Nsf Awards $36 Million Toward Securing Cyberspace

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Japanese customers who attempt to eat at one (unnamed) Western-style restaurant in Jilin, China (in the former Manchuria), will be turned away unless they first apologize for Japan's occupation of China during World War II. Japan's Kyodo news service, via a July Reuters dispatch, reported no apologies so far.

Researchers from Technische University in Munich, Germany, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May, found that patients with migraine headaches were helped just as much by acupuncture needles stuck randomly into their bodies as by needles at the precisely prescribed pressure points.

A University of Birmingham (England) professor, working from a third-century Greek text of the New Testament's Book of Revelation, found that the number representing the Antichrist is probably not 666, but 616 (in that 616 referred to the Emperor Caligula). (A Church of Satan official in New York had no comment except to say that his church will use whatever number Christians fear.)

Lisa G. Berzins, a nationally known psychologist and expert on eating disorders, was arrested in a West Hartford, Conn., convenience store in July after, according to police, passing out from inhaling the aerosol from three cans of whipped cream.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD