-- According to a February Wall Street Journal report, the annual "Milk Bowl," featuring competition between college teams for the national championship of dairy sniffing, crawls with corporate recruiters seeking to sign the nation's top flavor-evaluation talent, at starter salaries of up to $40,000. Mississippi State's three-person squad won the 1999 contest in October, winning "ice cream" (by coming the closest in agreement with professional judges as to sensory quality), finishing second in "cheddar" and "yogurt," third in "cottage cheese" and "milk," and fifth in "butter."

On the heels of the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in September due to engineers' failure to standardize readings between metric and the English system, a U.S. government report in December revealed that a 1998 test of mock nuclear warheads failed because a contractor had accidentally installed dead batteries in them and was not able to detect the error. Nonetheless, at a speech in February in Albuquerque, the manager of the Cassini interplanetary cruiser now heading for Saturn dismissed his program's apprehensive critics, even though his spacecraft blasted off with 72 pounds of plutonium in 1997 and approached Earth again in August 1999.

-- Two undercover policewomen running a prostitution sting in Dothan, Ala., in October declined to arrest a pickup-truck-driving john, around age 70, despite his three attempts to procure their services. He first offered to give the women the three squirrels he had just shot, but they ignored him (too much trouble to store the evidence). A few minutes later, he added to the offer the used refrigerator in his truck, but the officers again declined (same reason). On the third trip, he finally offered cash: $6, but without the squirrels and refrigerator. The officers again declined but said they resolved to arrest him if he returned, but he did not.

-- Texas Bomb Squad Follies: In November, a patrol officer in San Antonio confiscated two live bombs and nonchalantly took them across town in his squad car to the drug property room, having mistakenly identified them as elaborate marijuana bongs. Two weeks later, police in Cedar Park (near Austin), responding to a check-cashing store's report of a "pipe bomb," sent only an animal control officer to the scene because the 911 operator had instead understood "python."

-- Joshua Marete Mutuma, 32, was arrested in Modesto, Calif., in November on suspicion of impersonating his wife. Mutuma's wife had a restraining order against him, and Mutuma arrived at the courthouse dressed as a woman with a long black wig and 5 o'clock shadow, attempting to have the order dismissed, and responding to the clerk's questions in falsetto.

-- Little Rock, Ark., police officer Carlton Dickerson's 57-day suspension for sleeping on the job was upheld by a city commission in October despite his claim of the disability of sleep apnea. In his four years on the force, he has been caught asleep six times and has wrecked five patrol cars. (Dickerson once denied to internal affairs investigators that he was asleep even after two fellow officers said they needed to rap on his desk for 15 minutes to wake him.)

-- Campaign to Help Police Recruiting: In August a judge in Halifax, Nova Scotia, ruled that undercover police could legally touch prostitutes' private parts if it were necessary to effect the crime. And in November, the Arizona Republic newspaper revealed that police guidelines in Mesa, Ariz. (contrary to virtually all departments' guidelines in the United States), permit undercover officers to receive massages while nude if in the course of a prostitute sting operation.

-- In its November findings after a yearlong study of correctional institutions around the world, Canadian prison officials recommended that nearly all of its facilities be made to resemble its most lenient, including eventually removing razor wire, bulletproof glass and guards' guns, and giving all but a handful of the most heinous inmates control over the keys to their cells so as to establish "a culture of respect."

-- In a long-classified report on the World War II era, released in October, Britain's Special Operations Executive office warned that spies should know themselves better psychosexually in order not to compromise their missions. For example, careless destruction of code materials shows a castration complex; getting captured reveals masochistic tendencies; parachuting is a sexual stimulant; failure to bury the discarded parachute shows exhibitionistic tendencies; and fear of parachuting responds to "the unconscious reproduction of the trauma of birth."

In January, Bobby G. Olson, 34, pled guilty to vehicular homicide for an incident in rural Breckenridge, Minn., in 1998. Olson and another man were arguing in a bar over who had the more powerful pickup truck, and the two left to settle things by chaining their trucks together and having a tug of war. Olson won by default when the other man's truck slid into a ditch, rolled, and, when the man was ejected, came down on top of him.

