-- Twenty-two-year-old Devin Grant survived virtual target practice by three Atlanta police officers on Dec. 14, catching 16 bullets in the neck, back, arms and leg, with 24 separate wounds, but was out of the hospital seven days later. One bullet severed an artery, but Grant's muscularity slowed the release of blood, allowing him to remain alive until he could be treated. (He went immediately from hospital to jail, however; the shots were fired after Grant allegedly pointed a gun at officers following a 20-mile automobile chase, which started, police said, when Grant attempted to evade an arrest warrant for a traffic violation.)

-- Daily Variety reported in January that Britain's Pathe Pictures had scheduled an April shooting date for the $7 million comedy "Thunderpants," which it described as the story of "an 11-year-old boy whose amazing ability (to break wind) leads him first to fame and then to death row, before it helps him to fulfill his ambition of becoming an astronaut."

Welsh entrepreneur Ben Holst formed a company recently to distribute pillows shaped like breasts (the TitPillow Co.), following a grant from the Prince's Trust (headed, on paper, by Prince Charles). And at the stage show "Puppetry of the Penis," which ran for three months recently in London's 600-seat Whitehall Theater, nude actors artistically twisted their private parts into shapes resembling, for example, the Olympic torch and a hamburger. And a November feminist conference at Penn State University featured workshops and exhibits organized on a theme of regaining control of a word the organizers regard as empowering but which is now a despised vulgarity (calling their event "Cuntfest").

-- In November, off-duty Chicago police officer John Sebeck (240 pounds, with a master's degree in social work, which helps him on the job in counseling elderly abuse victims) was suspended for punching a 72-year-old man (115 pounds) in the face following a minor traffic accident. And in Springfield, Vt., in October, Brian Dodge, 44, owner of two Christian radio stations (including LOVE radio in Madbury, N.H.), was charged with punching his wife and choking her with a towel (and was subsequently arrested for violating a stay-away order).

-- Their Life's Work: In November in Plainfield, Ind., a space-heater fire wiped out George Marchiando's two-story dream house that he had spent all his spare time over the last 10 years building and which was three-fourths finished. And in August at the airport in Lakeland, Fla., David Eachon, 32, finally took off in the scaled-down replica of a British World War II Spitfire fighter plane that he had spent the last nine years building, but crashed shortly after takeoff and was killed.

-- New York state Assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, co-sponsor of anti-stalking legislation, pled guilty in January to harassing her ex-boyfriend in 1999, including, the man said, making dozens of hang-up phone calls; bursting into his home in the middle of the night; tailgating him in a car; and posing as a cosmetics saleswoman in order to get the phone number of the man's new girlfriend.

-- In November, Chicago divorce court judge Edmund Ponce de Leon ruled that a pregnant wife must give her estranged husband visitation rights to the baby she was about to give birth to and that, for the baby's well-being, it should be given breast milk during the visitation; thus, the judge ruled, the mother would have to pump extra breast milk in advance for the husband to feed to the baby. (Shortly afterward, an appeals court suggested he rethink the order, and at a December hearing, he changed his mind.)

-- In October, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that, just because a man had been convicted and imprisoned for sexually abusing his 8-year-old stepdaughter, he did not necessarily pose a threat to molest his own children, aged 3 and 5, and thus could retain custody of them. And the same month in Chicago, juvenile court judge Michael Brown ruled that a father could have an unsupervised visit with his three adopted sons even though recently accused of sexually abusing other foster children under his care.

In November, the Russian Orthodox Church named the apostle Matthew as the patron saint of the country's tax police, who the church felt needed an image boost because they resemble SWAT teams, dressing in black masks as they barge into businesses to audit them. And in October, the Vatican announced a patron saint for politicians (St. Thomas More of England, who was beheaded in 1535), the latest of nearly 300 named by Pope John Paul II, and Vatican observers believe St. Isidore of Seville will soon be named patron saint of the Internet.

In December, Yokohama, Japan, shopkeeper Akira Ishiguro, annoyed at shoppers who are "teasers," allegedly made a woman get on her knees and apologize to him because she did not want to buy the coat she had just been handling. Ishiguro had once locked a woman inside the store until she agreed to buy something, and in fact pressured the coat-handling woman into changing her mind and handing over about $25 as a down payment.

Super-messy homes have been a News of the Weird theme since its first year in 1988 (reporting on a San Jose, Calif., couple and their adult son, who collected garbage from dumps to store at home and in a growing number of storage lockers). In December 2000, a married couple (both well-paid U.S. Department of Labor employees) in Fairfax County, Va., were ordered out of their three-story home by authorities because of the mess. Trash was so heavy that walls had separated from ceilings; cleanup crews had to crawl on their stomachs to get to some of the garbage; and feral cats, rabid raccoons and rats (a nest in the oven and one rodent weighing nearly 3 pounds) ran wild. As she witnessed the county's cleanup, the wife moaned that she was losing "everything that was precious to me."

