-- On Jan. 1, John Guth, 32, and Jeff Tweiten, 24, set up outside the Cinerama theater in Seattle, where they announced they intended to await the public sale of tickets for "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones," scheduled for release May 16. Tweiten said he was actually engaged in an art project on "waiting for something"; he keeps a log of his experience and originally wanted to await the film for two years. "I'm becoming very aware just how long an hour is," he said, and "what happens in an hour." The film's distributors have not even confirmed that the film will be shown at the Cinerama.

-- In November, prosecutors in Greenbelt, Md., finally indicted Josephine Gray, 55, for her role in the serial murders of her two husbands (in 1974 and 1990) and a boyfriend-cousin (1996), cases that have long been stymied by several relatives' resolute refusal to testify against her out of fear that she would use voodoo on them. (She was not indicted for murder but rather for collecting on the men's life insurance policies after helping arrange their deaths.) One relative of the eventual second victim said Gray could control the man as long as he was eating Gray's cooking but returned to "his old self" when he ate elsewhere. Other relatives said a spell from Gray caused the eventual first victim once to scratch his face to shreds.

Legal fees had risen to about $30,000 as of November in the Golden, Colo., battle between ex-lovers David Rosenthal and Barbara Newman over whether their 2-year-old child is named "Kyleigh Rosenthal-Newman" or "Kyleigh Rosenthal Newman." And Thailand's minister of tourism said a 27-hole golf course would be built at the juncture of his country, Laos and Cambodia, with nine holes in each nation, though the territory is littered with Khmer Rouge land mines; the minister thought golfers would fly in from all over the world for the challenge. And leaders of the notorious right-wing death squad of Colombia's United Self-Defense Forces sent e-mail Christmas cards this season to their soldiers across the countryside, wishing them "peace."

-- A judge acquitted Yvonne Lancaster of drunk-driving charges in October, even though she had been found passed out in her car in Warrington, England, with an empty vodka bottle at her feet, with a blood-alcohol reading four times the legal limit. Because she was barely conscious and had to be propped up at the station for her breath test, the police declined to read her her rights (because she appeared not to understand anything being said to her), and that failure, the judge said, invalidated the arrest.

-- New York City defense lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg zealously claimed on behalf of her client in a December murder-rape-robbery trial that the 81-year-old victim begged, and paid $20 for, kinky sex from her client, a 37-year-old crackhead with a long rap sheet. The jury convicted Elbert Marcel Mitchell on DNA evidence but not before Van Leer-Greenberg had insinuated in argument and questioning that the victim, a kindly Harlem socialite, had consented to the swollen cheek, the split lip, and the black eye, and that the dog leash Mitchell strangled her with was around her neck as part of an erotic game.

-- Heart surgeon James McClurken of Abington Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia reported in November that his 70-year-old bypass patient was exhibiting an old wound that surely indicated that an object had entered and exited his heart. It turns out that the man had indeed taken a slug, in the Korean War, but thought at the time that it must have missed the heart, but now the surgeon says it passed through so quickly that the wound closed up tight with no ill effects.

-- The Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star reported in November that a state inspector, using new guidelines from North Carolina's Early Childhood Environmental Rating System, had downgraded the Kids Gym Schoolhouse day-care center in Wilmington only because she had found nine 2-inch-high toy soldiers in a play area and thus concluded that the center was engaged in "stereotyp(ing) violent individuals and promot(ing) violence."

-- The District of Columbia Department of Corrections admitted in August that it had illegally detained a deaf-mute man, who also has a serious mental illness, for 669 days on a minor misdemeanor charge (that ultimately was dropped) because it had lost his file. Jail records showed that the man never had visitors (not even the required public defender). The department director said it was "kind of unbelievable to me" that his agency could have done that.

