-- At least 1,400 college students are majoring in "golf" at eight universities, with more schools about to start programs, according to a March Wall Street Journal report. One school just completed a $1.1 million student "learning laboratory" (that is, a model golf clubhouse), part of what is necessary to meet the demand for pros as new or expanded U.S. courses open at the rate of about one a day. Curricula include business classes, turf science, and many, many rounds of golf.

-- In Galesburg, Ill., in January, long-haul trucker Dana Turner, 40, explained to police that the child pornography in his truck was important to him in that it kept him from falling asleep at the wheel. According to the police report, Turner said he was so angry that pornographers would exploit children like that that his agitation kept him alert.

-- According to police reports on March 3 (the first day of sale of the $125 Nike Air Jordan Retro XI sneakers), shoe stores in Detroit, Milwaukee, Columbus, Ohio, and Peoria, Ill., needed officers to quell actual or budding customer violence because of insufficient supplies of the shoes, and in Sacramento, Calif., and Toledo, Ohio, entire malls had to be shut down as consumers threatened to take their frustrations out on Foot Locker and other stores.

The ex-student suing the Oklahoma University law school for expelling him (who announced in January he would appeal to the state supreme court): Mr. Perry Mason. The 58-year-old man arrested for exposing himself in the front window of a business in Nashua, N.H., in December: Mr. Joseph Dangle. The 25-year-old woman arrested in West Haven, Conn., in September for spitting on a police officer and then urinating in his patrol car: Ms. Lonna Leak. A deceased man in Union City, Tenn., the subject of a December obituary: Mr. Finis Newton Drummond. A high-school track-and-field star in Staten Island, N.Y., noted in a January issue of Sports Illustrated: Mr. I-Perfection Harris.

-- A Los Angeles Police Department report released in January revealed that, because of high turnover of operators and slowdowns in construction of new 911 facilities, a total of 219,733 calls to 911 last year were never answered by an operator, which, even when discounted by the 80 percent that are nonemergencies, averages to 120 emergency calls ignored each day.

-- This month's municipal elections in France marked the first application of the country's recent law requiring political parties to field an equal number of female and male candidates. Female officeholders are scarcer in France than any other European country (one-fifth the incidence as in Sweden), and political parties that fall short of female candidates are subject to heavy fines.

-- In February, Ohio prison officials sent the state finance board the preliminary medical bill for correcting a convicted murderer's severe nosebleed: $160,303 (but final costs are expected to be added). The man, who is serving 15 years to life, is a hemophiliac who asked for surgery to correct chronic sinusitis.

-- Federal marshals seized the Indianapolis Baptist Temple in February for back taxes, 91 days after church leaders and parishioners began occupying it in a vigil and 16 years after it began refusing to deduct withholding and Social Security taxes from employees' paychecks. The church's position on taxes, that it is governed only by God's law, was consistently rejected by courts over the years and finally by the U.S. Supreme Court in January. But in Norwich, Conn., Salvatore Verdirome said he plans no such protest as the state property tax people zero in on his Sanctuary of Love, a hillside field of 47 sky-blue bathtubs that form shelters for statues of the Virgin Mary, and on which he owes more than $100,000 in back taxes and utility bills for the last 30 years.

-- In January, Quebec's health insurance board approved about $3,000 (USD) in payments for breast implants for a 15-year-old girl after a psychiatrist submitted a recommendation calling the surgery "necessary" for her mental health. (The next week, following the predictable outcry, a board official announced, to a chorus of skeptical critics, that the psychiatrist's recommendation was irrelevant and that the girl actually suffered from a medical condition ("aplasia of the breast," or a lack of mammary glands, which made her breasts unusually small) that required surgery.)

Raymond Jones filed a complaint after having angrily stalked off his job during the 1998 holiday season, never to return, at a Shoppers Drug Mart in Vancouver, British Columbia, because his boss told him to set up artificial poinsettias in a seasonal display, which he took as a directive to support the abhorrent idea of "Christmas" (he is a Jehovah's Witness). And the very petite Brenda Marshall said a constable in St. John's, Newfoundland, violated her civil rights as a short person by stopping her car, believing an underage child was driving. (Results: Mr. Jones won a $30,000 judgment from the province's human rights panel in January; Ms. Marshall lost in the province's court of appeals in January.)

News of the Weird noted in February 2000 the ascendance of eunuchs to elected office in India, thought to be attributed to a backlash against traditional corruption and to support for the nothing-to-lose attitude of the "hijras," most of whom are males castrated at birth, who make their living either as prostitutes or professional pests. Following elections in November and December, the totals stood at two mayors, several council members and a state legislator, Shabnam Mausi, who announced that "she" (as hijras prefer) would soon apply for the estimated 500,000 hijras to be an official national political party.

