Extremely strange people you come across

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Years ago in Minneapolis we had the following:

 1970s  -  a friendly, normal looking working class-type woman who walked 
                around downtown with a friendly smile. She would say to attractive
                young women:  'you can clean out toilets with your hands.'  Then, 
                she would move on, find some more women at a bus stop, and say.
                'you can clean out toilets with your hands.'  She never spoke to me
                 or other guys.

 1980s -  a guy who would jog around downtown, wearing only Speedo trunks,
               and carrying and lifting dumbbells.

 1980s -  a bag lady with the most bloodcurdling scream I have ever heard.
               She would be on a bench, or a bus, or wherever, then all of a 
               sudden, let go with one of her screams  -  people would jump and
               tremble!
42

Might I recommend not antagonizing Scary Christian Steve? There’s a good reason you were scared – IMHO he’s very dangerous. Get some pepper spray, or a handgun, before looking him up, OK?

Oh, Shirley, thank you so much. I now have a good answer to that question. I’ve always just said “Fuck you, Asshole”, and glared. Granted, that works pretty well, but your answer is more pleasant.

43

I think the weirdo quotient on the Toronto subway is rising.

Last Thursday I was coming home. I boarded the subway on the east side of town, and stayed on the same train past Yonge Street, which divides Toronto into east and west halves. Most people get on or off the train here, onto the other subway lines.

I didn’t pay much attention when someone sat down in the seat in front of me. I had been eating a Sour Soother candy, and I was holding the last bite between finger and thumb. The new arrival , a not-particularly-abnormal-looking man with neat close-cropped hair, looked at me and said, “You’re eating a candy.”

I munbled something noncommittal.

He said, “I want one.”

I mumbled something else about it being my last one (which it was), while thinking, “It’s generally not a good idea to antagonise the nutcases.” I go into “prepare to get out of here now” mode.

Fortunately (for me at least), he turned to the person in the other seat next to him, who was reading a newspaper. I heard him say, “Can I see your newspaper?”

The train pulled into the next station, and I got off and made like I was going out the exit until it pulled away. Then I turned back and went and waited for the next train. I rode the rest of the way home wondering whether the Demander would be at my destination, waiting for the bus into my neighbourhood…

44

Huh. This explains the " Jumbo Shrimp 10# for $10" sold at various scary corners out of the back of a crappy van. (Usually not far from the Velvet Paintings.) I think I’d rather take my chances with crack than eat that shrimp. Ingesting a bunch of mixed up household chemicals seems much safer than eating room temperature days old seafood.

Hardest Drug Shirley has done, outside of RX’s, is coffee. Yeah, back away from me, baby, I’m on the edge!

45

That’s funny. I work in Manhattan (near Times Square), and there is a little old lady who paces my street whose entire wardrobe appears to be plastic trash bags. For years, she asks all passersbys for 50 cents. She just keeps repeating “fitty cent, fitty cent…”. One time my friend offered to give her a dollar since he didn’t have any change. She actually refused insisting on only 50 cents.

46

I used to know a woman who would sit on her porch all day long, no matter what the weather was. The reason she sat out there, was because each car that went by represented someone she knew. I was represented by a small black truck. :confused: If she didn’t see a certain type of car the whole day, then something bad had happened to that person. She would also greet people by telling them how they would die. I was constantly warned to stay out of Alabama, because I would die in a fire there. At night, since there wasn’t any traffic to read, she would wander around town, usually on some mission, (clothing was optional on these missions). She once, walked 7 miles in the middle of the night, to her son’s house, because she thought he was dead. She entered the house, and shook his wife awake. Except it was the house nextdoor. She tried to kill her husband twice, while he slept.

I also know a boy who seems normal at first, until he gets frustrated. Then he makes a humming sound in his throat, and rocks back and forth. When he’s happy, he laughs very loud and flicks his ears with his hands. If he really likes you, he’ll tell you the “interupting cow” knock, knock joke, over and over again. Maybe one day, he’ll make someone’s life a little less boring, when they can entertain their friends by making fun of the weird guy they saw. :rolleyes:

47

Much as I hate to laugh I’d still probably have paid good money to have seen that.

48

In San Francisco??? When did Lady Sally move from New York?

Darn, there go my vacation plans!

Eli

49

I was accosted by a weirdo for … well, it seems like it was a long while, but it was probably just a half-hour. He said his name was Dave, and he was deep into conspiracies. He didn’t believe anything the authorities or most people said, from the Holocaust to the Moon landings. He believed he could make storms with his radio transmitter and that he convinced some Black Helicopter types to arrange a meeting with Ronald Reagan in a men’s room. He had, of course, had direct contact with aliens and thought that their ships were the three-dimensional extrusions of multi-dimensional craft, which according to him would explain jinking that violates the law of conservation of momentum. (Ninety-degree turns at full speed.)

Dave’s not here. Dave probably hasn’t been here for a long time.

It was surreal. I was picking up books at a library remainder giveaway (best place to get technical manuals for IBM cardreaders and books about programming languages that have been dead for 30 years), and he walked up beside me and just started into his bizarre spiel. He talked in a low voice, not whispering but also not very clear all the time. He talked about how the governmnet was being run by a conspiracy and how he’d seen American chemical weapons when he was serving in Vietnam. When his tale verged on the apocalyptic, I offered him a survival guide from the 1960s. After laughing that they’d never give good information to us dupes, he took it.

He had an odd manic energy that made him all the more interesting to listen to. Well, that and I was somewhat afraid that if I just walked away he might get angry.

A good while later, I was in Edmonton on vacation. While I was walking from a restaurant back to my hotel room, a severely agitated man walked beside me. Not with me, thank goodness, but close enough that I could hear his ranting. Reggie felt he was being unfairly persecuted, and when he mimed drawing a gun and shooting someone on the ground after we’d stopped at an intersection, I decided to cross the street a block down.

50

Sounds almost like a Dan Aykroyd character.

51

There’s a woman who stands on the corner of 5th and 42nd yelling something about Jesus Christ who never fails to startle the hell out of me. Walking along, minding my own business, and hear a shrill voice crying out “JESUS CHRIST!”

Every time, I think someone is swearing angrily, until I hear her lapse into whatever lecture about Jesus Christ it is she gives.

52

iggy popov: Funny story, clever name, and welcome to the boards.

My contribution:

This certainly qualifies as strange, but only in the sense of being completely mysterious. My wife and I have both speculated about what exactly might be going on in this person’s life, but none of our speculation is really satisfying. The mystery remains.

See, there’s this woman. Somewhat nondescript, mid 40s or so, not overweight, with longish stringy brown hair. She wears a baseball cap and a black raincoat over a regular outfit. Sometimes she has an umbrella. And she sits in a plastic patio chair next to the chain-link fence that surrounds the parking lot of our local police precinct.

That’s it. That’s all she does. It wouldn’t be all that remarkable, except that she’s been doing it for at least eight years.

That’s how long I’ve been living in the neighborhood, and she’s always there. Well, not always always. But nine times out of ten, between the hours of noon and nine o’clock, which is when I commonly drive past, she’ll be there in her chair, leaning forward, nose mere inches from the fence, staring at a parking lot full of police cruisers. Sometimes, she isn’t sitting; she’s standing next to her chair, leaning against the fence. Mostly, though, she sits.

On the very rare occasions when she isn’t there, you can usually see a small number of rolled-up pieces of paper, three to five, tied with what looks like colored yarn, and inserted into the chain-link fence.

Clearly, not everything is right for her. She’s obsessed with the cop shop, that much is obvious. But why? Does she love them? Is she protecting the parking lot? Or does she hate them, and is sitting there silently judging them? Maybe she was a cop’s wife and lost her marbles when her husband was killed in the line of duty. Maybe she’s just nuts and decided to start sitting there completely at random. We have no clue. I suspect there may be an amazing story there; I just don’t know what it might be. Or, perhaps, the story is completely mundane. No idea at all.

