-- University of Florida professor Thomas DeMarse revealed in December that he has constructed a primitive "brain" ("live computation device") out of 25,000 rat neurons and has taught it to maneuver an F-22 fighter jet simulation in a straight trajectory. The brain had to be "taught," he said, because at first, the plane kept crashing. DeMarse said an organic brain is potentially much more flexible than even the highest-tech computer. The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health are funding his work, as models for controlling otherwise-risky unmanned aircraft and for developing epilepsy-fighting drugs.

(1) Following an October worker compensation fine levied against a ranch in Australia's outback, after a cowboy fell off a horse and hit his head, the losing ranch owner said he would require all his wranglers to wear helmets instead of the classic cowboy hats (and other ranch owners may follow along). (2) In November, the school district in Spurger, Texas, ended its decades-old, Homecoming Week reverse-roles day (in which girls dress as boys and vice versa) after one parent complained that the tradition promoted a homosexual lifestyle; in its place, the school urged kids to dress in military camouflage.

(1) In July, Winnetka, Ill., investment promoter Charles Harris made a last-ditch effort to get his clients' support, hoping they would not cooperate with authorities who were about to arrest him for fraud. Harris sent each a DVD in which he begged them to give his investments more time, but federal agents, after arresting Harris in September, said Harris probably shot that DVD from the Caribbean Sea, on the 62-foot yacht he had bought with clients' money. (2) In Cleveland, Tenn., Rob Smitty gained media attention in November after donating a kidney to a stranger, hoping the selfless act would make his daughter "proud"; however, Smitty was at the time 24 months behind on child support, and his daughter, Amber, sighed to reporters that Smitty had a poor record of visiting or calling, even on her birthday.

-- According to a female bailiff in Tampa, Fla., county judge Gasper Ficarrota (during a hotel-room tryst with the bailiff) laid out his robe on their bed for her to wear so that she could "feel the power that his black robe possessed." "Why do you think successful attorneys strive to become judges?" he asked. (The bailiff's remarks were written in her private diary, introduced by her husband at their divorce trial in November.) [St. Petersburg Times, 11-18-04]

-- In September, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Judith Retchin ordered Jonathan Magbie, 27, to jail for 10 days for first-offense marijuana possession (a virtually unheard-of sentence in D.C.), despite the fact that Magbie was a quadriplegic with permanent tracheal, urinary and stomach tubes and was often ventilator-dependent, in addition to having various other infirmities. (Magbie died four days later, after what the D.C. Health Department concluded in December was severely inadequate care in jail and in an emergency room.)

-- America's Creative Class: Farmer Randy Valicoff (of Yakima Valley in Washington) sold designer apples (at $6) this autumn, created by laying tiny, artistic stickers of "cougars" or "huskies" on ripening apples, leaving on the otherwise-red skin yellow images of either the Washington State University cougar or the University of Washington husky. And in November, Rice University MBA student Beau Carpenter introduced his battery-operated, glowing thong for strippers, with a two-hour charge, in neon colors, at about $50.

-- New Scientist magazine reported in September that Chris Melhuish (University of the West of England, at Bristol) was readying his EcoBot II, a self-powered robot that runs on energy produced by catching and digesting houseflies (and breaking down their sugars to release electrons). The major downside: The most efficient way to attract flies is with sewage, which makes EcoBot II unfriendly to humans.

-- In Ruthin, Wales, the owners of the bull Picston Shottle said in November that they believe that piped-in Mozart music helped develop his amazing productivity as a stud; his semen is sold out until April, with enough output to create about 500 "doses" a day (at a price of about US$65 a dose). And sheep farmer Barry Walker touted his flock's production of superfine Australian merino wool at his operation in New South Wales, helped along, he said, by a secret diet of grains and the piped-in music of Italian singer Andrea Bocelli.

-- In November, BBC News previewed an upcoming story for its wildlife TV magazine show "Spy in the Woods," derived from film footage from a stationary hidden camera in the Quingling mountains in northwest China. Featured on the show was a panda doing a handstand against a tree, apparently for the purpose of extending the vertical reach of his urine, to more dominantly mark his territory.

The super-reclusive, 280-person German cult Villa Baviera, holed up in Chile since 1961 and worshipping of former army nurse Paul Schaefer (now age 81, with whereabouts unknown), broke into the public eye in a November Reuters dispatch describing how most members have finally, after four decades, come to realize that they were mistaken in their belief that Schaefer is God's messenger on Earth. The cult lived frozen in time, with few modern conveniences, wearing clothing from the 1930s, and in total obedience to Schaefer, who had imposed many idiosyncratic policies, including an ironclad no-intimacy rule.

In November, a 46-year-old man climbed into an enclosed area at the Taipei (Taiwan) Zoo, apparently to attempt to convert a pride of lions to Christianity by informing them that Jesus is their savior. According to witnesses, the lion king sauntered over and briefly sank his teeth into the man's leg, but then, according to one account, "got bored" and returned to his previous state of lounging, as zoo personnel hustled the intruder away.

