-- His Own "Head Start" Program: A 7-year-old Minneapolis boy stole an SUV on Dec. 6 and crashed into several things, and then, after attempts by the police and his guardian to explain to him why stealing cars was wrong, he stole another one on Dec. 17 and hit another vehicle, injuring a boy riding with his mother. His two reported explanations were, respectively: "I want to be a good driver when I grow up," and "I just had to get to school and I don't know where it is." (According to a hopeful Minneapolis Star Tribune report, experts believe that kids that young who commit crimes are no more than two to three times more likely to turn into violent criminals.)

-- In a December New York Times dispatch from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, concerning the heavily religious-law-regulated Perdu lingerie shop, its female marketing director said that about 85 percent of Saudi women wear ill-fitting bras, perhaps because the law requires that sales clerks in public stores be men. According to the Times, "(W)hile women may be berated for showing a ... leg or an arm (in public), they must ask strange men for help in assessing their bra size."

In December, police in Urbana, Ohio, said they would soon file fraud charges against Teresa Milbrandt, 35, for tricking local people and businesses into giving her more than $10,000 on behalf of her 7-year-old daughter, who she falsely said had leukemia. Milbrandt apparently never even told her daughter why she had to have her head shaved (to simulate the effects of chemotherapy), but that touch of realism ultimately caused the scheme to collapse when someone noticed the hair had been cut and was not falling out.

-- Two men who have sat on juries in notoriously litigation-friendly Jefferson County, Miss., filed a lawsuit against the TV program "60 Minutes" in December, claiming that they were defamed in a segment about Mississippi juries' generosity. Anthony Berry was on a jury that gave out $150 million in an asbestos case, and Johnny Anderson was on one that awarded $150 million in a diet drug case, and both say the "60 Minutes" segment made the juries seem so extravagant that they must be getting kickbacks. The two men's lawsuit (filed in Jefferson County, of course) asks for more than $6 billion.

-- The president of Baptist-affiliated Gardner-Webb University (Boiling Springs, N.C.) admitted in September that he raised a star basketball player's grade-point average so that he would be eligible to play in the 2000-2001 season, during which Gardner-Webb won the National Christian College Athletic Association championship. (The president, Christopher White, resigned in October; the class that the player failed, for cheating, but which was not counted on his GPA, was in religion.)

-- Following a Detroit Free Press interview in November with bulk e-mailer Alan Ralsky (who gloated that his success at sending "spam" advertising had paid for his $740,000 home), Internet spam-haters tracked down Ralsky's West Bloomfield, Mich., address and inundated him with thousands of unsolicited hardcopy catalogs and mailings. In another case, following news that the Pentagon had hired former Reagan administration official John Poindexter to oversee the creation of software that could track nearly all consumer transactions in the country, an SF Weekly (San Francisco) columnist released Poindexter's home phone number, and Internet activists set up a Web site for tracking all of Poindexter's personal transactions.

-- Jay Glaspey, 37, was hospitalized in Des Moines, Iowa, in September after accidentally setting himself on fire while trying to burn his girlfriend's bed after a fight. And Cordell T. Holland, 24, was hospitalized in Prince George's County, Md., in July after accidentally setting himself on fire while trying to burn up his car for the insurance. And Timothy Grubb, 46, was hospitalized in Cleveland in October after accidentally setting himself on fire while trying to burn down his ex-girlfriend's house.

-- In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in October, David Voth, author of a best seller on how to keep from paying income tax in Canada, was fined for his failure to file income tax returns since 1995. And Robert H. Morrison, author of "Divorce Dirty Tricks" (on how to avoid child-support payments), pleaded guilty in Phoenix in December to avoiding support payments on his 12-year-old son.

In November, Jason Morris, 30, was acquitted by a jury in Greater Manchester, England, of the charge that, using ordinary pliers, he pulled out 18 of his girlfriend's teeth, leaving her covered head to toe in blood. The case turned when the girlfriend, Samantha Court, 25, took the witness stand and admitted that she pulled the teeth out herself, during an April drug binge during which she tried to get rid of a green and pink fly that had darted down her throat. Court said the couple has decided to stop doing drugs.

In 2001, a woman filed a federal lawsuit in Minnesota (Engleson vs. Little Falls Area Chamber of Commerce), seeking to recover for injuries she suffered when she tripped over an orange traffic cone. The lawsuit was dismissed in November 2002 by Judge Donovan Frank, who said the law does not expect anyone to warn people that there's a warning cone up ahead.

