Steaks from Waygu cattle in western Australia were already revered by gourmets worldwide (noted for their marbling), but recently an exporter went a step further: The choice grains fed the cattle are now being soaked in a 2004 cabernet merlot, according to a January dispatch from Sydney in London's Sunday Telegraph. "Our biggest problem is going to be meeting demand," said the managing director of Margaret River Premium Meat Exports, even though the best cuts of steak might run the equivalent of about US$90. Plans are to feed each cow a liter's worth of wine daily during its last 60 days.

-- Doctors Gone Bad: (1) The British General Dental Council found David Quelch guilty in January of professional misconduct for pulling two teeth of a patient, against her will, without anesthesia, because she had complained about previous treatments. He supposedly said, "That'll teach you ..." (2) However, the patient at Romania's Panduri Urology Hospital was not at fault (according to United Press International, from a January story in Bucharest's Sunday Telegram) when surgeon Naum Ciomu lost his temper at his own sloppiness and chopped off a 36-year-old man's penis. Ciomu later admitted that he had overreacted. Nonetheless, the Romanian doctors' union complained that Ciomu's fine (the equivalent of about $190,000) was unwarranted.

-- "The world's most dangerous road," according to a November BBC News dispatch, is a 50-mile stretch of winding, mountain-hugging cliff three miles above sea level, running from La Paz, Bolivia, to the country's Yungas region. At least 200 people a year reportedly die on the road, which is about 10 feet wide with no railing and frequent confrontations when wide-load vehicles meet from opposite directions. Furthermore, bad Andes Mountain storms wash away parts of what road does exist. Bolivians frequently pray to the goddess Pachamama for safe passage.

-- (1) Transgendered patient Gina Tilley filed a lawsuit late last year against New York City plastic surgeon David Ostad (who has been cited by state medical authorities 11 times and sued 14 times), complaining that her 2004 saline breast implants had shifted to her armpits. (2) The fire alarm at the Sea Life Centre in Weymouth, England, sounded one night in December, attributed to a diet of brussels sprouts fed to a turtle. Marine biologist Sarah Leaney of the Centre explained that the turtle's resulting flatulence probably created bubbles that raised the water level enough to trigger the alarm.

-- Settling the Gender Wars: (1) German cancer researchers, writing in a January journal article, reported that any exercise helped ward off breast cancer in pre-menopausal women but that housework-type exercise worked for all women and was superior to job-based or leisure-based exercise. (2) A female chimpanzee, Judy, escaped at the Little Rock (Ark.) Zoo in January and, as she moved about, was observed entering a bathroom, grabbing a brush, and cleaning a toilet. She also wrung out a sponge and cleaned off a refrigerator, according to an Associated Press report.

-- Florida state Sen. Gary Siplin was convicted in August of grand theft for paying employees state funds to work on his re-election campaign, but according to senate rules, he retains his office while his case is on appeal. The first bill Siplin introduced for the new legislative session in January would make it easier under state law for convicted felons to have their voting rights restored.

-- The Mexican government is scheduled to consider, as early as March, a proposal from its states' migrant assistance offices to hand out satellite-tracking devices to its citizens who plan to emigrate illegally to the United States, so that they could be located in case of emergency after crossing the border. Skeptics, according to a January report in the San Antonio Express-News, wondered how vigorously the U.S. Border Patrol would assist in rescues.

(1) The New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services issued a warning in January to residents of the city of Ringwood that they should limit their intake of squirrel to no more than twice a week (children once a month). (A toxic waste dump is nearby.) (2) Dan Gulley Jr., 70, and David Brooks Jr., 62, fought in January in Atmore, Ala., and according to police, Gulley pulled out a gun and shot Brooks. The two were arguing over how tall the late singer James Brown was.

(1) According to police in Hartselle, Ala., Daniel Brown, 22, wore a ski mask to hide his identity from his grandfather when he staged a home invasion-robbery in January, but when he burst in, he yelled, "I need your money, and I mean it, Pa-Paw." (Nonetheless, when arrested, Brown denied that he was the man behind the mask.) (2) Glenn Vickers, 53, allegedly intoxicated, wildly tailgated a driver in January on Interstate 64 that happened to be Kanawha County, W.Va., sheriff Mike Rutherford in an unmarked car. After jockeying behind Rutherford for a while, Vickers peeled off at an exit and flipped Rutherford the finger, but immediately crashed into a guardrail.

"I was 6 when I first became aware of my desire to lose my legs," wrote "Susan Smith" in London's The Guardian in January. "The image I have of myself has always been one without legs." News of the Weird has reported several times on people with "body identity integrity disorder" (apotemnophilia), which leads them to remove one or more limbs (or men their scrota). The worst part, said "Smith," was having to kill her leg, by freezing it in dry ice for at least four hours (she tried twice before it succumbed to an infection), because surgeons cannot ethically amputate a healthy limb. (A 1998 News of the Weird story involved a de-licensed San Diego surgeon who illegally removed limbs of needy men.)

