In a classic case of mistaken identity, a man who had arrived at the BBC for a job interview ended up being interviewed as an IT expert on its News 24 channel. The mix-up occurred in 2006 when a producer went to collect the expert, Guy Kewney, from the wrong reception at BBC Television Centre in West London. There, a receptionist pointed the producer in the direction of Guy Goma, an economics and business studies graduate from the Congo, who was waiting for a job interview. The next thing Mr Goma knew, he was being whisked into a studio to answer questions live on air about the Apple court case. The interviewer, Karen Bowerman, noted that the guest seemed “very breathless and nervous”, while for his part Mr Goma assumed it was all part of the job selection process. However he did wonder why the questions were not related to the data support cleanser job he had applied for. It was only after Guy Goma’s short, vague TV interview that producers realized that Guy Kewney was still waiting in reception. Although Mr Goma described his unexpected screen appearance as “stressful”, he generously said that he would be happy to go on air again in the future, if asked, “to speak about any situation”.
ARTIST PLANS TO TURN MURDERER INTO FISH FOOD
Gene Hathorn, a convicted killer on death row in Texas, has given permission for Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti to use his remains as fish food should his final appeal against the death sentence fail. Evaristti would deep-freeze the body of Hathorn, who was found guilty of killing his father, stepmother and stepbrother in 1985, and then turn it into fish food which visitors to an exhibition could then feed to goldfish. In 2000, Evaristti had a museum display in which he placed goldfish in electric blenders filled with water and invited visitors to turn them on.
ART STUDENT’S INVITATION SPARKS TERRORIST ALERT
In a bid to encourage Norwegian dignitaries and celebrities to attend his 2000 exhibition, a 29-year-old art student mailed out bottles of homemade beer to the great and good of Oslo. Alas the beer sent to Norway’s parliament had not stopped fermenting, as a result of which the bottle exploded violently, showering the walls of the building’s mail room with foul-smelling liquid just hours before a visit from the South Korean President Kim Dae-jung to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. Police immediately feared the parcel contained a chemical bomb, and reports began to come in of similar packages being received by other people in the city, including leading newspaper editors. As panic spread, the red-faced student called police to confess.
KNIT YOUR OWN HITLER
A London designer has produced a set of knitting patterns for making woolly models of the most evil dictators in history. Rachael Matthews’s pattern book includes designs for Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and a hand grenade. She calls the Hitler doll “Knitler”.
FEMALE ARTIST STARTS AT THE BOTTOM
A Welsh artist was awarded a $30,000 National Lottery grant in 2009 – to study female bottoms. Sue Williams, 53, of Swansea, created plaster-cast moulds of women’s butts in a bid to explore their place in contemporary culture. She also examined racial attitudes towards buttocks in Europe and Africa. The Arts Council of Wales, which awarded the grant, insisted: “There is a serious point to this research.”
BLIND MAN OBJECTS TO “OBSCENE” PAINTING
In 2001, Fred Tarrant, a city councillor in Naples, Florida, demanded that a local art centre remove a controversial painting, which he described as disgusting and salacious, even though he himself was blind. The painting, by local artist Ted Lay, showed the Mona Lisa, Albert Einstein and Monica Lewinsky all sticking their tongues out, but Tarrant claimed that Lewinsky’s tongue looked like a penis. He said various advisors had told him so.
VIEWER SUES TV WEATHERMAN OVER WRONG FORECAST
In 1996, an Israeli woman sued Danny Rup, the country’s leading TV weather presenter, because of an inaccurate weather forecast which, she claimed, led her to catch flu by not wearing warm clothing.
MUSEUM SEEKS COMPUTER HACKER
The Ivar Aasen Museum in Norway was forced to advertise for a computer hacker after it inherited a vast collection of books and periodicals. The librarian cataloguing the bequest had entered 11,000 items into a database when he died suddenly – and nobody else knew the password.
RUSSIAN TV LAUNCHES CUT-PRICE VERSION OF WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?
A Russian television station launched the country’s first version of the big money game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in 2001 with a top prize of barely $50. The hard-up station said it couldn’t afford to pay more prize money but in acknowledgement of the fact that its jackpot was just 1,300 roubles as opposed to the UK version’s equivalent of 41 million roubles, it moderated the show’s title to Who Wants To Be Fabulously Wealthy?