A 45-year-old woman who was killed as she walked onto I-55 near Sherman, Ill., in October was revealed to have been a member of a Jehovah's Witnesses breakaway group that believes they should test their faith (much like snake handlers do) by standing in the middle of traffic. A few days before her fatal demonstration of faith, she had been pulled to safety from the same highway as she attempted to proselytize to drivers zooming by.

New Hampshire state Rep. Tom Alciere resigned after constituents discovered longstanding statements on his Web site praising people who murder police officers (though he wrote that he himself was "too chicken" to partake). In official papers filed with Georgia's Department of Education, school districts inexplicably reported that 112 students were murdered last year (the actual total was zero). A man who identified himself only as Obi-Wan Kenobi was arrested for stealing a car, which he said was on orders from "The Force" (Bismarck, N.D.). A 43-year-old man was charged with three recent bank robberies after walking up on stage at a comedy club and offering a conscience-clearing confession (Macon, Ga.)

Thanks This Time to Gary Abbott, Paul Hirschfield, Joel O'Brien, John Cieciel, Martha Swift, Arthur Fields, Juliana Abbott, Mike Lewyn, Chris Nalty, Rob Borosak, David Lips and Gary Goldberg, and to the News of the Weird Senior Advisers and Chief Correspondents.

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

-- The technology sector of the economy is in such a precarious state, according to a January story in U.S. News & World Report, that "Imara," a 44-year-old "business intuitive" with an MBA, has attracted a large following among entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (including 30 paying clients) who seek her investment and business-development advice that she says she acquires by extrasensory perception. "In these troubled times," said an Imara associate, "people are looking for a different insight that gives them a competitive advantage." Said Imara: "(C)ompanies don't have time to do market research studies, which can take months. I can give them feedback in an hour."

-- Scheduled for unveiling in May at Britain's National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, is a World War I commemorative statue to honor England's 306 combat deserters. According to the Arboretum's director, "(T)here has been a sea change in attitude, towards more understanding" of the plight of cowards and others who abandoned their comrades, especially for about 100 teen-agers whose principal sin was to run away after fearing they would be punished for lying about their ages in order to enlist. The director said some veterans' organizations support the memorial.

William R. Macera was re-elected mayor of Johnston, R.I., despite being found in October in a car that police said heavily reeked of marijuana smoke; he narrowly edged out write-in candidate Louis L. Vinagro Jr., who had been arrested hours before the election for threatening a state official inspecting his waste-hauling business. And Bobby Banks, 20, was elected to the New Bern, N.C., soil conservation board but was then arrested for having illegally registered to vote as a convicted felon. And in races that ended in ties in Delhi, Minn. (mayor), Fife Lake, Mich. (township supervisor), Louisville, Neb. (city council), and Hickman, Ky. (school board), things were settled by, respectively, a draw of cards, a draw from a hat, a draw of cards and a coin toss.

-- In November, Ms. Lucia Love won San Francisco's sixth annual Faux Queen Pageant, the world's only contest for drag queens who had the misfortune to be biological females and thus not technically qualified to be drag queens (males dressed as campy females). Said Love (of her fondness for impersonating female impersonators), "Drag queens would be nowhere without women."

-- Three Mexican migrant workers told reporters in November that the owner of Poncho's Cantina in Auburn, Maine, forbade them from speaking Spanish at their table while they were dining on Tex-Mex food and said they were considering a complaint to the state Human Rights Commission.

-- Sean Dix has been angry at CNN since 1996, when a reporter was critical of his dental-floss-holder invention (a product review that probably caused Dix's then-sprouting sales to fall off). In the ensuing four years, Dix has reportedly sent 6,000 faxes to Ted Turner and CNN protesting the televised report. In an April 2000 fax (according to a December report in the Village Voice), Dix intimated that he would kill Turner, which he prefaced this way: "It is at this point that I have come to the end of my attempts to deal with you in a rational manner (after 6,000 faxes)."

-- In December, Angela L. Pearn, 30, of Akron, Ohio, won her lawsuit that had charged DaimlerChrysler and Rolling Acres Dodge with fraud for concealing that the car they sold her had a history of trouble and was officially a "lemon" under state law. An elated Pearn told reporters afterward, curiously: "Now people will know that not all car dealers are honest."

-- Jennifer Garves, 22, and her mother, Karen Krause, 43, were charged in Waupun, Wis., with child neglect and concealing a corpse for what police say was a scheme last June to deflect attention from the death by blunt trauma to Garves' 2-day-old boy. According to police, the women took the baby's body to a restaurant, dined while pretending the boy was still alive, then expressed alarm that he had suddenly stopped breathing. Hospital and restaurant employees later expressed their suspicions to police, and after an investigation, the women were arrested in December.

