-- In a May dispatch from Cuba, The Wall Street Journal reported that Fidel Castro proposed in 1987 to alleviate a chronic milk shortage by trying to get his scientists to clone the most productive cows, shrunk to the size of dogs so that each family could keep one inside its apartment. The cows would feed on grass grown inside under fluorescent lights. Cuba was the home of the late Ubre Blanca, the Guinness book record-holder as the most milk-productive cow of all time.

-- A Dutch livestock-breeding-device manufacturer recently began selling a $27 vibrator that supposedly relaxes sows during artificial insemination to increase the chances of fertilization. Said the sales manager at the company Schippers Bladel BV, "Once the vibrator is inserted, the pig's ears will go up and she will stand ready to be serviced." The company also makes a remote-controlled plastic pig whose movements, mating sounds and scents supposedly encourage the sow to be serviced.

Among those arrested in May for inexplicable nudity: a 45-year-old man, driving naked on Interstate 95 (Cocoa, Fla.); a 23-year-old man, driving a pickup truck naked over the lawn of the state capitol (Lincoln, Neb.); a woman riding naked atop an SUV (Indianapolis); a 21-year-old prisoner who stripped and jumped against a bulletproof courthouse window in a futile escape attempt (Hillsboro, Mo.); a man in his 20s who ran onto an ice rink naked, interrupting a late-night skating class (Richmond, British Columbia); and a 20-year-old man who broke into a house and immediately removed his clothes (Eugene, Ore.).

-- They've Got the Shining: After the body of Chandra Levy was found in a wooded area of Washington, D.C., in May, former Georgia state Rep. Dorothy Pelote, who via a much-maligned psychic vision last year "saw" Levy's body in a ditch in the woods, said this proves that she has "the gift." And Fort Lauderdale, Fla., attorney William Cone told reporters in April that Federal Trade Commission fraud charges against his client, the psychic Miss Cleo, are bogus because she actually can see the future. Cone also said his California-born client's claim to be a Jamaican shaman was true, too, and gave seven possible explanations for that, saying one of them described Miss Cleo but refusing to tell reporters which one it was.

-- Testifying at the child pornography trial of John Robin Sharpe in Vancouver, British Columbia, in January, English literature professor James Miller (University of Western Ontario) said Sharpe's self-published writings were comparable to mainstream literature such as that of Dickens and Dante. According to Miller, Sharpe's book "Sam Paloc's Boyabuse: Flogging, Fun, and Fortitude: A Collection of Kiddie Kink Classics," was "transgressive literature" that "celebrates, in a ritual way, alternative visions of culture," "reveal(ing) the seismic ironies in the new world order associated with globalization." (In March, a judge acquitted Sharpe on his writings but convicted him on two counts of possessing child porn photos.)

-- In Scranton, Pa., in May, Janice Taylor, who maimed her 4-year-old son in 2000 in a stabbing attack because she thought he was the Antichrist, filed a lawsuit against two psychiatrists and an obstetrician for not giving her enough anti-psychosis medication. Taylor was pregnant at the time she attacked the boy, and her doctors were wary of prescribing more medication for fear it would harm her fetus, but they finally relented and gave small doses of Thorazine. (The baby was born unharmed, even though Taylor made a stab at it, too, plunging the knife into her abdomen.)

-- According to police in Woodinville, Wash., when Anita Durrett, 42, tried to speed away in her car with $266 worth of groceries shoplifted from an Albertson's store, an employee pursued her in his car, and when Durrett lost control and crashed at 90 mph, her 9-year-old daughter, riding in the front seat, was killed. Though Durrett has been convicted of vehicular manslaughter, she filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in May against Albertson's, claiming that they should not have chased her.

-- Italy's highest appeals court ruled in April that a 29-year-old out-of-work lawyer still has the right to be housed and financially supported by his parents. The son, Marco Andreoli, owns property and has access to a $200,000 trust fund, but he objected when his father cut off his $675 monthly allowance that had been ordered when his parents divorced, saying he needed it because he had not found a job fulfilling enough. (More than a third of all men in Italy between ages 30 and 34 still live with their parents.)

-- Born-again-Christian roommates Derrick Mitchell, 38, and Teresa Tafawa, 58, were served eviction notices in May by their landlord in Cornwall, Ontario, because of complaints that they pray loudly and often around the apartment complex. Mitchell says he can't help himself when he receives "visions," especially the holy alerts about local devil worship; he said he is moved to speak in a high, quivering voice that Tafawa calls "the ecstasies" and that the pair may pray and sing for several hours a day, even in the laundry room and the parking lot. Said Tafawa, "We try to walk with the Lord all day."

