-- University of California, Santa Barbara, researcher J. Gordon Melton's new edition of the Encyclopedia of American Religion lists 2,630 denominations in two dozen informal "families" (e.g., 116 Catholic flocks, "hundreds" of Pentecostal flocks), according to a January Associated Press report. Among the least mainstream: the (John F.) Kennedy Worshippers, the Nudist Christian Church of the Blessed Virgin Jesus, the Church of God Anonymous, the Church of the New Song (once offered porterhouse steaks for communion), and 22 that believe in UFOs (including the clone-happy Raelians).

-- The British government proposed privacy-rights legislation in January that would permit people to have sex in public restrooms as long as they could not be seen by others using the restroom. The week after that, the California Patriot (a publication of students at the University of California, Berkeley) reported that a university-funded gay students' Web site was openly discussing which restrooms on campus were the most hospitable for public sex (acts which are still illegal in California).

Some recent accidental self-shootings: Jason Gins, 19, Baton Rouge, La., January, in the genitals (gun stuffed in waistband during getaway from robbery); Michael Bent, 30, New York City, September, hit an artery near the groin (fatal) (fooling with gun in car while talking to his girlfriend); Randal Lewis, 40, near St. Louis, September, in the head (fatal) (while demonstrating to 12-year-old son how to unload gun); Robert E. Slay Jr., 55, Gonzalez, La., October, leg (trying on pants at an outlet store); Dr. Steve Kyplesky, 57, Raceland, La., hand (fumbling with gun in his truck's glove compartment); Dale B. Grimmett, 41, Ione, Wash., shoulder (pointed rifle at himself while cleaning it); 15-year-old high school student, Detroit, December, leg (bent over to pick up pencil in class).

In December, Robert John Cusack, 45, was sentenced to 57 days in jail for a June smuggling caper on a flight to Los Angeles. He had four endangered songbirds and 50 illegal orchids in his luggage, and when one bird flew off down an airport corridor during an inspection, the agent asked if Cusack had anything else. "Yes," he said. "I've got monkeys in my pants" (actually, two endangered pygmy monkeys from Thailand, which Cusack dug down for and handed over).

Police in Lowell, Mass., said in January that dozens of young Asian women had purchased sloppy breast augmentations, nose jobs and eyelid surgeries from a Cambodian couple posing as doctors in a bloody "Frankenstein's workshop." And a Venezuelan couple were sentenced to from two to seven years in prison by a New York City court in December for injecting a rooster-comb derivative into the faces of 20 women as cut-rate wrinkle-smoothers but which scarred them for life. And authorities in Guadalajara, Mexico, arrested fake "Dr." Myriam Yukie Gaona (a former stripper) in July for performing cut-rate plastic surgery on "hundreds" of women, augmenting the breasts and lips of some with industrial silicone and motor oil.

In February, the lawyer for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke (who is to be sentenced in March for defrauding financial contributors in order to feed his gambling habit) appealed to the judge to send Duke to an upscale prison because otherwise black inmates would tear him up. And Kenneth Hawthorn, a Jehovah's Witness proselytizer, filed a lawsuit in Adelaide, Australia, against a couple whose ram attacked him, battering him to the ground, as he approached the couple's door. (The parties settled the lawsuit in January.) (Bonus detail: The ram, since deceased, was named Shit for Brains.)

In Holmes County, Miss., in October, Mr. Chocwe Lumumba, Esq., earned an acquittal for his client, former policeman Eddie Myers, having convinced the jury that it was self-defense when Myers killed his sister-in-law (who was the assistant police chief). Myers told the jury that, yes, he grabbed two .40-caliber handguns and fired 36 shots, hitting the woman 14 times, and yes, the victim's own handgun was found by emergency workers still strapped inside its holster, but it was still self-defense.

-- In November, the Pentagon rejected a Freedom of Information Act request by a reporter to see an internal training video, claiming that the law allowed it to be withheld. The video is the 22-minute "Freedom of Information Act / The People's Right to Know," which is utilized to teach Pentagon employees how to carry out the maximum-disclosure purpose of the act.

-- Convicted sex abuser Daniel Ray Erickson (who once "purchased" a 5-year-old girl whom he then molested) petitioned a judge in Brooksville, Fla., in December to have his photo removed from Florida's sex offender Web site. "How," he asked, "can a guy get married and become a good, stable citizen if they're putting your picture there?" (Indeed, he said, his previous girlfriend had left him when she found out he was on the Web site.)

