And Now for Some Stuff That’s Completely Different

It’s time for the biannual “Are You Kidding Me?” column, a midyear salute to the limitless capacity of human beings to either do weird things or have weird things happen to them. The following dispatches came from wire services in recent months.

MILWAUKEE--A 300-pound woman who fatally crushed her 160-pound husband when she sat on him may have been the victim of abuse and might not be charged, authorities said. Authorities said she sat on her husband, who is of average build, while the children helped hold him down. After 11 days, he never regained consciousness and died.

NORCO, Calif.--Vice President Dan Quayle made a surprise stop at a Burger King here last week, pointed to a “Now Hiring” sign and declared, “Things are beginning to turn around in California.”

KETCHUM, Ida.--A man died after a beer keg in his refrigerator ruptured, shot upward and hit him in the head, authorities said. Sheriff Walt Femling said Clinton Richard Doan, 35, died when he opened the refrigerator in his garage to put his lunch for the next day inside. When he opened the refrigerator, the bottom of the keg cracked, shooting the keg upward “like a missile,” said deputy Gene Ramsey. A team of explosives experts was expected to review the death.

DUBLIN, Ireland--A man got stuck to the toilet in a Dublin pub after vandals coated it with super glue. The entire toilet bowl had to be wrenched from the floor so that man and bowl could be carried by stretcher to a hospital.

DOCTORS INLET, Fla.--An elementary school has suspended use of a puppet named Pumsy the Dragon as a teaching tool because one parent claims that it is hypnotic and might harm children.

HAMDEN, Conn.--A 25-year-old man died after he lost control of his car, crashed into a cemetery and was hurled from the car into a headstone, police said.

CARTHAGE, Mo.--A Denver couple whose cat vanished during a trip to Missouri have spent $6,000 and untold hours searching for it. Since the cat escaped from Bill and Carol Decker’s campsite, they have contacted 100 animal research laboratories, a psychic and a pet psychologist. They also have circulated missing-cat posters and taken out ads in newspapers from Missouri to Colorado.

CINCINNATI--Shriners Burns Institute has asked a surgeons’ group to investigate complaints that the hospital’s chief surgeon used a marker to draw “happy faces” on patients’ sex organs, hospital officials said.

FARGO, N.D.--A 34-year-old man who became ill with the flu drifted off to sleep with a high fever. A week later, he awoke from sedation and surgery to find his arms and legs had been amputated.

SANDUSKY, Ohio--A rabbi accidentally shot a colleague with a harpoonlike cattle-slaughtering device at a meat packing plant, authorities said.

TAMPA, Fla.--A man facing 8-year-old robbery charges asked that his trial be delayed. When the judge refused, the man decked his public defender.

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla.--A Florida county has defined the bottom line, drafting a 136-word legal definition of “buttocks.”

OCEANSIDE, Calif.--A man believed to be a transient commandeered a police car and used the radio to serenade officers with obscene rap music while startled dispatchers tried to locate him.

WELLINGTON, Kan.--A 37-year-old rural Kansas woman was charged Wednesday with offering two men her common-law husband’s baseball card collection in exchange for his murder, authorities said.

KENMORE, N.Y.--A man who lept from a fourth-story window and survived by landing on a car rode an elevator back up and repeated his suicide attempt--jumping from the same window and landing on the same car.

TAMPA, Fla.--Two Florida newlyweds had to revise their honeymoon plans after she threw macaroni salad at him during their wedding reception and he responded with gunfire.

NEW DELHI, India--A monkey fell into a huge frying pan on Friday, splattering hot oil that injured seven pilgrims eating in a community kitchen at a holy Hindu city.

ALBUQUERQUE--An attempt to build a second wild flock of rare whooping cranes by using sandhill cranes as foster parents has flopped. The grown whoopers want to mate with sandhill cranes, which turn and run.