FIRE-EATING SINGER SETS HOTEL ABLAZE
Steve McLennan, singer with avant-garde Australian rock band Freak Shop, breathed fire as part of his act. But while performing at the Star Hotel in Newcastle, New South Wales, on Christmas Eve, 1994, his crowd-pleasing antics backfired when the flames reached the ceiling and set the hotel ablaze. The fire put 11 audience members in hospital and left another four needing treatment for smoke inhalation. Some years later, McLennan reflected: “I’d been lighting fires since I set the front fence alight as a five-year-old. This was just an unfortunate moment. I guess I just got careless. I thought it was going to be the event that catapulted us into the next level. We all know what chickens did for Alice Cooper, and what bats did for Ozzy Osbourne. A little controversy never hurt anyone. But after that, wherever we were booked, venues copped grief from the licensing police, and it all turned very negative. The band self imploded a few months later when I set fire to the Cardiff Workers’ Club.”
WOMAN PUNISHES ENEMIES WITH MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS
An Ohio woman came up with an unusual way of getting even with people who had crossed her – she would sign their names to unwanted magazine subscriptions. In 1999, she was jailed for two months for forgery after being convicted of taking revenge on her enemies – including a job counsellor, a landlord and a neighbour – by signing them up to around 350 magazines.
ARTIST CREATES PANIC WITH NAKED MANNEQUINS
Artist Liu Jin caused havoc in Shanghai in 2008 by hanging four naked mannequins from the outside of skyscrapers. Mistaking the dummies for potential jumpers, several worried residents phoned the emergency services while the shock caused one grandmother to be rushed to hospital after suffering a heart attack.
RAP FAN SENTENCED TO LISTEN TO BEETHOVEN
Convicted of playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo, Andrew Vactor, of Urbana, Ohio, faced a $150 fine. But the judge offered to reduce the fine to $35 if Vactor spent 20 hours listening to classical music by the likes of Beethoven and Bach. Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott said she wanted to force Vactor to listen to something he didn’t necessarily like, just as other people had no choice but to listen to his loud rap music. Vactor accepted the classical alternative but only lasted 15 minutes and so had to pay the full fine.
ROTTING FISH CAUSES STINK AT EXHIBITION
“Majestic Splendour”, a 1997 exhibition by South Korean artist Lee Bul at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, consisted solely of rotting fish in sealed bags and glass cabinets. But after only a few hours on display, it was pulled by museum staff when the ventilation equipment failed and the stench became unbearable.
ARTIST UPSET BY SPELLING ERRORS
An educational mural created for Livermore Public Library in 2004 contained 11 spelling mistakes, including the names of such famous figures as Shakespeare (“Shakespere”), Einstein (“Eistein”), Michelangelo (“Michaelangelo”), Van Gogh (“Van Gough”) and Gauguin (“Gaugan”). Miami artist Maria Alquilar was paid $40,000 by the California city to create the 16-foot circular mosaic made up of 175 historical names and cultural words – and when the storm erupted over her poor spelling she was paid another $6,000 plus travel expenses to make the corrections. Alquilar couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. She dismissed th
e errors as “unimportant”, adding that people often spell her name incorrectly. “Anyway,” she said, “none of us are particularly good spellers anymore because of computers”. City officials confirmed that they were spell-checking Alquilar’s replacement tiles.
POSTMAN MISTAKES ACTORS FOR MUGGERS
When he saw two men apparently mugging a woman while on his round in Bristol in 2007, postman Neil Filer sprang into action. He whacked one of the attackers on the back of the head with his heavy mailbag and battled to free the victim. It was only when he called for help that he was informed the two men and the woman were actors and that he had interrupted filming for a scene in the BBC hospital drama series Casualty.
ARTIST PROJECTS PENIS ON BUILDINGS
Spanish artist Jaime del Val has used cutting edge technology to project enlarged images of his penis onto public buildings in Madrid, including Almudena Cathedral and the Royal Palace. He apparently wanders the streets of the Spanish capital naked except for camera equipment attached to his genitals.