News of the Weird reported in 1997 on how Palm Springs, Calif., airport authorities felt the need to issue hygiene regulations for taxi drivers serving arriving passengers, including requiring regular toothbrushing and daily showers with soap. In January 2000, the chief executive of Dublin (Ireland) Tourism told the city's taxi drivers to bathe daily and change clothes regularly in order to quell recent tourist complaints, although many drivers maintained the odors in their cabs came from previous passengers.

A 58-year-old man was killed when his small construction truck accidentally fell into a 25-foot-deep hog-manure lagoon near Laverne, Okla., in December (though divers could not find the body in the muck for 18 days). The same fate befell a 23-year-old man in December when his out-of-control pickup truck smashed through a fence in Orono, Maine, and landed in a 400,000-gallon tank of raw sewage. And a 57-year-old man accidentally asphyxiated in Duluth, Minn., in December; his body was found stuck head-first in a sump drain in his basement.

After two white police officers shot a black colleague, Providence (R.I.) mayor Vincent Cianci called on the city's poet laureate to help the community heal. An imprisoned Minnesota arsonist legally changed his name (at taxpayer expense) to G.Q. Fires. Courthouse employees in Rome, Italy, found papers on 700,000 open criminal cases accidentally stored in a basement since 1989. Spain dropped the minimum-IQ requirement for its military from 90 to 70. A federal tax official in Moscow, Russia, announced that confiscated vodka would henceforth be turned over to a government contractor to reprocess into antifreeze.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- Demand-Side Regulation: A bill introduced in the Vermont legislature (by Rep. Fred Maslack) in January would penalize any adult who chose not to own a gun, by requiring him to register with the state and pay a $500 fee for the privilege of being unarmed. A bill introduced in the Mississippi legislature (by Sen. Tom King) in January would seek to dampen the sexuality in strip clubs by making it illegal for a male customer to have an erection, even though he remains entirely clothed.

In Chicago in October, Bernard M. Kane, 56, pled guilty in a scheme to sell $135,000 worth of rancid seafood (labeled U.S. Grade A) to state and federal prison kitchens. And the next day in another Chicago courtroom, Richard Pergler, 41, was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison for bilking nursing homes and the government out of $4.8 million in Medicare payments for ordinary adult diapers that were passed off as medically sophisticated "external urinary collection devices."

-- Last spring, Cambridge College (Middlesex, Mass.) told Carol Ann LeBlanc, 51, and her son Troy, 29, that they could no longer take classes together in their quest for graduate degrees in psychology. Since 1989, the two have taken their high school equivalency exam together, every class together at Lesley College (where they received bachelor's degrees), and every class together (to that point) at Cambridge College. The administration would not say why it broke up the LeBlancs, except that an instructor had remarked, "(T)here are some things that you wouldn't say with your mother present." In October, the LeBlancs filed a lawsuit against Cambridge.

-- Fifteen members of an alleged nationwide ring of pimps were indicted in July in Minneapolis, 12 of whom are related to each other and known as the Evans Family. According to the indictment, Johnnie Lee Evans, Monroe Evans, Kiowan Evans, Levorn Evans, Clem Evans and others procured at least 50 women (some of them juveniles) on the street over an 18-year period and inducted them into a life of prostitution in Minneapolis and St. Louis, among other cities. An unindicted Evans daughter defended her father but was unable to explain to reporters how family members lived so well even though they had no steady jobs.

-- In closing arguments in September in a Barrie, Ontario, murder case, the lawyer for Jack Heyden, 55, explained why the prosecutor's theory (that Heyden and his son conspired to kill a man) was ridiculous: because Heyden thought his son was "useless." "Mr. Heyden wouldn't hire his son to cut the grass. Why would he hire him to kill somebody?" (However, in October, the two were convicted.)

-- Diane Haunfelder, 29, was charged with theft in Waukesha, Wis., in January after her 7-year-old son ratted her out as having directed him to shoplift a CD player and a camera from a Wal-Mart. However, according to authorities, Haunfelder claimed she was actually performing a public service by setting the boy up to get caught so that he would learn the consequences of crime: "I picked out the most expensive (items) so he'd get in trouble."

-- Three researchers, analyzing 25 years of data from the famous Kinsey Institute, concluded in a 1999 issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior that gay men's penises are longer than heterosexual men's (average 6.46 inches erect vs. 6.14 inches). And British inventor David Elliott, 20, announced in June that he was seeking financial backers for a pager ("Gaydar") to be marketed to shy gay men that would vibrate in the vicinity of someone with a similar device, thus making introductions easier.

-- Life Imitates Art: Rowan Atkinson, who plays the shy, bumbling Mr. Bean in the British TV series, fled on foot from onlookers in October after being involved in a car crash near Lancashire, England. According to a witness, Atkinson ran in the distinctively awkward Mr. Bean style ("His arms and legs were flapping") to a nearby factory, where he hid until reporters left.

-- Writing in a 1998 issue of the British Medical Journal, researchers concluded that physicians indeed have "unusually poor handwriting" -- worse than that of other health-care professionals. In October 1999, a jury in Odessa, Texas, ruled that a physician's sloppily written prescription caused a pharmacist to dispense the wrong drug, which contributed to the death of a 42-year-old man. (The family of the deceased said they were basically satisfied with their doctor's ability, except for his handwriting.)

A 36-year-old father was arrested in Norwalk, Conn., in January and charged with allowing his 2-year-old son to puff away on a cigarette in a restaurant. (According to an eyewitness, the kid handled the cigarette like it wasn't his first one.) And a 33-year-old mother was arrested in Euless, Texas, in December and charged with permitting her four children to drink alcohol at home, including a 16-month-old boy with a .126 blood-alcohol reading. (According to authorities, the woman said, "He wants what his mama wants. What am I supposed to do about it?")

When Peter "Commander Pedro" Langan made News of the Weird in 1997, he had not yet outed himself as a transsexual-in-progress, probably because he had just been convicted of assault and firearms charges as the leader of a white supremacist gang in Ohio and feared what his neo-Nazi buddies might do to him if they knew he suffered from "gender confusion." In November 1999, a Columbus Dispatch story on Ohio inmates applying for state-funded sex-change operations revealed that Commander Pedro is now out of the closet, having requested the surgery and having asked guards to treat him as a woman.

Trevor Brian Smith, 26, was arrested for bank robbery in Cary, N.C., in January after police alerted banks in the area. The day before, the manager of a Central Carolina Bank had noticed a man pacing outside his front window, getting up his nerve, while wearing a large false nose, a bad blond wig and gold-rimmed clown glasses, and who had covered the front license plate of his car before approaching the door. The manager called the police, but as the man was set to enter, a passing fire truck scared him away. A similarly dressed Smith was arrested at another bank the next day.

A murderer sentenced to 92 years in prison but paroled after 21 years won the $3.9 million Missouri Lottery. A kindergarten teacher was suspended after forcing a defiant blackboard-doodling pupil to lick off her graffiti (Oakland, Calif.). The man in charge of enforcing Falmouth, Mass., sexual harassment regulations for the last nine years was fired, for sexual harassment. A Hawaii state senator introduced a bill to permit government workers to go to sleep during their coffee breaks. A man charged with manslaughter by DUI and released on bail on condition that he not drive, arrived late to his first court hearing, absentmindedly explaining to the judge that he had trouble finding a parking space (Olathe, Kan.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- Warning to Dorks: Two British researchers told New Scientist magazine in December that they have developed prototype software to assist in crime-prevention by monitoring surveillance cameras and electronically identifying, by image pixels, people who are moving around in suspicious ways. As an example, said one of the developers, someone awkwardly approaching a car is probably up to no good. However, privacy advocates were alarmed at the news, fearing that police would target people who are merely gawky.

In January, two University of South Carolina professors released a study of high-speed police chases that concluded that pursuits are more dangerous the more cars that are involved, the higher the speed, the darker it is, and the more crowded the streets are; they came to these conclusions using a "pursuit decision calculus." And the research organization Statistics Canada concluded, in a study by R.O. Pihl and six others released in December, that the more alcohol that mothers drink, the more emotional and behavioral problems their kids tend to have.

-- Police in Upland, Calif., charged Darlene Bourk, 31, with the murder of her husband, Robert, and said she had covered up the crime for three years by stuffing his body in a wardrobe box in her rented storage locker. The scheme came to light in September when Bourk missed the third straight monthly payment, causing the landlord to auction off the locker's contents (for $20). Bourk realized the impending catastrophe just a few hours too late, and her frenzied attempts to buy back the wardrobe box aroused the suspicion of the buyer, who called police.

