-- University of Connecticut physics professor Ronald Mallett, 57, said in April that after years of study, he hopes to begin experiments this year leading to genuine time travel, involving probably no more than a neutron or two at first but laying the groundwork for transporting larger objects. Mallett believes his theory is solid (straight from Einstein's Theory of Relativity), but that amassing the amount of energy necessary even to move small objects may be impossible with current knowledge. Mallett said he's been thinking about time travel since age 10, when his father died, because he wanted to go back in time to warn his dad of the dangers of smoking.

-- According to a March Washington Post Magazine feature, a deaf Bethesda, Md., female couple recently gave birth to a child whom they had conceived by artificial insemination and specially designed to be born deaf. (They had used sperm from a man with a long family history of deafness.) The couple said they merely want their son to be like the rest of the family, including their older daughter. The boy is deaf in one ear, but the other ear may still develop hearing.

To "create a condition of silent introspection" during probation, a federal judge sentenced recidivist petty criminal Edward Bello, 60, in December to refrain from watching television for 10 months (New York City). And after pleading guilty in February to stabbing a man, Leah Marie Fairbanks, 25, was sentenced to 14 months' probation, during which she was to read the Declaration of Independence and seven classic novels and to write reports on each; her co-defendant, sentenced by another judge, got eight years in prison (Duluth, Minn.). And Luther Crawford, 50, who has 12 kids by 11 different women, avoided prison in March (he was $33,000 behind in child payments) by agreeing to a judge's offer to refrain from all sexual intercourse until he is paid up (although he said a week later that he thought the agreement had been a joke) (Louisville, Ky.).

-- Ian Cheeseman, 34, who pleaded guilty in October to multiple counts of sexual assault against girls in several Canadian cities, took the stand in February in Ottawa at his sentencing hearing and vehemently denied that he had gone so far as to actually rape any of his victims. "That's not my thing," he said, referring to intercourse. "Urophilia (drinking the urine of young girls) is my thing."

-- Marvin Martin II was convicted in February in Ottawa, Ohio, of shooting a 15-year-old boy to death following an incident with the boy's mother, despite Martin's insistence that the perp was not he but his clone (he says he was cloned three times while in the Army). And Edward Lawrence Frostbutter, 17, was arrested in January and charged with raping a classmate in a restroom stall at Calvert High School (Calvert County, Md.), despite his insistence that it was his alter ego "Sam" who had committed the crime; the victim was a friend of the accused, thus "knew" "Sam," and went into the stall voluntarily with Edward but said she was surprised when "Sam" showed up instead.

-- Jerome Heckenkamp, indicted for illegally hacking into computers at eBay, Lycos and other companies, challenged the charges at a court appearance in San Jose, Calif., in March by denying that he is the person named in the indictment, in that the document refers to a "HECKENKAMP" in all capital letters, whereas he capitalizes only the H. And two months earlier, Frederick R. James, 41, facing drug charges in East St. Louis, Ill., told the judge at a hearing that he owns a copyright on his name and that if the judge wants to utter it, he'll have to pay a royalty of $500,000 each time.

-- Auckland, New Zealand, police sergeant William Paul McKenzie told a judge in January that it was not his fault that he drove into a 43-year-old blind therapist in a crosswalk last year, knocking her down and breaking her leg. The victim was accompanied, as usual, by her guide dog, trained never to step into moving traffic, but according to the defense lawyer, since McKenzie looked both ways before accelerating, the problem must have been dog negligence.

-- Nice Tries: Michael William Rahmer, 26, arrested for purse-snatching in Reno, Nev., in January, told the police he was only trying to test police response time to a crime report (and that he was indeed impressed with how fast they caught him). And female leaders of Britain's large Unison trade union proposed in January that the organization join the cannabis-legalization movement, calling it a "women's issue," on the ground that smoking pot is a no-calorie way to lose weight.

In February, public school employee Maggie Wallace, 45, was sentenced to a year in jail; last Sept. 12, she had thought the kids needed a breather from the events the day before and so called in a bomb threat so the school would close (Johnstown, N.Y.). And Jose Portillo, 27, was charged in February with having sex with an underage girl, who was 12 at the time and then became pregnant; Portillo told police he thought she was 13 (Albuquerque).

In February, prosecutors in Orleans County, Vt., finally got around to filing a murder charge against Jamie Ovitt for killing his ex-stepfather Duane Perry in April 2000. Allegedly, Ovitt shot Perry because he was mad that Perry was spreading the word around town (truthfully) that Jamie and his mother were fathered by the same man (a fellow named "Hebe" Ovitt). According to the prosecutor, the murder was not smooth: Ovitt's fatal bullet went right through Duane Perry and hit the ex-Mrs. Perry (who was helping Jamie), bloodying her knee, and after they buried Duane in a deep grave, they jumped into Duane's truck to get away, only to realize that the keys were still in Duane's pocket.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (51) The careless burglar who makes his getaway on foot, oblivious to the footprints he's leaving in the snow or mud, usually leading to his own nearby home or car, as was the case for two men who stole a boy's tooth-fairy money in March from a home in Portage, Ind. (52) And the playing of dreadfully unpopular music on loudspeakers as a way of dispersing unruly young people from public places, as the city of Santa Cruz, Calif., did to clear loiterers on Pacific Avenue in January.

In April, the University of Minnesota Press published a treatise, "Harmful to Minors," whose thesis is that society should relax the restrictions on child-adult sex. Scotland introduced a systemwide experimental program in prisons giving methadone to inmates about to be released, to allow them to build up a tolerance so as not to overdose on heroin immediately upon hitting the street. In a divorce case set for court in June, the ex-wife of former Zambian president Frederick Chiluba is asking for more than $2.5 billion, equivalent to about three-fourths of the country's gross domestic product.

The government of driver-lax Iran reported that on one day in late March, 122 people died and 2,000 were injured in more than 900 different traffic accidents. Britain's Susie Stephens, 36, a world authority on pedestrian safety, who was speaking at a biking/walking conference, was accidentally run over by a tour bus and killed as she crossed the street near her hotel (St. Louis). A 12-year-old girl bloodied the male flasher who confronted her in a hotel elevator, by grabbing his zipper and yanking it up quickly (Virginia Beach, Va.). A Univest bank accepted for deposit two $100 bills chewed up and swallowed by the depositor's dog and recovered only when the dog answered nature's call (Hatfield, Pa.).

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

-- 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/.)