In April, Judge Gerald Jewers of the Manitoba (Canada) Court of Queen's Bench awarded Lynette Mary Sant, 55, about $63,000 (U.S.) because she believes very strongly that a company's chemical vapors made her ill even though the judge admits that there was no evidence that the vapors caused her problems. The judge found Sant's symptoms were real but that tests exposing Sant to distilled water had the same effect.

A 54-year-old school guard was accidentally shot to death by a colleague as the two demonstrated quick-draw techniques to each other outside a school dance (New Orleans, April). A 38-year-old angler was killed when he overestimated the height of a cement bridge beam he drove his boat under while speeding at midnight in a no-wake zone (Wilton Manors, Fla., March). The 22-year-old man behind the wheel of a drive-by-shooting car was accidentally killed by the passenger-side shooter, firing out the driver's-side window (Los Angeles, May).

High school students in Palm Beach County, Fla., needed only a score of 23 percent to pass a standardized state history test (55 is an A) (May). Through bureaucratic error, sensitive U.S. Air Force spy-plane parts, originally intended for destruction, wound up in private hands and were up for auction on the online eBay service (May). Also through bureaucratic error, 50 large boxes of sensitive abuse reports and medical records of foster children and other clients of Florida's embattled Department of Children and Families were offered at auction and purchased by a TV reporter for $5 (May).

Three young Amish drivers were charged with traffic violations after their late-night buggies' race caused a collision with another Amish-driven buggy (Leon, N.Y.). A 17-year-old boy who had allegedly vandalized a beekeeper's hives with a truck was identified because his family Bible had fallen out of the driver's side door during the incident (Northeast Harbor, Maine). A 24-year-old man dashed frenziedly out of his apartment after settling down to sleep and encountering a 3-foot-long snake under the sheets, left over from a previous tenant (Guelph, Ontario). Police put out bulletins for the "dork bandit," named for his demeanor, who is wanted in three robberies (Atlanta).

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

-- "Hundreds" of young Chinese women and men have recently endured the painful-for-months "Ilizarov procedure" to gain a few inches in height to supposedly improve their social and professional status. According to a May New York Times dispatch, the $6,000 procedure involves breaking bones in the shins or thighs, then manually adjusting special leg braces four times a day that pull the bones slightly apart, then waiting until the bones grow back and fuse together (which usually takes about six months, plus a three-month recovery). Said one 33-year-old, 5-foot-tall woman (aiming for 5-4): "I'll have a better job, a better boyfriend, and eventually a better husband. It's a long-term investment."

-- In May, Great Britain's Home Office, deciding on the proper compensation for a man who served 11 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, ruled that he was entitled to about $1.1 million, but said he would have to reimburse the prison about $63,000 for 11 years' room and board. Said the outraged Michael O'Brien, 34, who had been freed by a Court of Appeal in 1999: "They don't charge guilty people for bed and board. They only charge innocent people."

Germany's lower house of parliament voted in May to add "and animals" to its constitution's guarantee of protection for the dignity of humans. On the other hand, the director of Washington, D.C.,'s National Zoo denied The Washington Post a look at its animals' medical records in May in part to protect the animals' right of "privacy," a claim which stunned at least one animal-rights advocate. And a British ad agency came under fire in May for a cutesy commercial featuring a dog engaging (via trick photography) in X-rated undulations (supposedly imitating what he observed at a certain randy-young-singles' resort); critics said the dog in the ad was being held up to "ridicule and indignity."

-- What was described in a January Times of London story as an obscure panel of European Union bureaucrats (the Nomenclature sub-group of the Customs Code Committee) has been meeting in Brussels off and on for months now for the purpose of deciding the thorny question of how many lumps (20 percent to 30 percent) are permissible in a can of mushroom (or pasta) sauce before those foods are classified as "vegetables," which would be subject to much higher import taxes than "sauces." As of late May, there has been no announcement from the sub-group.

-- Among the most notable "pork barrel" projects in the FY 2002 federal budget, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, were: $273,000 for Blue Springs, Mo., to fight the incursion of "goth" culture among its young; $50,000 for San Luis Obispo, Calif., to remove gang members' tattoos; $450,000 to restore chimneys on Cumberland Island, Ga.; $240,000 for pecan research; $260,000 to explore asparagus technology; $200,000 to upgrade a kayak river course in Wausau, Wis.; and $600,000 to research the sex life of the South African ground squirrel.

-- According to a January report of the Department of Energy's inspector general, federal facilities in Tennessee and Ohio actually tested in all seriousness a procedure that was no more than a fancy dowsing device ("passive magnetic resonance anomaly mapping") worn on the wrist of an operator, who senses underground water, faults, buried objects and chemicals, via supposed changes in "magnetic fields." Apparently, no one at the facilities was skeptical even though the contractor said only one person in the world was "qualified" to operate the PMRAM, and he lives in the Ukraine.