In November 2001, News of the Weird reported on a language its practitioners called The Truth (but which is basically indistinguishable from gibberish), which at that time a few Canadian defendants were using in tax-evasion trials (with a huge lack of success). In December 2002, Janet Kay Logan, 46, and Jason Zellmer, 22, were convicted in Madison, Wis., of creating phony lawsuit documents, despite their using The Truth in their trial and attempting to call as a witness the language's creator, David Wynn Miller, also known as the "king of Hawaii," who informed the judge that the genesis of The Truth was when Miller "turned Hawaii into a verb" and showed "how a preposition is needed to certify a noun." Logan insisted until the very end that the lawsuits were legitimate because she is a judge in the "DI-STRICT court of the Unity State of the World."

A carjacker made off with a Honda Civic following a struggle, but he did leave behind his colostomy bag, which fell off in the fight (St. Albert, Alberta). Two hours after a TV news crew visited a candle shop to interview the owner about holiday fire safety, a faulty candle in the shop started a blaze that gutted four businesses (Colorado Springs, Colo.). The University of Magdeburg yielded to longtime demands of the daughters of the late 1970s Red Army terrorist Ulrike Meinhof and gave back Meinhof's brain, which it had commandeered after her 1976 suicide (Koln, Germany).

London's Daily Telegraph reported in December on a recent Peruvian military video that showed a dog being massacred and its innards eaten by troops training to become ruthless killers; a Peruvian official admitted that live dogs had been used in the past, but not since August 2002. Also, according to a December Reuters report, a surreptitious videotape surfaced of a ritual of elephant domestication in Thailand, in which a young elephant is forced from his mother and beaten for hours, to make him suitable for tourist attractions. (Thai officials defend their domestication program because the country has far more elephants than habitat necessary for them to survive in the wild.)

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (59) The elderly motorist who takes one wrong turn and then seems powerless to correct the mistake for hours or even days, such as the McLean, Va., woman (age 80) whose planned 10-mile shopping trip in November left her north of Pittsburgh, 250 miles away, 48 hours later. (60) And the packs of young men on minor-crime sprees who proudly videotape themselves during the acts, thus making prosecutors' jobs so much easier when the tapes are recovered, as with four men on a vandalism and shoplifting spree in the St. Louis area in November.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- A spokesman for the Internet site offering "Kaboom: The Suicide Bomber Game" (the more bystander-victims, the more points) told The New York Times in December that the game had been played by computer users about 875,000 times since its introduction in April and is but one of several of the site's questionable-taste games based on contemporary events, including "Extreme WTC (World Trade Center) Jumper," "Sniper's Revenge" and "Pico's School" (modeled after the Columbine, Colo., tragedy). Said the site's Web master, "People ... need to lighten up and realize there are far worse problems in the world than what games people are playing."

-- Singapore neurosurgeon Keith Goh and his colleagues said they would decide by the first of the year whether to attempt the unprecedented head-separating surgery requested by 28-year-old Siamese twins in Iran. Laleh and Ladan Bijani are law school graduates who claim to need the separation because they have grown apart psychologically. "We have different lifestyles," said Ladan (the more extroverted). "We think very differently about issues."

Administrators of the 162-year-old North Carolina state capitol authorized an inspection by the Ghost Research Foundation following years of disquieting complaints by security officers about middle-of-the-night "choral singing" and "door-slamming" (October). And in Dallas, Ruben Garces Moreno, 39, was convicted of killing his wife, motivated, he said, by the fact that a fortune-teller had informed him that the wife had been unfaithful (November). And the inexplicably charismatic Judith Lynn Ashmore, 57, charged with fraud in August, was revealed to have enticed a family of four to naively accompany her on her four-month, eight-state crime spree by telling them first that she needed help with her terminal cancer and then that she was in a witness protection program.

-- In Bennington, Vt., in October, Nicholas Perotta, 18, was charged with traffic violations that resulted in minor injuries to himself and two passengers in his Dodge pickup, caused when he collided with a utility pole. Perotta told police that there was a short-out in one of his stereo speakers and that he deliberately ran off the road seeking something to bump into in order to jar the speaker back into working order.

-- According to testimony at the trial of Anastazia M. Schmid in Lafayette, Ind., in October, a motive for Schmid's having murdered her boyfriend, Tony Heathcote, was that she snapped during a consensual sexual bondage session with him when he allegedly suggested, "I'll be the daddy, you be the little girl." Unfortunately, Heathcote allegedly made that suggestion only two days after Schmid had learned that Heathcote had been accused of molesting Schmid's own 6-year-old daughter. (She was convicted.)

-- In August (in Kenora, Ontario) and September (in Albuquerque), good-Samaritan motorists decided to pull over and offer help to police officers involved with traffic stops at the side of the road. The 27-year-old (unnamed) Ontario man was cited for DUI after he backed into the patrol car while parking, and the other Samaritan, Eddie Trujillo, 55, was cited for DUI after he badly slurred his earnest offer of assistance to the patrolman.

