Book Quote: Gibsonton

 

   

One of the great things about living in Florida is that you can't throw a rotten orange for hitting a weird story. I wanted very much to write about Gibsonton, a town just outside of Tampa where carnival folk used to make their winter home. I knew of a tragic tale in Gibsonton but I knew there were some marvelous love stories as well and I tell them both in Crazy Little Thing: Why Love and Sex Drive Us Mad. Here's a sample:

     "She was a little, living doll," Ward says.,"and always had a great personality. She also had two sets of teeth and black silky hair growing over her face and her body had a complexion that was kind of brownish-green in color." He remembers her as a marvelous dancer."     

      There is a love story that goes with that description and another between Al and Jeanie Tomaini, the giant and the half-lady, who married and opened a cafe. That's them on the left - I couldn't find any attribution for the photo. But anyway, this seems to be a classic case of opposites attract. ;)

Survivors of 'Dirty John' - Debra and Terran Newell at CrimeCon

Got to go to CRIMECON in New Orleans this year and meet crime analyst Dr. Laura Richards (far left) and Terra and Debra Newell (third and fourth from left). The Newells were at the center of the  Dirty John story, one of the craziest, scariest love and crime stories ever. 

I've met a lot of famous people but I was really flustered when I met Terra Newell who a hero / shero of mine. This petite, soft-spoken, gentle woman was attacked by her mom's ex-husband. She fought him off - fought for her life - and she won. That makes her a modern dragon slayer. It was exciting to meet her and to hear these three women talk about their story.

Even though I literally wrote the book on crazy love (which you can buy here!) I struggled to understand how Debra got tangled up with John, maybe because she seems so in control. These three women did a panel, though, in which I learned a lot about her predicament. Trying to outfox a psychopath is something I don't think most of us can imagine --  like running through a wet golf course in spiked heels carrying an open container of nitroglycerin.

Anyway, it was a thrill to meet these women and I can't wait till next CrimeCon. It's just like TV except when you wonder things out loud like "How'd that happen?" you get an answer.

Caught masturbating with a teddy bear - for the fourth time

Charles Marshall, 28, of Cincinnati, Ohio was arrested FOUR THE FOURTH TIME for having sex with a teddy bear in public, The Daily Mail reports. No word on whether it was the same teddy bear. God, I hope it wasn't Pooh or Paddington. Teddy Ruxpin, maybe, just to hear what he'd have to say about it, but not Pooh or Paddington! One wonders if the Build-a-Bear in Cincinnati has a restraining order against him.

What I don't get it the guy is obviously a specialist. You have your garden variety furries, you have people who get off on having sex in public, but having sex with teddy bears in public is quite the niche. If he had any business sense he'd be doing this on the web and probably make at least enough to get his bear(s) dry cleaned. Some people just never get the hang of capitalism.

Man Kills Wife, Pets Over Dog's Accident

Michael Stephen Stolz, a 76 year-old resident of the Dallas suburb Lewisville, shot his wife and her two dogs because one of the dogs defecated on the floor of the house, the Star Local News reports. There had been no other police calls to their home & police didn't know how long the pair had been married. Stolz shot the dog causing his wife to start screaming at which point he shot her as well. Police arrested Stolz after a four-hour stand off.  Two dead dogs, a Rottweiler and a German Shepherd mix, were found shot and killed in the home along with Bernice, who had been shot multiple times says DallasNews.

com.

As I write this the Supreme Court is deliberating over the Affordable Care Act. I don't know how anyone could read this and doubt that health care, including mental health care, should be easier to get...that if, say, you might snap and shoot someone over something the dog did that you could have someone to talk to besides a bartender or your friends. I wish everyone could have an on-retainer therapist. We'd be healthier and think of all the shrinks it would employ. But as far as I know you can't just pop into a strip mall and get a counseling session like you can pop into a Wal-Mart and buy a gun. So, for now, there will probably always be more stories like this to report. Damn.