Pediatric pathologist Dr. Dick Van Velden lost his hospital job in the Netherlands in February after an examination of his storage locker in Liverpool, England, revealed that he had removed (for research purposes but without parental permission) and stored the organs of more than 800 deceased children (in addition to a child's head, which he kept in a jar). Two days later, prosecutors in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he also recently worked, asked for extradition so that Van Velden could explain the presence of children's organs in heat-sealed bags in a locker in that city. Colleagues interviewed by Canada's National Post suggest Van Velden was so absorbed with his research that he simply collected organs and forgot about them.

A wind-blown skydiver landed on a woman serving beer during a Daytona Beach Bike Week event at which women wrestle in a vat of cole slaw, sending the woman to the hospital for three days. A homeowner forked over $40,000 to have his house lifted and moved three feet back to comply with a zoning rule (Snohomish County, Wash.). A Hoover, Ala., BP gas station owner, chasing after a customer who skipped out on a $20 fill-up, stayed with him at high speeds down Interstate 65 and U.S. 231 for 130 miles before finally giving up. Though he had not fought since July 1999 and in fact passed away in October 2000, boxer Darrin Morris advanced in the latest (January 2001) World Boxing Organization super-middleweight rankings, from 11th to 5th.

(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 a dispatch from a Chicago convention of "furries" (people, mostly men, obsessed with animals or animal characters), Vanity Fair magazine (March issue) profiled several people as typical of the 400 attendees: some who dress as animals (so passionately as to "become" the animal), or are sexually attracted to those who dress as animals, or are sexually attracted to stuffed animals ("plushies"), or who otherwise identify intensely, though nonsexually, with animals. Said one, "If a (high school animal) mascot walked into a room surrounded by naked women, I'd be thinking about the mascot." Furries typically scratch each other gently as a sign of affection and refer to nonfurries as "mundanes."

-- When Brian O'Dea, 52, touted his high-level marijuana-smuggling experience in his newspaper ad seeking a legitimate executive job, his phone "started ringing off the hook," according to a February report in Toronto's National Post (which ran O'Dea's ad on Feb. 19). O'Dea, who did a prison stint during the 1990s, emphasized his experience with "security" and international markets (and his ability to speak three languages) and his management of a $100 million enterprise employing 120 people.

-- Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" was the platform used in art pieces that opened in two cities in February to predictable controversy, in that Jesus was portrayed as a nude black woman ("Yo' Mama's Last Supper") by photo artist Renee Cox at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and as Mrs. Butterworth ("The Last Pancake Breakfast") by painter Dick Detzner at the Chicago Athenaeum (Schaumburg, Ill.). Cox said her work aimed to challenge the Catholic church's treatment of women; Detzner's piece was part of his ongoing work on corporations' dominance of society.

Gary A. Wysong, 39, was arrested on an obscenity charge at the electronics department of a Meijer store in Middleton, Ohio, in January. According to police, Wysong popped his own hard-core pornography tape into one of the VCRs on sale and watched it for about five minutes before security officers, seeing that it was making other customers nervous, asked him to stop. Officers detained him for police when he ignored their request.

High priest of the Santeria religion Richard Rossie was arrested in Palm Beach, Fla., in January after he allegedly dumped a box of chicken carcasses (recently used in Santeria ceremonies) into the environmentally protected Intracoastal Waterway, where they were to be received by the ocean god Yemoja). And in January, a leak of 6,000 gallons of mineral oil at the Los Alamos National Laboratory seeped through the floor and drenched $2 million worth of lasers in a basement lab (Santa Fe, N.M.). And five days later, an Environmental Protection Agency field office revealed that an accidental overflow of 300 gallons of home-heating oil at an EPA research facility caused a minor leak into adjacent Narragansett Bay (Narragansett, R.I.).

-- The Supreme Court of Canada reinstated child pornography charges in January against retired city planner John Robin Sharpe, 67, forcing a new trial on two counts of possession (one of which involves his own writings, "Flogging, Fun, and Fortitude: A Collection of Kiddie Classics"). Sharpe was unrepentant, however, demanding that kids be able to control their own bodies: "Do you think God made a mistake in the fact that kids reach puberty about (age) 12?" he asked a radio interviewer. "What is the purpose of that if not for kids to enjoy sex or have sex?"

-- In February, the lawyer for former FBI agent David Farrall said Farrall was not drunk the night he accidentally killed two people with his car on I-95 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that the .14 blood-alcohol reading was faulty, and that Farrall intended to prove that in a test in which he would drink and eat exactly the same thing he had consumed on the night in question (according to the bar receipt). In order to conduct the test, Farrall needed his judge's permission to drink alcohol, which is forbidden by the terms of his pre-trial release.

