-- British Army officers examining highly motivated potential recruits in the Commonwealth's Pacific island of Fiji reported in November encountering an alarming number of the men with marbles sewn under the skin of their penises, apparently to heighten pleasure during sex. According to an Agence France-Presse report, Capt. Sarah East said that the marbles were not an automatic disqualifier.

-- Several news outlets in Johannesburg, South Africa, reported in November that, in front of several witnesses, a 20-foot-long African rock python swallowed a 10-year-old boy in the brush near Lamontville (which is near Durban). Some experts, including snake park owner Craig Smith, said the evidence and the witnesses' accounts were credible, especially since the snake had probably recently awakened from hibernation and was famished. According to the boy's terrified playmates, it took about three hours for him to completely disappear.

Humming Rage: Sheila Raven Lord, 49, stabbed a companion with a steak knife because he was humming a Megadeth song louder than the Celine Dion song she was listening to (Glenview, Ill., November). Mailbox Door Rage: George Krushinski was charged with planting small bombs in a mailbox and a letter carrier's vehicle because a weekend carrier had been leaving Krushinski's mailbox door down (Lexington, Ky., November) ("I've warned you bastards many times about leaving my mailbox open," Krushinski wrote, "(and) now you will pay.") Wrong Socks Rage: High school student-musician Trevor LeBlanc won $25,000 in a lawsuit against his band director, Tom Cole, who, at the 2001 Tournament of Roses Parade chewed out LeBlanc for wearing the wrong-color socks (San Diego, November) ("I ought to wring your (expletive deleted in original story) neck," Cole reportedly said as he grabbed LeBlanc by the throat.)

Police in Fulton, Ky., investigating a marijuana-smoking complaint by William Hainline's neighbors in September, found dope burning on a backyard grill with a large fan on the other side of the house sucking the smoke through the home (in effect, said Police Chief Terry Powell, "turn(ing) the house into a large marijuana bong"). Hainline said he was merely having a 52nd birthday party, but police seized four pounds of marijuana.

-- In October, the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg, Fla., became the latest to debut a version of the church's 22-year-old "Theology on Tap" series, introducing young adults to the church by holding lecture and discussion sessions about contemporary issues, mostly sexuality, in local bars, with parishioners and potentials free to eat, drink and smoke. (In November, the Diocese of Toledo, Ohio, began the second year of its program.)

-- According to the police report on Farhad Qaumi, 19, who was arrested in Parramatta, Australia (near Sydney), in October and charged with raping a 16-year-old girl, Qaumi said he removed his Islamic pendant before the assault, telling the girl, "I have to take it off, as it is disrespectful."

-- In Bridgeport, Conn., in October, Roger Chimney, 34, pleaded guilty to two convenience store robberies; the police got him because he had accidentally dropped his name-inscribed Bible at one of the crime scenes. And in Augusta, Maine, in August, Craig Golden, 18, pleaded guilty to criminal mischief for vandalizing a farmer's field; the police got him because his name-inscribed Bible had fallen out of his truck during the incident.

-- The Lord as Micromanager: (1) "It isn't easy, but God said to (beat them)," testified former nun Lucille Poulin, before being convicted in October of assault in the harsh disciplining of children at her commune (Charlottetown, P.E.I., Canada). (2) "(G)od became my art agent. He basically gave me ideas," said Thomas Kincade, the pop artist who has sold $450 million worth of machine-produced paintings in 13 years, to the chagrin of art purists (Morgan Hill, Calif., March). (3) "God brought me down here," said Angel DeGroff, auditioning in November to be one of the competitors in the next round of the TV show "The Bachelor" (Hales Corners, Wis.).

In October in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Mr. Rosaire Roy was sentenced to a year in jail for hiring someone to rob his store so Roy could fulfill a sexual fantasy; he had arranged for the robber to force him to undress, along with an unsuspecting female acquaintance who was in the store at the time, because Roy wanted to be tied up naked with her. And in November, sheriff's deputies in Fayette County, Ga., acting on a tip, arrested Sandy Creek High School teacher Damian Belvedere, 44, who (using his webcam) was in the middle of a live Internet performance of fondling himself, nude, in his otherwise empty classroom.

