-- In the March mayoral primary in St. Louis, three deceased city aldermen and a dog were among those registered to vote, but the election was nonetheless an improvement over the November 2000 contest. That Election Day featured, among other things, a successful lawsuit by a man petitioning a judge to have the polls stay open late because crowding and poor record-keeping were preventing him from voting, even though it was subsequently discovered that he (the lead plaintiff on the petition) had been deceased for a year himself.

-- The Seattle (Wash.) School District agreed recently simply to pay Kathy Harris $180,000 to take her 16-year-old son out of the school system altogether rather than to carry out its legal obligation to educate the boy. The kid is blind and so mentally challenged and violent that he poses constant disruptions everywhere he goes, but the law requires the school district to educate any "special needs" students who request it, at whatever cost, until age 21.

-- Over a six-day period in April, careless people in Los Angeles, Trenton, N.J., and San Diego blew out windows and caused other damage to their homes when aerosol cockroach foggers accidentally ignited. In the first two incidents, the residents, also, were severely burned, but in San Diego, despite $50,000 worth of damage to the home, there were no reported injuries, including to any cockroaches.

In April, a Ralphs supermarket in Livermore, Calif., promised a free ham to anyone buying $50 worth of groceries, but Rachael Cheroti, 33, raised such a fuss when her total came to only $48 that the manager gave her one, too. However, apparently feeling empowered, Cheroti, according to police reports, demanded even more hams, on the basis that she spends so much money every month at Ralphs. When the manager declined, Cheroti then allegedly pinned him against the wall with a shopping cart and wrestled with him on the floor and later with a police officer (who suffered a hand injury and was placed on medical leave) before being arrested.

In March, District of Columbia police alerted the U.S. Marshals Service that it might need to protect a D.C. Superior Court judge after discovering that he had been "hexed" by a drug dealer's friends (tipped off by a symbolic human skull). And in February, the Secret Service checked out an editor at State University of New York (Stony Brook), who wrote a column asking Jesus Christ to "smite" President Bush. And in January, the governor of Bangkok, Thailand, said that sterner measures were necessary in his demands that police officers stop extorting money from street vendors, and he took action by reciting a "curse" against violators.

-- In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated Carolyn Humphries' lawsuit (based on the Americans With Disabilities Act) against Memorial Hospital in Modesto, Calif., for having fired her despite her obsessive-compulsive disorder. Humphries says she cannot work a set schedule because she needs so much time to groom herself for work, sometimes taking hours before she pronounces herself ready (and sometimes still not being ready to leave home until her shift has ended), even after the hospital told her she could create her own shift.

-- Buddhist officials in Nepal are having a difficult time recruiting 5-year-old girls to be official goddesses, to live in palaces and be waited on hand-and-foot, according to a March Associated Press dispatch from Katmandu. The problem is that the goddesses' jobs end automatically at puberty, and the girls increasingly are unprepared for the rest of their lives, untrainable because of how sheltered and pampered their early years were. (Mere tutors are not permitted to tell a goddess to study, and legend has it that men who marry ex-goddesses die young.)

-- In a February dispatch from Beppu City, Japan, The Wall Street Journal described the fading job of chicken-sexer, an occupation formerly done by highly skilled, deft-fingered people who can identify chicks' gender by touching a specific underbelly muscle (females' is smaller). Last year's speed chicken-sexing champion was Junichi Goto, who sorted 100 hours-old chicks in 3 minutes, 34 seconds, still well off the world record. Chemical and hormone tests of chicks are now alternatives to the touch model and can be performed by unskilled people.

-- Hillsborough, England, was the site of a soccer stadium disaster in 1989, in which 96 fans were crushed to death. In March 2001, it was revealed that a police officer who worked at that site nine years after the disaster nonetheless acquired post-traumatic stress from imagining the 1989 carnage and thus received a disability settlement from the government of about $560,000. That amount, according to a report in The Guardian, is more than 100 times what was paid to any of the families of the 96 people who were killed at the site.

-- In February, a jury in Sydney, Australia, awarded Dr. Paul Hogan, 30, about $1.25 million (U.S.) for injuries he said he suffered when he was punished with a strap in 1984 while a student at St. John's College in Sydney. That breaks down to about $156,000 for each time (eight) he was hit; he said some of the blows were on his hand, which to this day still hurts, even though no abnormality is present in X-rays.

Dr. Craig DuMond was dismissed from practice at a Saranac Lake, N.Y., medical facility in March after mistakenly operating on the wrong knee of his patient. Five years earlier, Dr. DuMond had operated on another patient's wrong hip, and as a result, the medical center at that time initiated a safety procedure requiring the staff to write "yes" on the correct body part for surgery. Since Dr. DuMond operated this time on a part that did not contain the word "yes," the medical center has concluded that the previous rule was inadequate and now requires the staff additionally to write "no" on the body parts that will not be operated on.

In March, Mr. Su Chun-min immolated himself, according to family because of depression over the uncertainty of whether the space station Mir would hit anyone while descending to Earth (Pingtung County, Taiwan). A week earlier, a middle-aged man in Umuahia, Nigeria, fatally poisoned himself; he had threatened suicide if Nigeria didn't beat Ghana in their World Cup qualifying match on March 10, and in fact the teams drew, 0-0. And in December, Maine State Prison inmate Dennis R. Larson, serving 50 years for pushing his third wife off a cliff, leaped to his death from a third-story window onto rocks and granite; officials said Larson had sealed his mouth with duct tape, on which was the word "Geronimo!"

A sex-shop robbery failed when the holdup man, trying to fire his gun at the recalcitrant clerk, couldn't because he had loaded it with the wrong-caliber bullets (Wheeling, W.Va.). A high school teacher (who is apparently behind on current events) assigned several students a class project of making a high-tech bomb, which the students delivered, even though inert (Tampa, Fla.). A man purposely contaminated a restaurant's salad bar with a spray mixture of human waste, upon which police are running DNA tests to see if it's his own waste so that they might be able to close 12 similar cases (New York City). The city council president in Elizabeth, N.J., had a councilman handcuffed and arrested for interrupting her too often.

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

-- 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/.)