-- Bethel AME Church, owner of the Beech Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, paid Rosa Lee Bentley $27,500 in October to settle Bentley's lawsuit over her mother's missing body. The cemetery said it had lost track of the body and that after a long search above-ground and below, it could not find it.

-- Adventures in Poland: A 51-year-old seamstress in the town of Stawold Wola, Poland, reporting for a routine mammogram in October, was found to have four sewing needles inside her left breast, probably the result of their having migrated in over the years from her habit of sticking them on the front of her apron. And USA Today reported in November that a funeral in a cemetery in western Poland was disrupted when a cell phone started ringing from inside a grave because attendants had failed to notice it in the deceased's suit before burial.

-- In July, inexperienced sailor Richard Stewart and his family set out from Newport, R.I., on their 65-foot ketch, headed for Florida, where it had been scheduled for repairs. After a friend lost contact with the Stewarts, he called the Coast Guard, which tried unsuccessfully for 30 days, covering 85,000 square miles, to find the vessel. In August, the disabled boat limped into Ocean City, Md., with the Stewarts completely unaware of the massive, $75,000 rescue mission. Three months later, the Stewarts set out for Florida again, and again became disabled, and on Dec. 19, the Coast Guard found them (cost: $38,000) near Cape Fear, N.C.

-- Kendall Breaux, serving a life sentence for killing two bank tellers during a 1998 heist, filed a lawsuit in October in Thibodaux, La., against his getaway driver, James Dunn, for injuries Breaux suffered when their car crashed into a slow-moving train during the police chase.

-- Marlene Hoffman filed a $1 million lawsuit in Georgetown, Texas, in December against the Dr Pepper Co., which sponsored a college football halftime punt-catching promotion that she didn't win. Hoffman was selected to stand on the 50-yard line and receive punts from a kick-simulation machine (catch one, $50,000; two, $250,000; all three, $1 million) and was told that balls would come down in the general vicinity of the 50-yard line. She caught none because, she said, her three balls came down too far away: on the 44-, 45- and 42-yard lines.

-- In November, a jury awarded Andrea Karlen of Milford, Conn., $500,000 for injuries incurred in what all parties acknowledge was a mere "fender bender" in 1991. Karlen's medical witnesses said the accident triggered post-traumatic stress disorder (from her memories of childhood physical abuse), sending her into a major depression and panic attacks, and resulting in at least 400 psychiatric sessions. The unlucky auto-accident defendant was a state judge who has now been nominated to a federal court.

From a pamphlet distributed by the new Russian anti-materialist group, Union of Revolutionary Writers (according to a September New York Times report): "The half-eaten hamburger left by the dead man on the streets is now a revolutionary hamburger."

The Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law filed papers at a court hearing in Toronto in December, intervening on the side of a 23-year-old man who had been charged with, among other offenses, sodomy on a 14-year-old girl. According to Sheena Scott, the foundation's director, the anti-sodomy law should be nullified because it does not except consensual sodomy and thus discriminates against teens over the age of consent (14), who are thus being denied their right to engage in anal intercourse. Said Scott, "We (are) intervening with respect to the interests of children in general."

On Nov. 23, a 42-year-old auto body shop worker was killed when the ambulance he was working under fell on him. Three days later, a 35-year-old worker at the Chartiers Cemetery was killed when a backhoe slipped and its front bucket struck the man in the head, knocking him into the newly dug grave.

New York City finally removed "telephone psychic" from the list of jobs it subsidizes for its welfare-to-work program. A woman filed a lawsuit against a flamboyant obstetrician who carved his 3-inch initials into her abdomen after a particularly pleasing Caesarean section (New York City). Miracles were attributed to apparitions in Port Sulphur, La., and Houston (dried ice-cream splotches, resembling the Virgin of Guadalupe, on a basement floor). The University of Florida introduced the U.S.'s first Doctor of Plant Medicine degree program, to rival those for veterinarians and physicians. Federal drug agents busted a 2,000-customer cocaine-home-delivery business ($25 "small" order; $150 "large"; Domino's-like, 30-minute delivery) (New York City).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)