-- In April, the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., surgically removed a dead worm from the brain of a woman because, having entered the woman's body via pork she ate in Mexico and then having died, its carcass was causing her periodic seizures. The operation took six hours and required that the patient be only mildly sedated, in that she needed to keep talking to surgeons to help guide them from point to point in her brain.

-- Accused Providence, R.I., drug-trafficker Pablo Alberto Manjarres-Riend decided in February to use as his primary defense the "redemption" theory (the fifth time it has been used recently in that court) that federal laws don't apply to most people, including him. According to the theory, the federal government, to escape bankruptcy in the 1930s, "converted" its flesh-and-blood citizens into paper "assets" (an event completely missed by historians), thus removing those flesh-and-blood's from the rule of U.S. statutes and allowing people wise to the conversion to set off their worth in "assets" against their ordinary obligations, such as mortgages. According to an April Providence Journal story, prosecutors are amazed at how earnestly defendants use the theory in court, as if its widespread acceptance is near.

-- In April, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that high school students can sue their guidance counselors for steering them wrong. (A high school athlete had taken a recommended course on the belief that it would help his college athletic eligibility, but it did not.) And in May, a former Levittown, Pa., high school student sued her softball coach because he taught her a pitching motion that she later learned umpires would rule illegal, which she says impeded her budding career.

Teachers were suspended at a middle school in Findlay, Ohio (April), and a high school in Paloma Valley, Calif. (March), and teachers were recently under investigation at high schools in Riverside, Calif., and National City, Calif., all for incidents in which they threatened "to shoot" misbehaving students. And an English teacher at Homedale (Idaho) High School resigned in March after warning his class, "(I)f you don't behave for (tomorrow's substitute teacher), I'll make Columbine look like a Sunday picnic." And in February, the school board president in Upper Moreland, near Philadelphia, criticized the teacher rating system by saying that system supporters should be "dragged out to the parking lot and shot."

-- In March, a homeowners' association in Boynton Beach, Fla., summoned six of its 83 members to a disciplinary meeting for violating the association's green-lawns requirement, even though south Florida is enduring a two-year-long drought (the most severe on record) with no end in sight and tight watering restrictions. According to the association president, the other 77 homeowners maintain green lawns even though they swear they obey the restrictions.

-- In January, sponsors of a Bangkok "beauty" pageant selected 40 contestants out of about 200 semi-finalists on the runway to vie later in the year for the title of Miss Acne-Free 2001, but the 40 were selected actually on the basis of how severely pimpled and pock-marked their faces were, with the eventual winner to be the woman who, with treatment, clears up the most. Said one eager contestant, "It is not often that I can step into the limelight because of my acne."

-- Environmentalist Briony Penn, 40, addressing reporters after riding a horse nude, Lady Godiva-like, through downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, in January to protest logging on Saltspring Island: "I've got a Ph.D. (in geography), and no one listens. I take my clothes off, and here you all are. So thank you."

-- Thailand's most prominent madame, Ms. "Oy BM," speaking to an International Sex Workers' seminar in Bangkok in November on why she believes the government's safe-sex guidelines are overprotective: "I don't think condoms are necessary because if you receive many customers a day, all the (infected) sperm fights each other and dies."

-- Matt Hely, a performer in the cutting-edge Bobby Reynolds Circus Sideshow (stunts such as nails hammered into heads and an animal trap closing on a hand), in a December profile in St. Louis' Riverfront Times: "When you find yourself eating light bulbs for a living, you know you've made some bad career moves."

-- Retired porno actress Sharon Mitchell (who now runs a medical clinic near Los Angeles for adult film performers), reminiscing about the early days of her career to a Reuters reporter in February: "I remember seeing (for the first time) my genitalia 16 feet high on the silver screen and thinking, 'Wow, this is great!'"

-- In March, a federal judge in San Francisco rejected the California prison system's attempt to deny public presence at executions. The state had argued that secrecy was necessary in order to protect the identities of the execution staff, but open-execution advocates had suggested that the staff could wear hoods for privacy. The state attorney general then told the judge that wearing hoods was impractical because concealing guards' identity would "disrupt the human bond ... that the (execution) team has tried to establish with the inmate."