Regardless of the reason, as the years go by, there she continues to sit.

:confused:

53

He sounds like a very low-functioning Autistic child. I babysat for a boy very much like that, and they are completely unaware of their repetitive behaviors (rocking, humming, flicking, etc). His mom told me to tell him things like “you know, a conversation is when two people talks. Sometimes you get to talk, and sometimes you get to listen.” He called me “the pretty lady with white hair (I’m platinum blonde) who can beat me at Commander Keen.”
I live near a group home for the developmentally disabled. There is a very sweet man (late 30s? Its hard to tell) who lives there and tries very, very hard to be socially appropriate. When he meets you, he will give you a biiiig hug, complete with back-rubbing and patting. Then, embarassed, he will look at the floor and shake your hand. His confidence renewed, he will then go for another hug. He will go through this cycle at least four times before he can start to talk to you.

I think that I may have been one of these people recently. I’m just learning the hustle, and it’s done to 70’s disco music. Those songs get stuck in my head worse than anything, so as I walk around campus, I may or may not sing

You are the Dancing Queen, young and sweet, only seventeen
Dancing Queen, feel the beat from the tambourine
You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the Dancing Queen!

Complete with disco hand moves.

Hey, where’d you go? Come back! I’m not… sigh dig in the Dancing Queen…

54

I was in “The Bookman/Bookwoman” used book store in Nashville, near Vanderbilt U. (visit–as a Doper, you’ll love it), when I met a rather dumpy, cleanly dressed woman who was raving about how the evilest man in the world wanted to stuff us all in concentration camps in order to save the Spotted Owls.

In case you didn’t know, the evilest man in the world is apparently Al Gore.
I thought that he was too bland to be evil.
I said so.
She said: “Well, yeah, maybe.”

55

Hee! You are a credit to the Doper name- fighting ignorance; one nutso at a time.

56

Address, wenn’s beleibt. We will be there Wednesday night to Saturday, and Kiminy loves those kinds of bookstores.

[/hijack]

Vlad/Igor

57

Bookman Rare and Used Books
1713 21ST Ave S
Nashville, TN 37212-3703
http://nashville.citysearch.com/profile/9334268/nashville_tn/bookman_rare_and_used_books.html?cslink=search_name_noncust&ulink=search__searchslot1_520__0_profile_268-509_1

58

Thanks, Susan. Thanks a lot. I just snorted Propel Fitness Water up my nose and then spit it all over myself.

Oh, well. They were six for $5 at the corner market this week anyway.

59

The only weird person I can think of right now is the guy I saw crying his eyes out during the movie “Troy”. And I don’t think he was crying because of how bad the movie was because he was cheering and really getting into the movie earlier.

But when Brad Pitt died, he really let loose with the tears.

60

A long time ago in Albuquerque there was Carlos, also known as the “Ragman” because he used to attach various rags to his clothes. He wandered around ranting a lot, although a former co worker who was a thalidomide baby (no,I’m not making this up–she had no arms and her hands were attached at the shoulder) said he once stopped traffic for her when she was having trouble crossing the street. Carlos lived off Mad Dog wine and spaghettios and died when someone set him on fire while he was sleeping in an alley near the University. As far as I know the killer was never caught.

When I worked at an appliance repair store a man came in with a broken microwave. The manager said that we didn’t fix microwaves and he started to ramble about something. The manager repeated that we didn’t do microwaves, that it was leaking radiation, and that he needed to get rid of it. Then I overheard him announce that he had a friend in a nearby town who was building a time machine out of used nuclear missile parts. Eventually the manager convinced him that the microwave wasn’t repairable and he left. I never did hear about how the time machine project turned out, but if there’s a madman in the middle ages carting around a broken microwave I guess it worked okay.