-- In January, University of Utah hospital surgeons removed half the skull of Briana Lane, age 22 and unemployed, in order to save her life after an auto accident, but because putting the skull back in place was not quite an emergency, it was delayed by negotiations over cost. The skull remained in a freezer for three months, with Lane battling serious pain (and wearing a plastic helmet for protection, feeling her brain "shifting" on her) while the hospital negotiated with the state Medicaid office, which pays only for long-term "disabilities." Her skull was finally reattached on April 30.

Oklahoma state Rep. Mike O'Neal, married with three children and the author of the state's proposed "Defense of Marriage Act," was charged with a felony in February for grabbing a woman's buttocks in an Oklahoma City bar; he was also accused of making lewd comments to, and chasing after, her. And one of the sponsors of Georgia's sanctity-of-marriage constitutional amendment (introduced in January), state Sen. Bill Stephens, was divorced in 1991 after 15 years of marriage but then had the marriage no-counted ("annulled") in order to marry a Catholic woman in 1994, according to a public records check by Atlanta's Southern Voice.

Adventures With Lubricants

In January, a National Park Service ranger arrested Marvin Buchanon for drug possession along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. Buchanon had been discovered sitting in a truck one evening, naked, covered with baby oil and with women's underwear at his feet. And in a widely reported incident in May, Roger Chamberlain, 44, was arrested in Binghamton, N.Y., after having allegedly smeared 14 containers' worth of petroleum jelly on nearly every inch of the walls and furniture of a Motel 6 room (and who was found shortly afterward at another motel, himself covered with the substance).

-- Among the secret British military plans recently revealed from classified documents: (1) a huge landmine to be planted during World War II on the German plains (to prevent the Soviet army from overreaching), to be kept at a warm, detonatable temperature by the body heat of thousands of live chickens underground (according to Britain's National Archives in April), and (2) a post-World War II plan disclosed in May to equip pigeons as suicide dive-bombers carrying explosives and biological agents to a targeted area. (The military said its research showed that homing pigeons could be tricked via electromagnetic fields into sensing that their "home" was actually the target area, but pigeon experts say it is more likely the pigeons would have returned to dive-bomb Britain.)

-- At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's "Sex Out Loud" Health Awareness Fair in March, the Feminist Majority organization sponsored a "giant vagina structure" for which students could pay a dollar and stick their heads in to have their pictures taken. Said a spokesperson, "There are a lot of phallic symbols in society, and we wanted to put a vaginal one out there."

-- Despite the 39-day waiting list for brain operations at the Queens Medical Center in Nottingham, England, the hospital suspended neurosurgeon Terence Hope in March (after 18 years' service), not for substandard work but because he had been accused of taking extra croutons for his soup in the hospital cafeteria, without paying. (The suspension was lifted three days later.)

-- Nuanced Views of Ethics: Convicted wife-poisoner Paul Agutter (who served seven years for his crime) was hired by the University of Manchester (England) earlier this year to teach adult-education courses in ethics; an Imperial College London lecturer, asked to comment by Reuters news service, said that people who do criminal acts are also qualified, "logical(ly)," to think about ethical questions. And in January, John Harris (a professor of "bioethics" at Manchester University), speaking at a conference, argued there is no moral distinction between aborting a fully developed fetus at 40 weeks and killing the child after birth a few weeks later; although his position could be seen as antagonizing both sides of the abortion debate, anti-abortionists appeared to be the more outraged.

In Orlando, Fla., on March 10, a motorist was unable to come to a stop quickly enough after making a fast left turn in traffic and smashed into a Just Brakes repair shop. And a company in Buckinghamshire, England, announced in February it would start selling a Russian-invented MP3 audio player made to the specifications of an ammunition magazine to fit into an AK-47 assault rifle.

A 21-year-old man and his teenage accomplice were arrested in Austin, Minn., in April, after allegedly burglarizing the Tendermade Restaurant; officers called to the scene noticed that the cash register tape had come unspooled outside, and they followed the 100-foot-long roll into some bushes, where the two were hiding. And in Honolulu, in April, Gavin Bolosan, 26, was arrested and charged with stealing a woman's purse and using her credit card at a Longs drugstore (but he was caught after he filled out the Longs credit card ID form with his own name and address).

