-- "Pain is the sensation of weakness leaving the body," Phoenix "artist" Steve Haworth told a Phoenix New Times reporter in May, while he was arranging scenes for associates of his Church of Body Modification, including a horizontal full-body suspension (hanging for five minutes by rings in body piercings); a tug of war (full-force pulling contest using a rope held taut through rings on various body piercings); free-moving implants just below the skin that appear to be, say, a living bracelet; and various body alterations such as "Vulcan" ears, a ribbed penis, and a filleted male urethra. Haworth won't amputate anything, though (too "destructive," he said), thus displeasing his girlfriend, who wants to lose two toes in order to fit into smaller shoes, and he has not yet decided whether to honor another associate's request to be crucified.

-- High school senior Trevor Loflin scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs this year despite the potential handicap of having lived the previous three years with his mother and sisters in the back of their Chevrolet Suburban, the result of the mother's having lost her job as a physician in Fresno, Calif. Mother Cynthia Hamilton decided to home-school her kids and, in view of housing prices in California, found the family got along just fine without a house (though they recently moved into a one-bedroom apartment). Since the family turned to religion to get them through their ordeal, Trevor told the Los Angeles Times he would probably enroll in Bob Jones University in the fall.

-- Lawyers Living the American Dream: A consumer who was oppressively required to buy a full season of NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV satellite service (instead of being offered a cheaper weekly rate) gets back $9 to $21, according to a class-action settlement announced in May, but the lawyers would receive $3.7 million. And a consumer who was oppressively charged daily late fees by Blockbuster Video (without realizing how much they could amount to) gets back a few discount coupons, according to a class-action settlement announced in June, but the lawyers would get $9.25 million.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (45) The surgically removed humongous abdominal cyst that might total half the body weight of the patient, such as the 100-pounder excised from a 17-year-old girl in Cairo, Egypt, in May (far off the world record of 303 pounds at Stanford Medical Center in 1991). And (46) the unlabeled or makeshift urn containing a loved one's cremated ashes that gets mistakenly sold at a yard sale or thrift shop, and which unsettles the surprised buyer when he gets home and inspects his purchases, as happened to a woman in Dallas in May.

-- A research team from UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh (writing in an April issue of the journal Tissue Engineering) and another from Duke University recently reported success at collecting valuable human stem cells from ordinary liposuctioned fat, potentially ending the need to collect such cells through controversial fetal-tissue procedures and painful bone-marrow extraction. Stem cells can make replacement muscle, bone and cartilage, and if they come from one's own fat, will not be rejected by the body. Also, as the researchers pointed out, Americans' fat cells are an abundant resource.

-- Centers for Disease Control specialist Charles Beard told the Los Angeles Times in April that he has created a genetically modified dung that might eradicate Chagas disease, which kills 50,000 people a year in Central and South America. Beard's meticulously manufactured bug poop looks and smells like the real thing (made from ammonia, ink and guar gum) but contains special bacteria that prevent the so-called "kissing bugs" from spreading the disease, which they would do if left to their normal "diet" of eating their parents' dung.

-- The Bethesda Center for Reproductive Health and Fertility in Cincinnati announced in March that the previously glum conception prospects of a couple were suddenly improved because the father's limited sperm cells had been safely stored in a hamster egg until they could be implanted to his wife's egg. Normally, sperm cells lose potency when not used immediately, and in the case of a man who produced fewer than 200 (instead of the millions most men produce), the attrition rate would have almost guaranteed failure. In May, the child was born.

-- Swedish scientists from the National Board of Fisheries reported in March that, after observing 117 pairs of trout engaged in sex (quivering violently with their mouths open, followed by the supposed simultaneous release of egg and sperm), they found that males always released their sperm at the end but that, half the time, the females cheated, withholding their eggs. The researchers speculated that the female was "faking an orgasm" as a mating strategy to preserve the eggs in case she ran into a more-desirable male.

-- According to documents released upon the settlement of a lawsuit in Kapolei, Hawaii, in February (involving sexual harassment claims against managers at a Safeway store), in one incident in the mid-1990s, a male employee who was spying on a female customer through a restroom peephole was injured when the woman realized she was being watched and shoved a toilet plunger handle through the hole, into his eye socket. (In the lawsuit, Safeway agreed to pay $250,000 to a former employee who had made numerous allegations about some managers' behavior.)

-- Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported in November that part-time magician Lau Yin-wai, 27, might have saved the life of a neighbor woman from her husband's rage. Alerted by yelling, the magician ran next door to the couple's apartment and saw the husband poised to stab his wife with a knife. The magician quickly threw his coat over the knife, shouted some words of distraction, and deftly removed the knife from the man's hand. Then, as he pulled the coat and knife away, he told the man that he had made the knife disappear, which he said seemed to bewilder the man enough to cause him to give up and await the police.