-- Unsavvy: In 2003, Bryn Mawr College student Janet Lee had apparently not watched enough movies or television to understand that drug smugglers often use condoms (swallowed by human "mules") to get cocaine and heroin into the country. Lee attempted to board an airliner with several flour-filled condoms that she said her classmates and she employed to squeeze as stress relievers and said she was astonished to be arrested at the Philadelphia airport and jailed for three weeks until the lab could verify that the substance was flour. In January 2007, the city of Philadelphia agreed to pay her $180,000 to settle her lawsuit for her wrongful detention.

-- Britain's National Phobics Society said in November it would launch a campaign to help the estimated 4 million people in the U.K. who are fearful of using public restrooms. According to the NPS, in serious cases, sufferers intentionally avoid liquids and even deprive themselves of good jobs because the workplace restroom situation is unsatisfactory. "(I)t's certainly no laughing matter," said a spokesman.

-- Texas judge Keith Dean, recently defeated for re-election, decided as he was cleaning out his desk in December that he would order the release of a man that he controversially sentenced to life in prison in 1990. Tyrone Brown was 17 when he committed a $2 robbery, and Dean put him on probation but changed it to life in prison when Brown shortly afterward tested positive for marijuana. (The Dallas Morning News in a series of 2006 articles had reported that Dean had failed to additionally punish a murderer who had tested positive for cocaine several times after his release on probation.)

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

Jennalee Ryan of San Antonio last year began selling choice human embryos, ready for prospective mothers to implant after having chosen from Ryan's catalog describing the contributors' education, attractiveness and medical history. "We're just trying to help people have babies," she told The Washington Post in January, and at less cost than full in-vitro procedures (since she has eliminated the risk of failed fertilizations). But, said a bioethicist, "It's like you're ordering a computer from Dell." (Ryan said she does not take custom orders.) Of her emphasis on well-educated, good-looking contributors of sperm and eggs, she said, "Who wants an ugly, stupid kid?"

-- We License Fishing, But We Can't License Parenting? (1) Shawn Mohan, 20, was arrested in January for shooting his infant son several times with a BB gun. Mohan said it was an accident, but the St. Charles County, Mo., sheriff pointed to similar bruises on the baby's face, left arm, hand, foot, hip and buttocks, and said Mohan was on probation for an earlier child-endangerment conviction. (2) Samaritans stopped on Interstate 465 in Indianapolis in December to help a wandering 3-year-old boy wearing only a diaper and T-shirt. Police tracked down his mother, Nancy Dyer, in her filthy apartment, where her 2-year-old daughter was eating spaghetti off the floor. Dyer's first reaction to news about her son: "Oh, he got out again."

-- For two months late last year after a pair of convicted murderers escaped from Sudbury prison in England, the local Derbyshire police refused to release their pictures. According to the police, "Photographs of named people that are in police possession are classed as data, and their release is restricted by law" to instances where there is a "proper policing purpose." Derbyshire authorities said that since the escapees had probably left the area, there was no such purpose, and the photographs should be kept confidential.

After Emmalee Bauer, 25, was fired by the Sheraton hotel company in late 2006, she sought unemployment compensation from the Iowa agency that offers benefits to employees terminated through no fault of their own. However, the judge noted that Bauer had written a 300-page journal, during office hours, chronicling her efforts to avoid work. Among her entries: "This typing thing seems to be doing the trick. It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important," and, "Once lunch is over, I will come right back to writing to piddle away the rest of the afternoon," and, "Accomplishment is overrated, anyway." (Her claim was denied.)

The school system in Hagerstown, Md., issued a written reprimand in December to the parents of a 5-year-old kindergarten boy who had pinched a classmate's buttocks, terming his behavior "sexual" harassment. Said his dad: "He knows nothing about sex. There's no way to explain (to him) what he's been written up for." Also in December, the principal of a preschool in Bellmead, Texas, issued an in-school suspension to a 4-year-old boy after he hugged his female teacher's aide with his face in her chest, which was termed "sexual contact and/or sexual harassment" (though following complaints, the offense was changed to "inappropriate physical behavior").

-- Daring young men use the danger of moving cars for attention, especially if there's a video camera rolling. An 18-year-old Topeka, Kan., man became the latest "Jackass"-imitating casualty when he bailed out of a car going 35 mph in October and suffered a serious head injury. Other video performers go "ghost riding the whip" (letting their cars coast in neutral while they climb onto the roof to dance), with at least two deaths reported. In the newest craze, Jonathas Mendonca, 22, was hospitalized in critical condition in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in January after "skiing" (holding onto the back of a car) on Interstate 95 at 65 mph.