-- Boston City Councilman Felix Arroyo, who opposes war in Iraq, announced in January that he was going on a hunger strike to protest U.S. policy. Arroyo said he would begin a liquid-only regimen, but then limited that to daylight hours (thus allowing himself dinner and, theoretically, breakfast), and later qualified that to mean that he would only adhere to this hardship diet on the second and fourth Fridays of each month.

The men of the Messiah Lutheran Church in Ripon, Calif., voted 25-17 in December to let women start voting on church matters, but that was still three votes shy of the required two-thirds majority. And health researchers told a conference in San Antonio, Texas, in January that they had treated a well-fed college student who had come down with the old-time mariner's disease of scurvy (absence of vitamin C in the student's steady diet of cheese, crackers, cookies and soda). And a retired professor was appointed in November by the town of Colwood, British Columbia, to find out why garage doors suddenly open, sprinklers come on, TVs and VCRs start automatically, and one couple's mechanical bed folds up while they're asleep. (Two new broadcast transmission towers are the suspects.)

Authorities in Lincolnshire, England, are trying to identify the 60-ish-year-old woman who was admitted to Lincoln County Hospital in December, suffering from amnesia but insisting she is Barry Manilow. The only things she was carrying were several Manilow albums.

The Philippine Star reported that George Mamaril, perhaps overreacting to his wife, Evelyn's, suspicion of infidelity, severed his penis on Feb. 22, wrapped it in newspaper, and tossed it through the window of her parents' house, where she was staying, with a note reading (in Filipino), "So you will not suspect I am courting another girl."

A Maryland state auditing office found, based on examining cell phone usage of 74 state employees, that the state could have saved $130,000 last year if the 74 had switched to a higher-minutes call plan. And Daniel Torres was convicted of killing a man (and his pet cockatoo) after prosecutors showed that Torres' DNA was found in the cockatoo's beak because the bird had pecked Torres furiously to defend itself (Dallas). And a highly lauded Vermont sex-crime investigation unit, staggered by government budget cuts, announced it would turn to raffle tickets and bake sales to keep the office going (St. Albans, Vt.).

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

-- In January, the engineers and hobbyists of Utah's Salt Lake Astronomical Society told reporters they were planning to air-drop bowling balls, at very high altitude, to check out their impact when they land on the salt flats, to simulate the impact of meteorites. The society said it had been frustrated that it could not find any meteorites so far and had been wondering whether they had disintegrated or been pulverized on impact. Two days later, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, citing the many people engaged in work projects on the salt flats, said it was a bad idea to be dropping bowling balls around them.

-- In December, Texas murder defendant Leonard Rojas' time for appeals ran out, and he was executed. Sixty-eight days later, three members of the state's highest court for criminal cases explicitly concluded that Rojas' appointed lawyer was woefully incompetent and that the court's majority had ignored that incompetence while Rojas was still alive. The lawyer, David K. Chapman: had never handled a death-penalty case, failed to investigate Rojas' case, rarely met with Rojas, admitted he missed filing deadlines (one of which barred Rojas from any federal appeal), and had had his license suspended three times by the Texas Bar (once during the time he was representing Rojas).

The race-discrimination lawsuit of two black sisters (Grace Fuller, 48, and Louise Sawyer, 46) against Southwest Airlines is scheduled to go to trial in Kansas City, Kan., in March. The sisters' entire case is that a white flight attendant, in a hurry to get passengers seated, recited Southwest's version of a rhyme that has a racist history: "Eenie, meeny, minie, moe / Pick a seat, We gotta go." The sisters felt degraded and believe they are due some money.

Most recent antiwar demonstrations have been by clothed people, but since November, nude demonstrations against an invasion of Iraq have taken place in Marin County, Calif. (200 women at three sites); near West Palm Beach, Fla. (23 people); Byron Bay, Australia (700); and New York City's Central Park (30, in the snow). And the U.S. Navy announced in February that it is way short of "morticians" and is willing to pay sign-up bonuses of $6,000 (but denied the job search was related to Iraq). And according to Britain's The Sun, both George Bush and Saddam Hussein recently ordered the same $975 handmade shoes from the Milan, Italy, shoemaker Vito Artioli (Bush in size 10, Saddam 9 1/2).

-- In February, a 23-year-old woman who had once changed clothes in the office of a talent agency in Brighton, Mich., while a hidden video camera was running, convinced a jury that that one humiliating experience was worth $575,250. She said that the incident was so severe (even though she had not sought counseling or taken medication for it), she had lost all trust in people and would have to give up on being a model.

