-- University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, 39, has for 20 years worn computer components on his body for ongoing research and even calls himself a cyborg, and carries enough documentation that he had never (even after Sept. 11) caused problems with airport security. (He wears computerized glasses and headgear and an electronic body suit; is constantly connected to the Internet; can see behind him; and can "feel" items across a room.) However, on Feb. 18, officials at St. John's, Newfoundland, airport would not let him board for two days while searching and testing him and making background checks. When they OK'd him on Feb. 20, about $50,000 worth of his equipment had been broken, and he was bleeding from having his chest electrodes removed. Two weeks later, Mann filed a lawsuit against Air Canada and Canada's transportation authority.

-- As a longstanding part of his lecture on "assault and battery," University of Virginia torts professor Kenneth Abraham said he gently taps the shoulder of a student at random in his class to illustrate the principle that even negligible unwanted contact can be costly if the victim is uniquely vulnerable in ways that no one could have expected. Indeed, Abraham did not know that a student he tapped recently, Marta Sanchez, had been raped a while back and that the tap apparently triggered fear and stress. In March, Sanchez filed a $35,000 lawsuit against Abraham, claiming that the tap constituted assault and battery.

The Swiss Re reinsurance company told financial analysts in February that it would likely post its first yearly loss since 1866 unless a court agrees with it that the two Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center (18 minutes apart) were just one big event, thus saving it at least $3.5 billion. And the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in March that two widows can collect on their husbands' life insurance policies even though the men died while committing crimes (one while attempting murder; the other when cocaine-filled balloons burst in his stomach).

-- In March, Jefferson County, Colo., sheriff John Stone informed the Denver Rocky Mountain News (with which he has been feuding over allegedly covered-up evidence regarding the mass shootings at Columbine High School) that his e-mails and letters about the case might be released under the state's public-records law, but that he could not be sure unless the newspaper first paid the cost for gathering up his correspondence files so that his lawyers could inspect them. The sheriff's office calculated that the retrieval cost would be, at a minimum, $1,072,200.

-- Latest Unintended Consequences: A 2002 Oregon law makes owners of partly electric cars pay $15 more to register them than owners of gas-guzzlers pay to register theirs, in order to replace the gasoline taxes the environment-conscious motorists are saving by driving fuel-efficient cars. And Arizona state Rep. Linda Binder's proposed law would prohibit allowing unrestrained dogs to ride in the back of pickup trucks, although for the past 18 years, Arizona legislators have tried but failed to enact a similar provision for kids in the back of pickups.

-- Last Christmas season, to demonstrate "fertilization" of the earth, the Copia art emporium in Napa, Calif., exhibited 35 squatting, butt-baring figurines by Spanish artist Antoni Miralda (including nuns, angels, Santa Claus and the pope). A Copia spokesperson said placing such defecating statuettes in Nativity scenes is a traditional activity in the Catalonia region of Spain.

-- In March, the cat belonging to avant-garde British artist Tracey Emin ran away, prompting Emin to create fliers to nail up around the neighborhood asking for help finding it. When neighbors realized that the missing cat was Emin's, her posters began disappearing and were being offered on the street for as much as about $800. A spokesperson for East London's White Cube gallery, who is sometimes in the position of defending Emin from critics who deny that her work qualifies as "art" (Emin's most famous piece was a messy bed), told reporters that the poster was not art, even though the public might regard it as art.

-- New York artist Chrissy Conant, 39, will display 13 of her reproductive eggs, floating in silicone, at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Conn., in May, in an exhibit addressing the pressures that women feel when their biological clocks are ticking down. Conant said in an interview that, in fact, she was actively seeking a man: "Consider me for consumption and consider my eggs, because I think they're pretty good."

The U.S. Postal Service revealed in March that 10 men had already been convicted as part of an Internet group that exchanged videos of themselves administering beatings to children (often their own). One man wanted to join the club but lacked an authentic video to contribute and so made one of himself administering corporal punishment to a small mannequin. Among the group: a middle school teacher, a nurse, a former Boy Scout leader, and a former Sunday school teacher.

Carol Urness, recently retired University of Minnesota librarian, opened a used-book store in February in St. Anthony, Minn., consisting of about 1,000 books from her own collection, but told a Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter that often she refuses to sell a book on the shelf because she can't stand to part with it. "The first day, a woman walked in and bought three books," she said, "and I about had a stroke." "This bookstore is hard to find," she added, "and once you get here, it's almost impossible to buy anything."

Just a few weeks ago, News of the Weird reported on electricity salesman Dennis Lee, who is under order from attorneys general in seven states, but a more recent report by Las Vegas Weekly shed even more light on the scams, which have so far hooked more than 2,000 people. One of Lee's dealers, Conrad Sorensen of Henderson, Nev., told the newspaper that he purchased (for $20,000 in 1999) the right to sell Lee's free-energy inventions (e.g., silent jackhammers, oil-eating balls, cars that run on water) and to recruit fee-paying "witnesses," who would buy Lee's generators, get free electricity for life, and sell their excess wattage to nonwitnesses. Sorensen, who believes Lee's work is a sign from God, said confidently that the magic generators will finally be unveiled on July 4, 2002, but a Lee critic in Pennsylvania said Lee's people have been assigning, and missing, such deadlines for 15 years.

The letter in which Texas gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez thanked the Texas State Teachers Association for its endorsement contained run-on sentences, a dangling modifier, a subject-verb disagreement, and the word "gonernor." The Rhino Management Group in Africa criticized "green hunting" (hunting with tranquilizer guns) because of evidence that animals hit more than once are permanently damaged. A 27-year-old woman told reporters in January that when she called Camarillo, Calif., police on Saturday, Dec. 22, to report a sexual assault, she was told that the staff is limited on weekends and that she should call back Monday morning (and when she did that, detectives counseled her to report for a medical exam).

Thierry Meyssan's book "The Frightening Fraud" became a best seller in France with its thesis that the U.S. government staged the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Two people commandeered a Krispy Kreme truck with its back door open and led police on a chase that created a 15-mile-long trail of scattered doughnuts (Slidell, La.). A nursing home complained that the unionizing vote by its workers should be overturned since someone put a series of voodoo signs around the workplace, thus frightening the home's large Haitian-American work force (Miami). The annual April Fool's ice cream flavor this year at the Wahlburger restaurant was vanilla diced with hamburger sandwiches (bun, lettuce, meat); last year, french fries were used (Avon, N.Y.).

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

-- Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, accepting an award in March in Coolum, Australia, for lowering his country's AIDS infection rate from 28 percent to 6 percent, implied that the task was made easier because, he said, no gays live in Uganda (despite a 2001 Amnesty International report condemning the torture of gays in that country). And officials of South Africa's ruling African National Congress issued a report in March questioning the existence of HIV (though 4.7 million of its citizens have AIDS) and attributing the pandemic to Western drug companies' anti-AIDS drugs.

-- A Stanford University School of Medicine report in March identified a physiological disorder that causes sound-asleep people to act out rough sex, including rape. Professor Christian Guilleminault said that although the problem appears psychological on the surface, he found telltale glitches in brain waves during sleep in all of his test subjects.

Ted Hudson was arrested in Casper, Wyo., in January for allegedly setting up a secret video camera in his boss's bathroom and catching the boss's wife showering (which he tried to tell the boss was just a practical joke). And deputy sheriff Gabriel Bruno was arrested in January and charged with placing feces in the sinks of two Rhode Island Superior Court judges (which he told authorities was just a practical joke). And in March, Idaho state Rep. Kent Higgins presented two colleagues who are early-childhood-education advocates with an "award": an old, swastika-adorned photograph of an Aryan child from the Nazi Germany breeding-scheme collection (which, he later told his stunned colleagues, was all a joke).

-- Among the absurdities touching Enron Corp. was the report in February by a former employee, broadcast by NBC News, that the company ran a mock trading floor in its Houston headquarters, furnished with desks, large flat-panel computer screens and teleconference rooms, for the sole purpose of making visitors believe the company furiously traded commodities full-time. In reality, revealed the employee, the equipment was only hooked up internally, and the employee-"traders," who appeared to be frantically placing orders, were merely talking to each other.

-- In February, a workplace-dispute murder in Menlo Park, Calif., was facilitated by the killer's phoning in a pizza order to Domino's and waiting until the delivery man innocently got the victim to open the door and present himself as a gunshot target. After the shots were fired, according to a neighbor (interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle), the Domino's deliverer fled in fear but a few minutes later, another Domino's man arrived, gathered up the left-behind pizzas, and resumed the delivery route.

-- Arson defendant Steven McDonald, 47, was acting as his own lawyer at his trial in Mount Vernon, Wash., in February, and when he took the witness stand, he used the simplistic tactic of posing his questions, as the lawyer, to "Mr. McDonald," the accused perpetrator. However, since a key police witness had testified earlier that he saw the arsonist "arguing with himself" at the crime scene, McDonald the "lawyer" sought to get his "client" to say the perpetrator could not have been him and must have been someone else: "Mr. McDonald," he asked, "have you ever talked to yourself?"

