-- Among the problems uncovered in a November Detroit News investigation of the city's firehouses was the absence of a central system of flashing alarms or bells to notify stations when 911 calls come in. Rather, each firehouse is equipped with a dot-matrix printer with a lead weight resting on the paper feed on a table and tied to a switch that activates a bell on the wall; when the 911 operator sends a message to the firehouse computer, the "print" function automatically engages, moving the paper feed up, dislodging the lead weight from the table, and tripping the switch, which triggers the bell. Detroit Fire Commissioner Charles Wilson told the News that there are no plans to replace the 15-year-old system, in that it seems to work pretty well.

-- Even though "nonlethal" military firepower might satisfy nations' needs for war, without loss of life, some experts counsel against developing such armament, fearing that such sophisticated weapons might spook Iraq and other countries to step up development of the lethal kind. According to a December report in New Scientist, feasible nonlethal weapons include a dust that would put everyone in an area to sleep (or in a mellow state); bombs dispersing microbes that eat up enemy rubber tires or eat up storehouses of oil and gasoline; and bombs that would suck up oxygen in an area to disable automobile or aircraft engines.

-- Barry and Rhonda Conrad filed a formal, pre-litigation complaint against Hendricks Community Hospital (Danville, Ind.) in February for mishandling the body of their stillborn son last April. The grieving couple had wanted to view the body (and have it examined to help learn the reason for the stillbirth) before it went off to a funeral home, but according to the complaint, hospital employees mistakenly left it in with the sheets to be laundered, and by the time the Conrads could see the body, it had been washed, bleached and dried.

Brian Boone, 29, on probation since June in Lincoln, Ill., for attempting to abduct a child (and written up in News of the Weird last year for his penchant for collecting used socks from teen-age girls), was sentenced to 30 days in jail in November following his disorderly conduct conviction for asking two teen-age girls to give him the gum they were chewing by spitting it into a cup for him. He said he needed it to fix a flat tire. (His probation requires that he stay away from minors.)

Testifying in January in her lawsuit against Dr. James Tyhurst, Jill Gorman joined four other former patients who said that psychiatrist Tyhurst pressured them into sexual master-servant relationships, which included spankings when she was disobedient (Vancouver, British Columbia). And in December, Vermont officials ordered practice restrictions on surgeon Frederick Lord for 11 serious incidents in an 11-year period (e.g., operating on the wrong body parts), including one resulting in death and another in a patient's becoming a quadriplegic (Windsor, Vt.). And according to January testimony, a 65-year-old man died at a Hong Kong hospital last year after being left poorly attended because Dr. Chau Chak-lam failed to write "acute" angina on the patient's chart because, as he later testified, he did not know how to spell it in English.

-- In November, the San Francisco Chronicle art critic remarked that the center of American art seemed to have relocated from New York to the West Coast and that no event demonstrated that more than the recent Christie's auction of contemporary art in New York City, in which a 1990 fiberglass male mannequin sculpture by Los Angeles' Charles Ray, featuring genitalia copied from the artist's own, sold for $2.2 million.

-- According to a September dispatch from Havana, the troupe of seriously overweight ballerinas, Danza Voluminosa, is gearing up for its 12th performance in four years, the Greek tragedy "Phaedra," which it will execute emphasizing arm movements and stretching, while avoiding traditional big jumps. Said one performer, "The world needs things that break conventions of beauty."

-- Performance artist David Leslie's show in October in New York City consisted of him putting on headgear and boxing gloves and inviting audience members to try to knock him out, with any successful patron awarded $1,000. "I'll be covering up," he said, "but people will have, like, 15 uninterrupted shots at me. (I)t'll be cool." In a 1988 stunt, Leslie jumped off a five-story building onto a small cushion, to get "close to that kind of (life-threatening) peril. I just love surviving it."

-- New York City writer William Adrian Milton, 59, and his doctor told reporters in January that his recent CAT scan revealed to his complete surprise that he had a bullet in his head. Searching his memory, Milton recalled a 1976 incident in which he wandered too close to a fight on a loading dock, heard a noise, and was knocked down. He said he staggered home bloody and went to bed, but failed to seek medical treatment because the bleeding soon stopped and the remaining lump was consistent with being hit by a brick. Milton said he'll leave the bullet there.