-- To help the Netherlands' meat-exporting business (already No. 3 in the world), but recognizing the country's small land area (half the size of South Carolina), Agriculture Minister Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst recently endorsed a think tank's proposal to build a six-story "agropark" of pig pens, chicken coops and salmon pools. An Animal Protection Society spokesperson likened the building to a concentration camp for animals, but proponents said the facility would be less animal-dense than some farms are now. Said one developer, "If people can live in apartment buildings, so can pigs."

-- Three (possibly four) of the 88 victims of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 in January 2000 led secret (separate) sex lives in Mexico or Guatemala, according to federal lawsuits filed in San Francisco by reputable U.S. attorneys who seek compensation for the men's alleged offspring. However, according to a San Francisco Chronicle investigation in November, foreign mourners (typically a "great-aunt") often run scams, producing "evidence" that a dead man had a clandestine lover and had fathered a child, that the lover had also died tragically, and that the "great-aunt" thus deserves a major payout (in this case, from Alaska Airlines and Boeing). (In one claim, the alleged mother was a flamboyant Mexican Zapatista rebel, killed in combat in 1994.)

Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, 43, was arrested in Great Falls, Mont., in December and charged with killing a 10-year-old boy in 1996, and because of notes he made and a psychiatric evaluation, police believe he may have used parts of the body in meat casseroles. And in December, in the Netherlands town of Best, two men were sentenced to 12 months in jail for conducting a duel with pistols, over a woman. And in November, accountant Gnanasuravi Raveendran, 51, told a UK Regional Press reporter in Bexley, England, that his brother had just suffered an attack of epilepsy shortly after trying to prune Raveendran's allegedly "cursed" hedge, following fatal attempts to prune it by his sister in 1997 and his brother-in-law in 2000.

Seven soldiers from Fort Carson, Colo., were arrested in December, quickly caught after allegedly robbing a McDonald's, cleaning out the cash registers of $400; reportedly, they told police they had spent hours meticulously plotting the crime (but had netted less than $60 a man). Another crime seemingly less remunerative than honest work took place in Springfield Township, Ohio, in December, as three men were charged with stealing 2,000 items from a Marc's store, items which police said the men were trying to resell from the basement of a home. However, the goods were mostly small-ticket items (retailing for as little as 39 cents each, with an average price of $4.12), which must still be discounted to move quickly, and reselling that much merchandise would require dozens of man-hours.

Files stolen from a police internal affairs investigation turned up in a Dumpster in back of a Dunkin' Donuts shop (Baltimore). A 17-year-old girl, who suffered disfigurement and mental impairment six years ago when she was injured while pushing her then-7-year-old friend from the path of a speeding 18-wheeler, sued the friend for nearly $4 million (U.S.) (Hamilton, Ontario). A 27-year-old blind man was issued a permit to carry a gun, which he says he needs because blind people are vulnerable to robberies (Fargo, N.D.). Show business people gave out awards to themselves in 564 ceremonies last year (4,025 "bests"), up 65 percent from 1999.

-- In December, NBC News, citing Pentagon and intelligence sources, reported that thousands of Sony PlayStation 2s may have been purchased by Iraqi sources recently, to capitalize on the device's powerful computer processor and video cards, possibly to use in connection with weapons systems. One expert told the World Net Daily news service that an integrated bundle of 12 to 15 PlayStation 2s could provide enough power to control a chemical-weapons-delivering Iraqi aircraft. (A Sony spokesperson said it was unlikely anyone could buy thousands of units.) And among similarly alarming, everyday products described in an October New York Times Magazine report were the 2001 Cadillac Deville (whose sophisticated night-vision system is potentially useful for tanks) and automobile airbags (whose compact explosive charge might be useful to terrorists).

-- In December, CNN founder Ted Turner offered to donate $35 million to cover the shortfall in U.S. dues to the United Nations that Congress is so far unwilling to pay. Two months earlier, however, to show his appreciation to the three local fire departments whose workers had fought summer blazes on his ranch near Gordon, Neb., Turner could only manage donations totaling $3,500.

Al Gore (presumably, the same one who ran for president) was elected by write-in votes as director of the Marion County (Ore.) Soil and Water Conservation board (but was disqualified because he owns no land in the district). And in Hartford, Conn., Terrell Bush beat out Johnny Gore in November voting to become homecoming king of Weaver High School.

-- Child-protection officials removed a 6-year-old boy from the home of his 32-year-old mother in Champaign, Ill., in December after they concluded that she had forcibly breastfed him until just recently. The mother defended her "parenting philosophy," telling the Chicago Tribune that society was too uptight about breastfeeding and denied that she coerced him.