-- In September, according to sheriff's officials in Buffalo, N.Y., Thomas Montgomery murdered a 22-year-old workplace colleague in a love triangle involving a West Virginia woman, except that two of the three triangle characters were nonexistent. Montgomery, age 47, was pretending to be a young Marine in online conversation with the woman, 45, who was pretending she was her 18-year-old daughter. The murder victim had also struck up an online conversation with the woman, apparently making Montgomery jealous, but the victim, ironically, was the only one in the triangle who wasn't someone else.

-- In January, a hospice in Britain run by Sister Frances Dominica approved the wish of a 22-year-old man (born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy), who wanted to lose his virginity before he died. The Douglas House hospice arranged for a prostitute to visit him at his family's home, and the man said afterward, "It was not emotionally fulfilling, but the lady was very pleasant."

The Washington Post, examining 135 cases of disability by "stress" among Washington, D.C., police officers, found only 16 that resulted from specific incidents, such as gunfire, with the rest due to "common workplace tensions" ("arguments with colleagues, shift changes, disciplinary actions" among them). According to an internal police memo, the department's generous disability benefit would be "unheard of in private industry and public service," and the department's rate of officers unable to work is, for example, several times higher than Baltimore's, according to the Post's October report.

(1) The allegedly drunk 23-year-old driver who caused a collision in Lynn, Mass., in December: Mr. Chansavong Y (whose name really is Y). (2) Convicted of attempted murder of his former girlfriend's current boyfriend in Cocoa, Fla., in December: Mr. Taj Mahal Owens. (3) The legislator seen erupting toward the speaker of Taiwan's parliament in January and throwing her shoes at him: Ms. Wang Shu-hui. (4) The man whose death in August left a vacancy on the Vidor, Texas, school board: Mr. Ivan Croak.

-- Easy Collars: (1) Nicholas Raber, 19, was arrested in Annapolis, Md., in December for punching a police officer and dashing up a flight of stairs after yelling, "You'll never catch me." The officers were aware that upstairs exits were locked and so waited patiently for Raber to come back down and be handcuffed. (2) Mitchell Sigman, 22, was arrested and charged with robbing the Village Pantry in Elkhart, Ind., in November, after the clerk-victim identified him as a regular customer and one who had recently filled out an application to work there.

-- Failures to Keep a Low Profile: (1) College student Cory Shapiro, 19, was arrested in January after he flagged down a police officer to complain that he had been overcharged for drinks at the Athens, Ga., bar Bourbon Street. (2) Sunday school teacher Edgar Selavka, 49, was arrested after he reported to police in Northampton, Mass., in January that someone had stolen his backpack from church; shortly afterward, police found the backpack in a nearby restroom, with its contents on the floor, including at least 11 child pornography photos.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Michael Wayne Poe (Dayton, Tenn., October); Timothy Wayne Widman (Pittsburgh, Pa., September); John Wayne Peck (Beaverdam, Va., October). Murder warrants issued recently: Bradley Wayne Hamrick (Longview, Wash., September); Billy Wayne Hayes (Nashville, Tenn., December); Christopher Wayne Luttrell (Henderson, Ky., October). Ordered re-sentenced for a 2001 murder: Gary Wayne Kleypas (Topeka, Kan., December).

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

Inexplicable: Sudan Provost, 40, walked into the River City Bank in Sacramento, Calif., on Dec. 29 and, reported the Sacramento Bee, quietly announced to employees that he had come to "rob" it, but then handed a teller his driver's license and a money order to be cashed. The teller asked if he had an account, and Provost replied, "This is not a joke. I have a gun. I do this for a living." However, he opened his bag to reveal that he had no gun and then asked for a tissue for his runny nose. The teller said she didn't have one. Provost said he'd be right back and walked across the street to a drugstore, and by the time he had returned, police were on the scene. Provost was arrested on suspicion of attempted robbery.

-- New York state food inspectors are having trouble keeping up with the illegal importation and sale of uninspected exotic meat, for the city's immigrant population, including bush meat and meat from endangered species, according to a December Associated Press report. Inspectors found, among other items openly displayed in New York City storefronts, armadillo and iguana meat, cow lungs, smoked rodent and an unidentified fish paste, along with crates of turtles and a tub of bullfrogs, and occasionally endangered gorilla and chimpanzee meat.

-- The Continued Americanization of China: (1) Though most Chinese women still prefer whiter complexions, urban professionals are beginning to tan, either by sunbathing or in salons, for that "healthy" and "fashion(able) look," according to a November Wall Street Journal dispatch. (2) Chinese urban professionals are also turning more frequently to divorce (in a country in which it has been rare), especially women, who tend to file abruptly (the so-called "flash divorce"). Said one counselor (for a November Time magazine report), "Life in (urban) China has changed so fast that if things aren't new or exciting, people just end their marriages instead of working through their problems."