-- Anne Stanley filed a lawsuit in Westmoreland County, Pa., in December, asking $90 million as her compensation for a period of time when she was unsure whether or not she had received a deadly infection. A defective bronchoscope was allegedly used on her at Latrobe Area Hospital in January and June of 2001, and one of the things that this particular defect (loose valve) permits is for bacteria to form in a pocket that cannot be reached by sterilization equipment.

-- High school senior Brian Delekta filed a lawsuit in February against the school system in Memphis, Mich., alleging that he actually did A-plus work in one course but only received an A for it, and that his average should be even higher than it is (and Delekta was ranked first in his class by the end of his junior year). The course at issue here is a "work experience" course in which he served as a paralegal in a law office and did a fine job, according to his supervisor. That supervisor happened to be his mother, Diane, who said she meant that he did A-plus, not A, work.

-- The 3rd Baron Mereworth and dozens of British nobles told reporters in January that they planned to sue Britain in the European Court of Human Rights because the Blair government had ousted most of them in a 1997 reform of the "upper" legislature, the House of Lords (which had long been criticized as a mere social club of aristocrats). (Lord Mereworth, for example, inherited his title last year upon the death of his father, who spent 70 years in the House of Lords without ever participating in a debate.)

In her Daily Telegraph (London) column of Jan. 16, Medical Editor Celia Hall reported that a family doctor in western England has been summoned to a formal hearing before his local primary-care trust because he refused to certify a male patient for a Pap smear to screen him for cervical cancer. The man sincerely believes he is a hermaphrodite, but his doctor said he can find no evidence of that (and in fact, the man once fathered a child). At least one colleague suggested appeasing the patient, which the doctor said he might do if someone would teach him the procedure for performing a cervical smear on a 34-year-old male.

Kenneth Patrick Porche Jr., 22, was arrested outside the ladies' room at Dillard's department store in Houma, La., in January, carrying four plastic bags of urine and several empty bags labeled with descriptions such as "old woman." Police said they believed that Porche would enter a stall, disable the toilet's flush mechanism, and line the bowl with a plastic film to catch the urine, before hiding away in an adjacent stall. After a woman used the toilet and left, Porche would collect and bag the urine from the plastic film. Since Porche's behavior was difficult to characterize, police charged him under the catch-all "criminal mischief."

Two women were arrested in February and two men were being sought by police in a failed counterfeit-check scheme in Hickory, N.C.; they were busted because, despite using elaborate computer software to publish bogus checks, none of the four noticed that they had spelled the payer Broyhill Furniture's name as "Boryhill Furmiture." And according to authorities in Winona, Minn., in February, Carl Fratzke defrauded seven people of a total of $200,000 in a bogus investment in gloves; Fratzke (not a very sophisticated investor, himself) then immediately fell for one of the myriad Nigerian scams, blowing the entire $200,000 (plus $550,000 of his own money).

News of the Weird has several times reported on Postal Service letter carriers who get so far behind on their routes that they believe their only way out is to destroy their many bags of backlog. In January, two Immigration and Naturalization Service supervisors in Laguna Niguel, Calif., were indicted for allegedly ordering subordinates to shred their office's 90,000-document backlog (and to continue to shred incoming paperwork so that the office kept current).

Motorist B.J. Justin Lundin, 20, stopped his car in the middle of a two-lane road near Weatherford, Texas, in January, got out, and attacked the driver behind him in a fit of road rage over the driver's having earlier objected to Lundin's tailgating; Lundin was then accidentally struck and killed by another car trying to get around the two cars. And retired Belgian engineer Louis Dethy was accidentally blown up in November by one of the 19 deadly booby traps he had rigged in his home near Charlerois to prevent his ex-wife and 14 children (with whom he was feuding) from legally taking ownership of the house.

A worker at the Brown-Forman Distillery sent 1,800 gallons of tequila into the sewer system when he mistakenly unloaded one tank into an already full one (Louisville, Ky.). Circus clown Gavin Riley, 37, was jailed for two years for beating up his girlfriend because she declined to go watch him perform (Newcastle Upon Tyne, England). Entomologists explained that warm weather was the reason that hordes of cutworms and army worms were slithering across northwestern New Mexico, covering roads and invading homes (but not to worry, in that they would turn into moths in a few weeks, anyway) (Shiprock, N.M.).

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

-- Though state tax revenues are shrinking nationwide, Kansas reported in January that taxes paid on marijuana sales were up 5 percent and taxes paid on cocaine, methamphetamine and other hard drugs were up 20 percent. As other states do, Kansas sells revenue stamps (in denominations from $10 to $1,000) that dealers are supposed to affix to the drugs in order to sell them. Even though such sales themselves are illegal, law enforcement agencies are forbidden from accessing information on the sellers (and if they did, any conviction would probably be tossed out, as based on unconstitutional self-incrimination). A Revenue Department spokesman guessed that most people who buy the stamps are merely collectors.

