Retired Exxon CEO given $144,000 a day

In April issues of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the chief executives of two huge companies in politically sensitive industries were revealed to have received such extravagant bonuses or stock options that even veteran industry observers were said to be shocked.

While customers of both companies are chronically panicked about rising prices, Lee Raymond, who retired as CEO of ExxonMobil in December, was reported by the Times to have received the equivalent of $144,000 every day for 13 years, and William McGuire, CEO since 1996 of the highly profitable health-insurance manager United Healthcare, was reported by the Journal to be sitting on stock options that, because they were mysteriously timed to kick in at the best possible date, are worth $1.6 billion.

Awesome!

In March, Matt Robison, 21, of Ottawa, Ill., said he felt “like I’ve done something memorable with my life” after sitting for a 14-hour session in which he received 1,016 skin piercings to eclipse the previous Guinness Book record. Immediately afterward, Robison had to remove each one, which he said was just as excruciating as the piercing.

? Prosecutors in Chicago are proceeding with the case against Howard Morgan for allegedly shooting at a police officer, although Morgan denies it, but what was clear was that in returning fire, police shots hit Morgan 25 times (from which he is recovering satisfactorily, according to a January WMAQ-TV story).

Also awesome was the endurance of a 35-year-old man in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who, according to a February Poughkeepsie Journal report, had just been a gunshot victim for the fourth time in the same housing complex. The first and fourth incidents involved multiple wounds.

Bright Ideas

The El Bulli restaurant in Barcelona, Spain, has long waiting lists for reservations for innovative dishes such as strawberry walnut mayonnaise, foie gras ice cream, cocoa butter with crispy ears of rabbit, and Kellogg’s Paella (Rice Krispies, shrimp heads and vanilla-flavored mashed potatoes), according to a February report in The Times of London. The meals of the artistic chef Ferran Adria cost the equivalent of $240 a person, but the world’s leading restaurant critics rate it at the top of their lists.

? Shellie White, 30, was apprehended in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., in March, two years after she fled Arizona with her two children in a custody dispute with her ex-husband. For most of the two years, she has been living as a man (with a female partner), having convinced the kids, now aged 6 and 8, that she is actually their father.

Family Values

Because of unexpectedly large crowds visiting the new Hong Kong Disneyland in January, park officials limited admissions for the first eight days, provoking some mothers who had traveled from all over China to show their frustration by trying to climb in, after first tossing their children, including toddlers, over the fence.

The Continuing Crisis

Eleven women in the area around the nation’s capital have bonded, according to a February Washington Post story, around a tall, athletic man of German heritage (with a master’s degree and who tans easily), whom none has ever met. The man, known as donor 401, is the one whose sperm each of the women chose to be inseminated with, selected from a biographical catalog of the Fairfax Cryobank. That the women’s 12 offspring have a common father has provided powerful motivation for them to learn about each other, as a way of learning about 401 (who has now retired as a donor, though there is still a waiting list for his stored sperm.)

Prolonged Childhoods

Results and schedules for championship tournaments for grown-ups:

(1) Rock Paper Scissors (The U.S. championship was held in Las Vegas in April, for a $50,000 prize.)

(2) Marbles (The renowned British and World Championship was held in the parking lot of the Greyhound Pub in Crawley, England, in April.)

(3) Paper Airplanes (The world championship will be decided in Salzburg, Austria, in May, among representatives from 48 countries.)

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.