Brian D. Beaudoin, 42, who was charged in August in Providence, R.I., with embezzling more than $100,000 from his mother in an investment scheme, first aroused suspicions when the mother and her two daughters entered Beaudoin's private bedroom to search for papers and discovered what the Providence Journal called a "stomach-churning, garbage-strewn mess," including "moldy food and soiled clothes" and "bottles and jars of thick liquid with unusual substances floating in them." Beaudoin later admitted that he sometimes urinated in bottles because he was too lazy to go to the toilet, which was in the next room. The sisters told reporters they suspected Beaudoin was storing strange liquids in order to poison their mother for insurance money.

From the Police Blotter column in the Oct. 30 San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News (during the nation's anthrax craze), about a mysterious bag of white powder that had been found in the waiting room of Good Samaritan Hospital the previous week: "The area was evacuated and the bag was secured by hospital staff and security personnel. Before the fire department or police department arrived, a security guard smelled and tasted the powder" and determined that it was not anthrax.

In June 1997, News of the Weird reported on Troy Hurtubise, a scrap-metal dealer from North Bay, Ontario, who had become so obsessed with grizzly bears that he had embarked on a 10-year, $100,000 project (sending him into bankruptcy) to build a suit out of rubber, steel and titanium that would enable him to safely wrestle a grizzly. In a December test at a special facility in British Columbia, Hurtubise hung a version of his long-awaited Ursus Mark VI suit in a cage, where it was promptly ripped up by a 1,200-pound Kodiak bear, forcing Hurtubise to go to plan B, in which he donned another suit and went face-to-face for 10 minutes not with the Kodiak but with a small, female grizzly. He said he would improve the suit and go face-to-face with a Kodiak later this year.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (49) The hit-and-run driver who, either impaired or incompetent, drives on, oblivious to the victim (or parts of the victim's vehicle) being embedded in the grill or windshield of his car, as did a 25-year-old man in Pueblo, Colo., in November (14 miles with the motorcycle he hit stuck in his grill). And (50) the "man bites dog" stories in which a criminal suspect, cornered by a police dog, manages to get in a bite himself, before the dog subdues him (resulting in an additional battery charge against the suspect), as happened to a 28-year-old man in Virginia Beach, Va., in December.

Ms. Takako Konishi, 28, was found dead, of probable suicide, in Detroit Lakes, Minn., six days after being spotted in Bismarck, N.D., inquiring how to find the money that had been buried by a character in the movie "Fargo." A Tokyo hospital official was ordered by a court to pay about $2,350 to a colleague whom he had verbally assaulted at a board meeting last year by calling him an "idiot" or a "moron" 74 times. Yale Divinity School dean Ralph William Franklin resigned over charges of mismanagement, including using Yale funds to pay for clearly personal expenses, in "flagrant violation" of his contract. An environmental official in Kagoshima, Japan, was arrested for threatening to knife a bar owner if he didn't start separating his garbage according to the country's strict trash laws.

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

-- Multinational corporations avoided $45 billion in U.S. taxes in 2000 by buying and selling with their own foreign subsidiaries at sometimes ridiculous prices, according to professors at Florida International University, in a study released in November by U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. For example, U.S. subsidiaries would buy (with tax paid to the other country) a toothbrush for $5,655 or a flashlight for $5,000, while U.S. subsidiaries would sell (tax paid to the U.S.) a bulldozer for $528 or a prefabricated metal building for 82 cents.

-- Isaac Levy, 57, and Zebolan Simonto, 41, told The Washington Post in November that, though they are the only remaining Jewish residents of Kabul, Afghanistan, each had been treated much better by the Taliban than by each other. Their relentless, petty feud began three years ago when both claimed ownership of a handwritten edition of the Torah. Simonto had Levy imprisoned by accusing him of being an Israeli spy, and Levy had Simonto imprisoned by asserting that Simonto had tried to convert Muslims to Christianity and that he had brought prostitutes into his home. Each maintains his own dilapidated, visitorless synagogue.

