-- Wired magazine reported in March that two German designers have invented a computer game with hand sensors allowing the administration of shocks and burns to opponents, with the winner being the player who can stand it longer. Painstation (not affiliated with Sony) is based on the old game Pong, and if a player misses the ball, it will hit randomly arranged Pain Inflictor Symbols (heat, jolts, shocks of varying degrees). The game ends when one player lifts his hand off the Pain Endurance Unit.

-- In March, the Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) StarPhoenix, citing several witnesses inside the Pine Grove Correctional Centre, reported that some formerly heroin-addicted female inmates so desperately crave methadone that they routinely consume the fresh vomit of inmates currently on methadone treatment because enough is still present in the regurgitation. The newspaper uncovered the practice while investigating the death of an inmate in February. Said a source, "The whole building knows (that the inmate choked on vomit). That's how she died."

The journal Experimental Biology and Medicine reported that regulating men's hand temperature has no effect on the temperature of the rectum but that regulating scrotal temperature does. And a University of Hertfordshire professor, working with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, concluded that the world's funniest joke involved Dr. Watson's attributing worldly significance to campground star-gazing while Sherlock Holmes was recognizing that if he looked up and saw stars, it meant only that someone had stolen their tent. And an August Journal of Sex Research report by two Georgia State University professors concluded that people who desire sex but are not having it are grumpier than those who are having it or who don't want it.

-- Kaziah Hancock and Cindy Stewart won almost $300,000 in damages in January from a breakaway Mormon sect in Manti, Utah, based on their lawsuit for fraud claiming that self-proclaimed prophet Jim Harmston failed on several promises, including one to produce Jesus Christ himself in the flesh. Hancock said Harmston persuaded her to give 67 acres of land to the church and that the church would give her back a place to live but that after the church made one payment on the new place, Harmston said God told him to stop paying.

-- In December, the Department of Justice applied to dismiss the lawsuit filed last year by Salah Idris, owner of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that President Clinton ordered destroyed in 1998, supposedly as retaliation for terrorism (in that the U.S. thought the plant was a bomb-making factory). According to Idris, however, Clinton ordered the attack mainly to divert political attention in that the raid took place only three days after Clinton had admitted for the first time to having had an improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

-- In March, a Canadian federal judge refused to quash convicted murderer David Wild's $2 million (U.S.) lawsuit against the Mission Medium Security Institution in British Columbia. Wild claims the guards aren't quiet enough when they do nighttime bed checks and thus make getting a good night's sleep impossible, causing Wild headaches, loss of balance, blurred vision, irritability and depression, and leave him too weary to play in the prison's soccer tournament.

-- Fugitive Harvey Taylor, 48, told reporters in February from his hospital bed in Bangor, Maine, that he would soon sue the sheriff's deputy who failed to arrest him fast enough, a delay that resulted in Taylor's spending three nights in the woods and losing two toes to frostbite. Taylor said that after fleeing the pursuing squad car, he got lost in the woods in hip-deep snow and that "(n)obody looked for me, not even the detective that I'm going to sue as soon as I can find me an attorney that will take the case." Taylor is a convicted sex offender wanted for probation violations in Brevard County, Fla.

-- Paul Andrew Jackson was awarded about $31,000 (U.S.) in March in his lawsuit against the provincial Roads and Traffic Authority after hurting his back at a bicycle bridge near Wollongong, Australia. Jackson, a 35-year-old surfer, had stepped over a guardrail in the dark to relieve himself but underestimated the drop-off (after a self-reported six-beer night), falling 40 feet down and momentarily knocking himself unconscious.

In March, a 39-year-old man who was described as someone who helped out with autopsies in Cochise County, Ariz., was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for fondling the corpse of a 17-year-old girl and taking pictures of it and other bodies in what the police called a "continuing fascination with the dead." Though initially he was also charged with a crime against a minor, that charge was dropped, as the man assured prosecutors that there were no live victims associated with his activities.

In a joint federal-state child-protection announcement in December, the German government proposed that online pornography Web sites could transmit only between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (which, for example, is 5 p.m. to midnight in New York and 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. in California). And a vacancy announcement for the Auburn University football team's defensive coordinator (a job filled in February by Mr. Gene Chizik) listed minimum qualifications as "seven years experience as NCAA Division I defensive secondary coach," but then noted that "women are encouraged to apply."

Bizarros in the News: The man arrested in February for violating the FAA's remain-seated rules for Olympics airline flights into Salt Lake City (who, despite repeated warnings, said he just had to get to the rest room) was Mr. Richard Bizarro. Before that, the family's good name was most prominently maintained by Mr. Joe Bizarro (no relation), spokesperson for Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth during the state's 2000 presidential election recount crisis.