-- News of the Weird has reported several times on men either killed or injured falling down embankments at night after stopping their vehicles on the side of the road to seek a secluded place to urinate. In September, Rick Schultz, 34, and James Esposti, 21, were taken to Punxsutawney (Pa.) Hospital after being knocked down when their Ford Ranger truck coasted backward into them while they were urinating at the side of a road.

-- The art of protest by sewing one's lips together is apparently becoming more popular. A 34-year-old man in Estonia, facing a charge of setting a Mercedes-Benz on fire, showed up in court with stitched lips in May. And in June, 50 refugees, held at the Woomera detention center in Australia, sewed their lips shut to emphasize their hunger strike as they lobbied for asylum. And a 39-year-old man from Iraq with bright red stitching on his lips was picked up by police from a city square in Zurich, Switzerland, in September (but he was unable to tell police what he was protesting, if anything).

-- A 1999 New England Journal of Medicine article warned that even putting a dead rattlesnake's head in your mouth can be fatal, and News of the Weird has run stories of men cuddling their pet rattlesnakes, particularly in conjunction with alcohol use. In November, Matthew George, 21, of Yacolt, Wash., was hospitalized in serious condition after the rattlesnake he was kissing bit him on the lip. Apparently, George was proudly showing to a friend the snake that he had found in the Arizona desert in October. Snake expert Richard Ritchey, asked by a reporter for The Oregonian whose fault the incident was (George's or the snake's), answered, "The one with the bigger brain," but he did not say which one he thought that was.

-- A leading British plastic surgeon said that human face transplants will be possible within a year (although the recipient would not necessarily look like the donor). And a woman named Kristina, 21, won the beauty pageant (talent, swimsuit, gown) at a woman's prison in Panevezys, Lithuania, but declined to reveal to reporters why she's in the slammer. A community redevelopment agency announced it was evicting 40 Hispanic migrant workers the week after Christmas, with no relocation assistance, so that Habitat for Humanity could build low-income housing on the site (Palmetto, Fla.). An inmate returning to jail from his day job at a recycling center tested higher than 0.20 blood-alcohol, gained by mustering last drops from all the empty liquor bottles he sorted (Charleston, W.Va.).

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

-- Inga Kosak won the first World Extreme Ironing Championship in Munich in September, beating 80 contestants (from 10 countries), who are judged on the degree of difficulty they can create for themselves in order to iron. One ironed while bouncing on a trampoline, another while surfboarding on a river, and another hanging upside down from a tree. Enthusiasts have photos of themselves ironing in remote mountain locations, where power for the steam iron must come from a generator (or a very long extension cord). The activity's founder, Phil Shaw, says he does it because ironing itself is particularly boring.

-- Two teams of Canadian engineers are completing their low-budget rockets and have begun seeking volunteer astronauts for a 2003 launch date to go 62 miles into space to win the St. Louis-based X Prize competition (which pays (U.S.) $10 million). The rockets (and those of about 20 other international contestants) are the "Cessnas" of the space industry, costing around (U.S.) $3 million to $5 million each to build. The astronauts will receive some training, but the engineers admit the adventure is hardly for the risk-averse.

Mike Rucker, running for county commissioner in Tallahassee, Fla., apologized for urinating in a voter's yard in October, attributing it to a prostate problem and not anger that the voter had moments earlier refused to post Rucker's campaign sign. And Republican Lamar Alexander, running for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee, reportedly turned a hand-shaking opportunity into a hand-squeezing contest with an opposition voter who had mischievously slipped Alexander a Democratic brochure in Dickson, Tenn., in October. And Makinka Moye, running for city supervisor in San Francisco, was revealed by the Bay Area Reporter in September to have been arrested earlier this year for bludgeoning and butchering a goat on a vacant lot near a city recreation center. (Alexander won; Rucker and Moye lost.)