Sad face horked off Gawker 

Couple married 76 years dies 16 hours apart

Maybe it's because spring is in the air but I've seen more of the touching, sweet, if-this-doesn't-make-you-tear-up-you're-a-Vulcan type storieslately, including this one, about Cleda and Rosemond "Frell" Blair, a devote couple of 76 years who died just 16 hours apart from one another. Can you imagine 76 years? Sometimes it's hard to manage 76 minutes with another person.
 Cleda died at 95 and Rosemond, 94, less than a day later. Their son said they were "inseparable," and Yahoo's Shine, where I picked the story up from, talks about the legitimacy of Broken Heart Syndrome, wherein a traumatized person can produce up to 30 times the level of stress hormones as "normal patients" would, enough to cause cardiac trauma. I wonder, too, if when you're together that much for that long it doesn't almost turn into that eerie bond that twins have, where something happens to one and the other feels it.

Interesting how our survival instinct is supposed to reign supreme but how our need to be attached to a particular person can circumvent it - and sometimes poetically. I'd imagine that though it's sad for the survivors (including two children, 12 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren) it might at least be comforting to know that, in a sense, Cleda and Rosemond still haven't separated. True romance.

If this doesn't bring a tear to your eye, your ducts are broken

French paratrooper Abel Chennouf was gunned down by Al-Qaeda militant Mohamed Merah who went on a killing spree in southwestern France this week before he was shot by police according to The AFP. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has given permission for Chennouf's very pregnant girlfriend Caroline Money to marry Abel Chennouf posthumously.

Argument ends in car wreck

It started as an argument between Valerie Ann Lacroix, 21 and her husband. The couple from Newport News had a fight and he left the house and got in his car.
     Now we all know how infuriating it can be to have someone walk away from an argument but sometimes it's the best thing - give each other time to cool off, right? Valerie must not have thought so. She got in her car and smashed into his car, causing him to hit two parked cars. The two proceeded to take their act on the road where she rammed his car again, causing him to collide with a fire hydrant and crash into a utility pole. He was taken to the hospital. She was charged with malicious wounding and attempted malicious and might be brought up on other charges later, according to this report from WTKR-TV.
     Didn't know there was such a charge as "malicious wounding." Suppose they changed some of the names of charges to things like "mental case" and "crazy broad" that people might be more likely to avoid getting arrested?

(Fabulous graphic from Velma's Retro Clip Art & Images)

"Suspected wife killer killed previous wife..."

That was part of the headline on a Newser story on Jeremiah Fogle of Lakeland, FL, who was arrested for murder and attempted murder after shooting his wife Theresa at home and then going on a homidical rampage at the  Greater Faith Christian Center Church, shooting pastor William Boss and associate pastor Carl Stewart. The other part of the headline was "....but Jeremiah Fogle only got 10 years' probation."

     Mitch Stacy of the Associated Press wrote  in a story on Fogle's arrest, "In the years before he was accused of killing his wife and wounding two pastors, Jeremiah Fogle's zigzagging lovelife spanned at least six other marriages and another violent death: A previous wife died at his hands more than two decades ago."

      Fogle had been asked to take a break from going to the church by Boss six years ago after some of the female members "complained about the way he hugged them." Fogle had started his own ministry out of his home. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said that investigators had several documents in the home that appeared to be confessions of infidelity written by Theresa Fogle and naming 25 men but it wasn't clear whether the writings were done voluntarily. Also found was a Bible opened to "a passage in Matthew, quoting Jesus as saying: "Think not that I have come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."

      Fogle was also charged with killing his first wife, Diane in 1987. A charge of murder was reduced to manslaughter and Fogle was only sentenced to probation on the recommendation of the prosecutors but no reasons for either the reduction or recommendation were in court records. 

      Theresa Fogle's daughter Shekema Clark didn't know Fogle had been previously arrested. "If you already killed one person and got away with it why would you do it again?" Stacy quotes her as saying.

      Maybe because he got away with it. 

      

    

Crazy Little Thing Canadian Content Contest!

There are a lot of beautiful love stories going on in the world, fabulous, impervious, rom-com relationships. There are also a lot of people who are thinking about the one that got away...or the one they got away from....or the one who assaulted them and claimed a ghost did it, the one who left over 1000 messages on their voicemail, the one who threatened to stab them for using Facebook too much. There are a lot of great love stories in the world but a lot of crazy ones, too.

Yes, people do crazy things in love and for love and in my book "Crazy Little Thing: Why Love and Sex Drive Us Mad," I tell some of the craziest stories you've ever heard along with some of the neuroscience and psychology of why we do these things.

