It’s weird to see what’s no longer weird

Chuck Shepherd collects weird-but-true news stories and publishes them. His “News of the Weird” solicits submissions of such stories from readers. But there are some kinds of stories which he won’t consider, because they’re so common as not to be weird anymore.

Shepherd lists these too-common-to-be-weird items on his Web site. Here are some examples:

1. an old, widely-advertised phone-sex number is reassigned to a
church/charity
. . . 7. family thinks he's dead, but he's not and attends his own funeral
. . . 33. the annual student cheating riots in Bangladesh
. . . 46. unlabeled urn with loved one's ashes mistakenly stolen or sold at yard sale
47. husband takes his wife back even though she just tried to kill him
48. judges punish young people by forcing them to listen to music
. . . 64. imposter cop has car with flashing light, stopping motorists, accidentally stops real cop . . .