In Ocala, Fla., in December, motorist Richard Stengel, 57, was charged with aggravated battery after he won a handicapped parking space from a 77-year-old woman who was standing in it, trying to reserve it for her motorist-husband; "Lady," Stengel allegedly said, "if you don't move, I'm going to run you over," and he did, knocking her down (even though a St. Petersburg Times report said Stengel's car did not appear to display a handicapped parking permit). And in March, Lee Damron, 48, and Richard Cavalier, 59, dueled over a handicapped parking space in front of Oak Hill Hospital in Spring Hill, Fla., Damron with a sword which he carried with him and Cavalier with a registered 9mm handgun; the wheelchair-using Cavalier prevailed.

Leon Watson, 22, of Albuquerque, N.M., was arrested for allegedly severely beating his 2-year-old son in February; he said the kid had given him a "mad dog" look reminiscent of gang members staring down rivals. And Thomas Mitchell was convicted of shooting his girlfriend in Galveston, Texas, in February; she had uttered the name "New Jersey" to him, which he said was one of four names that enrage him (the others: Wisconsin, Snickers, Mars bar). And Lee Barter, 39, was sentenced in January in Portsmouth, England, for stabbing a friend twice for cheating at Trivial Pursuit (adding extra "cheeses" to his counter).

Police Chief Pete Bradley was fired by the city of Woodfin, N.C., in February following a dispute with Mayor Homer Honeycutt, who had been captured on audio tape bragging about how he could fix traffic tickets (though there was no evidence that he actually fixed any), and as part of the mutual mudslinging, a State Bureau of Investigation report from 2000 was leaked, disclosing that Bradley had "engaged in parties where men wore diapers as part of their sexual behavior," according to an Asheville Citizen-Times report.

The Federal Court of Canada decided in February that Hugh Trainor was entitled to veterans' benefits for service during World War II despite the fact that he had been ruled medically unfit before becoming a member of the armed forces. The court ruled that Trainor's boat ride from Prince Edward Island to his recruiting-station physical exam in Nova Scotia qualified as service because it was dangerous, in that German submarines were thought to be operating in the Atlantic Ocean at the time.

Charity cow-patty bingo games at state fairs continue, such as those in Connellsville, Pa., in April and Calgary, Alberta, in June (in which a field is divided into squares, money bet on the squares, and a winner declared by which square receives the first cow deposit). But in February, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protested the cow-patty bingo fund-raiser at Florida Southern College (Lakeland, Fla.), accusing the organizers of both physical abuse (feeding the cow laxatives, which the organizers denied) and emotional abuse (because it is such a "demeaning" and "silly" game).

Iraq appears to be preparing construction contracts in a serious bid to host the 2012 Olympics, according to a Washington Times report (March). Canada's Federal Court ruled that inmate Jack Maurice has a constitutional right to vegetarian meals; the convicted sex offender had charged that eating meat is morally reprehensible (January). The Washington Department of Corrections admitted that a shortage of state facilities has forced it to house post-release sex offenders (those who have served their sentences but are at a high risk of recidivism) at hotels and motels around the state, without informing guests in adjacent rooms (February).

A 23-year-old man who was shot in the leg cut the bullet out himself with an X-acto knife and sold it back to the shooter for $200 to hinder the prosecution's case against him (Bend, Ore.). A protesting man shot himself to death after an 18-hostage standoff in the former world headquarters of Philips Electronics because he was upset at misrepresentations about the quality on 16-by-9-inch television screens (Amsterdam). A 73-year-old woman was trapped by a spring-loaded newspaper vending machine in a Wal-Mart for 20 minutes until an employee volunteered to put another 50 cents in the machine to free her (Geneseo, Ill.) The AT&T Universal credit card company turned down applicant Dallas Hill Jr., accidentally sending him 2,986 rejections by U.S. Mail (Telford, Tenn.)

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

-- Pushing the Advertising Envelope: A State University of New York at Buffalo professor, in a recent ecology journal, expressed confidence that eventually butterflies could be genetically altered to permit advertising logos and other designs on their wings. And in March, the British video game company, Acclaim Entertainment, announced it would "raise advertising to a new level" by offering to pay relatives of the deceased a fee if it could put small billboards on gravestones.

Now awaiting approval for admission to state bar associations are law-school graduates William Francis Hanlon III, 49, in Florida (a former police officer who was implicated in the 1979 fatal police beating of black Miami motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie) and James J. Hamm, 53, in Arizona (who served 17 years in prison for murdering a drifter in the 1970s). And the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal ruled in December that Montreal police could not refuse to hire a shoplifter whose conviction had been erased by a "conditional" sentence. And Sunderland University in England recently hired as a lecturer Professor Simone Doublett, 27, who six years ago admitted to having invented an elaborate tale of satanic abuse rituals against her so she could be paid from a New Zealand government victim fund.