Even though she had stolen nearly $250,000 over a three-year period from her employer, Elizabeth Randolph Roach, 47, received a sentence in May of only probation (with some home confinement and work-release) because a federal judge in Chicago sympathized with her shopping addiction, which he characterized as "self-medicat(ion)" for severe depression. At the depth of her illness, Roach needed the stolen money to pay for 70 pairs of shoes, a $7,000 belt buckle, and other clothes and accessories she purchased on shopping trips to London, most of which she never wore.

-- In March in Huntsville, Ala., John and Ruby Barnes were hospitalized with severe burns after trying to heat cans of aerosol paint on their stove to make the paint come out easier. Also in March, Greene County (Ill.) inmate David W. Vinyard, in jail for failure to pay traffic fines, was fooling around with a ceiling light while standing on his cell's lavatory when he slipped, leaving a portion of his little finger in the fixture as he fell to the floor. (The local prosecutor said he would file a claim against Vinyard for damage to the fixture.)

The Pentagon's fraud-detection office (the inspector general) was revealed by other government investigators to have placed fake documents in its own files to cover up inadequate fraud investigations. A historic preservation group's headquarters was accidentally destroyed when a wrecking company confused it with the to-be-demolished building next door that the group was trying to save (Miami). The BBC TV program "Crimewatch" declined to stage re-enactments of a recent wave of street robberies, saying it could not find an actor odd-looking enough (huge nose, no teeth) to accurately portray the suspect. For the first time since 1997, U.S. Navy basic trainees were scheduled to fire live rounds in boot camp (but only five bullets each).

(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 Swedish navy announced in May that because of slashes in the military budget, it would cut back from around-the-clock operations to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. The army and air force said they have not yet decided whether to remain open on weekends, but that they, also, were hard hit by the legislature's ban on overtime work.

-- Ben Lambert told reporters in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in May that he was forecasting to sell 40,000 pairs this year of his new E2U men's underwear, featuring a "three-hammock arrangement with non-crushing support" that would allow the scrotum to relax, whether the man is standing or sitting. Lambert said his shorts, priced at about $16 to $22 (US), would fit in much the same way that a bra fits a woman and would remove the need for men periodically to adjust their shorts for comfort.

-- Among the holdover Democratic projects recently canceled by the Bush administration was an $860,000 program to teach public housing tenants to reduce stress and improve their self-esteem by the use of colors, meditation, aromatherapy and "applied kinesiology" (in which a practitioner feels a person's glands to determine, for therapy purposes, which of 14 personality types that person is). The career Housing and Urban Development official who had approved the program is a priest of the International Metaphysical Ministry, and the program's chief trainer said she was "shocked" that something so successful was being terminated.

Witnesses to the bar shooting by Luther V. Casteel, 42, in Elgin, Ill., in April, in which two people were killed and 18 wounded by the gun-obsessed ex-con, say they were most disturbed by the fact that Casteel laughed all the way through the ordeal; said one, "How can you laugh when you're killing people?" And according to a police report in the Vail (Colo.) Daily on Feb. 22, a man was arrested for vandalizing a Colorado Mountain College building with a fire extinguisher, motivated, the man later said, because he was being chased by seven men and a baby and that the baby was laughing at him. And according to a Naples (Fla.) Daily News report in March, laughter "clubs" are starting up all over the world, with "certified" laughter "leaders" teaching members the techniques (and psychological and physiological benefits) of the "lion laugh," the "roller coaster laugh," and the "tickle laugh," among others.

-- When sheriff's deputies decided to break routine on April 17 and search not only visitors entering the Daley Center court building in Chicago but also the people who work there and who thus usually enter without inspection, they confiscated several dozen items of contraband from badged employees, including brass knuckles, tear gas and a dagger, and their booty does not even count what some lawyers and judges might have had on them except that they saw what was going on and simply declined to enter until the inspection ended.

-- At the International Beauty Show in New York City in April, Fort Myers, Fla., hairdresser Valentino LoSauro showed off his "Edward-Scissorhands"-type finger scissors, "Clawz," which he has been using in his salon and now hopes to bring to market. By attaching the devices to one or both hands, he can run his fingers through hair, with independent cutting action from each finger, greatly reducing the time for a haircut.

-- In the five years since he moved to Wilkie, Saskatchewan (population 1,300), Louis Harewood, 56, who operates assisted-living homes and who is a former Baptist preacher, has been accused by husbands of seducing local married women, using his charisma to allegedly send the women into voodoo-like hazes in which they reject old friends and otherwise act strange. Harewood denies any sexual contact and blames certain former employees for spreading rumors. Still, petitions recently circulated urging him to go away. Said one woman, "Our biggest worry is that if he can control 40-year-old women, what about our 16-year-old daughters?"

