-- The Cleveland Plain Dealer revealed in April that 12 Ohio government agencies have spent more than $50,000 in the last three years on humor consultants to help them do their work more effectively. The Department of Job and Family Services, recently criticized for misspending money on faulty computer programs, shelled out nearly $25,000 (for the purpose of "contribut(ing) to positive attitudinal perceptions of workplace transitions," according to its contract with Humor Consultants Inc.).

-- Case Western Reserve (Cleveland, Ohio) medical school professor Robert White, interviewed on a British TV program in April, said his monkey-to-monkey head transplant was a partial success (in that the patient lived for a while) and that, with improvements, the procedure could one day be used on humans. However, a critic, Dr. Stephen Rose, disputed that the recipient monkey was functional, contending that the brain's only connection to the body it was serving was a shared blood supply: "All you're doing is keeping a severed head alive."

-- In March, a federal judge in Alabama ruled in favor of the owners of the Eastwood Texaco station on Montclair Road in Birmingham in their lawsuit against the 11-nation oil cartel OPEC for price-fixing violations of U.S. antitrust law. The organization was forbidden by Judge Charles Weiner from reducing its oil production for one year, which is its favorite method of raising prices.

John Webb, 53, was ticketed by Janesville, Wis., police for disorderly conduct in March for an incident in a grocery store's express line. According to the police report, Webb three times confronted a woman ahead of him who had 11 items (limit is 10), finally bellowing that he had served his country in two wars and "did not have to serve any more time behind people who could not (expletive deleted in a Janesville Gazette story) count." After the two drove off, Webb allegedly deliberately swerved in front of her on the street.

Charged with murder: Rocky Wayne McGowan, 20 (Russell Springs, Ky., February); Mark Wayne Jennings, 30 (Charles County, Va., March); Derrick Wayne Kualapai Sr., 51 (Oakland, Calif., February); Michael Wayne Eggers, 33 (Walker County, Ala., January); David Wayne Smith, 39 (Virginia Beach, Va., April); Timothy Wayne Border, 38 (Fort Worth, Texas, April). Mistrial declared in murder trial: David Wayne Kunze, 50 (Vancouver, Wash., March). Held for questioning in the murder of his wife: John Wayne Boggs Jr., 35 (Cedar City, Utah, February).

-- Louisville, Ky., police, in the midst of a project to clear out backlogged cases, took Leanndra Taylor, 14, into custody in the middle of classes on March 26, according to a WLKY-TV report, and booked her on a 1995 warrant accusing her of shoplifting a 59-cent candy bar.

-- An Alachua County (Fla.) sheriff's deputy and a law-enforcement intern were reprimanded in March because they were not acting professionally during a drug bust in Gainesville in which 16 marijuana plants were recovered, along with 160 grams of dope and various drug paraphernalia. Superiors caught the two, in the middle of the raid, seated at a table in the apartment, playing Scrabble with the suspect's game.

-- More Stories for the Immature Reader: In March, the district attorney in Beaver County, Pa., after several months' consultation with banks, finally deposited $2,150 it had seized from arrestee Regina Griffin in November; a hygiene problem had been created because Griffin had been storing the roll of bills in her genitals. And Indiana State Police arrested John L. Hester, 51, in February and charged him in connection with a scheme to smuggle tobacco to inmates at the prison in Pendleton, Ind.; Hester was in charge of bringing cattle to the prison farm for slaughter and allegedly stored contraband cigarettes in plastic bags inside cows' rectums.

-- In February, Robert Valle, 58, a Catholic parishioner at the St. Thomas the Apostle Church, filed a lawsuit against the Joliet (Ill.) Diocese because the namesake statue in front of the church fell over on him while he was doing volunteer repair work on it in 1999; St. Thomas the Apostle is the patron saint of builders and construction workers. And two weeks later, schoolteacher Anthony Farrell, 50, was charged with pointing a loaded .357 Magnum at another man in a case of road rage in St. Charles, Mo.; part of Farrell's course load for the last five years was teaching driver education.

-- The New Fire Crisis: Earlier this year, fire stations in Columbia, Tenn., and Tampa, Fla., were found in violation of local fire codes (lacking smoke detectors and other equipment). And in March, careless cigarette-smoking in a fire engine on the way to fight a fire in Kushima, Japan, set the vehicle's seats ablaze. And the Bethells Beach fire station in Auckland, New Zealand, burned to the ground in March, caused by defective wiring, as firefighters watched helplessly (in that all their equipment was inside).

Jeffrey Thomas Anaya, 35, was arrested on March 4 for allegedly robbing a Chevron station; he was arrested in the parking lot, where he was soliciting help because he couldn't find the keys to his getaway car. Three days later, Timothy E. Beach, 23, a former manager of a Taco Bell, was arrested for allegedly robbing his store of about $2,000; according to police, Beach could not resist identifying himself during the heist to a former colleague and so briefly lifted his ski mask and said, "It's me, Tim."

-- A 17-year-old boy was charged with beating his father to death with a baseball bat because he was tired of Dad's admonishing him to turn down the music (Syracuse, N.Y., March). And a sheriff's deputy and a police officer were shot to death, allegedly by the 41-year-old man to whose home the officers were called on a complaint about a loud stereo (Centreville, Md., February). And a 48-year-old man was sentenced to 99 years in prison for killing a street musician, allegedly because the victim did not know the killer's favorite songs ("El Guajolote" and "The Turkey") (Corpus Christi, Texas, March).

A 27-year-old woman received two speeding tickets (one for going about 100 mph) in 20 minutes in her quest to race to the Land Rover dealership because her lease was set to expire in just a few minutes (Windsor, Ontario). A judge OK'd charging a 50-year-old man with rape even though the man had never met the victim (but merely tricked her on the phone into penetrating herself) (Passaic County, N.J.). Twenty-two poised skydivers had to stay with their troubled single-engine plane until it emergency-landed in an airfield (result: injuries but no fatalities) (Decatur, Texas). Police in Berkeley, Calif., arrested a man for running a parking-ticket scam, featuring his own authentic-looking, highly detailed citations placed on illegally parked cars, with envelopes for mailing fines to his post office box.

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

-- 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/.)