-- Taking advantage of the California electricity crisis, aluminum producers Kaiser, Columbia Falls and Golden Northwest have suspended production in their plants along the Columbia River and are now in the business of merely reselling their plants' electricity to California (for 18 times what it cost them), according to a February Business Week report. Kaiser says that aluminum production is unprofitable now, anyway, and that it still pays the workers in its idled plants; however, the regional power administration in Portland, Ore., pointed out that the firms acquired their rights to electricity only as aluminum producers, not as electricity brokers, and wants them to give back some profits.

-- Even Rugby Has Standards: Some players try to intimidate opponents by grabbing their genitals during tackles, but Australia's National Rugby League concluded in March that West Tigers' player John Hopoate went beyond that and routinely stuck his finger in opponents' anuses. The league suspended him for 12 weeks, but Hopoate resigned, and several days later was back in the news announcing he would seek legal action against the New Zealand Cancer Society for using his photo in ads to publicize the value of prostate exams.

-- A 59-year-old man was accidentally run over and torn in half by a slow-moving tractor-trailer at a gas station in West Pensacola, Fla., on March 22, but according to a Pensacola News Journal report, the torso portion continued to show signs of life, and paramedics airlifted it to the West Florida Regional Medical Center, where the man was not pronounced dead until about 3 1/2 hours later. Said a truck driver-witness: "I couldn't believe it. If you're cut in half, wouldn't you die instantly?"

In February, tennis star Boris Becker admitted that he is the father of Russian model Angela Ermakova's year-old baby girl; just a month earlier, newspapers in Germany were reporting that he had accused the model of impregnating herself with his sperm in an extortion plot engineered by Russian gangsters. And in December, West Palm Beach, Fla., socialite Nanette Sexton won a divorce court ruling to have her husband's bedsheet tested to prove that the dried-up wet spot contained DNA from his girlfriend. And in a February article in the journal Nature, a University of Liverpool researcher found that male sheep on the Scottish island of St. Kilda had so much sex during mating season (average of 13 times a day) that they ran low on sperm, allowing many smaller, weaker rams to move up in the mating queue.

-- Officials in the tony Silicon Valley town of Woodside, Calif. (population 5,600), recently debated compliance with a state law requiring that town to have at least 16 "affordable housing" units (maximum rent for a one-bedroom apartment, $870) in that otherwise-high-end real estate market, and the best they could come up with, according to a November Associated Press report, was to allow horse farmers to create "apartments" for middle-class residents inside their barns.

-- Miguel Castillo was finally freed from prison in Illinois in January after having served 11 years for a murder despite having an airtight alibi. At Castillo's trial, the medical examiner said the murder occurred "before May 11 (1988)," and lab tests later fixed the day as May 7, 8 or 9, but Castillo was in jail on other charges during that time, and records showed he was not released until May 14. Still, a jury convicted him because police officers said they heard Castillo confess (though he consistently denied that).

-- Frankfurt University researchers, according to a January issue of New Scientist, found that ants living in bamboo stems in Malaysian rain forests keep their nests dry by drinking any water that seeps in, then exiting the nest, urinating, then returning to the nest, repeating the process over and over until the nest is dry. The researchers found that 2 milliliters of water in a nest caused a colony's ants to scurry back and forth until they had urinated 3,000 droplets outside.

-- A December recommendation by the Canadian Transportation Safety Board (after investigating the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111) urged airlines to drastically shorten the checklist for cockpit detection of onboard fires. At the time of the crash, Swissair's checklist took about 30 minutes to run through; Flight 111 crashed 20 minutes after the first report of smoke.

-- Specially commissioned Braille posters with the theme of equal treatment for the blind were on display this winter at the Truro Leisure Center (Truro, England) and the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta) human resources department. However, sighted people cannot read the posters because the words are only in Braille, and the blind cannot read the posters because in both locations the limited-edition posters were hung on the wall behind glass covers, to "protect" them.