Willie Prince Cook, 21, on his arrest for peeping into a ladies' room stall at a county courthouse, said he was in the building on business, specifically, to pick up his new marriage license (Rockville, Md., August). And London's The Guardian reported that the U.S. firm OSI Pharmaceuticals is nearing the end of clinical trials for a cream that will make light-skinned people dark and dark-skinned people light. And identical twins Ruth and Rebecca Brown (students at Messiah College, Grantham, Pa.) were written up in their local newspaper for having created 4,386 tiny but highly detailed clay cats wearing Union and Confederate clothing, as part, they said, of their fascination with Civil War battlefields (October).

-- The king of Tonga (Tonga is the island between Fiji and American Samoa) has an actual court jester (until recently, Jesse Bogdonoff), whom he appointed out of gratitude when Bogdonoff discovered that the king's lucrative passport-selling income was being deposited in an interest-free Bank of America account instead of earning interest. It subsequently appeared that Bogdonoff and some colleagues may have absconded with much of the money themselves, instead of re-investing it. Tonga might have made $40 million selling special passports (at $5,000 to $8,000) to prominent people in trouble, such as Imelda Marcos and many lower-level international miscreants.

-- In a November Associated Press report on arson in Tennessee and Kentucky, one state investigator said the two leading causes locally were boredom and the fact that arsonists appear to be following in their fathers' footsteps ("My daddy did it, so I'm doing it," the investigator quoted some as saying; "It passes from one generation to the next (like) child abuse."). A retired arson and bomb analyst for the FBI endorsed the father-son connection and said it was unique to the Tennessee-Kentucky region.

There has been an even bigger worldwide jump in exorcisms recently than in 1973 when the movie "The Exorcist" was released, according to several press reports in September. Official Roman Catholic exorcisms have jumped from one in 1995 to at least 15 in 2001 (and the church has 10 official exorcists on duty in the United States), and a Fordham University researcher said there may be 500 protestant evangelical exorcism ministries in the U.S. alone. The researcher, Michael Cuneo, said he had attended about 50 and seen "lots of fireworks, lots of dramatic activity" but nothing supernatural. Cuneo suggested that exorcisms will increase as people's feelings of helplessness increase.

-- The Archdiocese of Philadelphia recently approved a rare petition from a man to be an official hermit under the Catholic Church's canons. Richard Withers, 46, has vowed to do all the things a priest does except that he spends almost all of his time away from people, in contemplation (based on "an almost unremitting desire to be alone with God"). Brother Withers has a paying job (which he works at in silence) one day a week and exchanges e-mail with other hermits.

-- The Answers in Genesis ministry in Florence, Ky., is building a $14 million creationism museum to compete with classic-science museums, with exhibits that it says will demonstrate that the world was created in six days just as the Bible says. According to a December Los Angeles Times report, a large double-helix of DNA will be on display to suggest that humans are so complex that they could not possibly have evolved, and a life-sized dinosaur will be shown, along with the helpful information "Created on: Day 6." Ministry director Ken Ham said he is targeting Christians who do not take the Bible literally. "This is a cultural war," he said. "They need to know: We're coming."

Mohammad Afroz Abdul Razak, 25, told reporters in Melbourne, Australia, that he belonged to a cell of 20 al-Qaida terrorists whose missions included flying an airplane into that city's 55-story Rialto Towers, but an investigation revealed, at the least, that he was not even close to passing his flying lessons, having taken 17 months to accumulate 20 hours' flying time and hiding in his bed on the days of particularly difficult lessons. According to a December Sydney Morning Herald profile, Razak also did the decidedly unfundamentalist-Islamic thing of crying frequently about his problems in front of his Jewish landlady, and besides, the Australian government has denied the existence of any such al-Qaida cell.

From the Police Report column of the Jackson County (Colo.) Star, listing a hunting accident on Oct. 6 in the south of the county: "A hunter shot a deer and was apparently trying to arrange his rifle on the antlers for a trophy photo when the gun fired, blowing off the man's thumb and part of his hand. When medical personnel arrived, the man had wrapped the wounded hand in duct tape."