-- Rodney Jones of Mendocino, Calif., was the victim of "identity theft" in 1999, facilitated by the Department of Motor Vehicles' issuing a duplicate license to the thief (who is black; Jones is white). Eventually, his records were restored, but his attempt to get DMV to pay for the inconvenience to him failed when a state appeals court ruled in April 2002 that DMV could not be held liable for issuing the bogus license. According to Jones, DMV has throughout refused to give him the name of the identity thief, citing applicants' "privacy" rights.

-- In November, the District of Columbia Department of Corrections carelessly failed to release a homeless man after charges against him were dropped because, according to The Washington Post, computer records were not updated. (He stayed in jail for five months.) And the same department, also according to the Post, mistakenly released a bank robber in March, then tracked him down at his mother's home by telephone and told him to report back to jail, but the department did not bother to send anyone to the home to get him. (He eventually returned on his own.)

James O. Riccardi III, 42, was charged with five misdemeanor counts by Higginsville, Mo., police in May in connection with bizarre phone calls to high school athletes in which the caller pretends to be a University of Missouri coach offering scholarships but then turns the conversation to the students' spanking their bare buttocks to show their dedication to college sports. The university said it has received 86 complaints about similar calls to student athletes throughout Kansas and Missouri. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch-AP, 5-26-02]

Justin Aragon, 19, was arrested in March in Albuquerque, N.M., and charged with roughing up his girlfriend and threatening to kill members of her family. According to police, his reign of terror came to an end in the incident when he collapsed and hit his head on a coffee table after informing the victim that he had laced her drink with a toxic substance but then had accidentally drunk it himself.

News of the Weird has reported several times on antisocial, and criminal, behavior in which the perpetrator commemorates his work in meticulous written detail. China News Service reported in May that Li Qingpu, 56, was sentenced to 20 years in prison following a trial in southern Hainan province for visiting prostitutes while he was supposed to be on duty as a government textile official. The evidence against him was from four file cabinets in his house, containing 95 diaries listing his sex partners by name, time and place, including lengthy descriptions of the women and what took place between them, plus fastidiously labeled pubic hair samples from 236 of them.

A "mini-industry" has developed in which pregnant South Korean women plan U.S. vacations, apparently for the sole purpose of gaining automatic American citizenship for the babies, according to the Los Angeles Times (May). An armed Buddhist monk, complaining that he was harassed by police, rushed Thailand's parliament building firing his AK-47 (May). Two British tourists caused a furor among townspeople in Mombasa, Kenya, when they spent about $140 (about half the average monthly wage in Kenya) to save the life of an injured monitor lizard they had come across (May).

An intoxicated 55-year-old man ran his car into a ditch, then climbed back to the highway, where he was accidentally hit by another car, driven by his intoxicated 43-year-old wife (Canaseraga, N.Y.). A 26-year-old college student was diagnosed with repetitive strain injury from a year's worth of hoisting about 25 pints of beer a week at a tavern (Manchester, England). Surgeons reported that a 7-year-old girl who had half of her brain removed in 1998 now speaks Dutch and Turkish fluently (Rotterdam, Netherlands). Minutes after allegedly robbing a bank, a 39-year-old man was captured when police spotted him holding forth at a bar a few blocks away (Winfield, Ind.).

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

-- Two 23-year-old California filmmakers told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that, as of early May, they had sold about 10,000 copies of their "Bumfights" video ($19.95), which entertains viewers with real fistfights and dangerous stunts willingly engaged in by actual homeless people (many of them intoxicated) on Las Vegas's streets. Some participants say the video is a realistic portrayal of their violent, everyday existence, and the two filmmakers, Ray Laticia and Ty Beeson, professed sympathy for their subjects by subtitling the video "Cause for Concern."

-- The Denver Fire Department responded to an emergency call in April from the adjacent city of Montbello when a woman reported being trapped in her home by 3-feet-diameter tumbleweeds that had filled her yard and jammed against her house, to a height of 16 feet. A department lieutenant said there were "thousands" in the yard. (In January, residents of a Kennewick, Wash., neighborhood were deluged with tumbleweeds "as big as Buicks," according to one man, but of particular concern were a small number that appeared to have been blown in from the nearby, highly contaminated Hanford nuclear reservation.)

Recent Punishments: A father pleaded guilty to stuffing so much toilet paper down his 7-month-old daughter's throat that some had to be surgically removed (Fairbanks, Alaska; May). A mother and stepfather were charged with forcing her 12-year-old son into a doghouse and blowing cigarette smoke at him through the door (Newark, Del.; April). A man was sentenced to 90 days in jail for forcing his 7-year-old son to accompany him to a funeral home and to touch a corpse (North Platte, Neb.; January). A 41-year-old woman, jealous to see her boyfriend out with her 16-year-old daughter, was convicted of attempted murder for dousing the girl with gasoline and setting her on fire, "to teach you a lesson you'll never forget" (Miami; March).