-- A February report in the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle described a local patient's remarkable recovery from botulism paralysis at Park Ridge Hospital. The woman recently recalled that, after the toxin struck her in June 2000, she lay in her hospital bed, able to hear everything around her but unable to communicate in any way with anyone, and that someone had erroneously said she was a big fan of singer Celine Dion. After that, the hospital staff, in an effort to aid the woman's recovery, played the singer's music in her room around the clock for weeks. When the paralysis left the woman, one of the first joys she experienced, she said, was stopping the music because she actually never cared for Dion.

-- In March, Alice Hoppe, 80, of Cheboygan, Mich., settled her lawsuit with her physician for his failure, over 18 months of treatment, to detect that the reason for her difficulty in swallowing was because her lower denture had caught in her throat during knee surgery in 1995. According to the doctor's attorney, the denture was hidden behind some folds of skin and "was very difficult to find."

Beverly Hills, Calif., security consultant Paxton Quigley introduced SuperBra recently, a $30 garment that doubles as a holster for a gun the size of a snub-nosed .38 revolver; said Quigley: "If a woman is attacked, the purse is the first thing taken from her (so) a good place to conceal a weapon is in the chest area." And in March, the British firm Gossard introduced the $40 Ultrabra Airotic that inflates (via accompanying pump) up to two cup sizes for the woman who, according to a spokesperson, doesn't want "huge breasts through the day but (does) want to have them in the evening."

-- In January, Ms. Sierra Kirkpatrick, 15, married Mr. Sauren Crow, 48, of Taos, N.M., after Sierra's mother vouched for her at a Las Vegas wedding (which is required for a minor to marry in Nevada). Sierra's father (the mother's ex-husband) went nuts when he found out, but the mother and others say the couple is well-suited for each other, in that both are artsy types, dress in "Goth" attire, and actually resemble each other, with their all-black clothes and long black hair.

-- As always, many people (375) died from accidents and fights during Thailand's New Year festival in April. And as always, there were several deaths on New Year's Eve in Japan from eating the traditional mochi rice cakes, which are so sticky that about a dozen people choke to death on them every Dec. 31 (eight last New Year's). And as always, many (this year 35) hajj-pilgrimage Muslims at the annual stone-the-devil ritual in Mina, Saudi Arabia, in March were crushed to death by the sheer numbers of those worshipping.

Police in the retirement town of Sun City West, Ariz., said they've been having problems lately with seniors having sex in public (on golf courses, as well as in lovers' lanes). Neighbors convinced Penn State University to close a research lab because they feared the consequences of living next door to its ongoing cockroach experiments. At least a dozen sheriff's deputies and drug officers in vans and SUVs aggressively raided a home because a helicopter patrol had spotted a patch of ubiquitous mulberry weed (mistaken for marijuana, which it vaguely resembles) in a woman's back yard (Spicewood, Texas). China's news agency announced that 3 million of its people practice auto-urine (i.e., drink your own) therapy, to strengthen the immune system.

(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 human-egg-donor business is flourishing in America, with brokers offering tall, athletic, brainy blondes as much as $80,000 for a multiple-egg harvest (though the average woman gets $5,000 or less), according to a May Los Angeles Times report. Several Ivy League women told the Times they pay off a semester's bills in a single doctor's visit to have eggs extracted by syringe (after a several-week hormone regimen). Said a bioethicist, "There is not much difference between those [egg brokers'] ads and what goes on with prize breeding of animals."

-- Saddam Hussein recently ghost-wrote a 160-page romantic novel, "Zabibah and the King," according to CIA sources interviewed by The New York Times in May, which included a rape sequence in which his heroine (whose name translates to "people of Iraq") was invaded, probably as an allegory to the Gulf War. Sample dialogue: The King: "I'm a great leader. You must obey me. Not only that, you must love me." Zabibah: "The people need strict measures so that they can feel protected by this strictness."

-- British researchers, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists in San Francisco in May, reported that a poison used by South African Zulu tribesmen to coat the tips of their spears and arrows appears in trials to deprive human cancer tumors of blood without harming the surrounding tissue and thus could be a major weapon against cancers of the colon, ovaries and lungs. The toxin comes from the root bark of the Cape bushwillow.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (43) People who impersonate teen-agers and return to high school to satisfy various psychological needs, such as Treva Throneberry, 31, who for four recent years was Brianna Stewart (Evergreen High, Vancouver, Wash., Class of '00, GPA 2.83), notable for getting a D in drama class despite her successful ruse and for getting a 45-year-old man jailed for having sex with an underage girl (which, in reality, she was not). And (44) the periodic scares in African nations, in which vigilante mobs are stirred up against outsiders rumored to have the power to make local men's penises disappear, as happened in April (two killed) in Ilesa, Nigeria.