Although ride-on lawn mowers have been used as transportation to and from crime scenes before (and even as "vehicles" that drunk drivers get charged with DUI while operating), it is rare that a suspect tries to actually outrun police while on one, as Steven W. Coleman, 37, did in Dover, N.H., in December; he was wanted for questioning in an arson at a former girlfriend's house, and when he saw the lights of a police cruiser, he opened the throttle and took off, for a couple of blocks, before a second cruiser cut him off.

The Sacramento (Calif.) Fire Department reported in November that a resident had dropped by the fire station on Granada Way in order to turn in a grenade he had found in his garage. It was later safely detonated. (As in many previous such episodes nationwide, Sacramento authorities requested that anyone who comes across a bomb or grenade should simply report its whereabouts, and not pick it up and, especially, not bring it to them.)

(1) Wildlife experts cited in a BBC News dispatch from Dar es Salaam said the probable cause of a lion's anti-human rampage in southern Tanzania in 2003 and 2004 (killing and eating 35 people) was an abscessed-caused toothache, which led him to seek an alternative to his favorite food, buffalo, which is difficult to chew. (2) A November Associated Press dispatch from Elyria, Ohio, profiled Jennifer Mitchell, who runs a "rescue mission" of sorts, acting as a home of last resort where people can leave rats that they initially kept as pets but grew tired of. At any given time, about three dozen are in residence.

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

"Freegans" are non-homeless Dumpster divers with a political or at least philosophical commitment not to waste perfectly usable discarded goods, including food, according to reports in Newsday (September) and the Houston Press (November). Most are driven by a belief that too many Americans have a fetishized view of newness, pointing out that restaurants discard much unspoiled food simply because they need to sell even fresher food. (Freegans don't eat table scraps.) Still, many restaurants elaborately protect their garbage from "Dumpstering" foragers, with locks and razor wire or by coating it with bleach. (Not usually counted as freegans are less-philosophical people who obsessively explore trash piles to carry away anything potentially useful.)

(1) Using parts she bought from the estate of a laser-tech engineer, Julie "Jitterbug" Pearce, 23, built a UFO-attracting device for the roof of her home in Duluth, Minn., and told the Duluth News Tribune in August that her machine's triangularly patterned strobe light design, looped radio transmissions, and laser light refracted through a quartz crystal may help signal aliens in the area. (2) In Johannesburg, South Africa, student John Smit, 18, caused a minor curriculum crisis when he willingly took a 30-point deduction on an important English exam because he could not bear to deal with a reading-comprehension question based on a passage from a Harry Potter book, which Smit regards as "witchcraft."

(1) Australia's High Court ruled in October that convicted drug dealer Francesco Dominico La Rosa could indeed write off a casualty loss of A$224,793 (about US$168,000) against his taxable income, even though the "loss" occurred when someone allegedly stole that amount that La Rosa had buried in his back yard and wanted to use for a heroin deal. (The Australian Tax Office went nuts at the ruling, and efforts are under way to change the law.) (2) Also in October, the federal appeals court in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit against the Navy, filed in the name of marine mammals, claiming that naval sonar disrupted their underwater communication; the court said federal environmental laws can be challenged only by people (or legal entities), not whales.

Controversial former chess champion Bobby Fischer, who fled to Japan to avoid U.S. visa-violation charges, and who is smarting from a recent Time magazine description of him as something less than a babe magnet, defended his virility to a Mainichi Daily News reporter in October by pointing out that he wears "size 14 wide shoes. Just keep that in mind when (they) say I'm not a dreamboat." After recounting an episode at a hot spring nude bath in Japan in which two fellow customers seemed in awe of his "size," Fischer then accused Americans of having persuaded Japanese authorities to lock him up in a facility close to a nuclear plant so that the U.S. government can "make me impotent."

-- Chutzpah: John Michael Dunton's infant daughter died in September when Dunton accidentally left her in his minivan, having forgotten to drop her off at the baby sitter's before work. However, upon learning that no criminal charges would be filed against him, Dunton appeared at a press conference, boasting that a jury would have acquitted him, anyway, and then imploring automakers to invent something to keep parents from forgetting about their kids.

-- Antoinette Millard, 40, filed a lawsuit against American Express in November to cancel her credit card charges, blaming the company for her $950,000 shopping spree at New York City's priciest stores (in that AmEx imprudently issued her its prestigious black Centurion Card). Millard, who recently portrayed herself as "Princess Antoinette" of a Saudi royal family and as a former Victoria's Secret model, said she suffered from "anorexia, depression, panic attacks (and) head tumors," which made her such an impulsive, frenzied shopper that she just couldn't stop spending. (According to prosecutors, Millard is a divorced woman from Buffalo who was working in an office in Manhattan.)

