NEWS OF THE WEIRD

In March, juries in Smith County and Matagorda County sentenced Henry Wooten and Melvin Johnson III to 35 years and 60 years in prison, respectively, for possessing small amounts of drugs (but enough under Texas law to allow jurors to infer an intent to distribute). Wooten, 54, had 4.6 ounces of marijuana (same penalty as for 5 pounds), and Johnson had 1.3 grams of crack cocaine (about half the weight of a U.S. dime). (Wooten’s prosecutor actually had asked the jury for a sentence of 99 years.)  Can’t possibly be true

. In February, the undergraduate dean’s office at Yale University disclosed that it was formally soliciting anonymous, first-person reports of student sexual experiences to publish on a school Web site, as “strategies for creatively navigating Yale’s sexual culture,” according to an advisor. “There is a real need for students to have space to think about what happens to them and what they want to have happen,” she said. “Sex@Yale” would contain “70 to 80” specific perspectives, she said, but critics suggested the anthology might grow to resemble Penthouse magazine’s often-ridiculed “Forum” section of lascivious fantasies.

. Alan Rosenfeld, 64, a New York City lawyer and real estate entrepreneur, is also a full-time schoolteacher, although he has been prohibited from teaching since 2002 because of accusations of leering at female students. He is thus a “rubber room” teacher whose union contract requires full salary

and benefits even though the school’s chancellor has barred him from the classroom as a “danger” to students. The Department of Education pays him $100,000 a year plus health care (plus retirement benefits worth at least

$82,000 a year). The New York Post

reported that Rosenfeld reports to “the room” each day but works exclusively on his business affairs.

. Under the government’s Local Housing Authority, Essma Marjam, age 34, unemployed and the mother of six, is entitled to rental assistance for a fivebedroom home, and the only suitable one she could find is in an exclusive London suburb in which her neighbor is Sir Paul McCartney. Luckily, the generous allowance (equivalent of more than $9,000 a month) covers the rent on the nearly $3 million (U.S. equivalent) mansion. (Additionally, according to the Daily Mail, Marjam’s non-housing government benefits total the equivalent of about $22,000 a year.) 

Inexplicable

In January, Aretha Brown, 66, who has lived in the same house in Callahan, Fla., (pop. 962) for 30 years, suddenly became unable to leave her yard unless she crawled between CSX railroad cars blocking her access to the road. Tracks had always been in place, but the railway only began storing train cars on

them this year. CSX told The Florida

Times-Union that it would soon build Brown an access road to the street. 

Sub-‘zero tolerance’

Seventh-grader Rachael Greer was suspended from River Valley Middle School in Jefferson, Ind., in February, even though she apparently did exactly what her parents and the school want kids to do (“just say ‘no’” to drugs). When a classmate handed her a prescription pill in gym class, she immediately handed it right back. Nonetheless, an assistant principal, after investigating the incident, suspended her for five days because she had touched the pill. (He expressed regret but said it is school policy. 

Least-competent police

. In March, on duty on opening day of the jail at the new Adair County judicial center in Columbia, Ky., sheriff’s deputy Charles Wright accidentally locked himself in a cell and was fired after he tried to shoot open the lock.

. A Collier County sheriff’s deputy suffered a broken ankle when he and a colleague accidentally locked wheels while patrolling in Naples on their Segways.

. It wasn’t pretty, but sheriff’s deputies in Montcalm County, Mich., got their man on March 3. Mark McCuaig, in court on an earlier charge, became unruly and escaped from two different sets of officers (despite a Tasering). Another court officer tried to stop him outside, but McCuaig got loose (despite being maced). He locked himself inside a van, but officers surrounded it, broke a window, and Tasered him again. However, they couldn’t stop McCuaig from driving off. After a highspeed chase, state troopers disabled his tires with “stop sticks” but couldn’t apprehend him before he reached his home, where he barricaded himself. Officers surrounded the house, and four of them (plus a police dog) entered, but McCuaig escaped and got into another vehicle. Finally, after another chase, he was forced off the road, Tasered a third time, and subdued. 

Update

Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges had been disturbing people, and sometimes running for office, for 10 years before he came to News of the Weird’s attention in September 1992 by attracting nearly 3,000 votes in a campaign for mayor of Memphis. Since then, the perpetual performance artist (always “333” years old, always from the planet “Zambodia”) has been annoying his neighbors in Memphis, and in Fort Lauderdale and Volusia County, usually as revenge for their complaints about his quixotic property maintenance. Last year, he built a deck on his Volusia home, without a permit, and neighbors complained, thus provoking Hodges recently to dump a mountain of sand in his front yard and to install clotheslines covered with women’s panties. Currently, he faces various county code violations 