-- A sheriff's official in Arapahoe County, Colo. (near Denver), admitted in March that deputies had inadvertently placed a 16-year-old girl in a holding cell early one morning for about 40 minutes, alongside a 34-year-old man who was being held for one sexual assault and suspected of two others. The error came to light when the girl reported to her lawyer that the man had, indeed, forcibly fondled her in the cell.

-- Carl Franklin, 30, was reportedly inebriated and about to urinate by a fence when Tallahassee, Fla., police called out to him. Startled, and intending to run, but needing to zip up quickly and yet still handle the cigarette in his hand, he stuffed the smoke in his pocket and took off running. A few seconds later, officers noticed that Franklin's pants were on fire, which did not slow him immediately, but he did fall down when enough of the waistband burned that the trousers came down.

-- In Fort Worth, Texas, jurors in the January murder trial of Sammy Alvarez, 54, accidentally checked the wrong box on the verdict form and sent Alvarez only to probation; they told reporters they had intended to sentence him to prison (two to 20 years) plus probation but marked the probation-only box. And the attorney-general of New South Wales, Australia, began an investigation in February after a man who was convicted of manslaughter was inadvertently provided the names and addresses of his jurors after he made a routine request for trial records to help him with his appeal.

A 52-year-old employee of Golden Peanut Co. slipped off a catwalk and sank way down into a vat of tons of unshelled peanuts before being rescued (Norfolk, Va., February). A sludge-hauling firm was fined about $12,000 for a 2001 incident in which its driver swerved in traffic, sending a ton of oily gunk overboard, much of it onto a 44-year-old man driving with his car window open (Cheltenham, England, February). One young woman died and another was injured after being buried beneath falling, room-sized rolls of carpeting at Carpet Closeouts (Chicago, February).

Sarasota, Fla., sheriff's Sgt. David London, a 24-year veteran of the force, resigned in March in the midst of sexual harassment complaints from female officers, including one who said London told her that he had to stop his patrol car at least four times on every shift in order to masturbate.

Walter Kidde Portable Equipment Inc. decided to go to trial late last year after being sued by X-IT products of Virginia Beach, Va., because Kidde thought X-IT would never be able to prove its copyright claim that it had originated the package design Kidde was using for the fire-escape ladder it was selling. However, X-IT easily proved that Kidde stole it, in that the woman and boy pictured climbing down the ladder in Kidde's design were actually the sister-in-law and nephew of X-IT founder Aldo DiBelardino. (A jury awarded X-IT $116 million.)

-- News of the Weird has reported on adults who have inadequately cared for elderly parents and allowed their homes to lapse into squalor, but the performance of Margaret Bobo, 42, of Tacoma, Wash., is noteworthy. She was arrested in January after health authorities found her 81-year-old mother living in a garbage-infested home, perched on a pile of trash about 4 feet high. The younger Bobo apparently never notified authorities about her mother, even though she diligently brought her mother meals and water every single day and admitted that she had to climb over the garbage piles to get into her mother's room and had to "slide" back down the piles to leave.

-- A 1993 News of the Weird story reported that the Kenosha, Wis., City Council had attempted to strengthen its anti-nudity regulations by proposing to make it illegal for a man to be in public with his "genitals in a discernibly turgid state" even though "covered," and a similar proposal was made in the Mississippi legislature in 2000, but neither became law. In February 2002, township supervisors in Numidia, Pa. (off of I-80 near Bloomsburg), succeeded in passing such an ordinance (though the town counsel, Todd Kerstetter, said the law would not apply to "normal occurrences").

A South Korean government ministry, aiming to reduce food waste, announced in March that by its calculations, the South officially threw out more food last year than North Korea consumed. The Australian cell phone company Telstra apologized for abruptly closing the account of a cancer patient, allegedly because of a company policy encouraging the settlement of accounts before they pass on to a deceased's estate. A U.S. Treasury Department audit in December found that Internal Revenue Service could not account for 2,300 computers supposedly in its employees' hands (but IRS is still expected to require that taxpayers under audit meticulously account for their income and deductions).

Germany's agriculture ministry announced it would implement European Union guidelines requiring pig farmers to spend quality time with their stock (20 seconds per head per day, plus playthings and brighter lighting) (Bonn). A 15-year-old boy was arrested just after he breathlessly took a lunchtime seat in his school cafeteria; police said that, 39 minutes earlier, he had robbed a Bancorp South bank (Jackson, Miss.). A bald eagle swooped down and carried off a 13-pound dachshund, 300 feet, before losing its grip (Madison, Maine). Two Seattle police officers, responding to a nonemergency, crashed into each other, totaling both cars and damaging a nearby SUV driven by an undercover officer.

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