-- John Perkyns, 48, who in September pleaded no contest to charges of destroying homosexual-themed books at two San Francisco libraries, also allegedly vandalized as part of the same rampages books by authors Gay Talese and Peter Gay and a book of poetry about the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (the Enola Gay).

-- An 18-year-old, Winnipeg, Manitoba, high school student (not named in a Canadian Press report) was let off easy on drug charges by Judge Cathy Everett, in that she sentenced him merely to write a report on the evils of the drug Ecstasy. In December, he handed in a 24-page essay that began with the foreword, "All I ask is that (the judge) keep an open mind while reading this paper," and continued with a trashing of the concept of teaching drug abstinence (because it's only natural to be curious) and with detailed suggestions on how to take Ecstasy safely and in moderation. The ever-tolerant judge ordered a rewrite.

In a still-unfolding story from Kassel, Germany, a man identified only as Armin M., 41, gave police a videotape in December showing him killing a 42-year-old companion who had answered Armin's Internet ad reading, "Gay male seeks hunks 18-30 to slaughter." Armin allegedly admitted that he is a cannibal and that he froze parts of the victim's body for later meals. According to police, the victim (an upscale professional) had methodically put his financial records in order before leaving his Berlin home to meet Armin, and according to one newspaper, the men are shown on tape eating the victim's penis, after he consented to castration. Armin also reportedly told police that he would never eat a woman because "they are too important for the survival of mankind." Stunned police investigators reportedly had to undergo psychiatric counseling after viewing the tape.

Matt Boswell of Dallas apparently became the latest victim of thieves who make bad guesses about the value of packages they believe are worth swiping. In December, Boswell reported spotting a man rummaging through his truck, and when Boswell yelled, the man grabbed two containers and fled. As Boswell later explained to a Dallas Morning News reporter, the containers held pickups from customers of Pet Butler, Boswell's pet waste-removal service (advertised by signs on both sides of his truck).

A 19-year-old man was fatally shot in the forehead by his 17-year-old brother after sneering that the kid didn't have "the guts" to shoot him (and mock-commanding him, "Shoot me, you (expletive deleted in the original story)") (Albuquerque, September). And a 23-year-old man, who had opened a van's sliding door and begun pelting cars and mailboxes with rocks as the van drove by, was killed when he fell out and hit his head (Clark County, Ore., August).

An official at Sundon Lower School (Bedfordshire, England) prohibited parents from videotaping the school's nativity play this year because she feared that photographs could somehow be commandeered by pedophiles (November). A priest, feuding about policy matters with the president of the local Church of the Holy Resurrection of Christ, pulled out a gun (but accidentally shot himself in the foot) (Lebanon, Pa., December). A computer records investigation by the Fox TV station in Seattle found that 347 fugitive felons in the Seattle area are routinely receiving state welfare benefits because law enforcement's computers can't access the Social and Health Services computers (December).

The World Bar (in New York City's new Trump World Tower) introduced a $50 cocktail (Remy XO, Pineau des Charentes, freshly pressed grapes, and a dash of liquid gold, among other ingredients). A 29-year-old man was arrested in possession of three homemade bombs, which he said he carried around in case he ran into al-Qaida terrorists (Twin Falls, Idaho). A 45-year-old man was sentenced to life in prison for the Pakistani crime of being a follower of a bogus prophet (Faisalabad, Pakistan). A jury put Landon D. May, 20, on death row for two 2001 murders (where he'll join his father, Freeman May, condemned in 1995 for a murder he committed just after Landon was born) (Lancaster, Pa.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- Some callers to Boston's major homeless shelters became angry that their requests to help out this year on Thanksgiving and Christmas day were rejected because the shelters have too many volunteers on those days (yet too few on the other 363 days a year). A Boston Globe reporter found that volunteers even try to cajole officials to bump them up the waiting list (170 on one shelter's list, which started accumulating names in August), but express disappointment at suggestions that they help at less "popular" (and less prestigious) suburban shelters.

Ian Jewell, an employee of the West Somerset (England) District Council, was rewarded by his bosses after his counting revealed that the toilet paper in the restrooms contained fewer than the 320 sheets per roll stated in the supplier's contract (September). And a popular pastime in Bismarck, N.D. (according to an October Associated Press report), is a game called "Slip," in which teenagers walk the city during summer nights trying to avoid cars' headlights. (If they get flashed, they're out.) Said one teenage girl, "It's better than sitting around on the couch on a Friday night watching a movie." And in many cities, the opening of a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop has been marked by fans queueing up several hours in advance, but Peter Bolland and his son, P.J. (both grown men), lined up 30 hours early for the store's debut in Kitchener, Ontario, in November. ("(This) sounds so ridiculous," said P.J.)