-- According to a transcript obtained by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in September, convicted rapist John Horace, 60, was turned down by the New York Parole Board after offering a new excuse for his crime (which was committed against a nursing home resident in a near coma). Horace, then an aide at the home, said he had read in a medical book somewhere that the sensation of pregnancy would snap a woman out of a coma and that he was thus only trying to help.

-- In a September issue of the London Review of Books, trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zisek made the point that the essential ideological differences in German, French and British-American societies, as noted by G.W.F. Hegel and others, can be represented by their countries' respective toilet designs. The German toilet's evacuation hole is in the front, facilitating "inspection and analysis," but the French design places the hole in the rear, so that waste disappears quickly. The British-American toilet allows floatation, which of course signals that society's "utilitarian pragmatism." Zisek described his theory as an "excremental correlative-counterpoint" to a framework identified with French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss.

-- In a June lawsuit in Albany, N.Y., Mark Hogarth, 45, asked a court to protect his constitutional right to privacy by exempting him from child-pornography laws so that he can reclaim 269 lewd photos of himself, taken when he was a kid, but which his now-deceased father had hidden away in another country. In his petition, he said that his father approved of, but did not participate in, the photo sessions (some of which featured other children) and that Hogarth would like to keep the pictures as, basically, mementos of his childhood.

Jason Rodd, clocked at 90 mph on Interstate 91 near St. Johnsbury, Vt., in November, tried to evade police by the clever ploy of pulling off the highway, dousing his headlights, and turning in to a farmer's field for cover. However, unable to see very well without lights, he promptly drove into a manure pit, immobilizing his car, and was tracked down a few minutes later.

Six weeks ago, News of the Weird reported on two New Hampshire mothers who had been arrested for viciously assaulting their own children over rather petty provocations. Later, in November, came Nicole Mancini, 29, who was arrested in Rochester, New Hampshire, after she, wearing pajamas, walked into the St. Mary's Church with her three children and was overheard mumbling about the need to "sacrifice" the kids on the "altar" "before 3 o'clock." After charging her with three counts of child endangerment, a police lieutenant said, "Eighteen years I've been doing this, and I've never come across anything like it."

In Kent, Wash., in November, a 24-year-old man, whose reasons will probably never be known, tried to heat his lava lamp on a stove; he was killed when the lamp exploded and propelled a piece of glass into his heart. And on Thanksgiving day in Worcester, Mass., Frank Palacios, 24, apparently got tired of being criticized for picking at the turkey with his fingers and stabbed his cousin and his uncle, sending both to the hospital.

Among the latest "miracles": a fiberglass statue of Jesus, which washed up on a sandbar on the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass, Texas, and which has now drawn thousands of worshippers (September); an inflated balloon with a rubber smudge in the image of the Virgin Mary, decorating the car lot of Payne Weslaco Motors, Weslaco, Texas (giving at least one worker there "chills") (August); and the spontaneous falling over of the statue of the Virgin Mary at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, which was taken to be a holy signal that the church, which had been scheduled for closing by the Boston Archdiocese, should remain open (October).

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

Despite a $7.5 million budget deficit, the city of Berkeley, Calif., bought a 40-foot-long refrigerated trailer last year for the sole purpose of storing shopping carts that had been commandeered by homeless people for their "stuff" but then abandoned. According to a November 2004 report in the San Francisco Chronicle, the city says the freezer prevents vermin infestation while authorities wait (up to 90 days) for the "owners" to reclaim their belongings. Critics of the program said the city should just confiscate the shopping carts, most of which had been stolen from merchants in the first place and almost all of which are never claimed, anyway.

In underreported November election returns: Notorious Florida radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem lost his race for Pinellas County sheriff, and his Tampa radio competitor "Dave the Dwarf" Flood lost for a conservation-panel seat (but each got nearly 30 percent of the vote). The mayor of Arvin, Calif., Juan Olivares, was arrested the day before polls opened, charged with child molesting. (Voters ousted him.) Peter Stevenson, losing candidate for Vermont lieutenant governor, appeared at the only televised debate with a fake arrow through his head and blood on his clothes. Bruce Borders won, becoming the Indiana General Assembly's only Elvis impersonator. Losing Pennsylvania congressional candidate Arthur Farnsworth, who ran on an anti-tax platform, was arrested three days after the election for tax evasion.

In 1998, a New York jury said Kenneth H. Payne murdered a man, but the state's highest court set him free in October 2004, with no strings attached. The jury had convicted him of "depraved indifference" murder (rejecting "intentional" murder), but the Court of Appeals said the circumstances of the crime better fit the latter rather than the former. Noting that state prosecutors have often used "depraved indifference" as a crutch for juries that might be reluctant to call a murder "intentional," the court decided to send district attorneys a message by essentially giving Payne a free murder.