-- A 2006 Church of England report warned that disagreeable congregants, together with the pressures of the church's "feudal system" bureaucracy, were turning priests harshly negative and creating an "irritable clergy syndrome." One of the report's authors told The Times of London in December that priests are bothered by "having to be nice all the time to everyone, even when confronted with extremes of nastiness," such as aggressive and neurotic parishioners.

-- The recent traditional Christmas Nativity play at St. Stephen's church in Tonbridge, England, centered on music from the Beach Boys, with Mary turning into a "surfer girl" to sing "God Only Knows" and the Three Wise Men portrayed as Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson performing such favorites as "Fun Fun Fun" and "Good Vibrations" (according to a December Agence France-Presse report). Said the pastor, "(N)ativity plays ... can just be a bit dull. (This) made it more realistic."

-- (1) Sweden's English-language The Local reported in November that prosecutors were about to release both male suspects who acknowledge being present at a 1998 murder but who each blame the other. Prosecutors concluded that since there is no additional evidence, they could not convict either man. (2) A 59-year-old German man, identified as Gerold H. and serving life for murder, refused in October to accept his release after 34 years, according to a Reuters report. Said a spokesman for the Brandenburg justice ministry, "We can't do anything if someone sentenced to life in prison doesn't want to leave."

-- Michigan Law: (1) A bill passed in November by the Michigan House of Representatives makes it a crime for a cohabiting boyfriend to pressure his pregnant girlfriend into having an abortion, including by simply moving out of the house. (2) The Michigan Court of Appeals, ruling in November, said an obscure but unambiguous state law makes any "sexual penetration" a serious sexual assault if it occurs during any other felony, including simple adultery, with a maximum penalty of life in prison.

-- Elementary schoolteacher's aide Kumi Houston of Williamson County, Texas, was fired in November after she allegedly admitted to a sheriff's detective that she allowed an 11-year-old boy to reach under her bra and fondle her (which would clearly be illegal). However, as Houston's attorney later explained, her statement (which Houston did not deny making) was not necessarily a confession. What happened, said attorney Robert Phillips, is that his client "made a statement. It may be an admission, or it may be just (her) version of what happened. That's not a confession."

-- The Alabama Supreme Court, ruling in January, told leukemia-stricken Jack Cline that state law makes it either too early or too late for him to sue the manufacturer of benzene, to which he was exposed in his factory job, and it dismissed his lawsuit. He may have known he had been exposed to a carcinogen, but he couldn't sue until the cancer was actually diagnosed, but when it finally was, years later, the state's statute of limitations had long since run out. Several justices expressed concern about the catch-22, but they were in the minority.

Lamest Defense: James Lane III, 27, was arrested in Carrboro, N.C., in January after police chased him, in his car and later on foot. Officers tackled Lane about 20 feet into a wooded area and recovered a white plastic bag containing a pound of marijuana. When police pulled Lane to his feet, he said that someone must have left the bag on the ground at precisely the spot in the woods where Lane fell, because he had never seen it before.

Least Competent Lawyers: Jeffrey Leonard is on death row in Kentucky for murder and had challenged the fairness of his conviction, criticizing his court-appointed defense counsel. Lawyer Ferdinand Radolovich had represented Leonard all the way through his murder trial without bothering to learn his real name, in that for his conviction and subsequent first appeal, Radolovich thought Leonard was "James Slaughter" (and he didn't even know how to spell that name, habitually writing it "Slawter"). (Also, Radolovich had told judges that he had previously handled four death penalty cases but in fact had done none.) Nonetheless, by a 7-7 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals could not conclude that better lawyering would have helped the clearly guilty Leonard.

-- (1) Neil Rodreick II, 29, shaved his body and posed as a 12-year-old boy, and then allegedly had sex with Lonnie Stiffler, 61, and Robert Snow, 43, in Chino Valley, Ariz., before all three were arrested in January (as the result of Stiffler's attempt to enroll Rodreick in a charter school as a boy). The two men were said to have been quite upset when police told them Rodreick was not 12 years old. (2) Inner Mongolian herdsman Bao Xishun, at 7-foot-9 reputed to be the world's tallest man, was recruited by a commercial aquarium in Liaoning province, China, in December to reach into the stomachs of two dolphins to extract some plastic that they had swallowed and which was making them sick. Surgical instruments had irritated the dolphins' stomach, but Bao's 41-inch arm did the trick.

The Bosnian town of Bijeljina proposed in November to build a giant cabbage monument to honor its most important crop. "We very much appreciate this vegetable," said the director of the town's tourism office. And Briton Richard Townsend, 24, on a personal mission in December, ate 36 brussels sprouts in one minute, seeking the world record, but fell seven short. He said he had trained by eating a plate of brussels sprouts every day for six weeks.

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)