Police in Bangkok charged Japanese businessman Yukio Tatsuka, 50, with the attempted murder of his son in November in what they say was a plan to eliminate him from the family because of his aggressive behavior. According to police, Tatsuka brought the 19-year-old on a holiday to Bangkok to show him "the best time of his life" so he wouldn't feel so guilty about killing him. A police colonel said Tatsuka might have mellowed just a little during the excursion, but when the son began scolding the father anew, Tatsuka grabbed his gun and allegedly shot the boy in the neck.

In January, Daniel F. Everett, 38, was charged with disturbing the peace after he allegedly pulled down his pants in the busy first-floor lobby of the St. Louis County Courthouse and photocopied his buttocks. From his position atop a machine, he had made two copies and was working on a third when Clayton, Mo., police officers arrested him. According to witnesses, Everett beseeched the officers: "What did I do? What did I do?"

-- A 46-year-old woman was killed in September in Molalla, Ore., when a 2-ton concrete wall collapsed onto the portable toilet she was using. And a 64-year-old man was killed in Reno, Nev., in January, found underneath several hundred pounds of old newspapers that had been stacked to the ceiling throughout his house. And at the airport near Luanda, Angola, in January, an out-of-control airplane managed to land safely, sparing the lives of all seven on board, but its erratic path caused a fatal collision with a pedestrian who was relieving himself too close to the runway.

British pro soccer player Rio Ferdinand went on the disabled list with a strained tendon caused by having his leg propped up for too long on his coffee table while watching the Super Bowl on TV (Leeds, England). A fistfight broke out in the middle of a highway funeral procession when a 20-year-old motorist became angry that he had to wait for the line of cars to pass and began yelling vulgarities and tossed a bottle at a car full of mourners (Florence, Ala.). The fire department had to rescue a 67-year-old man when the ground over his septic tank caved in and trapped him inside the rusty container for nearly an hour (Warwick, N.Y.) An 8-year-old boy was suspended for three days under a school's "zero tolerance" policy, for pointing a piece of breaded chicken at a teacher and simulating gunfire (Jonesboro, Ark.)

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

-- In January, a federal judge in Tampa locked up 1980s corporate raider Paul Bilzerian for contempt of court for allegedly hiding assets in a longstanding civil lawsuit in which the government is trying to collect a 1991 securities judgment that Bilzerian defrauded investors of $62 million. In a recent bankruptcy filing, Bilzerian claimed only $15,800 in assets, listing even a $5 Casio watch, but Florida law allows bankrupts to keep their homes, and Bilzerian has lived for years in an 11-bedroom, 37,000-square-foot lakefront residence with indoor basketball court, movie theater, nine-car garage and elevator (which he offered to rent out during the week of the Super Bowl for $600,000).

-- Excellence in Education: In a Nov. 16, 2000, letter published in its entirety (except for naming the recipient) in Washington (D.C.) City Paper in January, the human resources director for the District of Columbia Public Schools informs a female job applicant that an investigation into her criminal record has been resolved in her favor. According to the letter, DCPS accepted the applicant's documentation that the government had, for undisclosed reasons, declined to prosecute her cocaine distribution charge, her marijuana possession charge, her three dangerous-weapons charges, her shoplifting charge, her soliciting prostitution charge, and her destruction of government property charge (all during 1984-1992) and that the woman, thus with a clean record, is now "eligible for employment with DCPS."

In December, a couple in Tangxia, China, was considering a lawsuit against the Tangxia Central Hospital for its failure to spare their baby girl the misery of being born (since undisclosed ultrasound examinations had earlier shown that the girl, born in October, had two heads). And in France in October, a deaf, partly blind, mentally retarded 17-year-old boy won his wrongful-birth lawsuit against doctors who failed to counsel his parents that the mother's rubella during pregnancy almost certainly would cause birth defects that would make his life not worth living. However, in January a Texas Court of Appeals sided with doctors and reversed a trial court that had awarded a couple $42 million for their prematurely born daughter's dismal quality of life (blind, incontinent, brain-damaged, speechless, paralyzed in three limbs).

-- The New York Times reported in November that at least 23 small businesses (though one with 76 employees) are actually taking the far-fetched advice of a former agent and an accountant who give seminars showing how "Section 861" of the Internal Revenue Code actually exempts nearly all Americans from the duty to pay income taxes (and thus, that the firms need not withhold taxes from paychecks). The IRS director calls that interpretation "just plain nonsense," but the agency has for months allowed the companies to flout the law.

