When A Man's Hat Is Nailed On, It's News   

Every time something incredibly weird happens, someone tells Chuck Shepherd.

With help from hundreds of eagle-eyed contributors, Shepherd collects bizarre-but-true events reported in the press and reprints them in his syndicated weekly newspaper column, "News of the Weird." Along with a handful of other archivists – including John Bendel, who edits the popular "True Facts" column in National Lampoon – Shepherd reports on such oddities as the man who didn't know he'd been shot in the head with a nail gun until he tried to remove his hat. Or the ballet critic who wrote a scathing review in absentia and discovered the next day the performance had been cancelled. (He lost his job.) Or the lawyer who demanded a mistrial when the prosecutor lifted his leg and farted during defense summations.

Strange news has become a cottage industry in the past few years, with a handful of paperback compilations on the market, including three by Shepherd and co-authors Roland Sweet and John J. Kohut and one by Bendel. There are numerous newsletters and magazines that chronicle odd or funny press items, such as Shepherd's View from the Ledge, Gnu Snoose News, The Realistand The Nose. And at least one newspaper, the Marshall(Texas) News Messenger, recently experimented with a newsstand supplement filled with unusual stories and photos. "All this strange stuff comes over the wire," explains Publisher George Smith, a fan of bizarre news whose paper has limited space for such items. "I don't know where else to put it."

Sociologist Marcello Truzzi of Eastern Michigan University points out that strange news is nothing new – "Ripley's Believe It or Not" has been around for decades – and has always been therapeutic. "When you read about people acting like idiots, it makes you feel a lot smarter," he says. Most collectors, however, respond much like Roland Sweet (who compiles a column for the weekly Syracuse[New York] New Timesand 17 other alternative papers) when asked if they contemplate the larger significance of odd news: "I try not to."

Shepherd believes the success of tabloid TV shows and Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" comedy routines with botched headlines and ads has warmed editors who once thought such items in poor taste. Modern news-gathering technology also insures that strange news "doesn't get buried anymore," says Truzzi, a self-proclaimed "sociologist of the bizarre."

Shepherd began clipping weird news during the late 1970s ("True news struck me as stranger than anything people could make up") and in 1981 started his newsletter, which he sends free to friends and contributors and recently offered to subscribers. In 1988, City Paper, a Washington, D.C., alternative weekly, began a column of his best items. Today, through a syndicate, "News of the Weird" appears in more than 150 daily and weekly papers.

The best items in the column detail events "on the edge of socially unacceptable behavior" that don't incite pity, says Shepherd, a law professor at George Washington University's business school. Almost always they involve incompetent crooks.

Bendel and Shepherd both cite the San Francisco Chronicleas a gold mine for strange and wonderful wire stories often ignored by other papers. "The Chronicleeditors seem to have no filters," Shepherd says. (Neither man peruses supermarket tabloids – besides their dubious accuracy, the stories are never weird enough, Shepherd says.) Bendel also sees an unusual amount of copy from the Bozeman(Montana) Daily Chroniclepolice blotter. "Everything that happens in that town seems to end up in 'True Facts.' "

The Bozeman Chronicleisn't unique. Hundreds of other papers have unwittingly contributed to "True Facts," which was added to Lampoonin the early 1970s as "a lazy way to fill space" by then-editor P.J. O'Rourke, Bendel says. It blossomed. Bendel began editing the column in 1980 and, although he left the magazine two years later, he continues to compile it on a freelance basis while working as editorial page editor at the North Jersey Herald and Newsin Passaic.

Even in the world of strange news, Bendel says repetition has soured once-novel favorites such as bank robbers who leave their identification behind, burglars stuck in chimneys, men accused of sex crimes who offer to expose themselves in court to prove their innocence and travelers accidently leaving loved ones at highway rest stops. Shepherd even thought cow-patty bingo – a game in which spectators wager on where a grazing cow will relieve herself – was outdated until he learned the Connecticut legislature has passed a law to regulate the event. "Cow-patty bingo has come full circle," he says, somewhat amazed.

Bendel likes to recall the story of singer Waldwick Soriano, who 15 years ago in Brazil became enraged and incited his audience to riot while performing a song entitled "I Am Not a Dog." During the performance, someone had pushed a dog onstage wearing a sign, "I Am Not Waldwick Soriano."

"Many of the stories are really tragic, but we have the luxury of being three or four times removed," Bendel admits. "If we can laugh at a 21-gun salute at a wedding where the minister is accidently shot, I guess that separates us from the grumpy people."