-- West Hempstead, N.Y., high school guidance counselor David D'Amato, 39, was convicted in April of e-mail-disabling mischief against three universities, crimes motivated by revenge when certain male students at those schools tried to break off their association with D'Amato. Their relationships consisted of D'Amato's paying them each hundreds of dollars over the years for their making videotapes of themselves being tied up and tickled, for D'Amato's viewing pleasure. D'Amato, who was known as "territickle" in his online community, was not charged with sex crimes because the boys were at all times clothed and their activity limited to tickling.

-- Crime Pays: Federal and most states' laws require that prisoners be furnished adequate medical care, but Larry Causey has sought benefits of the laws more deliberately than most previous inmates. He pled guilty in March, after being arrested in his car outside the post office in West Monroe, La., which he had just held up, apparently for the sole purpose of being incarcerated so that he would get treatment for his cancer. Upon being jailed, Causey was immediately prescribed three drugs and scheduled for a colonoscopy.

-- Latest High Tech: Researchers at Northwestern University reported recently that they have developed a light-seeking machine that is operated solely by signals from the extracted brain of an eel-like lamprey, which is preserved in an oxygenated saline solution; the technology could be used to develop sophisticated prostheses. And the Office of Naval Research reported in April that the Marines are developing a 4-pound, hawk-sized, unmanned aerial vehicle that can be assembled and launched anywhere and cruise quietly for about 6 miles at 45 miles an hour to transmit video back to, and return to, a hand-held ground station.

In March in Montreal, pro boxer Davey Hilton, 37, was convicted of sexually assaulting two girls (age 12 at the time), after having a judge reject his claim that the girls were lying. Hilton said that since 1983, he has suffered from a "wandering testicle," which tends to migrate into his abdomen when he has an erection, which he routinely contains by fastening a rubber band around his scrotum every time he is preparing to have sex (including masturbation); since neither girl ever mentioned the rubber band, he said, they must be lying about the encounters. However, Hilton has repeatedly claimed a foggy memory about the past, confessing that he spent much of that time period intoxicated.

-- In March, Sussex County (N.J.) officials billed Chrissy McMickle, 18, and her brother Michael, 21, for part of their father's mental hospitalization costs, as required by state law. However, the only reason the father is hospitalized is because another state law requires him to be committed upon completion of his sentence as a sexual offender, and the only victims of those sexual offenses were Chrissy and Michael, starting when each was age 5. Said a county official, "Children are legally responsible for parents in state facilities."

-- Maria Iguina-Medina spent much time in March lobbying to retain her municipal job in Middletown, Conn., from budget cuts, especially since the mayor is a woman and might be sympathic to Iguina-Medina's argument. Iguina-Medina certainly fears that she will not find comparable work in other cities, in that she is the city's official (part-time, $13,240 a year) "breast-feeding counselor."

-- Bernard Landry, a leading candidate to be Quebec's next premier, proposed in February that the province increase spending, by about $11 million (U.S.), to remedy a shortage of clowns and other circus performers turned out by Quebec's National Circus School. The current eight to 10 graduates a year are quickly placed in circuses around the world, and Landry would like to increase the number to 25 to better serve Quebec's own Cirque du Soleil and to "maintain and enhance our leadership position" in clown training.

-- At the Feb. 21 County Commission meeting in Wichita, Kan., Commissioner Ben Sciortino objected to the procurement of Scott paper towels at $8.06 per thousand when another brand was available at $3.67. However, commissioners Betsy Gwin and Tim Norton, who have perhaps seen too many TV commercials, knew immediately what to do: They sloshed down some water on the commissioners' table and tested the absorbency of each towel, with the Scott towel reportedly picking up at least twice as much water. Commissioner Sciortino quickly withdrew his objection.

-- New York City's AIDS support office budgets $180,000 a week to shelter about 200 homeless AIDS patients, and in late March, according to a report in the New York Post, the city's high hotel-occupancy rate forced the office to rent 20 rooms at the four-star Sofitel hotel, at $329 per room per night (which of course annoyed some of the paying guests in rooms adjacent to the AIDS patients).

Missouri State Hospital in Fulton opened an entire 20-room, 11-guard wing last year for one patient, Angela Coffel, 23, who has just finished her five-year sentence for molesting two teen-age boys but must be hospitalized as a sexual predator until doctors release her. And the government's St. Mary's hospital in Mussoorie, India, located on a steep incline, has not had a patient for three years but continues to pay the full staff to report to work every day, according to a February report in the Indian Express; part of the problem is that the hospital has no ambulance and access on foot is treacherous, especially to sick patients.

Several Pittsburgh neighborhoods have been plagued recently with parking-meter thefts (214 since September), which sets the city back $350 each in replacement cost but is otherwise thoroughly perplexing in that meters are both difficult to get into once stolen and low-yielding, as thefts go. According to the city's parking director, the thieves need either a sledgehammer or crowbar to open one, or a blowtorch to melt the glass dome (which would still leave much jiggling to do to free up the coins), and a day's average take per meter ranges from $1.14 to $15.78, meaning that stealing and opening two mid-range meters would net the thief about the same money as the hourly wage made by the city employee who collects from the meters with a key.

A 22-year-old man, who told his friend he needed "something to do," climbed from balcony to balcony at a London highrise in January until he lost his grip and fell seven floors to his death. And a 48-year-old man was asphyxiated in Zebulon, N.C., as a 36-year-old man held him down in a fight over which of the two men "was the baddest." And the body of a 41-year-old man, who was last seen alive on Dec. 1, was found on March 2 in the chimney of Magna Tool Corp. in Racine, Wis.; authorities say he probably got stuck and died in a burglary attempt.

Feuding, obscenity-screaming twin sisters (age 22 and aspiring models from Michigan) forced the diversion of a China-bound 747 to Anchorage, Alaska, after they wrestled, punched and choked a pilot and flight attendants who tried to calm them. Vorarlberg province in Austria finally banned a longtime, inexpensive practice of cattle-carcass disposal on its picturesque Alpine pastures; from now on, any cattle that die must be helicoptered from the mountain instead of merely being blown up by explosives where they lie. Juror Brian Harvey was jailed for contempt of court after a lunch break, claiming the shooting trial testimony made him so queasy that he had to have a few drinks (Canton, Ohio). Israeli authorities announced that Miss Israel would wear a Galit Levi-designed, diamond-and-pearl, bulletproof evening gown at the Miss Universe pageant this month in Puerto Rico.

(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 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/.)