(1) According to an October Reuters dispatch, Afghan women are being vigorously recruited for the police force even though there are still no female uniforms, and the crews being trained by the United States wear their everyday jewelry, accessories, stockings, high heels and brightly colored head scarves (but still appeared to be highly motivated). (2) The U.S. Forest Service, acting under its new policy of directly billing culpable parties for firefighting costs, said in October that it was preparing to send Ryan Unger, 18, of Wenatchee, Wash., an invoice for $10 million for his having started the August fires in central Washington.

-- Public Servant: The school superintendent of Beverly, Mass., William H. Lupini, decided to leave that $130,000-a-year job in May and take the $148,000-a-year job as school superintendent in Brookline, Mass. However, since Brookline's school year did not start until July, and since Lupini perhaps felt there were no other "school superintendent" jobs available covering the interim month of June, he applied for $2,332 in unemployment compensation for that month, as reported in the Beverly Citizen newspaper.

-- The Chicago Sun-Times reported in November that Illinois officials had decided to spend $115,000 in federal money to distribute 2.4 million condoms to help reduce sexually transmitted diseases among the young, but also concluded that the young might need special incentives to actually use the condoms. Consequently, bureaucrats decided that 900,000 would be in colors (orange, green, red or blue) and that 300,000 others would be flavored (orange, lemon, grape, cherry), to encourage their use in oral sex. State Sen. Steve Rauschenberger objected to the distribution of what he called "French ticklers" and suggested that all condoms should be "army green, utilitarian, low-priced." (Update: Gov. Rod Blagojevich subsequently eliminated the colors/flavors option.)

-- In November, the Federation of American Scientists revealed the existence of a recent U.S. Air Force-paid study of psychic teleportation prepared by true-believing Nevada physicist Eric Davis, who wrote that moving oneself from location to location through mind powers is "quite real and can be controlled." An Air Force Research Lab spokesman defended his agency's use of UFO and spoon-bending reports and Soviet and Chinese studies of psychics, telling USA Today, "If we don't turn over stones, we don't know if we have missed something."

-- Three of the five National Transportation Safety Board members criticized a fourth, the chairman, in a personal letter obtained by the St. Petersburg Times in September. According to the letter, Chairman Ellen Engleman Conners was getting too political (the board is supposedly nonpartisan) and too controlling (the board is traditionally quite collegial), and the Times reported that members and staffers had complained privately that Engleman Conners would sometimes call them in advance of public meetings to negotiate clothing, in order to discourage outfits that would clash with her own.

In October, prominent Albany, N.Y., pediatric neurologist Phillip Riback was sentenced to 48 years in prison after his conviction on 28 sexual-abuse counts against 12 boys, but he continued to insist that his actions were simply "misconstrued," disputing testimony not only that he touched the boys inappropriately but that he had them spit on his face and into his mouth. Riback's lawyer said his client suffers from a disorder that makes socializing difficult: "He has a pattern of quirky, entertaining behavior as a way of relating that simply goes too far."

In addition to his poor performance on a field sobriety test, the chief evidence that Frank Hersha, 28, was driving drunk in Manchester, Conn., in October was that police spotted him trying to order from the drive-thru window of a local restaurant that was obviously closed. And in Watertown, Mass., a playful Kudzai Kwenda, 23, accidentally locked handcuffs on his wrist at home in October, and figured they would know how to get them off at the local police station, but shortly after arrival, he was jailed because he had apparently forgotten there was an arrest warrant out against him.

Two months ago, News of the Weird reported on computer technology that would permit quasi-insertive sexual intercourse by a remote user (the Sinulator). In just a short step from that, hunter John Underwood announced in November that he had set up the equipment for "hunters" to fire a rifle over the Internet at deer, antelope and wild pigs on his 330-acre ranch near San Antonio, Texas (but opposition is mounting, and state regulators may step in, although current law is said to be written in a way that could not cover Internet hunting). Underwood would provide animal retrieval and shipping services, and said his business would be especially valuable for disabled sportsmen.

Karen Stolzmann, 44, was arrested in October in Portage, Wis., and charged with possession of stolen property, specifically, her long-dead boyfriend's ashes, which police say she dug up more than 10 years ago, perhaps to taunt his family, with whom she never got along. Other items that had been buried with him were found in her possession, and authorities speculate that the beer the family buried as tribute had long since been drunk by Stolzmann. (The couple reportedly had a stormy relationship, and the family believes she provoked his suicide.)

(1) A journal study by Maastricht University in The Netherlands concluded that even the air quality alongside major highways is not as dangerous as the air inside the typical church (with candles, incense and poor ventilation). (2) A Junction City, Ore., high school student was arrested after he and a pal allegedly distributed a DVD they had made, complete with rap-music sound track, of them beating up a classmate they had selected at random.

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