In a Vancouver, Wash., courtroom in April, John K. Flora, defending himself against charges that he has for years stalked a woman whom he had dated briefly 25 years ago, asked the woman a series of questions on the witness stand to entice her to reveal that she really does love him, but she remained astonished at his cluelessness, and the longer the questioning continued, the more hostile and horrified she became, until Flora, mistaking her revulsion for encouragement, suddenly whipped out a $5,000 engagement ring and thrust it at her, imploring, "Marry me! You mean everything to me! Please!" The woman was aghast; the judge ordered Flora chained to his chair; and Flora later promised the judge the proposal was his "last hurrah."

Mr. War N. Marion, 26, was charged with murder in Milwaukee in February after one of his roommates was stabbed to death; Marion said he couldn't understand the death because he had purposely avoided the man's heart and stabbed him on the other side of the chest "to slow him down and calm him down." And in Columbus, Ohio, in February, DUI and vehicular homicide charges were filed in the July 2000 death of a 63-year-old woman who was accidentally run over by a careening car in the middle of the night while she was asleep in her bed.

-- A convicted armed robber, allowed out of prison twice a week on work detail, was charged with a bank robbery (and suspected of four others) committed during his forays (Atlanta). An unapologetic traffic cop wrote 15 $150 tickets to bicyclists who rode through a stop sign, even though they were merely part of 2,000 bikers participating in a multiple-sclerosis bike-a-thon (Antioch, Calif.). Golf driving-range owner John Thoburn, 43, has sat in jail since February because he declines to add neighbor-friendly trees to his landscaping, as ordered by a judge (whose name is Michael McWeeny) (Reston, Va.). Florida state Rep. Nancy Argenziano, upset that inadequate nursing-home protection was being passed and that an antagonistic industry lobbyist had barged in to watch the vote on her office TV, sent the lobbyist a gift-wrapped, 25-pound box of cow manure.

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

-- Police in West Vancouver, British Columbia, said in April that they had stopped a three-year petty-crime spree in a neighborhood of upscale homes when they arrested multimillionaire Eugene Mah, 64, and his son, Avery, 32. According to police, the two are responsible for stealing hundreds of minor and even tacky items, such as garbage cans, marginal lawn decorations, and even government recycling boxes, and keeping them at their own posh home. Mah's Vancouver real estate holdings are reported at about $13 million (U.S.), but among the items he allegedly stole were one family's doormat and, subsequently, each of the 14 doormats the family purchased as replacements.

-- In April, the Washington (D.C.) Humane Society pled guilty to a charge of illegally euthanizing three mockingbirds in violation of the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the prosecutor said the society actually illegally euthanized more than 800 protected birds during the previous four years. In the latest incident, the society (which claimed it never realized it needed a permit to treat protected birds) was trying to eliminate a threat of mockingbirds dive-bombing pedestrians near the State Department headquarters.

-- In a lawsuit deposition reported in April in the New York Daily News, the dismissed assistant to a prominent cancer surgeon charged that the doctor loaned out blood samples of the late New York City Catholic Cardinal Terrence Cooke long after his death so that parishioners could pray over them for good luck. The New York Archdiocese said it did not authorize the surgeon, Dr. Thomas Fahey, to safekeep or to lend the blood. (Catholic tradition says praying over the "relics" of "saints" brings good look, but the relic blood in this case was actually the cause of Cooke's death in 1983, of leukemia.)

Scott Hanko was arrested in April in Central Islip, N.Y., and charged with making lingerie purchases by phone with other people's credit-card numbers, a practice he said he did (according to police) because he is "an introvert and very shy." Police said Hanko called to converse with female order-takers and that to legitimize the calls, he ordered merchandise, which would be sent to the homes of the credit-card holders. Sometimes, he said, he would have to call as many as 15 catalog operators before he found one whose voice was engaging enough to talk to.