London's The Mirror released a list in March of the world's 20 inheritance-wealthiest animals, topped by the dog Gunther IV (now worth over US$320 million, from the late German countess Karlotta Libenstein), followed by Kalu the chimpanzee (about US$95 million, from the late Australian Olympic swimmer Frank O'Neill) and the dog Toby Rimes (about US$80 million, from the late New Yorker Ella Wendel). The list consists of 10 cats (four of them American), five dogs, a hen, a tortoise, a parrot, Kalu the chimp, and a herd of cattle supported by a British royal trust. (Most on the list are offspring of the original recipient, with trust funds even larger because of investments.)

A 61-year-old retired biochemist who had been teaching high school chemistry in recent years was killed while stirring homemade marmalade on his kitchen stove, after inadvertently inhaling carbon monoxide from the stove's faulty gas line (Walk, England, April). And a 16-year-old honor-roll student, and member of her school's anti-drinking organization, passed out and died at her cousin's birthday party, with an empty vodka bottle nearby and a blood-alcohol reading of 0.439 (legal limit, 0.08) (Bartonville, Ill., April).

In February, an unidentified audience member was led away, still shouting, after attempting to debate former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani at a University of Oklahoma speech about Sept. 11's effect on the city; contrary to Giuliani's blaming the attack on al-Qaida, the man insisted that the culprit was Wal-Mart (Norman, Okla.). And in May, several senior Japanese women (ages from their 50s through their 70s) met to discuss the revival of the sport in which they had once excelled during its heyday, female sumo wrestling, a gathering that included an exhibition by the 61-year-old Ms. Mikako Shimada (Mikatsuki, Japan).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

New Frontiers in Charity Fund-Raising: Norwegian activists Tommy Hol Ellingsen and his girlfriend, seeking new funding sources for the environmental movement, created a Web site earlier this year that charges visitors about US$15 a month to view pornographic photos of the couple, with all profits to benefit environmental organizations (although some were reported ethically reluctant to accept their money). And in January, a 33-year-old British woman, "Vix," who has multiple sclerosis, created a Web site featuring topless photos of herself and asking visitors to donate to the UK's MS Resource Centre. (Business is slow on both sites: As of April, Ellingsen reported only 200 visitor-months, and Vix had raised the equivalent of US$6,000 from about 100 of the site's 125,000 visitors.)

In 1990, News of the Weird reported on a World War II "cargo cult" on Tanna, one of the 83 islands comprising the republic of Vanuatu (located between Papua New Guinea and Fiji). (Such cults are known for regarding as magical the food and supplies that Americans brought to military staging areas on the islands, and they continued to pray for more "cargo" for decades after Americans left.) In May, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, violence broke out on Tanna when Christian breakaways, calling the cargo business nonsense, fought with supporters of "John Frum," the iconic American whom the cultists worship. About 25 people were hospitalized, according to police dispatched from Vanuatu's capital of Vila.

According to police in Atlanta in January, Nathaniel Lee Stanley, 20, just released from jail, walked out and immediately carjacked a woman in the jail's parking lot (and was later returned to jail). And Ms. Kelly J. Handy, 37, who posted bond on burglary charges in Wheat Ridge, Colo., in March, picked up the wig and clothing that had been taken from her on her arrest, then went into a restroom, created a new look, and, according to police, immediately began stealing from residential mailboxes near the jail.

-- Richard Timmons' $80 million police brutality lawsuit went to trial in April in New York City, with Timmons acting as his own lawyer to persuade a jury that he deserved to be a rich man because he was "beat(en) continuously" during his 1997 arrest. The jury turned him down after a quick deliberation, perhaps in part because his crime (for which he was convicted) was a triple murder that included the beheading of his wife and 7-year-old son.

-- Not My Fault: Chef Michael McCarthy, 21, with about a year's experience in the kitchen of the Dalmunzie Hotel in Perthshire, Scotland, filed a lawsuit for the equivalent of US$42,000 against the hotel in January because he had badly cut his finger while slicing open an avocado. He said no one had taught him that unripened avocados were harder to cut than ripened ones.

-- After praising lawyer Brian Puricelli's courtroom work in winning a case for a client against the city of Philadelphia, federal Judge Jacob Hart cut Puricelli's loser-paid legal fees by $32,000 because his written work was sloppy, citing missing pages, missing paragraphs, and a huge number of typos (such as repeatedly referring to the court as representing the "Easter District" of Pennsylvania). Further, Puricelli's work apparently did not improve during the trial despite numerous admonishings; in a key, three-sentence paragraph in his response to Hart's fee-cutting decision, Puricelli wrote four more typos and addressed his objection to Judge "Jacon" Hart.