PRESENTER’S TOILET-TALK DROWNS OUT BUSH SPEECH
Instead of hearing a speech by President George W. Bush in 2006, CNN viewers were able to listen to a news presenter’s conversation in the toilet. With her microphone not switched off as she took a toilet break, Kyra Phillips’s private chat, in which she described her husband as “passionate” and her sister-in-law as “a control freak”, was broadcast live over the President’s speech. CNN duly apologized for “audio difficulties”.
DEAD POET PURSUED BY TV LICENCE AGENCY
A German poet who had been dead for over 200 years was sent two letters by a TV licence-collecting agency threatening to instigate legal proceedings against him unless he quickly settled his monthly $25 bill. Friedrich Schiller had died in 1805 – long before the invention of either television or radio – but that did not prevent agency GEZ sending him two letters in 2008 demanding immediate payment. The letters were sent to a primary school bearing Schiller’s name in the Saxony town of Weigsdorf-Köblitz. Headteacher Michael Binder informed the agency that “the addressee is no longer in a position to listen to the radio or watch television” and attached Schiller’s CV to his reply. GEZ responded by insisting that Schiller would only be exempt if he could prove that he did not own television or radio sets. After the confusion was finally cleared up, GEZ promised to alter Schiller’s status in its computer system.
ANCIENT CARVINGS WERE FAMILY JOKE
Visiting the British Museum in 1994, 79-year-old Ted Ridings was strangely drawn to two stone faces that were on display. They were described as 2,000-year-old Celtic carvings but Ted recognized them as the work of his brother Leslie, who had created them in 1939 to resemble Hitler and Mussolini. Embarrassed museum officials quickly withdrew the exhibits.
SQUIRREL BLACKS OUT OLYMPIC FINALE
A squirrel hunting nuts in an electricity station caused an 80-minute blackout that shut down Switzerland’s main TV station – just as the closing ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was about to begin. The blackout also hit coverage of motor racing’s European Grand Prix in Valencia, silenced two Swiss radio stations and cut power to 6,000 homes in Zurich. The squirrel died in the incident after giving itself an 11,000-volt shock.
COMEDIAN INTERRUPTED BY ROBBERY CONFESSION
Rickey Smiley’s stand-up routine at the Comedy Café in Macon, Georgia, in 2001 was interrupted by a heckler with a difference. Glenn Matthews jumped up on stage, grabbed the microphone and proceeded to confess to the bemused audience that he had robbed several banks. While the audience laughed, club officials called the police. Matthews was subsequently convicted of three counts of armed robbery.
DANE TURNS VOMITING INTO AN ART FORM
As part of her final year exams in 2002, Birgit Hansen, a Danish design and fine art student at the University of Ulster in Belfast, performed a piece called “Mother Land Father Tongue” which involved her reading aloud the text of a French philosopher while intermittently vomiting into a bucket.“I was using the body in a way that I have never done before,” she explained, “and I have generally received a positive response about it.” Asked how she was able to vomit on demand, she replied: “It happened more easily than I expected. People thought it was amazing.”
DONKEY RIDER BANNED FROM DRIVE-IN CINEMA
A New Zealand farmer was banned from a drive-in cinema near Wellington for watching movies on the back of a donkey. Theatre bosses said Geoff Roder blocked the view for others while sitting on the animal. The 35-year-old bachelor protested that he couldn’t go to the movies without his donkey because he couldn’t drive and, anyway, he added, the donkey was his only companion in life.
FAN WOOS SINGER WITH RUSTY WRENCH
A crazed male fan stalked American country music singer Barbara Mandrell over a 15-year period. Among the tokens of affection that he sent to her Nashville, Tennessee, home were a case of corn flakes, dirty clothes, four bicycles and a rusty wrench.
CHEF PREPARES TESTICLE COOKBOOK
Serbian chef Ljubomir Erovic has compiled what he claims is the first cookery book devoted solely to dishes made from animal testicles. His recipes, which include testicle pizza, battered testicles and barbecued testicles with giblets, require thorough preparatory washing and a very sharp knife. Erovic says: “The tastiest testicles in my opinion probably come from bulls, stallions or ostriches, although all testicles can be eaten – except human, of course.”
