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In 2007 News of the Weird highlighted the clothes cults of impoverished Congo: “In (the country that) has lost an estimated 4 million people in the civil wars of the last decade and where many must get by on about 30 cents a day, ‘gangs’ of designer-clothes-wearing men” have fashion smackdowns in the streets of Kinshasa to prove that Versace and Gucci styles look better on them than on others.
These “sapeurs” (from the French slang for clothes) continue to strut their genuine Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana, according to a March Washington Post dispatch.
One sapeur, “Luzolo,” who lives in a one-room shack with no bed, no water and no electricity (but a closetful of designer outfits) describes the feeling as “like a spirit that comes in me.”
When he wears “the labels,” he said, “I feel there is no one above me.”
<<< Again this year, in April, the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo hosted the possibly-400-year-old Naki Sumo (“crying baby contest”), in which infants are blessed to good health by having sumo wrestlers hoist them into the air, hold them at arm’s length, and coax them (no squeezing!) to cry, thus signaling that the offering has been heard.
This year, 80 babies were glorified, with special spiritual favors afforded those who cried the loudest and the longest.
<<< In 2007, News of the Weird mentioned the nightly ceremony on the India-Pakistan border at Wagah Crossing as part pomp, part macho posturing and part Monty Python (“Ministry of Silly Walks”), in which troops from both sides wearing hard-to-describe headgear perform complicated boot-stomping maneuvers to assure their countrymen that they are protecting their nation from the other one.
Lately, however, according to a July Agence France-Presse dispatch, the high-kicking show has become subdued because so many of the soldiers have reported knee injuries from the exaggerated prancing.
<<< Cosmetic surgery-obsessive Sheyla Hershey of Houston has endured more than 30 operations, including breast augmentations in increasingly large sizes (in her quest to have the world’s largest pair).
As News of the Weird reported, her luck started to go south in 2008 when licensed Texas surgeons declined to implant the M cups she wanted, and she was forced to use a clinic in Brazil.
Last year, for the birth of her first child, she had the Brazilian implants removed — and later replaced with a smaller pair — but in June 2010, she was diagnosed with a staph infection.
At press time she was still being treated with radical antibiotic therapy in Houston and might lose one or both breasts.
<<< Oklahoma City bomber-helper Terry Nichols, serving a life sentence at the “Super Max” federal prison in Colorado, recently ended his third hunger strike of 2010 to protest food quality.
Lack of fiber in the diet, he said, causes him “chronic constipation, bleeding, (and) hemorrhoids” and thus disrespects “God’s holy temple,” which is Nichols’ name for his body.
The prison continues to offer Nichols only limited dietary options.
