-- Following a religious experience, Michael Braithwaite of the mountain village of Putney, Ky., recently converted his Love World shop (selling vibrators and other porn paraphernalia) to Mike's Place (selling Bibles and other Christian items). (However, according to a December report in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a 31-year-old government lawyer has developed a side business that may bridge both of Braithwaite's lines: The lawyer manufactures and sells high-quality, silicone sex toys in the shapes of religious icons, such as Moses, Satan and a nun, at prices of $54 to $65 each. One sex shop owner in San Francisco's freewheeling Castro district said he might stock the "Jackhammer Jesus" model, but that his Buddhist customers would be offended at the Buddha model.)

Edward Blaine, 61, who served 20 years in prison for a 1963 bank robbery, apparently is becoming even less competent with age, as he was arrested in January and charged with robbing the Union Bank & Trust branch in Port Royal, Va. Police said Blaine fled with the stash while $100 bills were falling out of his pockets, and then he realized as he arrived at his getaway car that he had locked the keys inside. He grabbed a log to smash the window but tossed it away in frustration, only to have it hit Emmett Lowe's truck, thus angering Lowe, who grabbed a gun and chased Blaine for 150 yards. In a struggle, Blaine shot at Lowe but hit himself in the leg, just before Lowe shot Blaine in the same leg.

If you ever run into these people, here's what to do: (1) If you're playing horseshoes with Fred William Leigh, and he says it's a ringer, it's a ringer (The insistent Leigh, 60, was convicted of shooting his disagreeing opponent in the stomach with a .38; Frederick, Md., December). (2) Don't demand fresh bacon with your eggs from Steven Deere, 50, when the rest of his family is having leftover pork (Deere was charged with shooting his stepson with a 9 mm pistol; Pittsburgh, December). (3) Don't insult Amanda Hicks' baby (The 20-year-old and two girlfriends allegedly punched, kicked, kneed, stripped and burned the man, and raped him with two different objects; Panama City, Fla., December).

-- In January, a judge at London's Old Bailey released 31-time recidivist Mark Patterson, 42, after his 32nd conviction, for burglary, because Patterson claimed that he needed drug rehabilitation so he could fulfill his calling as a poet. (His subsequent ode to the judge, in part: "I've now been set free / in a blaze of publicity / so that everyone can see / my great ability.")

-- Ayub Ali Khan, 36, who was held in a Brooklyn, N.Y., jail for 13 months after being detained as suspicious in the aftermath of Sept. 11, told a Washington Post reporter in January, "I feel I am the real victim of (Sept. 11). Just look at how much my family and I suffered." Khan was deported to Hyderabad, India, after pleading guilty to credit card fraud (using and selling fake credit cards and other bogus documents).

-- Richard Hobbs, who solicits tips in public by making balloon sculptures for children, filed a lawsuit against Westchester County, N.Y., for denying him the right to work the crowd at the county's Playland Amusement Park. In the course of defending the lawsuit, the county discovered that Hobbs had been convicted in 1978 and 1982 of sexual abuse of children. However, Hobbs persisted with the lawsuit, and in December, federal judge John Martin ordered the two parties to settle among themselves the issue of which areas of the park are commercial and which are traditional park space, in that Hobbs apparently has a constitutional right to practice his craft in traditional park spaces.

-- A judge in Monroe County, N.Y., denied Jerold Ponder's application for a handgun permit, but Ponder is appealing that decision, even though he is currently in jail charged with the shooting death of his pregnant girlfriend. Ponder's best-case-scenario defense is that it was just an accident, occurring while he and the girlfriend were target-shooting with a rifle, and that that incident is not relevant to whether he is safety-conscious enough to carry a pistol.

-- According to the prosecutor at the Waterloo, Iowa, theft trial of Bradley Steven Bailey, 21, in December, not only did Bailey steal a day's bank deposit for the Hardee's restaurant where he worked and leave town, but after he was arrested and jailed, he wrote a letter to the Hardee's manager saying he was sorry but that he never did get his final paycheck, and could it please be mailed to him.

Margie Schoendinger of the Houston suburb of Missouri City, Texas, filed a lawsuit in December against George W. Bush for a lengthy series of alleged actions while he was governor, including "watching" her and "having sex" with her and her husband. The rambling and non sequitur-laden complaint, filed in Fort Bend County Court and reported on by the weekly Fort Bend Star, names the Sugar Land (Texas) Police Department as corroborating many of the plaintiff's allegations (example: that "plaintiff had seven dates, which became seven lovers, had told no lies, committed no crimes, gotten two traffic tickets, and dated George W. Bush as a minor"), but a department spokesman said no one had any idea what Schoendinger was talking about.