-- In November, prominent Vermont hunter Thomas N. Venezia, 41, was finally brought to justice after several shooting sprees, marauding through Canadian woods massively and maliciously violating game laws. An undercover agent quoted Venezia after one illegal shooting: "I have the 'K' chromosome. I love to kill. I have to kill." Once, Venezia spontaneously leaped from a truck and started firing at ducks, then later at pigeons because, he said, he needed action because he had gone an hour without killing anything. At a hearing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Venezia, sobbing, admitted the incidents and was permanently barred from Canada (though he remains licensed to hunt in Vermont).

-- The University of Michigan has accepted 15,000 personal papers of Unabomber-murderer Ted Kaczynski (an alumnus) and is housing them with, according to a December San Francisco Chronicle report, "all the academic solemnity that, say, Churchill's papers received when they went to Cambridge." Said a Kaczynski biographer, "Ted is obsessed with his public image." The university's decision is ironic, said Kaczynski's former prosecutor Steven Lapham, who points out that the man's private journals, introduced in his trial, showed that contrary to his alleged social and environmental reasons for his serial bombings, he merely "enjoyed taking other people's lives because he could."

-- Apparently, the fragrance Oh My Dog, from the French company Dog Generation, is selling well in Paris (at about $30 a bottle, including complimentary shampoo), providing pooches (according to the label) "an emotional short-cut between dog and man." And in Baltimore (according to an October report in the Baltimore Sun), Susan Wagner continues to pursue her lawsuit against the maker of Paws and Effect (a cologne designed to be sprayed on cats to mask their natural odors, sold at a Nordstrom fragrance counter) for failing to put a clear-enough warning on the package that it was not for humans; Wagner claims serious, recurrent skin problems.

-- A December Newsweek story reported that some female entrepreneurs can't change their underwear fast enough to fill all their customers' orders (at $10 to $30 per pair, used, a price presumably kept down by supply and demand, in that there were at least 400 such sellers on the eBay Web site before restrictions were placed). For example, "Michele," a 28-year-old Floridian, buys brand-new panties by the case, gives them free to her girlfriends, and retrieves them daily from their dirty-clothes piles for resale.

-- In November, the company 911 Computer of Korea introduced a $60 hand-held lie detector that reveals deceptions by sensing voice tremors caused by stress-restricted blood flow (a technology developed for the Israeli military). The Handy Truster Emotion Reader can allegedly point out lies with 80 percent accuracy after being calibrated with truthful statements, but a company spokesman said it might not work against politicians because it can be defeated by "compulsive" liars.

Frank Buble, 71, pled guilty in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, in December to attempted murder for smashing his son Philip, 44, with a crowbar several times, mostly because he was tired of the son's sexual relationship with his dog. Philip was relieved at the guilty plea, pointing out that he is "the first out-of-the-closet 'zoo' (zoophile) to be attacked because of my sexual orientation, so (lawyers) have no precedent to gauge how a jury would react."

-- In 1999, News of the Weird reported on the 82-year-old retired chemist who had been living quite happily in a 200-square-foot room in the downtown Boston YMCA since 1949. In November 2000, former Navy man Orlan Lattimer, 81, finally moved out of his room at the Arlington Hotel in San Francisco, where he says he has lived since 1937. After a while on a waiting list, the city Housing Authority assigned Lattimer a studio apartment (with his first-ever private refrigerator and private bath) about a block from the Arlington.

Bob Talley passed away in London in December during his 100th birthday party, just after receiving a congratulatory telegram from the Queen and uttering, "Yes, I made it (to 100)." At a New Year's Eve performance of the Trenton (N.J.) Symphony Orchestra, first trumpeter James M. Tuozzolo, 57, passed away of a heart attack moments after rendering (according to the conductor) a "flawless" solo. In July, Percy McRae, 65, passed away of a heart attack moments after singing the national anthem for Chicago Cubs fans at Wrigley Field.

Fairfax County (Va.) supervisors banned residential sleeping except in bedrooms as a way of curbing situations in which dozens of immigrants occupy the same house. A human skeleton was found in a chimney, judged by a wallet and clothing to have been there for 15 years, and police speculated a burglar got stuck (Natchez, Miss.). Italy's highest court ruled that a man's "isolated, impulsive" grab of a woman's derriere is not enough to constitute sexual harassment. An arrest warrant for failure to appear in court, for a 91-year-old shoplifter, was dropped when authorities concluded she would have shown up if it weren't for her failing memory (St. Pete Beach, Fla.).

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

-- 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/.)