-- London's Observer newspaper reported in November an increasing number of artificial inseminations in which a woman is impregnated with sperm from her husband's father, in order to improve the chances of continuing the genetic line when her partner's own sperm won't work. Two Japanese physicians told The Washington Post in December that they, too, see the practice increasing: "Japanese people put strong importance on the bloodstream. We are a homogeneous people."

-- In July in Tucson, Ariz., Corey Viramontes, 15, pled guilty to murder and faces up to 22 years in prison for viciously stabbing a service station supervisor to death during a robbery. Corey has three brothers: Robert, 21, is serving life in prison for beating a neighbor to death with a baseball bat; Anthony, 22, will be sentenced in January (possibly to death) for beating a man to death for eating his pizza; and Samuel, 18, is already serving a life sentence for his role in bludgeoning the pizza-eater. The boys' records include other frequently vicious beatings. As an Arizona Daily Star writer put it, "Victims of the Viramontes brothers do not die easily."

-- In Chicago in November, Marcus Henderson, 22, was charged with kidnapping and other crimes after he took his 68-year-old grandmother at gunpoint to an ATM and forced her to withdraw money for him. Police said that when they later arrived at the grandmother's apartment, Henderson held the woman in front of him as a shield and opened fire, hitting one officer before being captured.

-- In March, Nathan King, 12, of Helena, Mont., made News of the Weird by surviving a lunge for a football that resulted in his falling on the point of a pencil, which penetrated his heart; if anyone had removed the pencil before he reached the hospital, he would have died almost instantly. Then, in October, Ms. Destiny Lopez, age 6, survived the same fate when she tripped on the way to her first-grade teacher's desk and fell on her pencil; her teacher talked calmly to her until paramedics arrived, and surgeons later removed the pencil, which had penetrated 3 inches into her heart.

-- News of the Weird has reported over the years on prisoners' sometimes-prodigious aptitudes for safekeeping valuables in their rectums. A man arrested on drug charges in Amarillo, Texas, in November 2000 allegedly was rectally housing 80 $100 bills (along with two $50s and money orders totaling $4,200), easily beating the record of $2,000 kept by a Florida State Prison inmate in 1991 (though that man also had six handcuff keys, seven hacksaw blades and 34 razor blades in a pouch in his rectum).

Michael H. Cautela, 39, was sentenced to 300 hours' community service in Columbus, Ohio, in December, specifically targeted to cleaning restrooms and zoo cages, for two counts of assaulting women by spraying them with a mixture of salad oil and urine. (When the judge asked why, Cautela said, "I just like to see ladies with oil on them." But, said the judge, "This had urine in it." Cautela held firm: "It was mostly oil.") And in December in Orlando, Fla., Joseph Edward Nichols, 29, was sentenced to five years in jail after a no-contest plea to squirting as many as 11 people with a water pistol containing his semen.

Charged with murder, Edgefield County, S.C., October: Steven Wayne Bowman. Charged with murder, Tucson, Ariz., November: Bryan Wayne Padd. Charged with murder, Sequoyah County, Okla., October: Jeffrey Wayne Leaf. Now embroiled in a marital-estate fight while on death row for murder: Scott Wayne Blystone (who is housed at the State Correctional Institution in Waynesburg, Pa.). Testified against his former partner, Tavares, Fla., October: convicted murderer Terry Wayne Johnson. And in a double-suicide pact in October at the jail in San Marcos, Texas, accused murderer Kenny Wayne Lockwood (who made News of the Weird in July 2000) was successful, but accused child molester Bradley Wayne Dixon survived.

Highway Death Toll: A 22-year-old man died of massive head injuries after jumping reflexively out of an open convertible to avoid a cigarette butt flicked by the driver (Virginia Beach, Va., October). A 37-year-old motorist was killed when another driver hit a piece of debris on the road, launching it through the victim's windshield and into his chest (Fort Worth, Texas, October). A 29-year-old woman was fatally run over by a street-sweeping machine (Washington, D.C., September)

A judge granted John Turner a divorce after a 38-year union, persuaded by testimony that Mrs. Turner compulsively rearranged their furniture every single day they were married (Thornaby-on-Tees, England). The man claiming the world's longest fingernails (47 inches) announced he wanted to sell them to a museum for $200,000 (Pune, India). A 20-year-old hotel parking attendant joyriding in a guest's Ferrari 355 GTS ($175,000) totaled it into a palm tree (Dana Point, Calif.). A federal judge rejected, with a decision in poetic verse, a prisoner's lawsuit against Penthouse magazine for fraud in overpromising how revealing its recent nude pictorial of Paula Jones would be (Austin, Texas).

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