Marcus Calhoun, 24, was taken to the county jail in Little Rock, Ark., on Jan. 29 on several misdemeanor charges, for which he would have been given citations and released after several hours' paperwork and records checks. However, he became restless, and when he heard the jailer call the name of a man he knew was asleep in a back cell, he pretended to be that man and was released. Family members convinced him to turn himself in (at about the same hour he would have been released, anyway), but the result of his ruse is that he now faces a felony escape charge.

-- In March, a Norway, Maine, man (unnamed in a police report in the Oxford County Advertiser Democrat) was arrested for indecent exposure just after he waited in line and made a purchase at a convenience store with his zipper down and his genitals in plain view. The man's last brush with the law was in February at his apartment house, where police discovered him fully clothed but with a frying pan inside his pants, which he said was to protect his genitals in case he got into a fight.

A 19-year-old college student was killed in March when she crashed into a parked trailer while joy-riding inside a garbage can down what is believed to be the world's steepest street, in Dunedin, New Zealand. And a 16-year-old boy froze to death in February after becoming tangled in cables atop a Des Moines, Iowa, church he had just burglarized. And a 19-year-old straight-A student fell to his death in March from a Furman University dormitory balcony when he lost his balance trying to win a spitting-for-distance contest with two friends (Greenville, S.C.).

Incumbent Mark Andrew Kern was re-elected mayor of Belleville, Ill., over challenger Mark Alan Kern (with not one voter so far expressing Florida-style confusion over the ballot). A Maryland state agency reported that the No. 1 cause of death of pregnant women for the years 1993-98 was homicide. Several angry viewers made death threats against Philadelphia TV meteorologist John Bolaris after his prediction of an early-March snowstorm fizzled. Police in Christchurch, New Zealand, got burglar Stuart Robert McPherson's confession when he called up a victim just to taunt him about his "stuff (being) crap."

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

-- Fraternities at the University of the Philippines and other Filipino campuses stage many of the same activities (such as toga parties) that U.S. "Greeks" do except that some apparently engage in murder and bombings in displays of organizational power, according to a February report in the Far Eastern Economic Review. The prestigious UP has accounted for 11 frat-related homicides (of about 100 nationwide) in the last 10 years, in acts ranging from student executions to gang-type rumbles, and frat brothers now in government and industry allegedly help to shield their organizations from police scrutiny.

-- In a decision published in February, Canada's Tax Court rejected Newfoundland magician Hans Zahn's attempt to claim business losses on his income tax returns, ruling that Zahn's record of losing money for the last 17 years, plus the province's economy and the nature of its far-flung communities, urge the conclusion that no reasonable person would think Newfoundland could support a magician. Zahn said he once earned about $1,200 (USD) a week but started suffering setbacks; for example, the rabbits he used in his act started dying in the frigid Newfoundland winters. "You try to bring world-class entertainment to the regions," lamented Zahn, "and Revenue Canada (the taxing agency) penalizes you for it."

-- Police in Jacksonville, Fla., arrested Robert Eric Denney, 19, for a 1998 murder, and a Florida Times-Union report in March revealed that his DNA is linked to the crime scene. Despite close surveillance, Denney had avoided giving up a DNA sample, three times foiling officers (refusing a glass of water; putting a cigarette butt back in his pocket rather than discarding it; declining to lick-seal an envelope) and smirking that he knew what the officers were trying to do. Shortly after that, while walking around outside his workplace, Denney absentmindedly spit on the ground, and officers scooped up the saliva and rushed it to the lab.

News of the Weird has reported several times on cat "hoarders" who may "collect" felines as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but none had the quantity of Jack Wright of Kingston, Ontario (361, down from his Guinness Book record 689 in 1994). He drew the attention of the Globe and Mail newspaper in January when he fell behind several months in mortgage and utilities payments because of litter, food and other cat expenses (about $100 (USD) a day) and also because, unlike the typical hoarding case, the local Humane Society has no issue with Wright, in that his cats appear properly cared for.

