, landed
with one foot in the fire, leaped out of control because of the pain and
pitched forward over the cliff.

FETISHES ON PARADE

Topeka, Kan., police had to cope with at least three incidents this year in
which a telephone caller, posing as a doctor calling from a hospital, tried
to persuade women to cut their hair off so that it could be "tested" as a
remedy for some illness the caller said their husbands had.

Charles Rodney Mills, 37, was arrested near Orange, Texas, in July,
wandering around an interstate highway at 1:40am wearing only a leather
harness and a spike-studded dog collar.  He told police only that the people
he was staying with had forced him out of their car.

St. Louis police recently were investigating an officer who, based on about
10 reported incidents, would stop a female driver on the pretense of giving
her a minor traffic ticket, then tell her to sit in the back seat of his
cruiser, remove her shoe (because, he said, it was a potential hiding place
for drugs), place her foot on the front seat, and would then either fondle,
tickle or merely look at the foot.