-- Police in Georgetown, Ky., charged Georgetown College beauty pageant coordinator Kathy Wallace with assault in February after she allegedly roughed up contestant Keaton Lynch Brown, 18, who had insisted on, as her talent presentation, lassoing a stuffed pig onstage. Said another contestant, "There was some controversy (between Wallace and Brown) over whether her talent was ladylike."

-- In January, South Africa's Constitutional Court voted 5-4 to deny the petition of law graduate (and Rastafarian) Garreth Prince to practice law, citing his admission that he intends to continue smoking marijuana heavily. Said Prince, "(I)t's my mission, man (to be a "dagga"-smoking lawyer). Mandela struggled for 27 years."

-- Hermilo Mendez, 28, behind bars in Dilley, Texas, and finally having the time to work on his long-desired divorce, wrote the county clerk in San Antonio in March to start the paperwork, but admitted that he needed some help, in that he could not remember his wife's name. The couple had married in 1992 after a one-week courtship, and she cleared out eight days after that. After some research, the clerk informed Mendez that his better half was "Violeta Sanchez Juarez" and that she had apparently long ago returned to Mexico.

-- Korean-born artist Hoon Lee licked yellow cake icing off of the entire reach of a 2,500-square-foot Omaha, Neb., art gallery floor in May in order, he said, for "people to look at the icing and feel a certain way (about the color yellow), whether they know what (that feeling) is or not." And Mr. Cang Xin of China, exhibiting at the Biennale show in Sydney, Australia, in May, asked visitors to bring him any objects they want for him to lick; in his "Lick the World" show, he said, he improves the world's spirituality with his tongue.

-- Found in Illinois: Two men doing minor roofing work at Fox Valley Blueprint in downtown Aurora, Ill., in May found a bucket filled with rain water, but when they poured off the water, they realized it was filled with approximately 1,000 human teeth. (At press time, police were still investigating.) And in April in a wooded area near Countryside, Ill., a passerby found an abandoned 55-gallon container with hazardous-material labels that was later revealed to contain either goat semen or pig semen, originally shipped by the Iowa firm Swine Genetics.

-- At the April trial of Anthony Lanza for driving the getaway car in a 1998 murder near St. Petersburg, Fla., the jury was deadlocked, 11-1, and Lanza, certain that it was 11-1 for acquittal, waived his right (against the advice of his lawyer) to a unanimous decision, which, if he had read the jury correctly, would have meant that he would go free. The judge accepted Lanza's waiver, but the verdict happened to be 11-1 for conviction. Lanza (the son of a former, alleged Genovese family "capo") was sentenced to life in prison and immediately challenged the outcome as unfair.

-- Albuquerque, N.M., police arrested Amadeo Salguero, 21, in May and charged him with carjacking three people at gunpoint and making off with their Acura, which, according to a detective, contained one of the best stereo systems in town. Salguero was busted after he later called one of the victims and asked (according to police), "I don't want there to be hard feelings, but, hey, how do you hook up your amp?" The call was traced to the cell phone of Salguero, who happens to live across the street from the scene of the carjacking.

Earlier this year, Plainfield Memorial School (Norwich, Conn.) decided that it was so concerned about elementary school pupils' privacy that it would not publish the last names of students making the honor roll (thus denying them traditional recognition in local newspapers). But in April, KPRC-TV (Houston) revealed that several school districts around Houston routinely make publicly available the full name, address, phone number and photograph of every student in school under an exception to federal privacy law that allows "directory"-type information to be released without parental authorization.

The restaurant of the brand-new Ritz Carlton hotel in downtown New York City employs what it believes is the world's first water steward, to recommend which bottled waters from its collection go best with which fancy dishes (February). The California Assembly's education committee, concerned about kids' sore backs, voted to require school textbooks to be smaller (April). Executed child-killer Daniel Lee Zirkle's last request, as his idea of contrition, was that his ashes be spread over the graves of his two victims (one of which was his own daughter) (but the girls' horrified mother got a judge to stop it) (Richmond, Va., April).

Twenty-seven men with outstanding arrest warrants turned themselves in to police specifically so they could serve their relatively short sentences right away and not have to worry about being in TV-less jail during the World Cup matches (Hertfordshire, England). The Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, city council repealed a sloppily written, 20-year-old law that made it illegal for an animal to answer nature's call within the city limits. A California state program on medical marijuana was criticized by several participants because of the low quality of the government's dope (allegedly full of sticks and stems) (San Jose). Police found $8 million worth of cocaine hidden in a discarded sofa that crack addicts were lounging on on a side street, consuming their hard-to-come-by nickel bags, completely unaware of the treasure trove below (South Bronx, 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/.)