In March, police in Jaipur, India, arrested 81 bookmakers who had been offering bets as to whether the Hindu-Muslim riots would escalate to adjacent states (as well as offering over-under bets on the number of casualties). And Reuters reported in March that veterinarians in Jerusalem are finding that more dogs suffer panic attacks due to increased gunfire and are generally prescribing Valium for them. And through inattentiveness of the Albuquerque telephone directory's publisher, sex-oriented businesses were listed in the latest edition under "Incest Abuse" and "Rape Abuse," thus compounding victims' anguish when they inadvertently called for counseling.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said that financially faltering parishes should rent out their buildings part-time as "disco" clubs (London). A man and woman, both 24, were arrested after they had urgently pulled off a highway, into a private driveway, at 7 a.m., to have ostentatious sex, even though there was $11,000 worth of marijuana in their car (West Rockhill Township, Pa.). On International Women's Day (March 8), a female judge dismissed all domestic violence charges against a firefighter on the grounds that the man was a career hero but would be forced to retire if convicted (Hamilton City, New Zealand). The California Supreme Court ruled that police could arrest and search a person whose only offense was riding his bicycle against traffic, if the cyclist was not carrying identification.

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

-- After sheriff's deputies in Kalispell, Mont., arrested militia leader David Earl Burgert, 38, in February, they uncovered his group's "Project 7" plot, allegedly to assassinate several county officials (including the local dogcatcher) in a fanciful plan that Burgert is said to believe would eventually create enough local chaos to start a national revolution. Burgert (whose last job was as a snowmobile rental agent) had amassed a huge arsenal of machine guns and heavy weapons in order to carry out the assassinations, defeat the National Guard, and stanch the probable waves of what Project 7 called "Red Chinese" from Canada. According to Project 7 thinking, NATO would somehow then be called on to send troops to Kalispell. Law enforcement officials said Burgert was just a local loudmouth who this time had gotten in way over his head.

-- In March, the manager of a Hartford, Conn., senior citizens' home told residents in the monthly newsletter to "please stop throwing rice in the garbage disposals" and that repairs for such "negligence and carelessness" would be billed to the tenant, but the Spanish-language version of the same newsletter was different (as translated): "You have to get used to the fact that you do not live in Puerto Rico, where leftovers were given to the pigs. We do not have pigsties, but we do have garbage cans." "If (using the garbage can) is too hard for you to do, move and continue with the customs of Puerto Rico." The manager, Carmen Aponte, who is of Puerto Rican ancestry, later apologized.

An editor of a major Sri Lanka astrology magazine resigned in November, concerned that his boss was using planet-alignment readings to make political commentary, thus undermining readers' faith in astrology. And a Nigerian transportation official urged in November that citizens de-emphasize their heavy reliance on automobile icon charms to keep them safe, urging instead that they concentrate on the rules of the road (as similarly urged by the governor of Trang, Thailand, when informed in February of the heavy use of auto charms to overcome evil ghosts at the town's major traffic intersections). And in January, the Kanda Myojin Shinto shrine in Tokyo began selling its own information-technology-prayer charms to ward off computer viruses.

-- A 50-year-old construction worker in Knoxville, Tenn., survived his Jan. 14 impalement by a 3-foot-long, 3-inch-thick metal rod that fell off of a bridge and which went point-first through the man's skull and neck, coursed down his trunk, and stopped only when completely embedded in his body. He was semiconscious at the scene but talkative later at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. The man was not wearing the required hard hat.

-- Canada's British Columbia Court of Appeal reversed the child sexual assault conviction against Hugo Oswald Castaneda in October, even though he had admitted having sex with a 12-year-old girl, because the prosecutor had gone too far in attempting to persuade the jury that Castaneda was a bad person. According to Justice John Hall, the government delved too deeply into Castaneda's admitted drug-dealing and other unrelated criminal activities when, according to Castaneda's lawyer, his general "character" was not at issue in the trial.

-- Rod Yellon, a political science professor at the University of Manitoba, was fined in February for protesting a postponement of the trial in his four-year-long constitutional challenge over a $25 (U.S.) traffic ticket he had been issued in Winnipeg for rolling through a stop sign. Yellon had challenged the law as too vague, in that a "stop" sign did not "specify sufficiently" what drivers were supposed to do when they encountered one.

-- Lithuania's gender-equality ombudsman, Ms. Ausrine Burneikiene, announced in January that she would fight to end the country's requirement that women need a gynecological exam to get a driver's license. The exams apparently are based on the belief that some gynecological illnesses manifest themselves suddenly or cause unconsciousness and therefore would be dangerous to other motorists. (And a study reported in November in Saudi Arabia's Riyadh Daily, from a professor at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah, concluded that women are responsible for about 50 percent of Saudi traffic accidents, even though they cannot legally drive cars; the professor was referring only to women as distractions and backseat drivers.)