-- In January, Judge Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss of Britain's High Court announced that prominent killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both now age 18, who have been in juvenile detention for eight years since sadistically murdering a 2-year-old boy, would be released within the year, given new identities to protect them from vigilantes, and freed without further penalty (except the penalty vowed by the victim's father, who said he would hunt them down).

-- Judge Peter Leveque recused himself from a case of sexual assault by a teen-age boy against a 3-year-old girl in Calgary, Alberta, in January after describing the case to a prosecutor merely as one in which "a young person had raging hormones." And Montgomery County, Pa., lawyer Roger B. Reynolds withdrew from a child sexual abuse case in January after quarreling, during a teen-age girl's testimony, with her concept of "bad touch"; said Reynolds, "(N)one of my women (ever) thought it was bad."

-- Recurring Theme: In March, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Russell Weston, the paranoid schizophrenic charged with killing two U.S. Capitol police officers in 1998, could be forcibly medicated to attempt to stabilize his illness so that he might assist in his defense. Until the judge's decision, Weston's lawyers resisted the medication because once he goes to trial and is convicted, he is a good candidate for the death penalty, whereas if he continued to reject medication, he would likely deteriorate and never be well enough to stand trial (though ethically, physicians say, a doctor should never purposely make a patient worse). Weston is not the first person recently so conflicted; News of the Weird reported on an accused murderer housed since 1996 at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts for the same reason.

Emery S. Pluff, 59, of South St. Paul, Minn., was arrested in February for allegedly robbing and molesting his wife (which he did, police said, pretending he was a stranger). For reasons not yet apparent, Pluff allegedly faked going to work on the morning of Jan. 30 and instead donned a black cape and a Halloween mask the family kept in the garage and entered the house, where he surprised his wife and dragged her into a back room. She apparently was not the least bit puzzled by her perpetrator's identity and asked Emery repeatedly why he was doing this. According to police, Emery replied, "I'm not Emery." Police said Emery then took some money from his wife and fled, winding up at work, where he was arrested.

A high-school senior was killed, apparently playing a game of chicken with a San Francisco Municipal Railway street car (40 tons) just after midnight on Jan. 3. A 22-year-old man was accidentally shot to death on Christmas Eve after he placed a plastic cup on top of his head and consented to his friend's request to try to shoot it off (Aurora, Colo.). A 24-year-old man was killed in a police chase that reached 105 mph, begun when the man drove over lawns in a residential neighborhood at 3 a.m. and ended when the man drove through three fences and accidentally off a cliff (Plainview, Texas).

A University of Mississippi pharmacy professor continued to seek drug company funds for trials to test his mild "medicinal marijuana" suppositories. A 37-year-old man was arrested and charged in connection with the recent disappearance, one at a time, of more than 100 stepladders in a small town (Jeffersonville, Ind.). A 38-year-old man was arrested, and his warehoused arsenal of guns seized, after he was spotted in a city park taking target practice at a photo of his mother-in-law (Brooklyn, N.Y.). Two high school teachers were suspended and charged with giving a student higher grades in exchange for price breaks on groceries at a store where the student is a clerk (Canonsburg, Pa.).

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

-- "Vote for Me, and I'll Fight for You": In January, a 55-year-old member of the Turkish parliament died shortly after being punched in the head about five times by legislators from the far-right Nationalist Action Party who disagreed with him on whether the chamber's rules of debate should be changed. Although it was the parliament's first death, fights are known to break out there, unlike the extraordinary two-judge fistfight in January at the courthouse in New Orleans; according to WDSU-TV, the combatants were judges Steven Plotkin and Charles Jones, and the results were not announced.

-- In January, News of the Weird reported that a North Dakota man had qualified under that state's law for a concealed-weapon permit even though legally blind, but that man had at least satisfied the state's reasonable shooting test by hitting a human-sized target 10 times out of 10 from a distance of 21 feet (after practice shots to get his bearings). However, in February, according to a report in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Kentucky's weapons law has also permitted at least two legally blind people to obtain licenses, and in that state, the shooter must hit the human-sized target, also from 21 feet, only 11 times out of 20.

According to Reuters news service, a January campaign attributed to Venezuelan military dissidents has seen more than 100 pairs of women's panties mailed to current military brass to make the symbolic point that the generals have been pushed around by President Hugo Chavez. And police in Davos, Switzerland, trying to contain protesters at the World Economic Forum in January, loaded their high-pressure water cannons with manure bought from local farmers. And among the chants by union-organizing strippers picketing to keep potential customers away from a San Francisco club (in a new British documentary): "2-4-6-8! Don't come here to masturbate!"