-- Clothing Trends (from an October Wall Street Journal dispatch from Seoul): an aloe vera bra and underwear set to continually lubricate the skin for up to 40 washings (from Triumph International in the UK); menstrual-pain-reducing pants (from the B.L. Korea Co.); Ki business suits, with charcoal and jade powder sewn into the armpits and crotch, to block computer-screen radiation and boost energy (from Cheil Industries Inc.); and "yellow earth" boxer shorts, with a sewn-in special soil that supposedly emits infrared rays that cut odor and improve circulation (from Kolon Corp.).

-- Michael Carroll, 19, of Norfolk County, England, won that country's national lottery (equivalent: (U.S.) $41 million) in November and said he hopes the money will be an incentive to overcome the life of petty crime he has led for the last several years (examples: drunk and disorderly, vandalizing a school bus, car theft, other theft, driving without a license). He cannot now celebrate his win at a pub, nor drive his new car, because judicial restrictions are still in force from his last sentence.

-- In October, Australian serial killer Ivan Milat complained to a state commission, asking the equivalent of (U.S.) $22,000, for a violation of his human rights. Milat, serving seven life sentences for seven murders, had swallowed some razor blades in a 2001 incident and now complains that prison officials' releasing his X-rays to the media was an invasion of his privacy. (Milat had complained previously about the air quality in his cell.)

-- In November, coroner Nigel Meadows of Plymouth, England, ruled that the 18-years-dead corpse of Edwin MacKenzie (known to locals as Diogenes) was actually the personal property of the recently deceased artist Robert Lenkiewicz and thus should go to Lenkiewicz's estate. MacKenzie was Lenkiewicz's helper for many years, and when he died without heirs, Lenkiewicz took possession of the body, had it embalmed, and used it in various art projects, and Lenkiewicz's executor is said to be considering using it in a memorial display of the artist's work.

-- In October, Virgin Atlantic Airways agreed to pay passenger Barbara Hewson the equivalent of (U.S.) $20,000 for injuries she suffered on an 11-hour flight when an obese woman sat in the seat next to her and apparently crushed part of her body. Hewson said the squashing caused a blood clot in her chest, torn leg muscles and acute sciatica, requiring her to be bedridden for a month.

Masters of Technology: Burglars hit the K Bros. Service Station in Everson, Pa., in November and lugged away the lottery-ticket machine, perhaps hoping to print themselves some winning tickets; a lottery spokesman said the machine only works when it's hooked up to lottery headquarters. And Baptist minister James Andrew Smith, 42, was arrested in Fort Worth, Texas, in November for a September graphics presentation (to a logistic company) that he was making with his computer; he had clicked the wrong line and inadvertently called up a photograph of a nude boy, which led to a search that police said yielded much child pornography.

News of the Weird reported in March that jail officials in Arapahoe County, Colo. (near Denver), had inadvertently placed a 16-year-old girl in a holding cell with a man suspected of several sexual assaults (and, indeed, she said, he fondled her). In August, officials at the same Arapahoe jail inadvertently placed accused killer Edward Brown, 21, in the same cell with a witness against him, Martin Brewer, 21, whereupon Brown allegedly beat Brewer up, breaking his nose. (Also, in September, officials in Albuquerque inadvertently locked four men in a cell with what they thought was a sleeping man (but it was a woman); by the time they realized their error 30 minutes later, the woman had allegedly been raped.)

In September, Peru congressman Eittel Ramos, feeling insulted, challenged Vice President David Waisman to a duel using pistols (which would be the country's first political duel since a 1957 presidential candidates' fight with swords). And British motorcyclist Leon Humphreys, angered at a vehicle registration problem, challenged an unidentified bureaucrat to a duel with unspecified weapons (Suffolk County, November). And Omaha, Neb., contractor Art Dore Sr., challenged business rival Virgil Anderson to a boxing match to finally settle their ongoing disputes over municipal demolition contracts (although Anderson, in his 60s, is unlikely to accept, in that Dore is a founder of the Original Toughman Contest).

