-- Upscale pet hotels are open in New York, Hollywood and (based on a December Washington Post report) Fairfax County, Va., where the Olde Towne Pet Resort charges up to $230 a day for pooches' use of a hydrotherapy pool, state-of-the-art exercise room, beauty parlor and suites with satellite TV, classical music and original, color-pleasing artwork (even though dogs are basically color-blind). (Products and services elsewhere on the pet-care market include gourmet food, heated dog beds, acupuncture and chiropractic treatments, herbal flea collars, water bowls with purifiers, and, according to a December Reuters dispatch from Tokyo, therapeutic mud packs for dogs, using mud from the Dead Sea.)

-- A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in November that the U.S. Department of Justice has for about 20 years blatantly denied attorneys overtime pay in violation of federal law, a practice the department defended merely by arguing that it thought there ought to have been an exception in the law (which is an argument the department usually scoffs at when filing its own lawsuits against lawbreakers). Court of Claims Judge Robert H. Hodges Jr. said the department apparently years ago simply declared itself immune from overtime-pay law for attorneys and has been maintaining two sets of time sheets (one for pay, one to track work on cases).

Taiwanese national Shuo Shan Wang, 29, pleaded guilty in December in Oak Park, Mich., to practicing surgery without a license, specifically the kitchen-table castration of a 48-year-old man who had found Wang's "service" on the Internet. Wang told police he had 50 such surgeries under his belt, but that this patient began to bleed uncontrollably after bursting out laughing while eating a post-operative piece of pie at Wang's house. Police recovered two testicles in a Tupperware container in Wang's refrigerator.

-- In November, incoming Colombian defense minister Marta Lucia Ramirez rescinded the military's policy of encouraging the country's Marxist rebels to defect by airdropping sexy photos implying that the depicted women were waiting for them upon their surrender. Said Ramirez, "I, as a woman, add myself to (the protests of this policy)." (The so-called FARC rebels, mostly men, are not allowed to have sex without permission of their commanders.)

-- In November, the city council of Soap Lake, Wash., a 1,700-population town that did a booming tourist business in the 1950s but has fallen on hard times, voted the first step toward a revitalization that it believes will draw visitors back in droves: a 60-foot-tall Lava lamp on Main Street. The architect of the campaign, Brent Blake, said, "I just for some reason thought of (a) lava lamp."

-- Among the performers at the International Professional Rodeo Association's show at the Hardeeville (S.C.) Speedway in October: Tim Lepard and his sheep-herding dogs (which is not so novel, in that dogs are bred to herd sheep in some countries, but Lepard's three dogs are ridden during the herding by small, screaming monkeys). Said Lepard, "I wanted to put an act together that people will always remember."

-- In November, the Longchi Scenic Area in southwestern China, apparently bowing to public pressure, canceled plans to put to sleep the five monkeys that had been terrorizing the park's visitors. According to the Commercial Daily newspaper in Chengdu, the park had become so exasperated by the marauding monkeys that it had been planning on a formal execution by firing squad. The park decided instead on faraway exile.

Air Force Academy cadet Matt Bayless of Topeka, Kan., was expelled in April for honor code violations. Among the charges was that Bayless had lied to his colleagues about the reason he kept certain jars in his room, which, it was finally revealed, was so he could urinate in them at night without having to walk down the hall to the bathroom. In December, the academy demoted Bayless to the enlisted ranks for three years.

The Merced (Calif.) Sun-Star reported on Dec. 10 that an unnamed man was taken to a hospital in Modesto, Calif., after his head was split open by a brick. Police, called to the scene, were expecting to find foul play, but witnesses said the man was merely trying to see how high up he could throw a brick, and since it was dark (2:30 a.m.), the man lost track of the brick's flight and could not get out of the way when it came down on his head. Police said alcohol appeared to be involved.

A November 2002 News of the Weird item reported that a U.S. Immigration official whose "visa express" program might have made it easier for some of the Sept. 11 terrorists to enter the United States, received a $15,000 "outstanding performance" bonus for his work including Sept. 11. In December, FBI official Marion "Spike" Bowman received an FBI "exceptional performance" award (and five-figure cash bonus) for his work that included Sept. 11; Bowman is in charge of the headquarters office that whistleblower Colleen Rowley blamed for impeding the Minneapolis FBI office's pre-Sept. 11 investigation of so-called "20th terrorist" Zacarias Moussaoui.

Springfield, Mass., firefighter John S. Marrero, 25, was fired in October, and superiors said it had nothing to do with the charges of possession of crack cocaine and Oxycontin filed against him (in that he is innocent until proven guilty of those charges). Rather, he was fired because he was caught smoking a cigarette when the state trooper arrested him, and cigarette-smoking, on or off the job, is a violation of state law for any firefighter or police officer hired since 1988. (A Plymouth, Mass., police officer was fired for the same reason in 1993, and a court upheld the firing.)

Freya McDonald, 15, and her family said they would soon file a lawsuit against the Speyside High School (Morayshire, England) for violating the European Convention on Human Rights by giving her 11 after-school detentions in nine months. And following an exhaustive four-month search by Florida's child-welfare agency to find the 393 kids entrusted to it but whom it could not locate after an August crisis, Gov. Jeb Bush proudly announced that it had found all but 88. And the head of a government health agency in Thailand proposed that a leading oil company offer massages to tired motorists at its gas stations, to help reduce traffic accidents.

An 18-wheeler full of beer (Interstate 5 near Fort Tejon, Calif., July); 1,500 gallons of Southern Comfort whiskey (warehouse in Louisville, Ky., July); 20 tons of hot dogs (Interstate 70, Kansas City, Mo., August); pizza dough (leaking out of a truck's door, from rising yeast), spread over 25 miles of highway, from a Tombstone Pizza truck (near Chippewa Falls, Wis., July); 270,000 eggs (Interstate 65, Crown Point, Ind., May); $1 million in cash (U.S. Highway 160, near Pagosa Springs, Colo., May); 50,000 inch-long screws (causing scores of flat tires) (Interstate 65, near Lebanon Junction, Ky., December); and 37 voting machines (fell off of a truck and were ruined, six days before primary elections (Albuquerque, May).

A 32-year-old motorist, waiting at a crossing until a southbound train had passed, drove across those tracks but was struck and killed on a second set of tracks, by a northbound train (Santa Ana, Calif., November). And a 30-year-old man was killed by a freight train on Oct. 12 when he walked across the tracks in Hermann, Mo. According to the coroner: "The engineer (blew the whistle) hoping he'd stop but ... he just kept walking. He was talking on a cell phone, and ... stepped right in front of the train."

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

-- 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.)