-- H. Beatty Chadwick, 65, has served more than 6 1/2 years in jail in suburban Philadelphia for contempt of court for not being able to produce $2.5 million that he was supposed to split with his divorced wife. He was scheduled to be released in February, but a federal appeals court blocked that order. (The U.S. record for contempt is believed to be held by a Chicago man who was released in 1997 after staying in jail for 10 years in order not to reveal the whereabouts of his daughter.) Chadwick said he lost the money in a bad investment, but his ex-wife believes that the money was not lost and that Chadwick is willingly sitting in jail in order to protect its now-multiplied value.

Sheriff's deputies in Glades County, Fla., on the edge of Lake Okeechobee, arrested a 53-year-old farm laborer in February on a single count of incest after discovering that he and his sister had established a 25-year family unit that had produced nine kids and four grandchildren. The family lived in a rural work camp run by his employer and first drew the attention of deputies when a neighbor reported that the couple kept a casket in their living room, containing the remains of an infant son who had died 12 years earlier.

Chaddrick Dickson, 25, was hospitalized briefly in Monroe, La., in December, after being wounded by the .22-caliber bullet he was fooling around with. Dickson said he was trying to remove the gunpowder by smashing the bullet's casing against the floor. He said he needed the gunpowder because he wanted to mix it into his dog's food to make the dog meaner.

In November 2000, News of the Weird reported the startling news that, at a public demonstration in Taipei, three martial-arts masters, without using their hands, had pulled a truck holding 80 people 12 inches with ropes attached only to their penises. In January 2002, the Federal Communications Commission fined Seattle radio station KNDD-FM $14,000 because its morning show personalities had made an on-air offer last year to give free concert tickets to any man who would come to the studio and pull certain heavy objects around with his penis (discussions which the FCC said constituted "indecent language").

A Saudi Arabian woman who was found by a court to have been raped by her sister's husband was sentenced to six months in jail and 65 lashes because she had thus had sex (Jeddah, February). A Mexican immigrant in his 20s, who was returning a purse and cell phone he found to their owner, was shot to death, allegedly by the owner's brother-in-law, who thought the Samaritan's $50 reward request was too high (Whittier, Calif.). A Dallas-area public school system announced it would sell permanent naming rights to dozens of its buildings and facilities (e.g., $1 million for a soccer field), but at least would not sell to corporations (Highland Park, Texas).

A fired health-care association manager filed a lawsuit alleging that his female boss kept a "man sack rack" display (device for hanging male genitals) in her office, supposedly symptomatic of her sexually harassing attitudes (Woodbury, N.J.). A 33-year-old juror, right in the middle of deliberations in a murder case, abruptly took off on an already scheduled Mexican vacation (but the judge jailed her upon her return to town) (Cincinnati). The Georgia parole board issued a rare reprieve, moving a death-row inmate to life in prison because he is so delusional that he sometimes believes that the actress Sigourney Weaver is God. A 47-year-old woman was convicted of animal cruelty for throwing her 3-foot-long pet iguana at a tavern's bouncer, though she argued that the iguana leapt on his own to defend her honor (Isle of Wight, England).

(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, Colorado Republican Party activist Randal David Ankeney, 30, was charged in another sexual assault incident, following his July arrest for assaulting a 14-year-old girl he had met in an Internet chat room. (The December arrest involved what the Colorado Springs Gazette termed a "girl" but whose age was not disclosed.) And in February, the National Republican Congressional Committee withdrew the "Republican of the Year" award that had been scheduled to be presented to Virginia party activist Mark A. Grethen, 44; the committee had just learned of his conviction on six counts of sex crimes involving children.

-- Matsushita Electric Industrial runs a state-of-the-art retirement home near Osaka, Japan, and according to a BBC News report in February uses robotic companion bears to comfort the residents (average age: 82) and also to continually check health signs. Among the fur-covered bears' skills: They can respond to voice command and can monitor residents' alertness by timing their responses to spoken questions.

The Washington Times reported in December that the U.S. Forest Service had admitted that three of its employees, and other government environmentalists, had planted endangered lynxes' hairs in Washington state forests, thus skewing a research project on whether to restrict development in those forests. And the FBI disclosed in February that the largest U.S. domestic terrorist group (600 attacks in five years) is the environmentalist Earth Liberation Front, whose spokesman took the Fifth Amendment 50 times during a February congressional hearing. And a Cloverdale, Australia, terminal cancer patient complained that he suffered through an agonizing Christmas because a Greenpeace protest shut down the Sydney nuclear reactor that makes his high-tech pain-relieving radioisotope Quadramet.