Ron Landon, 32, was captured by police in Belleville, Ill., in December after he ran through a Lone Oak Farm pasture to avoid arrest for several traffic tickets. Landon tried to hide in a shallow, water-filled ditch, but several horses wandered over to take a closer look at him, drawing officers' attention to the ditch. And at the January trial of alleged mobster Billy Rinick in Philadelphia, a narcotics agent described how he came to arrest Rinick at the home of his boss Joey Merlino. The agent had tracked Rinick to the upstairs part of Merlino's house and then, feigning secrecy, playfully whispered to Merlino's 4-year-old daughter, sitting on a bed, "Where's Billy?" The girl innocently pointed to the room across the hall, where Rinick was hiding under a bed.

Latest person to believe he had been beaten up in a mugging when actually, as his doctor informed him, he had been shot in the head (with the bullet still there): Keishun Scudder, Paterson, N.J., December. Latest annual New Year's Eve death toll in Japan from eating the traditional mochi rice dumplings, which are notoriously difficult to swallow, especially for the elderly: six (with 25 more hospitalized).

The Atlanta firm Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences regularly runs consumers through MRIs while they look at pictures of products so that researchers can see which parts of the brain are stimulated in order to learn consumers' subconscious thoughts about those products. A Brighthouse spokesman tried to say as little as possible about this "neuromarketing" technology, and which companies pay the bills, and told the Canadian public radio program "Marketplace" (which reported on the Institute in December): "Right now (our clients) would rather not be exposed. We have been kind of running under the radar with a lot of the breakthrough technology."

Fairway Middle School (Norwich, England) barred students from throwing snowballs at anyone without permission of the target. State judge Dan Ballou, complaining that the recommended punishment for two teenage speeders was too lenient, ordered them to drop down and give him some pushups (about 40) before he issued the sentence (Lexington, Ky.). A Tacoma, Wash., woman told police that when she was about to be raped on Jan. 17, she began to pray aloud; the rapist asked if she was a Christian, and when she said she was, he apologized, pulled his pants back up and left.

(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 Montana district judge ruled in January that for a homicide suspect with apparent multiple personalities, exercise of a Miranda right by one of them carries over to all the others. Tessa Haley lawyered up when police sought to question her about the stabbing death of her roommate, and though police questioning ceased, Haley transformed into "Martha" and spontaneously confessed to the crime, according to officers. Judge Thomas Honzel ruled that Martha's statements could not be used against Haley (although Haley is still free under existing law to argue that she is not responsible for Martha's crime).

-- Among the fashions introduced at the seasonal shows in Milan, Italy, in January was British designer Vivienne Westwood's "Man" collection, featuring male-only items with frilly cuffs and sleeves and bonnet-like scarves, along with tight, knit sweater sets and jumpers worn over male models' fake breasts. Westwood (a pioneer of punk clothing in the 1970s) said her design had something to do with "how men are so attached to the breast of their mother, a symbol of eternal warmth."

Michael Brown, 33, was arrested in Marked Tree, Ark., in January and charged with burglarizing the lobby of the Marked Tree Bank after security cameras caught him hauling away a clock radio, a CD player and a handful of Dum-Dum suckers, which the bank has on hand for customers' children. The next morning, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, police followed a trail of Dum-Dum wrappers down Frisco Street, across the railroad tracks, and into the mobile home park where Brown lives.

A study by psychology professor Barry Jones (Glasgow University) found that men and women who have had three beers perceive people of the opposite sex as 25 percent more attractive than they did before they started drinking (August). And, writing in the Journal of Clothing, Science and Technology, a Southampton University (England) physicist found that many women wear the wrong-size bra because retailers commit a math error known as "spurious rounding" when converting bust and rib-cage size to bra size (December). And studies at Jikei University (Tokyo) found that people who employed seven rules for good health (e.g., adequate sleep, no smoking) had about 6 percent higher blood pressure than people who were not so concerned about their health (October).

-- Australian Supreme Court Justice Barry O'Keefe rejected the challenge of a drug-possession suspect in November that his rights had been violated during his arrest. Contrary to the suspect's contention, O'Keefe said that when Rocky the police dog nuzzled the suspect's crotch, it was merely a "social gesture" that dogs habitually do, rather than an indecent assault.