News of the Weird reported a year ago that 1,400 college students were majoring in "golf" at eight universities, taking classes in business and turf science, in addition to shooting round after round of golf. Among other curricula recently reported are workshops at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, on how businesspeople schmooze effectively on the golf course (etiquette, ethics, and inferring a company's culture by the way its executives play golf), and an addition to the Penn State program, Spanish for Golf Course Turfgrass Management Students, to help future golf pros communicate better with Hispanic groundskeepers.

The union representing 1,500 Church of England clergy has arranged for martial arts training after statistics showed being a vicar is more dangerous than being a probation officer (December). Imelda Marcos was awarded an $88-a-month World War II military widow's pension, despite recent charges (with more likely) that she looted the Philippine treasury of $350 million during her time as first lady (November). A 48-year-old polisher was pinned against a conveyor belt and killed by an industrial robot at a vehicle-wheel manufacturing plant (Norton, Ohio, December).

A 39-year-old woman was found not guilty of abducting her children in a divorce fight but moments later convicted of contempt of court because she wouldn't stop putting her finger in her mouth and making popping sounds while the judge was speaking (Toronto). Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen announced that any karaoke bars remaining open in the country would be destroyed by military tanks. On Dec. 17, a 47-year-old naturist announced that he had fulfilled his goal of driving 15,000 miles nude (Des Moines, Iowa). A 28-year-old man shot his wife to death, then drove to a highway overpass and shot himself to death, then toppled over the railing onto a Toyota Camry going 65 mph, killing the driver (Los Angeles).

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

-- In December, according to New Scientist magazine, Swiss inventor Paolo Rais introduced his solution to the boring dinner party in which unfortunate guests, by the luck of the draw, are seated next to uninteresting people: a 12-to-24-seat dining table whose chairs keep moving so that one cannot spend more than 10 minutes trapped next to the same person. Chairs (and a wooden tray containing your food) move at 3 inches per minute. The models vary in price from about $29,000 to about $44,000.

-- Fourteen-year-old Christina Santhouse lives a normal teen-age life in Bristol, Pa., in almost every respect except for a partial paralysis of her left arm and leg, caused by the removal six years ago of half of her brain. According to an October Associated Press report, her surgery (to eliminate Rasmussen's encephalitis, which caused up to 100 brief seizures a day) has not penalized her compared to her supposedly full-brained classmates, in that she remains a straight-A student and loves 'N Sync.

-- Update: Transsexual Tammy Lynn Felbaum (formerly Tommy Wyda), 43, was found guilty in December of involuntary manslaughter and other charges in connection with the February death of her sixth husband, James Felbaum, from complications after his castration. Tammy at first said James castrated himself, then admitted she did it but at James' specific, written request. The Butler County, Pa., judge reached his verdict based on testimony from a jailer who said Tammy told her that castration was the only way she could see to rehabilitate the marriage after an alleged affair by James, and despite testimony from one of Tammy's earlier spouses, Lynn (formerly Tim) Barner, who let Tammy perform her castration because she was an expert. Said Barner, "She could castrate a dog in less than five minutes."

In September, an executive of the Bolton English soccer team ate sheep's testicles, raw squid and snails to uphold his end of the deal after his players won an impressive victory (but they would have had to eat the meal if they had lost). And South Korean archers cleaned up sewage in Seoul and stared at dead bodies in a cemetery in mental preparation for the grueling September World Outdoor championships in Beijing (which the men won, despite losing four squad members because the training was too rigorous). And in Miami in October, a dozen Burger King marketing people (among 100 in a corporate team-building exercise) were treated for serious burns after they walked on hot coals (which a trainer had assured them would not be painful if they adopted the correct attitude).

-- A November report in the Northwestern University daily newspaper described Dr. Michael Bailey's research project (which had already been vetted by the school's ethics people) to determine sexual arousal rates of females by, respectively, heterosexual erotic images and lesbian erotic images. Coeds were recruited at $75 an hour (two to three times the going rate for campus research guinea pigs) to have the "vaginal photo-plethysmograph" inserted to measure moisture and swelling. Dr. Bailey's preliminary conclusion: Women (whether straight or gay) get aroused by either straight or lesbian scenes, whereas comparable research had shown that men were aroused only by images depicting their own sexual orientation.