Now I want to hear YOUR crazy Canadian love stories in my Crazy Little CANADIAN CONTENT Contest! Send me your story of crazy love and win a signed copy of my book "Crazy Little Thing." The stories can be funny, silly, scary, the ending can be happy, horrid, or even pending. I just want to know the craziest thing you've ever dealt with romantically. 

The only rules are: please keep it to 300 words or so, please don't just tell me crazy sex stories (they can have sex in 'em but not just sex...I can get that online...and I probably should) and the deadline is Mach 23. If you don't want your real name revealed that's fine....you can change the names to protect the crazy.

And please be Canadian.

Why am I doing a contest limited for Canadians only? Well, I did one here in the US and now I want to do a special one to show my appreciation for my friends and neighbors way up north. I have lots of reasons to love Canada - my heritage is half Canadian, I used to be a columnist 'for the Toronto Sun  and if I ever move from Florida I'd probably go to Victoria, BC where they have totem poles on the Parliament lawn and all feels right with the world. I love it there.

Anyway, it'll be fun! So send my your crazy Canadian love stories. You can contact me on Facebook or email me at crazylittlecontest@gmail.com  - I look forward to hearing from you!

Good luck! And have some TimBits for me!

Monkeys spontaneously miscarry when new males come to power

This isn't an example of crazy human behavior but of the stunning ways that nature assumes power over mating choices in animals. Since we are animals it pays us to take a look at what occurs in other species even though we like to think of our choices as being more conscious (despite what we know about, say, scent playing a potentially significant subconscious role in who we see as the love of our lives - or at least the flavor of the month).

A recent study from researchers at the University of Michigan on gelada monkeys shows that female geladas will spontaneously abort a pregnancy when a new dominant male comes into power over the group. The Bruce Effect, named after Dr. Hilda Bruce who studied this phenomenon in lab mice in the 50's, was thought to possibly be a result of lab conditions but a recent study of geladas in the wild found that it happens in nature as well. Detailed on io9's Gelada Monkeys Offer Evidence that Abortion is Part of Evolutionary Fitness by Robert T. Gonzalez, the study found that the birth rates plummeted in groups where new males had just taken power and that pregnant females were spontaneously miscarrying. The researchers hypothesized that rather than carry a pregnancy to term - only to have the offspring possibly killed by the new male leader - the females would spontaneously miscarry, thereby becoming fertile again more quickly and better able to produce offspring with the new male in power faster, offspring that would be able to survive.

Not exactly happily ever after, is it? And The Bruce Effect "almost certainly does not exist in humans," Gonzales writes but it might help us understand "pregnancy success rates across a variety of species - humans included."

Happy Birthday, Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams was a genius, one of the greatest and wittiest writers that ever lived and certainly one of the most endearingly curious. In addition to all the brilliant sci fi and holistic detective stories you know all about of course (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency), he wrote non-fiction just as astonishingly well, which also makes him a superb journalist. One of my favorite things he ever wrote was an interview with Straun Sutherland, a medical researcher and expert in venomous creatures, whom Adams met with en route to Komodo for the book Last Chance to See about endangered species. The interview is reprinted here on Life in the Fast Lane and though Adams didn't dwell a great deal on sex or love in any of his books, the last line of this story is one of my favorites - short and sweet and everyone has been there.
It's one of the funniest interviews ever and I'm so glad to have found it online.
Happy Birthday, Douglas!

1001 nightmares

The Houston Chronicle reported in October on the case of Toni Jo Silvey a woman who was driven so mad by a break-up with leather artist Peter Main, 62, that she called him 1001 times in 3 months - 146 times in one day, egged his home, allegedly also hacked into his email account, posting excerpts from emails between Main and another woman, broke a leaded glass window in his front door with a tire iron and another window with a 5-foot sword and blogged all about it.  The break-up had taken place in 2009 - two years before Silvey was arrested and charged with felony stalking.

Shoulda read the book....

Crazy Little Thing: Why Love and Sex Drive Us Mad 

Get it for your crazy friends!

Lacrosse player sentenced in girlfriend's murder

On Feb. 22 George Huguely was sentenced to 26 years in prison for murder and grand larceny in the death of off-again-on-again girlfriend, fellow lacrosse player and University of Virginia student Yeardley Love on May 3, 2010 when her bloodied body was found by police in her apartment. Time magazine's Newsfeed ran a timeline of events leading up to Love's death, including previous incidents of violence and threats toward Love by Huguely, a pattern of violence that happened before he kicked her door in and attacked her the night before she was found.

