-- The Mexican government announced that beginning June 15, it would distribute "survival" kits to its citizens crossing the border illegally into California and Arizona because they face such a rugged journey. Included in the kits are bandages, aspirin, drugs for snake and scorpion bites, dry meat, granola, 25 condoms (or birth-control pills), and anti-diarrhea medicine. Said a Mexican official, "Those who've gone to the U.S. have told us (what) they need."

-- According to a petition filed in Common Pleas Court in Dayton, Ohio, in May, Boomer, a golden retriever, is the plaintiff suing the Invisible Fence Co. because the electrical charge to his collar, triggered when he attempts to leave his guardians' yard, was too strong and, according to an Associated Press dispatch, caused him severe emotional distress, for which he asks $25,000. Boomer's guardians, Andrew and Alyce Pacher, who purchased the "invisible fence" and permitted the electrical charge, were not sued.

-- Smoking Gun: Erik Williams, 21, of the 3600 block of South Michigan Avenue, was arrested in Chicago on May 18 and charged with sexually assaulting (forced fellatio) a 42-year-old woman. The victim arrived at a police station in the early morning hours clutching, in her hand, testicles that she had just bitten off. At about the same time, Williams showed up at Michael Reese Hospital missing his testicles. Doctors confirmed that the testicles were Williams' but were unable to reattach them.

The Iowa Court of Appeals ruled in March that an unarmed man who had disguised his face and ordered a convenience store clerk to give him "the money" (and who then took $110 and ordered the clerk to lie on the floor) committed theft but not "robbery" because the clerk was never in "immediate, serious" danger. And a judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., ruled in April that police had no legal cause to stop a young man seen running from a building holding his hand to the side of his hip because there are other explanations than that the man had a gun (although he was, in fact, holding onto a gun). And a judge in Middlesex County, Mass., ruled in February that because of a loophole in state law, disseminating child pornography by computer is legal, but merely storing the same images on a computer is illegal.

-- Inmate Chad Gabriel DeKoven's lawsuit against the Standish prison in Bay City, Mich. (and several other defendants), was tossed out in April as frivolous, despite DeKoven's insistence that he is the "Messiah-God" and rightfully president of the United States (in that, since his name is "Chad," he figures that many thousands of punch-card votes last November were symbolically for him). However, Judge David M. Lawson did compliment DeKoven's typing, his "lengthy expositions" on his deity, and his "disciplined effort" in assembling his 125-page brief's exhibition of numerical analysis and secret codes that prove he is God.

-- Recent Messages Received: A 34-year-old man was stabbed to death in February, allegedly by his mother-in-law at the command of God and a Ouija board (Chickasha, Okla). And a convenience store clerk was hacked to death with a machete in February, allegedly by a man ordered into action (and praised for his good work) by God (Bellefonte, Pa.). And a 39-year-old man was arrested for torching a theater in which 12 mentally retarded adults were watching a movie, also on the command of God, who apparently also told the man he didn't need a lawyer because He would be representing him in court (Vinco, Pa.).

-- Divine Wisdom: Rev. Richard C. Weaver, 55, the Sacramento preacher who penetrated the Secret Service detail to shake President Bush's hand on Inauguration Day, said it was God who had gotten him access to the restricted area; the Secret Service was embarrassed, especially since they were on the lookout for Weaver, who had told them at President Clinton's 1997 inaugural that he would be back in 2001. And passerby Ray Hutcherson, who happened upon a truck spill of processed chicken on a Houston freeway in March, and who stuffed his car with the birds, summed up his good fortune: "Anytime you get anything free, it's got to be the work of God."

-- Following the death in a March auto accident of abrasive Greenpeace founder David McTaggart, the internal backbiting that has long characterized the environmental organization passed on to veteran activists Paul Watson and Patrick Moore, based on Watson's longtime feud with McTaggart and his upcoming Hollywood movie of Greenpeace exploits. According to a National Post report, Watson plans to fulfill his longstanding promise to urinate on McTaggart's grave, and Moore was exploring a lawsuit because he had heard that his character in Watson's film (starring Pierce Brosnan) was a tyrannical bureaucrat. Watson himself is offended that Moore, when he left Greenpeace, went to work for the Canadian forestry industry (a "running lap dog whore to corporate power").

-- In 1986, 15,000 tons of incinerated ash in Philadelphia was loaded onto a barge, which set off for disposal. After seven countries refused to accept it, the captain lied about the contents to get Haiti to take some of it and then outran the Haitian military when they found out the truth. The captain and crew have long since moved on; the barge has been recommissioned (after probably dumping most of the ash at sea); but the 3,000 tons remained on a Haitian beach until April 2000, when Waste Management Inc. was hired to bury it. However, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia and Florida have now rejected it, and in April, the owner of the barge currently holding the ash sued Waste Management for $490,000 in storage fees for the now-15-year-old cargo.

In a February German television stunt, Swiss citizen Roger Weisskopf, 32, won a lifetime supply of toilet paper when he correctly identified several brands blindfolded, by feel and taste. In December, Cambodian university lecturer (and Pol Pot opponent) Pak Leakreasy introduced a line of toilets with facial likenesses, on the side of the bowl, of several leaders of the evil Khmer Rouge regime. And in February, Hong Kong jeweler Lam Sai-wing introduced a solid-gold bathroom (including wash basin and two toilets), constructed as homage to Vladimir Lenin's critique of capitalist waste, telling reporters that he had dreamed all his life to have enough money to build a gold toilet.

Christopher Simms, 34, the father of two small kids, was charged with invasion of privacy in Montgomery County, Pa., for rigging a hidden camera in a room in his workplace used by new mothers to pump breast milk for their infants. Said a neighbor to a Philadelphia Daily News reporter: "You would think he's seen enough of that at home." Said a prosecutor, "This is perversion at its lowest."

On March 24, two East Orange, N.J., police officers fired 38 shots at two unarmed black teen-agers sitting in a stolen car, connecting on eight and sending both, age 14 and 18, to the hospital. A subsequent investigation revealed, according to a report in the Newark Star-Ledger, that the shooting erupted when two officers approached the car and one accidentally shot himself in the thigh. When he uttered, "I'm hit," the second officer assumed the teen-agers had shot him, and he emptied his gun at them; another officer coming onto the scene subsequently fired 25 more shots. The boys survived.

Tye Thomas, 22, resigned as mayor of Gun Barrel City, Texas, a week after he telephoned police to insist that they come arrest him because he was intoxicated in public. A college student threw a pair of cow eyeballs at a writing professor who had undervalued her required-for-graduation essay, which was on the horrors of slaughterhouses (Johnson, Vt.). A 21-year-old man, in court for illegal skateboarding, threatened a judge and others and climbed a table, screaming, "You'll never take me alive!" before being subdued (Santa Rosa, Calif.). At a retirement community, a man allegedly fired shots at his girlfriend's house in a drive-by shooting from a golf cart (Green Valley, Ariz.).

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

-- 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/.)