(1) "Trio Arrested for Breaking in and Performing Dental Work" (a December story in the Alexandria, La., Town Talk, about two people trying to help a friend who had lost part of a filling one night and couldn't wait until the dentist's office opened). (2) "Jail Teaches Prisoners to Shoot" (an April story in The West Australian, revealing that the Eastern Goldfields prison allows Aboriginal inmates to shoot air rifles because, upon release, they will return to a life of hunting animals for food).

Among the beach attractions on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten: bracing oneself in the sand at the beach at the end of the runway at Princess Juliana International Airport and trying to remain upright as airliners take off. (Jumbo jets' blasts have been known to topple vans.) A March Chicago Tribune dispatch described the giddiness of several tourists (who defied posted warnings), one of whom was "tossed in the air like a human shot put." Said another man, slowly pulling himself to his feet after a take-off, "I couldn't resist. (My wife and I) are both doing things we'd never do (back home) in Ohio."

Another Cardinal Rule Broken (the one about keeping a low profile): John Parker and Rick Owens were arrested in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart in Athens, Texas, in April, after they were allegedly spotted by several people sitting in their car carefully cutting out individual counterfeit bills from larger sheets they had just printed. And Dennett Colescott, 41, was arrested at a drugstore in Corte Madera, Calif., in April after an employee reported to police that Colescott was standing at the store's photo printer, calmly copying child pornography.

News of the Weird reported in 1998 on the emerging Hollywood trademark battle between the creators of TV's "Ren & Stimpy" and "South Park" over who had original rights to a cartoon character who was an animated piece of excrement (John Kricfalusi's "Nutty the Friendly Dump" or South Park's "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo"). In April 2004, a South Korean company announced it was planning a major U.S. media launch of a short, philosophical children's film with the clay-animation character "Doggy Poo" (who, in one scene, asks a guru, "What am I good for?" and receives the answer, "God has not created you for no reason. He must have a good plan for you").

School System Accountability: The principal of one of Washington, D.C.'s, roughest-neighborhood elementary schools was revealed in late 2003 to have obtained her doctorate degree from a diploma mill, but her school system supervisors decided in April to impose no punishment (except to drop her salary to what master's-degree principals get). Also in April, the school system declined to punish the 110 employees it identified who had vastly and improperly overspent using D.C. government credit cards, pointing out that investigators had no evidence of "personal gain" from the uses (but then admitting that their investigation stopped short of looking for such personal gain).

According to a February Reuters report, 15 hooded men were very apologetic while they robbed the priests of a Catholic monastery near Guaratingueta, Brazil, of the equivalent of US$6,200, but one of the crooks forced a priest to swear on a Bible that that was all the money they had. And officials of Canada's Algonquin Nation recently convinced the distributors of a popular, Arab-written, U.S. and Canadian high school student guide to Arab history to drop a passage on how Muslim explorers beat Christopher Columbus to North America and how "Algonquin Muslims" Abdul-Rahim and Abdallah Ibn Malik negotiated with English pilgrims. (A spokesperson for the distributor said she had no idea how the reference originated.)

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

In May, in the latest blooming of the lawyers' class-action money tree, California law firms asked a court to approve $258 million in fees for their handling of a lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., amounting to $3,000 an hour for the lead attorney (who billed for 6,000 hours of his own time, even though three dozen lawyers from more than 30 firms had a piece of the case) and $1,000 an hour for administrative work, all for the following consumer bonanza: Each victim will get a coupon worth $5 to $29 toward the purchase of another Microsoft product (coupons that are often routinely ignored by consumers in these settlements, as not worth the bother).

In April, a judge in Ocala, Fla., sentenced a 27-year-old man to probation-only for having sex with his then-girlfriend's rottweiler (with the man admitting that he had a "lifelong problem") and lamented that under state law, the man could not be forced to register as a sex offender, since the victim was a dog. Also in April, authorities in Nashville, Tenn., charged Metro News with violating the state's Sunday-closing law for adult businesses, but the owner said he would fight it since he had recently tried to avoid the law by occupying most of his floor space with a Sunday-law-acceptable retail furniture and garden business (although his sign still said customers had to be age 18 or older to shop for furniture).

