-- Former pro football player Rae Carruth's elaborate defense to the charge of ordering his pregnant girlfriend's murder (semi-successful, in that he was convicted in January only of conspiracy) was financed by the state of North Carolina because the well-paid Carruth convinced Judge Charles Lamm that he was "indigent," according to court documents that Lamm had kept sealed for six months but which were discovered in January by the Charlotte Observer. Carruth earned about $38,000 a week during the 1999 season, and when the prosecutor suggested the motive for the killing was to spare Carruth child-support payments, Carruth countered by pointing out that he made enough money (net worth: $360,000) to easily support a child.

-- In January, Nicholas Griffin, owner of video stores in York and Grimsby, England, was fined about $9,900 by a magistrates' court under the Trade Descriptions Act for marketing ordinary feature films (such as the 1973 Jack Palance comedy "Secrets of a Sensuous Nurse") as "hard-core" sex videos. Said Griffin, "I am amazed people have the audacity to complain about things like that."

British Antarctic Survey personnel (and helicopters) are now in the Falkland Islands specifically to learn whether penguins do, indeed, topple over when following the path of an aircraft overhead. Also, a team of researchers from the at-Bristol center, using "arousal monitors," found that 20 of the 25 surveyed members of Parliament appear more emotionally aroused by the sight of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher than by the sight of local glamour personality Denise Van Outen in a skimpy dress. And, commenting on a Bremen University (Germany) study on gambling as an addiction, British psychologist Mark Griffiths and British gardening expert Alan Titchmarsh said in November that the findings should apply, as well, to the addictive activity of gardening; said Titchmarsh, "Once you've discovered the thrill of making things grow, you can't stop."

-- Former police officer Edward Ludaescher and a partner were charged in November after allegedly attempting to rob an Oxnard, Calif., bank, but Ludaescher said it was all a misunderstanding, that he really was only studying up on the mind of the bank robber for a police training video he and the partner were planning to make. (However, prosecutors said that the two men badly needed money, having recently defaulted on a $200,000 loan for developing a pepper spray gun.)

-- John Bradley Park's defense at his drunk-driving trial in Llano, Texas, in October was that he was perfectly sober while driving on the night of July 4, 1999, even though his car might have been swerving on the road, but that while sitting in the driver's seat after police officer Jody Deatherage pulled him over, he quickly began drinking, and that by the time he reached the medical facility to test his blood-alcohol content, he was drunk. (He was nevertheless convicted.)

-- Twenty-six years after Mel Lastman (who is now mayor of Toronto) paid off a former long-time, married girlfriend, with whom he had had two sons, in a private settlement, the sons (now age 41 and 38) filed a lawsuit against Lastman, complaining of low self-esteem, anxiety, humiliation and delay in their personal development, for which they want Lastman to pay them $4 million (U.S.) more. Nevertheless, said the 19-year-old son of one of the plaintiffs, the lawsuit is "not about the money."

-- According to his campaign manager Jose A. Riesco, U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida did not retain illegal campaign contributions in the bank for eight months rather than issue immediate refunds as legally required and as he promised to do. Rather, Riesco told the Miami Business Review in December, all 45 refund checks (totaling nearly $30,000) were mailed out on time in February 2000. The reason none of the 45 recipients ever cashed their checks over the next eight months, said Riesco, was that somehow every single one of the 45 checks was lost in the mail, "poorly addressed, things like that," thus allowing Diaz-Balart full use of the illegal money for the recent campaign. Riesco denied any wrongdoing.

-- In Edwardsville, Ill., in November, Kwayera "Q" Jackson, 18, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in the death of his 5-month-old son, whom authorities determined was killed by a blow to his intestines. Jackson (a recent high school football standout) said he might have gently thumped the boy's stomach, but only because he was trying to build up his abs so that he would be a better athlete when he grew up.

-- In November, a jury in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., awarded Harvard undergraduate student Patricia Ryan, 36, $363,000 from the Cabaret nightclub for a 1994 injury in her previous occupation as a stripper. In her act, Ryan was a fire-breather, but after accidentally dribbling out some of the 151-proof stage booze, her chest caught fire, causing second-degree burns. The Cabaret's attorney said, "We didn't cause the fire," but Ryan argued that the club's employees declined to help her during the emergency.

In January, Gainesville (Fla.) police charged James Anthony Harmon, 39, with fraud after finding his house cluttered from floor to ceiling with as much as $200,000 worth of unopened cartons of merchandise ordered under various credit-card names from Home Shopping Network. It appeared that very few HSN-ordered items were actually in use in the home. Said Harmon, "I just shop a lot." According to the Gainesville Sun, Harmon's neighbors said he is "a loner who often kept to himself."

Accidentally shooting yourself in the head with a nail gun is rarely fatal, as readers of News of the Weird know from several stories in which construction workers have inadvertently plugged themselves and earned little more than a terrific souvenir x-ray. In January 2001, a 25-year-old construction worker in Bethlehem, Pa., tempted fate by firing a dozen shots into his skull with his nail gun, but with a purpose in mind: He was in agony from having just accidentally severed his hand in a mitre saw mishap and thought somehow that he could divert some of the pain (which doctors said is quite possible to do). At press time, he was hospitalized in stable condition after surgery to reattach the hand (and to remove the nails).

In November, Mr. Auburn Mason, 62, was sentenced to four years in prison in England for a 1999 British Airways hijacking. He had grabbed a flight attendant, held scissors to her neck, and threatened additionally to blow up the plane, yelling, "Take me to Gatwick (airport, London)!" At that point, the flight was 15 minutes away from its scheduled destination, which was Gatwick airport. Mason was disarmed after observers realized the "bomb" was a pocket dictating machine.

A 33-year-old mother was charged with felonious failure to prevent child sex abuse, by giving her 13-year-old son condoms to facilitate sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend (the "abuser") (Milwaukee). Vietnam vet Harry Hunt got his waist-length hair cut, ending his eight-year boycott of the clippers in protest of draft-dodging Bill Clinton's presidency (Mexico, Mo.). A 34-year-old man was charged with forcing a woman to have sex by wielding a live hand grenade (York, Maine). A circus-performing archer missed the apple on his wife/assistant's head for the first time in 14 years, sending her to the hospital with a catastrophic wound below the eye (Paris).

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

-- 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.