At dawn on Sept. 29 in Hood River County, Ore., a 58-year-old hunter was accidentally shot to death by another hunter (who mistook him for a black bear), perhaps made easier by the victim's all-black clothing. And a 28-year-old man stopped his truck on a road in the Mojave Desert near Needles, Calif., in September, grabbed some beer, and went hiking in the midday sun (and died of dehydration). And a 32-year-old man was killed in October in Santa Cruz, Calif., when he fell from a hotel balcony, from which he had been hanging while shouting to his friends, "Look at this."

Robert and Theresa Dolin pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of their teenage kids based on having given them Christmas gifts last year of marijuana bongs (Crystal Lake, Ill.). Ojibwe Indian Albert LaFontaine declared that his newly purchased strippers' club would be a sovereign nation and said there "ain't no way" the government can stop him (Elko, Minn.). Yenline Neil, 59, was convicted of smuggling about $110,000 worth of cocaine into Britain in his prosthetic leg, despite insisting that he didn't know the cocaine was there (Croydon, England). Evangelical Environmental Network (Wynnewood, Pa.) announced a national campaign to discourage gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles, calling its project "What Would Jesus Drive?"

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

-- Alberta (Canada) judge Shelagh Creagh ruled in October that prison inmate Shane Arthur Wilson could not be punished for carrying around a homemade plastic knife since Wilson said the knife was only for defending himself against prison gangs. This, and a similar decision currently being appealed by another Alberta judge have predictably outraged prison guards across Canada. And a November Washington Post dispatch from Mexico reports that escaping from prison is not a crime in that country (nor is running away from police or lying about guilt) because, as one Supreme Court justice put it, Mexico respects the individual's "basic desire for freedom."

-- Absolutely the Least Substantial Reason for a Knife Fight: Police in Mansfield Township and Hackettstown, N.J., charged Emmanuel Nieves, 23, with aggravated assault on Nov. 13 after he allegedly slashed the face of his friend Erik Saporito, 21, as the two men fought after arguing over which one had more hair on his buttocks.

Sumpter Township, Mich., Supervisor Elmer Parraghi, 74, and Finance Director Dwayne Seals, 35, habitually, viciously feuding about business issues, recently obtained judicial restraining orders against each other, even though both work in a four-office building. And in September during the annual, vituperative Miami-Dade County (Fla.) budget hearing, Commissioner Natacha Seijas snapped at Chairwoman Gwen Margolis for interrupting her: "You're going to leave here in a body bag if you keep this up." And in June (according to telephone records obtained by the Tulsa World newspaper), Oklahoma State Rep. Chad Stites angrily told a Tulsa official whose department was badgering him about code violations on Stites' property that he would "neuter you sons of a (sic) bitches."

-- In September, Robert Rozenhart, now 56, won his 7-year-old lawsuit against Skier's Sportshop (Edmonton, Alberta) for injuries suffered on his maiden attempt to in-line skate, which came after a Skier's employee tried unsuccessfully to tell Rozenhart not to venture out until the store's instructor arrived to help him. Rozenhart skated away anyway, and was on a downward incline when he first realized he did not know how to stop.

-- In October, Kevin William Presland, 44, commenced his lawsuit against the James Fletcher Hospital in Newcastle, Australia, in which he is asking to be financially compensated because, he said, hospital personnel released him prematurely after a brief psychiatric admission in 1995 and thus made it easy for him to kill his prospective sister-in-law a few hours later. Presland's lawyer acknowledges that nothing can be done to help the woman's family but says Presland, at least, deserves a payoff. The hospital says Presland was calm and rational and that it had no legal basis for detaining him.

