-- Punta Gorda, Fla., inmate James "Happy" Borland, 41, suffered a near-fatal concussion in December from being roughed up by inmates Lemuel "K-Money" Ware, 32, and Corey Andrews, 32, because Borland had accused Ware of stealing his pet spider and renaming it "Pinky." According to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement report, Borland had demanded his spider back, but Andrews intervened. Ware, who said he had purchased the spider fair and square, felt he had to go after Borland because Pinky (in a small box in Ware's shirt pocket) "told" him to.

-- After the police chief of Portland, Ore., defied a local judge and said he would continue to examine suspicious people's garbage without search warrants (because, he contends, curbside garbage is public property), reporters from the local Willamette Week newspaper examined (under cover of night) a December day's curbside garbage thrown out by the chief, the district attorney and the mayor (who is officially the chief's boss). The newspaper published an inventory of each official's trash, finding much banality (e.g., what the mayor planned to watch on TV) but nothing illegal or improper. When told what the reporters did, the police chief got hostile, and the mayor, said the reporters, "went nuclear."

The former Bob Craft filed a lawsuit in November against the owners of the reckless-stunt-filled MTV program (and movie) "Jackass," claiming it has defamed him, in that five years ago, he had his own name legally changed to "Jack Ass," which he thought would call attention to his national campaign against drunk driving. Ass, who lives in Montana and filed the lawsuit there, claims that the TV show and movie have damaged his reputation ("which I have worked so hard to create," he wrote) to the tune of at least $10 million.

-- London's Observer reported in November that the British government is exploring whether to require convicted pedophiles to receive microchip implants that would allow them to be tracked by satellite after their release from prison. The government would know not only whether pedophiles visited schools or parks but, based on a proposal by one company whose software monitors astronauts' bodily functions in space, whether the pedophiles are feeling nervous or excited (but so far, sexual arousal cannot be tracked by the software).

-- State authorities raided a Honolulu artifacts dealer in December and filed criminal charges against him for possession of rare or extinct birds without a state license. However, as dealer Don Medcalf pointed out to them at the time (to no avail), not only are the rare birds merely stuffed animals, but they were killed and stuffed sometime in the 1800s, not only before the possession law was passed but before Hawaii was even a state. In January, the prosecutor dropped the case because he "felt (the charges) wouldn't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt."

-- Immigration and Naturalization Service is being incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security just in time. In November, INS revealed that it had routinely granted citizenship to a man with ties to the radical Islamic group Hezbollah during a time that he was under direct scrutiny by a joint FBI-NYPD terrorist task force. One week after that, a General Accounting Office review found that INS could not find nearly half of the 4,100 supposedly registered immigrants that the federal government wanted to interview in the days after Sept. 11 because the agency had been so lax in enforcing the registration law.

-- For 12 days in November, Yugoslav performance artist Marina Abramovic, 56, confined herself to three raised desks at a New York City gallery, where she denied herself all external stimulation (except being stared at by visitors), subsisting on water, and carrying on all bodily functions in full public view, in order to heighten her senses so that, she said, she and the audience could efficiently transmit energy between them. (Previously, for the same purpose, she and a partner sat at ends of a long table for seven hours, not moving and trying not even to blink.)

-- In September, art student Nathan Banks, 22 (of New York's Purchase College), painted randomly chosen words on about 60 meandering cows in order to see if they would inadvertently line up to form poetry. At about the same time, in England, writer Valerie Laws, 48, did the same thing with sheep (except that she chose the words of only one poem, to see if the sheep could form another poem). An arts council granted Ms. Laws about $3,400 for her project, which she said would break down the boundaries between "literature" and "quantum mechanics."

According to police in Red Bluff, Calif., Andrew McCrae killed one of their officers in November and fled to Concord, N.H., where he was arrested a few days later. According to his Web site postings, McCrae (a former "human shield" in Israel) thought the alleged murder would create sympathy for his views on war, police brutality, globalization and corporate social irresponsibility. He allegedly told friends that he was immune from prosecution because he had had the foresight to incorporate himself beforehand in a state other than California (corporate name: Proud and Insolent Youth).

In November, Blair MacKay, 32, was fined about $600 for invasion of privacy by a court in Dingwall, England, after testimony that he had barged into a neighbor's apartment and asserted, "I don't listen to phone conversations," after the woman had just minutes earlier told her companion over the phone that Blair MacKay was probably listening to them. (In other wiretapping news, the Agence France-Presse news service reported in October that a German police surveillance campaign had been compromised when a software mix-up by the O2 mobile phone company mistakenly notified criminal suspects that their phones were being tapped from a voice-mail phone whose number was printed on their September bill.

Ng Lai Ping, 39, complained in October that an official at Hong Kong's Central Library had demanded that she stop breastfeeding her child in public and gave as the reason signs posted at various places in the building, "No Food or Drinks." And Arab News reported in December that a hospital in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, had refused to hand over the body of a deceased baby until after father Wajeeh Suleiman (of Turkey) pays his bill of about $48,000 (U.S.).

Officials were understandably alarmed when 24 residents of a nursing home tested positive for marijuana, but it turned out to be a reaction to a prescription for acid reflux (Claiborne County, Tenn.) And among the celebrated "first babies" born on Jan. 1 were one produced by artificial insemination to a female-female couple in Fairfax, Va., and one born to a father on the lam from the law (who was quickly picked up by police after a news story on the birth) in Spring Hill, Fla. And the Castaways Travel agency of Houston has booked a May 3 clothing-optional Boeing 727 flight to Cancun, Mexico (but the crew will be clothed and cabin temperatures warmer).

The FBI charged in November that the now-resigned head of the Washington, D.C., Teachers Union may have embezzled more than $2 million in union funds (while broken-down public schools lack books and supplies for students) to support an Imelda Marcos-like clothing, furnishings and artwork habit. On another matter, the D.C. public school system admitted in December that it had continued to pay out $5 million in employee benefits during the year to ex-employees who had already left the government (and other parts of the District government were suspected of doing the same thing).

The Guardian (London) reported in December that multinational food giant Nestle continues relentlessly to demand about $6 million from dirt-poor Ethiopia as payment for that government's having nationalized a Nestle subsidiary 27 years ago. (According to the Oxfam humanitarian group, $6 million would feed a million people for a month.) And Florida inmate Gary Alvord, 55, who escaped from a Michigan mental institution and killed two women in Tampa in 1973, this year begins his 30th year on death row.

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

-- 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.)