Recent Events, Inexplicable Except for Alcohol: Raymond Garbaldon, 19, was charged with breaking into a stranger's home, apparently for the sole purpose of turning on an outside light so he could see on the porch to shave his friend's head with electric clippers (Albuquerque, February). And Ms. Dale A. Sunday, 49, was discovered in her car on the right field warning track at the then-under-construction Pittsburgh Pirates' ballpark, which was accessible from the street only through a complicated-to-navigate construction tunnel (March). And Iris Martinez, 24, was found alive in her car at the bottom of the 200-foot Rio Grande Gorge in Taos, N.M., despite a large rock barrier that supposedly prevents cars from going into it (March).

-- In February, an exhibition opened in Berlin, featuring about 200 unatrophied body parts and skinless corpses, dismembered in various designs and gaudily displayed with super-preservatives to highlight what developer Gunther von Hagens says is every last sinew, cell and vein, and to show "the beautiful interior of the body." Among the most startling pieces from this "Body Worlds" "plastination"-process exhibit: a five-months-pregnant woman whose cross-sectioned abdomen reveals a curled-up fetus and dark, smoker's lungs.

-- Opening at the Custard Factory arts center in Birmingham, England, in March was an exhibit basically consisting of no exhibit at all: no paintings, no sculptures, only whitewashed walls in a 2,500-square-foot hall that is empty except for a few scattered captions and the sign "Exhibition to Be Constructed in Your Head." Said a co-organizer, "It's an experiment to see how people react to it."

-- Cincinnati photographer Thomas Condon, 29, was indicted in February (along with a deputy coroner) on corpse-abuse charges following the revelation by a film-processing firm that Condon had photographed morgue corpses oddly posed and holding such things as a syringe, sheet music and an apple. Said a man familiar with Condon's art, "(This work) is insensitive to the family members (b)ut from an art perspective, there is precedent for it."

-- In March, a California consumer group, analyzing information supplied to the Federal Trade Commission by auto manufacturers, reported that the companies buy back about 100,000 of their cars every year (95 percent with one or more safety defects) under federal "lemon" laws, but then resell all but a few thousand of them after supposedly "repairing" them, even though they could not successfully repair them when the original consumers owned the cars. According to Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, most of the repurchased cars are sold at auction in the states in which it is the easiest to hide the fact that the car was a "lemon law buyback."

-- In April, Ms. Annika Oestberg of Denmark successfully defended her international ice golf championship at the annual tournament before 35 challengers on Uummannaq Fjord, Greenland, beating American Tom Ferrel by 10 strokes. The temperature this year was a balmy 17 degrees (Fahrenheit), but the greens were still called "whites."

Vandals active in March near Williamsburg, Va., have not yet been apprehended despite their lack of sophistication: They spray-painted eight cars with slogans such as "White Power," "KKK" and "High (sic) Hitler."

A 21-year-old man lost control of his car and was killed while driving to court for his trial on previous reckless driving charges (Virginia Beach, Va., March). And three people were killed recently after confrontations as samaritans tried to prevent drunk friends from driving: A 46-year-old woman tried to keep an intoxicated friend from driving, but he drove off anyway and accidentally struck and killed her (Fairfax County, Va., January); and a Carrollton, Texas, man accidentally suffocated to death while being held down by seven friends to keep him from driving drunk (October); and an intoxicated 29-year-old man was struck and killed while walking across a busy highway after a friend had taken away his car keys (Morgan Hill, Calif., December).

Marlene Lincoln passed her driver's test, after 12 failures and 200 lessons, costing about $6,800 (Sprowston, England). A 54-year-old forgery suspect was released from jail after his wife presented a certificate showing that she had posted bail; however, the certificate turned out to be a forgery (Edwardsville, Ill.). A federal appeals court ruled that a state university in Pennsylvania had the right to fire a professor who refused to issue a passing grade to a student, even though the student skipped most assignments and 12 of 15 class sessions (Philadelphia). Christian Anders, 56, a semi-prominent German singer, said he and his girlfriend accepted an "indecent proposal" to lend her to millionaire Michael Leicher because Anders needs the money for a liver transplant (Berlin).

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

-- 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/.)