-- Richard L. Greist filed a lawsuit in January against the state mental hospital in Norristown, Pa., where he has been a patient since 1978 because he killed his pregnant wife and stabbed his daughter and grandmother. Greist complained that when officials would not consider him for an in-house job as a clerk, they violated his rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act, in that they were obligated to "accommodate" his severe paranoid schizophrenia.

-- Debby Messer of Livonia, Mich., filed a $1 million lawsuit in February against her late ex-husband, Gordie Milner, claiming that because he allegedly harassed her after their divorce, she still fears him to this day and cannot stop imagining that he is lurking around her. She said she knows full well that he passed away six months earlier but said that he still "continue[s] to hurt me [and] hurt the children."

-- In January, a Canadian court ruled in favor of convicted drug trafficker Khon Ha Tri in his lawsuit against the prison in Peterborough, Ontario, for his 1996 injury when he fell out of his bunk and tore a knee ligament. Tri said that a prison doctor had prescribed him a lower bunk because of a previous prison-incurred injury but that guards ignored the order. Though Tri had been released from prison after the lawsuit was filed, he has since been re-jailed on another charge.

-- In March, the day after a federal grand jury in Philadelphia handed down a massive fraud indictment against him, former U.S. Rep. Edward Mezvinsky sued his doctor, his drugstore and the pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding, claiming the reason he got into trouble with his investment business was because the anti-malaria drug Lariam fogged up his thinking. Mezvinsky, who took the drug for business trips to Africa, was charged with 56 counts, totaling $10.4 million, based, said the government, on a series of lies to banks and clients, including his mother-in-law.

-- Martin Joyce, 20, filed a lawsuit in April against Reese's Tavern in Warminster, Pa., for serving him alcohol, which he says caused him to get shot. According to the lawsuit, if Reese's hadn't served him illegally, he would not have thought it such a good idea to stop a motorist just outside the bar to ask to borrow money to make a phone call. According to a police report, when the motorist declined the request, Joyce became belligerent, reached into the car, punched the motorist and threatened to kill him. The motorist then pulled out his licensed gun and shot Joyce in the stomach.

Questionable Crimes: An adult brother and his sister were arrested and charged with beating up three men who were conducting loud cell-phone calls while standing in front of the siblings' father's home in an early-evening hour (Boston, March). And three men were being sought by Hartford, Conn., police after a 14-year-old boy and a friend got beaten up in February; most likely, according to police, because the boys had been standing in a street, throwing candy at passing cars. And in April, Wisconsin state Rep. Marlin Schneider sought to formally legalize some retaliatory behavior, introducing legislation to permit battery if committed upon someone who is physically abusing a close relative (but local domestic violence officials were opposed to the bill).

In Charleston, W.Va., in April, James Dale Duncan, 38, was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison for having sex with his daughter beginning when she was 13, for the purpose, according to him, of preventing her from ruining her life by getting pregnant with her boyfriend. Duncan insisted he acted only "from a parent's point of view and not a pervert's," and his sister agreed, telling the judge, "He didn't do this for pleasure." Unremorseful, Duncan said, after sentencing, "I'm going to jail knowing she won't end up pregnant."

A 46-year-old toll-booth operator slipped and was accidentally dragged to his death by an 18-wheeler when he reached out of the booth to grab snow on the moving truck to arm himself for a snowball fight with another toll-booth operator (Wilmington, Del., March). Subway "graffiti artists"/vandals were killed on the job in April in Brooklyn, N.Y. (hit by a train), and Chicago (electrocution). And a 19-year-old man was killed as he ran a red light while attempting to flee a minor traffic accident that he caused (Largo, Fla., April).

A judge threw out charges against a couple carrying 560 pounds of marijuana, because the search was triggered by the incompetent police dog "Falco," two-thirds of whose previous discoveries turned out to be bogus (Knoxville, Tenn.). A man was arrested for locking his 5-year-old nephew in a 100-plus-degree car because he feared thieves would steal the stereo if the car were unattended (Los Angeles). A 42-year-old Good Humor vendor was convicted of disrupting a public school, because so many junior-high kids were walking out of classes to buy ice cream (Winnipeg, Manitoba). Glenda Stevens' dog Sweetie was hit by a mail truck and presumed dead, and then ceremoniously buried in Stevens's back yard, but minutes later, Sweetie dug her way out and is now mending (broken leg and jaw) (Park Hills, Mo.).

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