5% would divorce for the chance to work at home

Happy Freaking Valentines Day: The Grindstone reports that 5% people would give up their spouses in order for the opportunity to work at home, according to a survey by TeamViewer. Now that's a low percentage and a lot more people would give up things like chocolate (29%) and daily showers (12%) but it goes a long way to say two things:  

    a) Our hatred of commuting - and communing - is pretty strong. No surprise, really. Sartre wisely said "Hell is other people," and where are other people? Well, there's a lot fewer of them at your house than there are at Starbucks, in traffic (see left: ew) or at your workplace.

    b) there are people - few, but in evidence - who would drop their sacred bond like it was a rabid mouse if it meant the chance to work in dirtysweat pants. And that's just the ones that answered the survey.

Shoulda read the book....

Crazy Little Thing: Why Love and Sex Drive Us Mad 

 Get it for your crazy friends on Valentines Day!

The Museum of Broken Relationships

      It doesn't surprise me to learn, via the Huffington Post that the Museum of Broken Relationships sees it's visitor numbers nearly double on Valentines Day. I can't think of a better place to be. If you're sad about love it would give you a feeling of commiseration. If you're happy in love it would make you feel lucky for what you have.
      The museum is in Zagreb, Croatia, not a hop, skip and a jump for most of us, but here's the website where you can look at pics of some of the exhibits and read the stories of the people who donated them, some very spare, some very sad and some of them odd, like the Divorce Day Mad Dwarf, about this garden gnome who became a soaring projectile on the day of a divorce, hitting a new car and some pavement: "It was a long loop drawing an arc of time...and this short long arc defined the end of love."
       People from all over have donated items to the museum, which was founded by Drazen Grubisic and Olinka Vistica after having to divide their things during their own break-up. Their stroke of brilliance won them the 2011 European Museum of the Year Kenneth Hudson award given to honor the year's most innovative museum.
        Way to make a sad event into a beautiful place that so many people can relate to. I had few examples of that in Crazy Little Thing  and am always delighted and inspired when it crosses my path.
         And you probably won't find many more lemonade-out-of-lemons stories on this blog so savor the mental health while you can...

Valentine's Day busiest time for...private eyes

Big 105.9 in Miami reports that Valentine's week is the busiest time of the year for private investigators, since cheating spouses feel obligated to spend some time with the other woman and therefore it's an easier time for suspicious partners to get them caught in the act. Private eye Charlie Parker says that he often catches cheating partners giving that goodnight kiss and that "When we're watching people it's a really sad thing."
The message? Well, that cheating's not as much fun as you might think, but also, if you're the kind that's gonna cheat maybe you want to rethink getting married.

Real life corpse bride: Man marries dead girlfriend in joint wedding/funeral

     Okay, if this doesn't bring a tear to your eye you need to have your ducts flushed.
     The Huffington Post reported in January on the sad case of Chadil Deffy of Thailand whose girlfriend had wanted to get married. Deffy put off the wedding but the young man wanted to focus on his education, as many do, before getting hitched. Unfortunately the young lady, Sarinya "Anne" Kamsook died in an accident, a car wreck, reports the Pattaya Daily News.. The Thai-ASEAN News Network reports they had been together for 10 years. So Deffy married her in a combination wedding / funeral ceremony. HuffPo reported that the groom said he followed through with the wedding out of guilt and a feeling of not having done enough for Kamsook while she was alive.
      Sob-inducing? Absolutely. But I'm not 100% sure this should make people run out and get married or take otherwise big steps they're not ready to take. There are a lot of small ways to let someone know you love them...concentrate on those and they'll get the message.
(Photo from Thai-ASEAN News Network)

Did you hear that? Man claims a ghost beat up his wife

Back in January The Huffington Post reported that a Michael West of Fon du Lac, WI explained told the cops that his wife's injuries were from a fall and, when pressed by police, tried to tell them that a ghost did it. The wife had called 911 saying that West had tried to strangle her and hit her in the face when she called 911. Even paranormal investigators called bullshit on that...and they often show people experiencing ghost or demon-related bruises.
     If the guy gets beaten up in prison one wonders if his fellow inmates will say the same thing.