-- In Butler County, Pa., in March, Tammy Lynn Felbaum, 42, was charged in connection with the death of her sixth husband, James Felbaum, who died from complications of a botched castration, which Tammy said James performed on himself. Tammy (who used to be Tommy Wyda before allegedly castrating himself in 1980 in order to move up in the sex-change-surgery queue at Case Western Reserve medical school) was known in the community as an amateur medical practitioner, allegedly working on animals, and in a previous career as a stripper was known for crushing empty soda cans between her breasts. A crude surgical-consent form, signed by James, was found in the couple's home, but Tammy told police she had nothing to do with the fatal operation and that the form was actually from an earlier castration attempt by James.

-- In February, the British company Travelman, publisher of short fiction, installed three vending machines in London train stations to sell single-sheet, folded-like-a-map collections of poetry, to supply reading material for newspaper-avoiding commuters.

-- In March, responding to what he calls Europe's "delicate problem" of too few taxpayers to support an increasing population of retirees, former tennis great Bjorn Borg urged westerners in a signed, full-page, English-language ad in Sweden's leading financial newspaper Dagens Industri to step up their procreation. The ad, purchased by Borg's clothing company, urged readers to "Get to it" and to "F--- for the Future."

On March 16 in New Plymouth, New Zealand, Stuart Beech, 31, changed his plea and admitted in court that his high DUI blood-alcohol reading might have been caused by the six beers he had drunk; initially, he had pointed out to police that since he does a nightclub act as a fire-breather, it was natural for him to have methyl fuel on his breath (though he has since switched professionally to kerosene). On the same day, halfway around the world in Los Angeles, fire-breathing magician Randall Richman, 32, told the Los Angeles Times he will argue at his upcoming DUI trial that his breath-test reading detected only the lighter fluid he uses in his act (though the police report said he also had bloodshot eyes and could not stand up).

Former Long Island police officer Dominick Steo filed a $45 million lawsuit in federal court in Central Islip, N.Y., in January, charging the police department with ill-advisedly furnishing him a service weapon during a period of depression, three months before he shot himself with it. And Richard L. Garcia, 17, filed a lawsuit in November against the city of Bradenton, Fla., because police let him go with no penalty after stopping him while he was driving drunk. (He crashed a few minutes later, suffering serious injuries.) And burglar Shane Colburn filed a $20,000 (USD) lawsuit in Penrith, Australia, in November, because his victims and their dogs roughed him up when they caught him in the act.

-- A team of researchers from the Netherlands' Delft University of Technology announced in December that after nearly four years of research, it had solved the perplexing problem of how to store and pour draft beer on zero-gravity space stations. The team injects carbon dioxide against a flexible membrane inside the keg, which forces the beer out without commingling the liquid and the gas (as is done in the conventional keg) and provides the additional benefit of ejecting the beer in liquid chunks the size of table tennis balls.

-- In a February dispatch from Tblisi, Georgia, the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported that surgeons at Tblisi's prominent Institute of Aesthetic and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery had successfully replaced a cancer patient's amputated penis with a substitute made from the man's left middle finger and had created a channel inside to allow urine (and semen) to pass.

-- Business is brisk for the Seek Ye First Lingerie shop (Louisburg, N.C.), whose two female Baptist owners appeal to religious women who want to be alluring but not sleazy. According to a January report in the Raleigh News & Observer, the most popular part of the shop is the "Thong Center" rack.

-- Latest Food News: Hormel Foods announced in January that it will sell pork and turkey protein products in the form of a binding substance that General Motors will use to make molds for casting metal parts for cars (thus reducing GM's dependence on chemicals). And among eateries recently in the news: Miami's B.E.D. restaurant, where customers are served not at tables, but on large beds (up to 60 feet by 10 feet, for parties of 10), and New York's Ike, which in its appeal to baby boomers has a Swanson's TV dinner on the menu for $6.

-- Personal property of the late opera diva Maria Callas fetched about $1.25 million at a December auction in Paris, with most of the media attention devoted to 13 lots of brassieres and lingerie, which were won by a group of Callas' admirers working through a private foundation. The unmentionables (for example, about $5,000 for a girdle, slightly more for a black lace slip) will be either burned or placed in extremely deep storage because the admirers were appalled at the estate's owners' greed in cashing in on Callas' underwear.

News of the Weird has followed the antics of Pekin, Ill., gardener Robert Norton, now 77, over the years because he does much of his work while nude, to the consternation of neighbors. Despite more than 20 arrests and several convictions, Norton insists his activity is protected by the U.S. Constitution. He has been sentenced twice more since his last News of the Weird mention. And in December in Bellefonte, Pa., Charles Stitzer, 62, was convicted of the same offense (his first), having "alarmed" a neighbor despite being 200 feet away with nightfall approaching.

By mid-March, three reveling college students had died from falls or incompetent leaps during this year's spring break: a Florida man, 20 (climbing balcony to balcony in Daytona Beach); a Kansas man, 18 (climbing balcony to balcony at a Mexico resort); a New Jersey man, 19 (leaping from a balcony into a swimming pool but missing, in Fort Lauderdale). (Another man survived a fall off of a motel building in Panama City Beach, Fla.)

A Buffalo, N.Y., public school program announced it will pay some high school students $5 an hour to attend English and math classes this summer. A slow-handed 27-year-old 7-Eleven clerk was taken by paramedics not to a hospital but to an industrial shop (along with the store's auto-locking safe) to have her fingers extricated from the safe's coin-deposit slot (Aberdeen, Wash.). A stickup man wielding a toy gun robbed the Glebe Side Kids toy store (Ottawa, Ontario). Britain's Princess Anne, 50, was fined about $700 for driving her Bentley about 90 mph and ignoring a police officer chasing her; she said she just assumed that the officer's flashing lights meant that he had come to provide a royal escort (Gloucestershire, England).

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

-- 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/.)