Chuck Shepherd is on vacation. The following items are reprinted from the News of the Weird archives.
In Milwaukee in 1997, Gary Arthur Medrow, 53, was charged with 24 counts of impersonating a police officer in the pursuit of his locally infamous obsession with calling up women and convincing them to physically pick up other women and carry them around. Local police had arrested him for dozens of similar offenses over the previous 30 years.
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The 1999 starvation death of a 49-year-old woman in Scotland was the third among the followers of Jasmuheen (nee Ellen Greve), an Australian “holistic educator” who preaches “liberation from the drudgery of food and drink” to Westerners, in part to tap the “spirituality” of third-world hunger. Jasmuheen claims 10,000 disciples and charges more than $2,000 (U.S.) per ticket to her seminars.
Least Competent Criminals
In 1998 author and guru Sri Chinmoy sponsored an endurance race in New York City won by Istvan Sipos of Hungary, who finished the 3,100-mile course in 47 days, running from 6 AM until midnight. He and four other runners competed on the concrete grounds of a Queens school, circling the facility about 115 times every day. Said one runner, “To me, what the race is all about is the blossoming of the human spirit.” According to the wife of another, the runners are “nuts.”