100 THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE AUTHOR DIES
The man who co-wrote the best-selling adventure travel guide 100 Things To Do Before You Die perished in 2008 after only doing half of them. Dave Freeman had already visited around 50 per cent of the places mentioned in his book, whose recommendations included a voodoo pilgrimage to Haiti, running with bulls in Pamplona, Spain, and nude night surfing in Australia. He died at the age of 47 in ironically dull circumstances after hitting his head in a fall at his home in Venice, California.
COMPOSER CREATES CHAMBER MUSIC
Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim made music using noises recorded at an Oslo sewage treatment plant. Whenever any of the city’s 280,000 residents take a shower, brush their teeth or flush a toilet, it generates a noise in the plant; by attaching leads to a computer Nordheim was able to air the recorded sounds from 32 strategically placed speakers below ground. To the intense disappointment of music lovers everywhere, he said he was not planning to release a CD of his work.
ACTOR GETS DRUNK WHILE PLAYING A DRUNK
To add realism to his portrayal of a drunk in a 2010 performance of Moscow – Petushki by Russian satirist Venedict Yerofeyev, Austrian actor Marc Schulze drunk several shots of real vodka during the course of the show. At first the method acting went down well with the audience in Frankfurt, Germany, but gradually the alcohol took its toll and Schulze ended up getting so drunk that he collapsed on stage. One theatre-goer commented: “He was turning in a very realistic performance and it looked really impressive. I was amazed at how good his drunken staggering was and how he was slurring his words. But then he started missing lines, staring blankly at the other actors and generally looking confused. That was when the audience could tell there was something wrong and realized that he may not actually be acting. Finally he just collapsed.” Theatre bosses ordered Schulze to stick to water in future.
LEG BREAST IMPLANTS EXPLODE
After having a drawing of a woman tattooed on his leg, Lane Jensen, from Edmonton, Canada, decided to make it more anatomically accurate by getting breast implants put in the leg. However within a few weeks the breasts had burst. Describing how fluid had started oozing out of the leg, Jensen said: “There was nothing wrong with the implantation procedure. My body just rejected it. I guess my girl wasn’t meant to have 3D breasts.”
SEAGULLS SWOOP ON PERFORMANCE ARTIST
British performance artist Mark McGowan has pushed himself to the limit in the name of art, rolling a monkey nut for seven miles along the streets of London with his nose, eating a corgi, and walk
ing backwards for 11 miles with a 27-pound turkey on his head. But in 2008 his stunt to encourage Britons to holiday at home instead of travelling abroad, by burying himself up to his neck for 48 hours on Margate beach, had to be scrapped after aggressive seagulls began dive-bombing him. Fearing that the birds might peck out his eyes, he abandoned the challenge after only 30 hours. “I just lost it,” he lamented. “Physically and mentally.”
BBC ANNOUNCES NUCLEAR TESTS IN NORTH YORKSHIRE
A newsreader on BBC Radio Five Live mistakenly announced in May 2009 that North Yorkshire – instead of North Korea – had launched a programme of illegal underground nuclear tests. The newsreader declared: “There has been widespread condemnation of North Yorkshire’s decision to carry out an underground nuclear test. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, says he is deeply worried.” A spokesman for Five Live said: “We are aware of the occasional tensions between North and South Yorkshire, but clearly this was a slip of the tongue.”
SWEARING PARROT FIRED FROM FAMILY PANTO
Percy the Amazonian Green parrot was sacked from a production of the pantomime Pirates on Treasure Island in 1999 after saying “piss off mate” instead of “pieces of eight”. Percy had been word perfect during earlier rehearsals of the production in Blandford Forum, Dorset, but suddenly unleashed a stream of profanities. Actor Mark Hyde, who played Long John Silver, on whose shoulder Percy sat, could not believe his ears. The rest of the cast stood shell-shocked, particularly when Percy then added: “Bugger off!” A spokesman for the theatre company said: “We could not risk him in a family production.”
The Mammoth Book of Weird News (Mammoth Books) Page 10