-- In November, convicted Hawthorne, Calif., rapist Jaime Garcia Padilla, 42, lost his state appeals court case in which he had argued that his girlfriend had unlawfully seized his sperm for testing. The girlfriend's sister had claimed that it was Padilla who had awakened her at night and raped her in the dark, and Padilla's girlfriend needed to find out if Padilla was the one. She had consensual sex with Padilla and turned in his sperm to authorities, and it was indeed matched to both women. California's 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that Padilla, not having "express(ed) any further interest" in his semen at the time that he ejaculated with the girlfriend, "basically lost all possessory interest in (it)," and cited Roe v. Wade as legal authority.

-- A family court judge in White Cloud, Mich., ruled in November for Kristin Hanslovsky, who in a child-custody dispute had tried to prevent her ex-husband, Jonathan Fowler (a member of the Native American Church of the Morning Star), from letting their 4-year-old son use peyote in ceremonies at the church. Fowler said the 4-year-old should decide for himself if he wanted to use peyote, which Fowler personally credited for helping overcome his own alcoholism and to "come into contact with God."

-- The town of Recklingshausen, Germany (near Cologne), which operates a zoo, found out in November that it could not summarily fire its zookeeper, even though it had caught him barbecuing and eating seven of his animals (five Tibetan mountain chickens and two sheep from Cameroons). After a labor court hearing, the town was forced to comply with German law and give the zookeeper six months' severance pay.

-- New York City criminal court judge Gerald Harris ruled in October that drug suspect Vincent Cooper's rights were violated when a police officer pinched his cheeks, causing four bags of marijuana to fall out. The arresting officer had asked Cooper what he was doing in a notorious drug neighborhood, and when Cooper allegedly mumbled an answer, the officer attempted to clear Cooper's mouth so he could understand him.

The Boston Globe profiled homeless philosopher Donald Keaney, 61, in December, describing his Walden-like existence in the woods near Brookline, Mass. Keaney lives under a plastic tarp, warmed by several heavy blankets, but the rest of his possessions consist of about 10 years' worth of newspapers (New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, Boston Globe and Boston Herald) that are methodically filed and sealed in plastic bags and strewn around the ground as if they were chairs and tables. Keaney, a political conservative, also attends protests, lectures and concerts, and, by the way, has long been the beneficiary of a trust fund which he has chosen so far to ignore. "Living in the woods, you can see life is very tragic," he told the Globe. "I don't know if I'm a misanthrope, but (people) have a lot of limitations."

Police in New Britain, Conn., confiscated a 50-foot-long pile of stolen items in November, the result of a ritual scavenger hunt of the Canettes, New Britain High School's all-girl marching band drill team. According to The Hartford Courant, police, parents and school personnel were flabbergasted that 42 normally law-abiding girls could wantonly steal so many items in a single evening, but the girls apparently sincerely had a hard time believing that they had done anything wrong. Said one girl, who helped pull a mailbox out of the ground: "I just thought it was a custom ... kind of like a camaraderie thing (and) if the seniors said it was OK and they were in charge, then it was OK."

Florida, after a 4-3 decision of the state Supreme Court in January, became the latest state to rule that a man who initially agrees to pay child support until age 21 cannot shed that obligation just because he subsequently proves by DNA testing that he could not be the kid's father. Cathy Anderson had told police officer Michael Anderson twice that she was sure the kid was his, after which he agreed to pay $8,000 a year in support, but after the DNA test, he claimed that her assurance constituted "fraud," a claim that the Supreme Court thus rejected.

Officials in Rankin Inlet, on the north shore of Hudson Bay in Canada's Northwest Territories, began installation of an artificial ice rink because rising temperatures in the last three decades have reduced hockey season from nine months to five. And a female murder victim was identified (even though her body had been dismembered) when the coroner checked the serial numbers on her breast implants (Nottinghamshire, England). And the town council of Bend, Ore., formally prohibited spitting and defecating on its transit buses, as well as riders who emanate "a grossly repulsive odor."

A man acting as a tree-sitter (to discourage logging operations) in woods south of San Jose, Calif., fell out of the tree and was killed (October). And a 55-year-old man fell to his death from a hotel railing as he was reaching for documents that were being blown away by the wind (Cebu, Philippines, October). And a 72-year-old man accidentally fell to his death from a cliff at Buck's Pocket State Park in Alabama as he thrust into the air the ashes of his recently deceased son (October).

-- 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.)