-- In March, Charles Douglas Stephens Jr., was acquitted in Panama City, Fla., after only 15 minutes' deliberation, apparently because the jury accepted his indignant denial that he ever robbed a convenience store. Stephens had pointed out to police that he had served time for murder and that he would probably murder again if the circumstances warranted, but that he could not have robbed that Circle K because he would never have been "stupid enough" to leave witnesses alive.

-- The Federal Communications Commission proposed a $7,000 fine against WZEE-FM, Madison, Wis., in January for violating its "indecency" regulations by playing the raw, unedited version of the Eminem song "The Real Slim Shady" during hours when children could be listening. Station personnel defended themselves by saying that they of course had cued up the milder, edited version of the song but that "static electricity" caused the station's CD player to skip that and jump right to the nasty version.

-- King of Denial: A 68-year-old repeat child molester, charged with impregnating his 13-year-old daughter, explaining himself (in Edmonton, Alberta, in February), said he only "accidentally" had sex with her when she slipped into his bed one night and that the whole thing was "a trap the Devil had set, not something I consented to or something I had control over."

-- In February, Australian ex-soldier Frederick Somerfield, 79, won his appeal and will now receive a military disability pension, based on heart trouble that he said was caused by having drunk too much beer while stationed at remote locations during World War II. In fact, he said, some of the locations were so remote that the only alcoholic beverages available were very cheap brews, which were especially bad on his heart.

-- Lawyer Craig Wormley, explaining his client to reporters in January (the client being the 19-year-old San Jose, Calif., college student Al DeGuzman, in whose home were found 60 explosive devices and four long guns along with a map and tape recording detailing a plan to make a Columbine-like attack on the De Anza College library and cafeteria): DeGuzman merely has "an innocent fascination" with bombs.

In December, according to Albuquerque police, James Sammon skipped out on a tab at Paisano's Italian Restaurant, but his chances for success were not good because he was dining with his two young sons that night and left the 6-year-old behind. And a shoplifting suspect (Home Depot, St. Louis, January) left his 10-month-old son behind as he fled the store's security guards; the baby's mother identified Vernell Parker, 41, as the alleged culprit, and he was found and arrested three days later.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported in December that a 9-year-old boy started up a parked transit bus using a screwdriver and drove it an eighth of a mile in morning rush hour in downtown Quezon City before police overtook him. (He said his father taught him the trick with the screwdriver.) And 2-year-old Harry Fairweather caused a furor last winter in Winsford, England, by regularly setting off retail stores' shoplifting alarms just by passing by the detectors; medical exams have to date turned up no certain answers on how Harry could have such a strong electrical field around his body.

A 43-year-old driver was shot to death in Lynwood, Calif., in January because, stopped at an intersection, he refused to run the unusually long red light despite the fact that there was no other traffic, a reluctance that annoyed the driver behind him, who pulled out a gun and started firing. And a 56-year-old man who lived in unit 712 of a Miami Beach apartment building was shot to death in February, allegedly by the resident in 512 who had once too often endured the overflow bathtub in 712; the resident of 612, who usually mediated the men's disputes, was not home that day.

Norway's Children and Family Minister said her office might introduce legislation establishing minimum weight requirements for professional models. A 36-year-old bride was charged with battery for smashing the groom with the wedding cake during the reception and kicking him after he fell to the floor (Stuart, Fla.). A strip-club customer who volunteered to assist dancer Sana Fey on stage filed a lawsuit after she gripped his head in a leglock and left him with a perhaps-permanent ringing in his ears (Lake Worth, Fla.). A judge mistakenly released a 37-year-old white man, who had been accused of a felony, after confusing him with a black teen-ager accused of a minor ordinance violation (Syracuse, N.Y.).

(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 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/.)