-- Brandon Clifford, 27, pled guilty in May in Bucks County, Pa., to attempting via the Internet to lure an underage girl for sex, but apparently Clifford's perversion of choice is merely to experience pain by having someone kick him in the testicles. This fetish, named (according to the prosecutor) "Asian Ball Busting," would also have been practiced by the girl's smashing Clifford's scrotum violently with her hand from underneath. After his arrest in January, Clifford was fired from his job as an inspector with the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

-- Ignorance on Parade: In March, the principal of Stony Brook School in Branchburg, N.J., ordered a 12-year-old, hearing-impaired girl to stop using sign language on the school bus because it was somehow causing a disturbance. And in April, a National Park Service ranger at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., ordered a visiting group of high school patriotic-essay contest winners to stop singing the National Anthem because they did not have a permit for a demonstration. (In both cases, the orders were rescinded several days later, following protests.)

-- On April 29, Carla Renee White, 17, beat out 10 other women in casual wear and evening gowns to win a Berkeley County, S.C., beauty contest now in its 30th year: Miss Hell Hole, named after the Hell Hole Swamp, the local community's "defining body of water," as a May Boston Globe dispatch labeled it. White will not compete in the Miss South Carolina Pageant because the entry fee is too steep, but the pageant director said, "We'd love to have Miss Hell Hole."

In March, this year's Miss Brazil admitted to four plastic surgeries and 19 other cosmetic procedures (including ear reductions) in her quest for perfection, but perhaps she merely reflects the obsession of her country, which has the world's highest per capita rate of plastic surgery. Meanwhile, in the United States, an April raid in New York City closed down an unlicensed, makeshift liposuction/implant shop that had been serving (at cut-rate, but still high, prices) dozens of largely dissatisfied customers, many of whom were spotted by neighbors staggering out the door, bleeding. And in Miramar, Fla., a woman died in March from illegal silicone injections to her buttocks by a man whose day job is house cleaner, and authorities warned of neighborhood, Tupperware-style, silicone-injection "parties."

-- Women in villages and small towns across Slovakia continued this year to endure the hundreds-years-old tradition of Easter Monday, though not with the pain and humiliation suffered as recently as the 1950s. Historically, unmarried men ritually threw cold water on, and then whipped, single women, and the women in turn rewarded the men with hard-boiled eggs and chocolate and bragged about the number of men who visited; nowadays, except in the remotest villages, men gently spray scented water on women.

-- In Indonesia in February, young Dayak tribesmen in Borneo slaughtered more than 400 job-stealing immigrants from the island of Madura in the renewal of a centuries-old rivalry that had largely been relaxed in recent decades through Dutch and Christian missionary influence. As their ancestors had done, the Dayaks beheaded their victims and displayed the skulls for their alleged magical powers of increased security and rainfall. According to a March Washington Post dispatch, Dayak elders were shocked by these youthful rampages because Borneo is relatively modernized (satellite dishes, designer clothing, motorcycles).

-- As the time nears for the International Olympic Committee to select its 2008 site, China dogged Paris' bid, primarily because of the city's notorious canine poop problem. An April Boston Globe dispatch reported on the city's casual approach to cleaning the 16 daily tons of droppings (and average of two hospitalization injuries a day from people slipping on them), with a Paris Olympic official shrugging off the criticism: "It's just that there are no dogs in China, because they eat them."

-- The land of the matriarchal Mosuo people, in southern Tibet, has become a popular in-country tourist destination recently for newly rich Chinese because of its tradition of females choosing which males will be their sexual partners. According to a March London Daily Telegraph dispatch, a woman typically "lamps" her choice by shining a flashlight into the man's face (a switch from the traditional tickling-the-palm method), but prostitutes have begun to flood the area and impersonate Mosuo women, in order to serve visitors' fantasies.

During the last five years, nearly 28,000 fugitives have received Supplemental Security Income disability payments, in violation of federal law, money which has undoubtedly contributed to their ability to evade capture, according to government reports disclosed in April by the Associated Press. And the German government announced in April a program to persuade neo-Nazis to renounce their philosophies and memberships; about 10,000 of the most violence-prone could claim incentives worth up to about $50,000 each.

In January, the Columbia, S.C., City Council was informed that the land for the almost-completed municipal golf course primarily for youth was formerly a graveyard in which as many as 1,400 bodies of indigent black mental health patients had been buried in the early 1900s; some fearful officials want the project stopped immediately and are seeking help from a major funder of the course, the Tiger Woods Foundation. And in Palatine, Ill., according to a February Chicago Sun-Times report, funeral director Doug Ahlgrim celebrated the 35th anniversary of the basement miniature golf course in the Ahlgrim & Sons funeral home, which is apparently a community institution that Ahlgrim believes cheers up his customers.

A Vancouver, British Columbia, apartment complex was evacuated and condemned in April after a dentist died inhaling toxic vapors while engaging in his at-home hobby of fooling around with his large collection of mercury. And in Cardington, Ohio, after chemist Thomas Beiter died of apparently natural causes in his apartment in February, authorities found 17 pounds of mercury and two containers of uranium, with which, according to a brother, he liked to conduct various experiments in his home laboratory.

Michael Johnson, 37, and Sung Taek Park, 67, were arrested in Toronto in February and charged with several counts of fraud for attempting to obtain a line of credit from a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce branch by leaving collateral of $25 billion in U.S. government bearer bonds that turned out to be fakes. The bonds, picturing President Grover Cleveland, appeared to have been issued in the 1930s, supposedly to have helped fund Chinese nationalist Chiang Kai-shek. The men's scheme might have been too ambitious, however, because in the 1930s, the entire U.S. national debt was only about $30 billion, and $25 billion of that would not have been tied up in a single set of bonds held by one entity. Also, the Federal Reserve addresses on the bonds had ZIP codes (which were only introduced in 1963).

A 36-year-old man who fell asleep in a garbage bin was automatically loaded onto a truck and compacted before being rescued and treated for multiple fractures (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan). The new owner of a bungalow in northwest Chicago, inspecting his property, found the corpse of the previous resident, in a chair, apparently dead of natural causes and unattended since February 1997. Five 2001 Rolls-Royce lines, including the three most expensive models in the world (led by the $353,000 Corniche), had to be recalled to the factory when the power window switch ignited the car's fuel line at a Michigan dealership and blew out the windows. A city welfare agency contractor was revealed, in brochures in service for several years, to have been recommending to welfare recipients that they regularly check Dumpsters to help make ends meet (Eugene, Ore.).

(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 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/.)