-- In a December report in The Times of London, University of Nebraska geologist John Shroder (an Afghanistan specialist) said the Pentagon has a Remote-Sensing Gas-Detection Device that is so finely tuned that it can distinguish ethnic groups based on faint aromas of the foods that they eat.

-- The hottest arcade game in Japan recently has been Boong-Ga Boong-Ga, in which a player virtually jabs an oversized finger up the clothed derriere of one of eight loathed targets (e.g., "ex-boyfriend," "golddigger," "con man"), with the more aggressive the jab, the more pained the expression on the target's face. Japanese consumers are said to be more comfortable with the anal theme than consumers in the United States.

-- The Braehead Shopping Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, announced in November that for the holiday buying season, it would offer the female shopper temporary boyfriends/husbands on loan so that she would have someone to browse with if her own mate tended to reject the shopping experience. Said the organizer: "The Shopping Boyfriend is the ultimate retail therapist: enthusiastic, attentive, admiring and complimentary" and will "even say her bum looks small."

-- China Youth Daily and other Chinese newspapers reported instances in November and December in which job-seekers in Shanghai and the northern city of Anshan were turned down solely because their blood type was other than the desired type O. One interviewer allegedly said that type B people "lack independent thought, discretion and ability," but a Shanghai interviewer said he rejects only types A and AB because their possessors are reserved and temperamental. An Anshan employer said he got the idea to screen by blood type by studying in Japan, where he said the practice is common.

Dwight Pichette was serving 14 life terms (concurrently) on 58 convictions for robbery and related charges, yet his lawyer and others said he is one of the most intelligent and sensitive people they've ever met, and since he has been in prison (in Victoria, British Columbia), he has published three books, with a fourth having won a pre-publication arts award. In May, he received a supervised leave to attend a philosophy discussion downtown, gave his escort the slip, and tried two more bank robberies before being reapprehended. Pichette said that he was probably subconsciously sabotaging his future because, on that supervised leave, he realized how he'd tossed away his life. And the self-sabotage worked, because he now has 16 concurrent life terms.

Unlikely Model for al-Qaida: Twenty-one people who claim now that they speak for Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult (which killed 12 people and injured 5,000 in a 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack) said they have become a benign religious organization and changed their name to Aleph, and in November they started a computer business with the goal of earning enough money to compensate the cult's victims. So far, they have raised about $2.5 million. The most famous member, Shoko Asahara, remains in custody and on trial (trials are not constitutionally guaranteed "speedy" in Japan) for murder.

A 38-year-old, alcohol-fueled man, taking up the challenge of a 50-year-old man that if the younger man could outswim him in San Francisco Bay, he'd give the younger man his car, drowned (Berkeley, July). A 45-year-old surfer from Denver, attempting to capitalize on the 10-foot waves of Hurricane Juliette at the southern tip of Baja California, drowned (Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; July). A 48-year-old man was killed while attempting to pass a car he had been expressing his displeasure with for traveling too slow; as he swerved his pickup truck right to gently nudge the car, he lost control and smashed into a light pole (Laval, Quebec; November).

According to a lawsuit, a Wal-Mart manager, informed that an employee had allegedly fondled a 10-year-old girl in the store, offered the girl's mother a $25 gift certificate to forget the whole thing (Columbia, S.C.). A 49-year-old man was arrested for DUI with a record-challenging blood-alcohol reading of .532 (Lorain, Ohio). Arizona Cardinals' placekicker Bill Gramatica made his 16th field goal of the year (in 20 tries), against the Giants, leaped into the air in celebration, and ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament as he landed, ending his season and jeopardizing his career. Towing company employee Joseph Thomas Johnson, 33, was arrested for joyriding in rap singer Missy Elliott's 2001 Lamborghini (price: $330,000), during which he hit a stop sign and crashed, inflicting $160,000 damage.

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