-- James Anibella filed a federal lawsuit in October challenging the constitutionality of the Colorado law that sets a voter registration deadline of 29 days before an election, a deadline that Anibella admitted he knew about but was too busy to bother with; Anibella characterizes the 29-day deadline as merely "some snafu in the law." And after Bryan Furrow, 17, was charged in Manchester, Conn., in August with masturbating in front of 10 children (and sexually touching five of them), his mother, Lenora Furrow, told reporters that Bryan had simply "made a wrong judgment call."

-- Conscientious workers at the ARO Campulung auto plant in Romania offered in October to help pay off the company's debts by selling their sperm to a fertility clinic in the city of Timisoara, at the equivalent of (U.S.) $50 a session. Said the plant's union leader, "We have found (a solution) that even the best economists have never thought of." (However, to pay the equivalent (U.S.) $20 million debt in full would require 400,000 sessions, or 400 sessions for each of the 1,000 males at the plant.)

-- In October, all 21 volunteer firefighters of Elgin, Iowa, submitted letters of resignation after they were told they could no longer keep beer at the firehouse. (Later in the month, they backed off in exchange for the City Council's agreeing to open an investigation of Councilwoman Jean Roach, who is the person who allegedly first ratted them out to the city's insurance carrier.)

Adventures With Gasoline: Octavio Soto, 44, and Jose Cezares, 23, were hospitalized with third-degree burns in Fitchburg, Mass., in September when they attempted to saw into the vehicle gas tank in which they had hidden $100,000 worth of cocaine; an errant spark from their sawing created a flash fire. And two men escaped after an unsuccessful attempt to rob a guy filling up at the Swifty Service Station in Indianapolis in October; the victim merely flicked the gasoline hose at the men, dousing them and sending them scampering.

In October, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child told Great Britain it should repeal its parental-right-to-spank law because spanking violates an international corporal-punishment treaty (which the U.S. has declined to honor, as well). In September, the North Tyneside (England) Council advised a local business group not to hold the annual children's Christmas caroling contest this year because it would be a bad experience for the kids who did not win. In October, Mayor Shelton Richardson of North Randall, Ohio, charging racism, proposed to make it illegal for any gas station to make customers pay before pumping (despite a marked recent increase in customer "drive-offs").

Mayor Jay Lee of Virgin, Utah (a town that once required a gun in every house for self-defense and that also once banned United Nations activities within its borders), announced there would be a $25 charge for anyone who wished to speak up at Town Council meetings (October). Alabama, one of two states to ban the sale of devices whose main function is to assist in sexual pleasure, had its law declared unconstitutional by a federal judge (October). One of the Indiana fast-food workers who in 2001 submitted to body searches by their managers, after a pervert made bogus "police" telephone requests of the managers, filed a federal lawsuit against Burger King (October).

Officials at Somerville (N.J.) High School warned students in October to stop trying to get high by choking each other into unconsciousness. (With the so-called "California Knockout," a student holds his breath for 10 seconds to get light-headed, after which a pal squeezes his neck to put him out.) And University of Pennsylvania researchers found that the average price of a black-market human kidney in India has dropped (despite insufficient supply) from the equivalent of (U.S.) $1,603 to $975, suggesting that wealthier, kidney-needing people have learned how to put the squeeze on impoverished donors.

After five months of nightly practice, Jonathan Smith of Delaware, Ohio, beat 16 finalists (out of 50,000 entrants) for the $1 million DeWalt power-screwing championship by drilling five screws in less than seven seconds (Phoenix). Only a $1,200 first prize was offered, however, in November's international championship of the World Rock Paper Scissors Society (Toronto). At an annual judicial conference, Taiwanese judges voted 49-11 that oral sex, without intercourse, should not be a legal ground for adultery (Taipei). Japan, in a long economic stagnation, posted an encouraging 0.8 percent growth in personal consumption in August, but economists noted the main component was a 34 percent rise in spending on funerals.

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