-- "It's sick, disgusting and perverted. I know all these things (but) I can't go to prison for the rest of my life ... without seeing (some)." (spoken by confessed murderer Cory Stayner, offering police a deal in which he'd describe his crimes in detail if they'd give him a "good-sized stack" of child pornography to look at) (San Jose, Calif., July) [San Jose Mercury News, 7-24-02]

-- "It was like a 'Blazing Saddles' routine, because every time these (management) guys would move on their seats, you could hear flatulence." (spoken by a participant at a September labor-management session in San Francisco, describing a union man's prank of having placed a small flatulence-sound-producing device under the table during a Pacific Maritime Association negotiating session with the dockworkers union, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle)

-- "(M)any top businessmen spend more of their time in hotels than in their own home. ... So when they get home, they like to re-create the hotel experience. ... Many of my clients (for example) have their own mini-bars in their bedrooms. ... They come to me (to make them) a hotel-style (closet)." (spoken by Arnold Chrysler, owner of Chrysler's World of Hotel Decor, on trial in London in October for stealing 40,000 hotel coat hangers (the bottom part, useful only if affixed to the closet's hanging bar))

-- Slow Crime Days: Two St. Petersburg, Fla., police officers were suspended in November after allegedly using their in-car terminals to send each other a total of 4,232 non-duty messages in a one-month period (about 10 messages each, per work hour).

-- James Sabatino, already serving time in a Putnam County (N.Y.) prison for attacking a federal officer and having recently served time in England for a telephone-based scam, had his telephone privileges removed because Putnam officials said he spent almost eight hours a day on prison phones, for five months, before they caught him in another scam. According to officials cited by the New York Post in November, Sabatino called phone companies and convinced them he was doing movie shoots and needed dozens of cell phones quickly (and was able to order about a thousand activated phones, delivered to places arranged by his girlfriend, without spending a penny).

Sadomasochism practitioner Steven H. Bailey, 54, was indicted in St. Paul, Minn., in November in the bondage death of a sexual partner (one of 5,000 he said he's had); Bailey calls himself "The True Master" of his craft but allegedly failed to render assistance when his partner stopped breathing through the chloroform-soaked bag over his face. And in November, The Washington Post disclosed that one of the members of the United Nations weapons inspection teams headed for Iraq was also an uncloseted S&M master: Harvey John "Jack" McGeorge, 53, of Woodbridge, Va., an instructor in "Dungeon 501," featuring activities involving knives, ropes and choking devices.

Capt. Van Fussell, a Florida Highway Patrol district commander in Venice, Fla., accidentally shot himself in the foot as he was holstering his Glock pistol while taking his annual firearms test in November. (He'll have to take it over.) And the previous week in Brooksville, Fla., homeowner Jimmy Batten walked in on Sean Todd Duval, 26, who had apparently broken in to steal Batten's guns. Batten was puzzled that Duval did not try to run away, but the reason was that minutes earlier, Duval had accidentally shot his left middle toe off with one of the guns and was so despondent that he told Batten: "Finish me off. Go ahead and blow my brains out."

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he was considering purchasing out-of-service cruise ships to alleviate the nightly overcrowding at the city's emergency shelters (November). And prominent, board-certified Independence, Mo., psychiatrist Donald Hinton, who seriously swears that he has been treating Elvis Presley for the last five years, was put on probation in November by the state for overprescribing a painkiller to a patient (not Elvis). And the Urbana, Ill., mother who was still breastfeeding her 8-year-old boy lost partial custody of him to the state (November).

A 46-year-old non-swimmer drowned in his apartment house pool during an attempt to overcome his fear of the water (Galesburg, Ill., October). A 73-year-old man died from the extreme heat caused when a thermostat broke and would not shut off (creating such heat that, for example, all of the water evaporated from a toilet) (Great Falls, Mont., November). A 21-year-old student accidentally strangled himself with his belt, which he had looped around a door handle in a contraption to keep his head from nodding off during a marathon study session (Bangkok, Thailand, July).

Two customers and an employee were trapped inside Sam's Mini Market for two hours on Thanksgiving Day by successive swarms of bees that coated the front door, until firefighters foamed them off (Chatsworth, Calif.). Panda bear experts announced that "dating" software had been developed to match males' and females' personality characteristics so as to improve mating opportunities (Beijing). An aboriginal Manitoba (Canada) woman alleged racial profiling when she was not allowed to buy hairspray at an Extra Foods store, probably because owners feared she only wanted to drink it (Winnipeg). Britain's Office of Fair Trading charged the toy company Hasbro (maker of Monopoly) with retail price-fixing.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)