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Chuck Shepherd, editor of "News of the Weird," has been collecting peculiar stories for almost 20 years.
Basically, News of the Weird was born one day in the 1970s when I was sitting around in Washington, D.C., with my buds Bob Maslow and Kevin Walsh, taking turns recognizing that life at its essence was really, really boring, and that such realization made some people desperate. We were provoked to consider the strikingly bad ways that people have dealt with this harsh ennui.

A constant quest for examples was born. Newspaper clippings started getting saved and posted and circulated. At first, there were the stories of criminals with grand designs and pea brains; of bureaucracies that reached results that absolutely no one participant ever intended; of everyday cultural customs (domestic and foreign) so goofy that they appeared to be bad science fiction; of ordinary middle-class people who just briefly and inexplicably lost total control of themselves; and of course the suspicion that everyone (as in "every single person") has, if not a dark side, then a fringe obsession or fetish that clearly goes too far (and challenges us as a people to wonder just what we are capable of).

A "zine" (View from the Ledge) was created (long before zines were cool). Mailing lists were created and expanded. Kindred spirits were located around the country and around the world.

Then, in 1988, the editor of Washington's alternative newsweekly, City Paper, made a career-jeopardizing decision and published a column of my news, which then grew like so much journalistic kudzu, first to other alternative newsweeklies, and then, in July 1989, to the mainstream press after being signed up by the big-shot Universal Press Syndicate, which at the time distributed Doonesbury, The Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes. Perfect fit.

At the time, I was pretending to be a scholar, teaching in the business school at George Washington University, with a few hundred graduate and undergraduate students a year in law and regulation and social policy. (I had bluffed my way into that job after short careers as a government lawyer [Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission], government official [head of one of the least prestigious federal councils in the Carter Administration], trade-journal editor [advocating "the public interest" in broadcasting and cable TV], night-club revue producer ["The Slightly Raucous Caucus"], and for 17 years, statistician at Washington Bullets basketball games.) Soon, I realized that the service I could provide to humanity by chronicling the weird news easily outpaced the help I was providing business students in how to avoid indictments. Thus, I resigned in 1992 and moved to Florida.

(The rest of my routine biography: B.S. in Communications, University of Texas at Austin, 1971; J.D., The American University, 1973; M.B.A., The George Washington University, 1989; U.S. Air Force, 1966-1970, including 12 months during 1968-69 in the late, great Republic of Viet Nam [actually, not a year: 362 days, 4 hours, and 19 minutes, from touchdown to liftoff].)

When one leaves the Washington government disneyland, one is under a mighty obligation to land in a place that affords just as much inspiration for the work of weird chronicler; fortunately, the F State more than met the challenge. I had grown up in Florida and known full well its own unique responses to The Boring Society (basically: drive really fast, obsess over college football, become aroused at women with surgically enhanced breasts). Florida, you know, was once home to a mail-order "foot of the month club" that peddled plastic feet modeled from local coeds, $29.95 a foot, $39.95 a pair, available as the month's "Main Selection" or "Alternate."

I'm now (January 2005) 59 years old, in good health, live in Tampa, and work harder than I should in pursuit of my mission to monitor this deteriorating society, generally working every day from early, early in the morning until such time as I get dizzy. But when I'm tempted to slow down, I just remember the millions and millions of judgment-challenged people in the world who are not taking time off. They are still knocking themselves out committing weird news, and I must persevere.