Although 50 countries (including Japan) have now banned American beef because of inadequate mad-cow controls, the U.S. Department of Agriculture not only has declined to order widespread testing but has even prohibited one farm, Creekstone (Campbellsburg, Ky.), from voluntarily testing. USDA said such conscientious testing would imply that America's entire 35 million yearly slaughters should be tested (which the industry says is too expensive, even though Japan requires universal testing for its beef). USDA said it aims to test only 40,000 cows, up from 20,000 for the last two years (although it has been unable for nine months now to document those tests in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by United Press International).

-- Until March, Mr. Dayn Riegel and his girlfriend kept 77 cats in their house in Lawrenceville, Ga., but a Humane Society spokesman said he saw no problem, in that all appeared to be in good health and well-fed, and Riegel's home was clean (though filled with litter boxes). Riegel recorded each cat's history on a computer database, provided one packaged meal and one special meal a day for each, and turned over 60 pounds of cat litter a week. (During a recent move from the home, Riegel gave away just a few of the cats.)

-- Veteran schoolteacher Carrie Peoples, 63, quit her job in April in Covington, Ga., after an incident in which she responded to a trash-talking 14-year-old student by ordering two male classmates to toss the girl out of an open window (even though it was a first-floor window); the boys dutifully complied, for fear of punishment. And two-year teacher Jason Schoenberger, 24, was suspended from PS 279 in Brooklyn, N.Y., in March after he hung a 5-year-old student on a closet coatrack (supposedly with the kid's permission) just to see the shock on a colleague's face when he walked in to the closet.

-- Sweden's Parliamentary Ombudsmen's office in Stockholm, looking through some old environmental records recently, discovered that in 1986 a regional environmental court in Jaemtland province had denied a resort-development permit to a builder on the ground that the Loch Ness-resembling "Storsjoe monster" (serpentlike body, catlike head, first rumored in 1635) often "sighted" there had been declared endangered. Declared the ruling, "(I)t is prohibited to kill, hurt or catch animals of the Storsjoe monster species" or to "take away or hurt the monster's eggs, roe or den."

-- In April, the Virginia Supreme Court turned down the petition for a new trial for Aleck J. Carpitcher, who was sentenced in 1999 to 38 years in prison for molesting an 11-year-old girl even though she recently told authorities she made up the whole incident to punish Carpitcher, who was at the time dating the girl's mother. The justices cited state law, which allows consideration of "new evidence" only if it is submitted within three weeks of the sentencing date.

-- The Boston Herald reported in April that the Massachusetts Treatment Center, at which the state's pedophiles and rapists are housed, was using a controversial aversion therapy that some experts say includes providing convict-patients with illegal child pornography and forcing them to masturbate repeatedly, past the threshold of pain, in the belief that child images will thus eventually become uninviting.

New Hampshire state Rep. John Kerns resigned in February while on the verge of expulsion for, among other things, writing "State of New Hampshire" on some personal checks (later dishonored) to feign officialness and for threatening violence after unsuccessfully demanding a private parking space; he appeared at one court hearing wearing a black cape to, as he said, improve his credibility as a defendant. Also, presidential candidate Robert Haines, 57, of New Hampshire, was arrested while campaigning in Virginia in April after he threatened to kill a police dog over a parking ticket dispute; last year, at a Dartmouth College football game, Haines tried to commandeer the public address system and ceremonially "throw out the first football" (which is only done in baseball).

A man, perhaps not all that incompetent, took $180 from another in a home robbery in Covington, Ky., in April. The money was handed over by the victim only because he was late in noticing that the gun the man was holding had no barrel. As the robber ran out, the victim called police, and neighbors joined in a search, but the only thing that was found nearby, according to the Kentucky Post, was discarded clothing and "pieces of a gun."

A 2003 News of the Weird report heralded a rural Peruvian doctor, on a mountain far from a hospital, for performing lifesaving surgery to relieve swelling in a man's skull, using only a carpenter's drill and pliers. In a similar incident near Ketchum, Idaho, in December (with med-evac helicopters grounded by a blizzard), Dr. Keith Sivertson likewise saved Ben King's life, but using a Makita power drill from a clinic's maintenance shop.

In April, Sheryl Hardy, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for her role in the brutal death of her 2-year-old son in 1989 in Florida, asked the Department of Family Services in Illinois (where she now lives after early release) for the parenting equivalent of a golf "mulligan" by petitioning to be allowed to raise her follow-up baby, who had been immediately taken from her by the state after she gave birth in 2001. And in Edinburgh, Scotland, bus drivers are apparently subjected to so much abuse that transit officials recently gave all 1,800 operators DNA-collecting kits so that they can swab themselves when passengers spit on them.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)