-- In December, the Myrtle Beach (S.C.) Fire Department was designated as the year's recipient of a $2,400 donation by a civic group that, for the fourth straight year, raised money by holding an event at a strip club, the motif of which was that dancers had their bare chests rubbed with a ham. (Despite the department's current need for $8,000 to buy a computerized talking fire truck to use in safety exhibits, the fire captain declined the contribution as inappropriate.)

-- Bob Manion, who has appeared as Flasher the Clown at festivals near his home in Clayton, Calif., for nearly 20 years, was rejected in January for this year's Walnut Festival and will probably be rejected as well for Clayton's Fourth of July parade, as organizers of both events say his act has started to worry people. Manion carries a small Yorkshire terrier inside his pants, and for a surprise, opens the costume and allows kids to pet the dog.

-- In February, Girl Scout officials of the San Jacinto Council near Houston announced that this year's father-daughter event would be a "pajama party" dance in which fathers and the girls, aged 11-17, would come dressed in sleepwear; after some complaints ("It would attract every pervert in the city," said one mother), the council changed the dress code to sweatsuits. And The Tennessean newspaper reported in November that the longstanding Halloween tradition of the Morris Levine family near Nashville, to hand out gift "daddy bags" to fathers accompanying trick-or-treaters, was not well-received by all parents because some of the bags contained copies of Penthouse and Hustler.

-- The Museum of Natural History in London decided against creating the scent of the dinosaur because it was just too disgusting, according to a February Associated Press dispatch identifying Dale Air Deodorising Ltd. of Lytham, England, as the company that had the contract to simulate the smell. Said Dale's owner Frank Knight: "The T-rex would have to be the most putrid, foulest thing that ever lived. A hyena times 10 would not even get you close." The odor would have to account for the chunks of rotted meat of its prey caught in its teeth, he said, and probably a few pus-filled wounds, as well.

-- The Ontario Court of Appeal, in the course of its January ruling that drug charges against a teen-ager at a Marilyn Manson concert would have to be thrown out because of police entrapment, described a scene that some concert-goers found gross and scary in its own way: older men (undercover police officers) dressed in Goth garb trying to trick kids into selling them marijuana by saying things like, "Hey, man, it's going to be a wicked concert" and "Hamilton (Ontario) sucks."

Barry Darrell Freeman, 29, was convicted in January of an attempted rape last year near Philadelphia. According to testimony, things started to go bad for Freeman when the victim asked him to take off his own clothes and then chided him until he did. With his clothes off, the woman saw that he was not carrying a gun, and ran away, eventually to outrun Freeman to safety. However, during the chase, according to the woman, Freeman kept muttering something about not being able to trust a woman.

News of the Weird has reported on studies revealing that certain types of water pollution are causing some simpler forms of marine life to change sexes, but in a report in a December 2000 Science News, University of New Brunswick (Canada) researcher Kelly Munkittrick disclosed that most of the large female chinook salmon around Washington state appear to have been born males, although he believes so far that neither escaping nuclear materials from the Hanford plant near Richland nor estrogen-rich pesticides common to the area appear to be the cause.

Excerpts from letters written by convicted murderer Christa Pike, 24, to fellow imprisoned Tennessee Satan-worshipping murderer John Fryman, who apparently believe they can communicate their love for each other telepathically (as reported in the Knoxville News-Sentinel in January): "(Blood) is quite beautiful before it turns brown." "I love the feel of life then lack thereof in my hands. And just knowing the pain I can cause after accepting so much." "I like to see blood and brains fatty tissues and wide-open ripped flesh." "See, I have an innocent baby face, the face of an angel. It disguises me to a lot of people. I need my horns so I'll have something to hang my halo on." "I used to have 3 (demons), now only one. The other 2 were weak. I do wish you'd remove this one. He may be big and tough, but he's stupid, and he's holding me back." "I'm unlike all the others, Johnny. You know that!"

The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down a state law protecting public school teachers from insults, as unconstitutionally vague (though the justices did agree that the 13-year-old defendant was wrong to call her teacher a "bitch"). A 19-year-old zookeeper was mauled to death after answering nature's call too close to the cage of a tiger, which was attracted by the scent (Jinan, China). Rep. Joseph Brooks introduced a bill in the Maine legislature to add a nickel-a-butt deposit (as now with soda bottles) to each cigarette sold. A customer filed a lawsuit against Taco Bell for injuries she suffered during an employee food fight (Nashua, N.H.)

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