-- Now operating in Seoul are at least eight "booking clubs," in which males and females pay waiters to forcibly introduce them to each other because South Korean social rules discourage voluntary contact with strangers. According to a January Wall Street Journal report, men may pay several hundred dollars a night to demand introductions, and women pay a similar amount knowing (and preferring) that they will be physically delivered by the waiters to prospective suitors' tables.

-- Licensing officials in New York City declined to issue a permit for the highlight of the two-day Russian end-of-winter gala in February at Prospect Park in Brooklyn because the festival's signature event, the centuries-old "stenka na stenku," calls for two teams of 50 men to engage in vicious fistfights. Said one organizer, "We will have an ambulance standing by (but if) we lose a tooth, we lose a tooth. No big deal."

-- A January Los Angeles Times report described a dozen emerging businesses in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, devoted to staging elaborate break-up schemes (for couples and for business partners) so that the dumping partner does not have to convey the bad news personally. In complicated cases (highly resisting dumpees, or with much money at stake), the breakup agent might charge $100,000 and employ schemes as elaborate as a CIA caper, perhaps creating false identities and false companies or staging sham events.

-- A December report by St. Louis's KMOV-TV caused an uproar when it revealed that the city's 3,500 euthanized dogs and cats a year are disposed of at a local rendering plant that sells some of its product (recycled fat and protein) to pet food manufacturers. The rendering plant subsequently stopped accepting dogs and cats (which it had been taking for free, as a public service), but the city's crisis continues, in that cremation and other alternate forms of disposal are very expensive.

-- Among the 39 charges leveled by the Tennessee Health Department against former state medical examiner Dr. Charles Harlan in December were that he deliberately mutilated bodies during autopsies so that "no one (could) second-guess me"; vastly overused "sudden infant death syndrome" as the cause of death for babies; and let animals "roam freely in his facility and consume the organs of deceased persons."

Bad Habits: Mohammad Saboor, 56, was arrested in January as the well-dressed man who has spontaneously kissed at least nine female strangers on Toronto streets since November. And Melvin G. Hanks, 54, was arrested in Belleville, Ill., in February, accused of stealing 92 ponytails in 13 attempts from a salon that was collecting the hair to make wigs for children who had lost theirs because of disease. And Ronald Castle Sr., 54, was arrested in Syracuse, N.Y., in January, suspected as the man who has been masturbating into colleagues' coffee cups at the county Department of Social Services.

Three Alaskans were charged recently with ill-thought-out thefts: Todd Shobe, 38, was arrested in Anchorage in January when his SUV got stuck in the mud at a construction site after being weighed down with all the tools he was trying to drive away with. And Roger D. Yost, 40, and William Isberg, 40, were arrested in Fairbanks in February when they tried to get a 500-pound safe out the door of a Moose Lodge hall, seemingly forgetting that they had arrived at the Lodge only on bicycles.

Arrested for murder: Christopher Wayne Davis (Pearl River, La., November), Jerry Wayne Dean (Jackson County, Ky., November), Billy Wayne Cope (Rock Hill, S.C., November), Joshua Wayne Andrews (Woodbridge, Va., January), Jeffrey Wayne Gorton (Flint, Mich., February), Timothy Wayne Adams (Houston, February). Murder Warrant Issued: Jason Wayne Johnson (Comal County, Texas, December). Sentenced for Murder: Mark Wayne Campmire (Litchfield, Conn., January). Executed for Murder: Randall Wayne Hafdahl (Huntsville, Texas, January), Stephen Wayne Anderson (San Quentin, Calif., January). Avoided a Murder Charge Only Because He Was Killed in a Shootout With Police: Danny Wayne Sand (Brandon, Manitoba, December). Appealed or Sought Parole: convicted murderers Kenneth Wayne Woodfin (Richmond, Va., January), Gary Wayne Sutton (Knoxville, Tenn., January).

An education law firm in Adelaide, Australia, recommended that its client private schools obtain student permission in writing before sending report cards home, so as not to violate new privacy legislation that took effect in December. And biology teacher Christine Pelton resigned in December from Piper High School near Kansas City, Kan., after the school board refused to allow her to give grades of zero to the 28 students who plagiarized their term projects. And to cut absentee rates, a school in Sooke, British Columbia, began passing out perfect-attendance coupons this year, good for free fast-food sandwiches and french fries.

A half-ton cow jumped a 6-foot slaughterhouse fence and hid out so heroically for 12 days that when she was finally captured, the mayor said he'd present her a key to the city (Cincinnati). A tenured University of Texas chemistry professor was fired for having a messy office (so many books as to be a fire hazard) and a messy laboratory (corrosive materials) (San Antonio). A 42-year-old man was hospitalized after being stabbed in the stomach with a swordfish during a brawl outside his home (Madeira Beach, Fla.). A University of Greenwich professor announced the discovery of the oldest fossilized vomit on record (of a four-flippered reptile from 160 million years ago) (London).

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