-- A January Wall Street Journal report described "dB Drag Racing," a "sport" in which the winning car is not the fastest but the one with the loudest stereo system, but ordinary urban street cruisers are not in these drivers' league. In the "Extreme" category, cars are completely rebuilt and powered with enough juice to operate several private homes. Extra-thick glass and concrete poured into the floor and doors keep the sound inside, where the measurement takes place. Last year's winner, from Germany, registered 177.7 decibels.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wrote to Yasser Arafat deploring public bombings, at least when the bomb is delivered (as one was on Jan. 26 in Jerusalem) on a donkey. (Said a PETA official, "It's not my business to (comment on) human wars.") And to help the U.S. military, a Las Vegas porno distributor offered 500 videos free of charge (except for postage) to servicemen as thanks for their sacrifice. And in Cebu, Philippines, in February, a German man, Frank Oesterle, was detained by police after knifing an American tourist at a bar; they were arguing over their respective countries' views on imminent war in Iraq (i.e., U.S., fight; Germany, don't fight).

-- Allison Adams, 23, a veterinary technician for Wildlife Rescue in Austin, Texas, warms up traumatized baby animals (squirrels, kittens, rabbits, etc.) by putting them in her bra (while she's wearing it), according to a profile in the Austin American-Statesman in January. Her report: Squirrels are the hardest; possums the easiest; she's done it about 75 times; no, they don't itch; her fiance is OK with it (even though he was deprived of a hug once because of "hissing possums").

-- Gloria DeFrancesco, 61, filed a lawsuit in Akron, Ohio, in December against TV evangelist Ernest Angley, alleging that the muscle men who surround the stage during his healing sessions roughed her up in August 2001 while she was accompanying her 94-year-old, wheelchair-using, generously tithing mother to be cured. DeFrancesco said she was struck, grabbed and pushed by six men, resulting in a detached retina and other head, nose and body injuries that required hospitalization and surgery.

-- According to trial coverage in the Omaha World-Herald in October, the prosecutor of accused Omaha sexual assaulter Akhiktemelo Braimah said that DNA evidence indicated that the probability of another "African-American" besides Braimah having committed the assault was "1 in 30.3 sextillion" ("303" followed by 20 zeros). (30.3 sextillion represents 5 trillion times the number of people of all nationalities on Earth right now and 303 billion times the likely number who have ever lived.) (Braimah pleaded no contest two days later.)

-- The BBC reported in January that Holger Voss has been ordered to court in Muenster, Germany, accused of breaking its law against "glorification of a criminal act." According to a complaint to police, Voss had written on an Internet message board, "Congratulations to the murderers of (Sept. 11)." Voss told a BBC reporter that he obviously meant to be sarcastic, but court spokesman Juergen Wrobel said that would be for the court to decide.

-- Freshman Missouri state Rep. Cynthia Davis, at a legislative orientation session in December in Jefferson City, took her turn at learning how to preside over debates and interrupted Rep. Chuck Graham, who had the floor. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Davis recited the rule that members must be standing in order to speak and that Graham was thus out of order, in that the veteran legislator Graham has been in a wheelchair for 21 years, the result of a car accident.

Retired pediatrician Alva J. Hartwright, 63, pleaded guilty in February to sexually assaulting two boys, age 11 and 14 at the time, by giving them enemas (part of a 30-year pattern, said prosecutors, of administering enemas to as many as 40 boys). When police arrested Hartwright at his home in June in Morrisville, Pa., they found "feces everywhere," with "so much feces in one room (that) it was impassable," said an officer. Also found were "thousands" of photographic images of boys receiving enemas, all of which, insisted Hartwright, were "medically necessary" and not sexually gratifying to him.

Tyrone Jermain Hogan, 20, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles in February to attempted carjacking, six months after trying to steal a van that unbeknownst to him at the time was carrying a martial arts team visiting from Florida International University; the students, said their instructor, held Hogan "like a pretzel on the ground" until police arrived. And Edgar A. Brown, 27, was arrested in Worthington, Ohio, in January and charged with robbing the First Merit Bank; police were tipped off after Brown paid his electric bill at a Columbus store using red-stained $50 bills.

In a still largely underreported 1996 study by St. Louis University (revealed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in January), researchers concluded that at least 40 percent of Catholic nuns in the United States have suffered either sexual abuse, sexual exploitation or sexual harassment, with nearly half of the instances perpetrated by priests or other nuns. The results were published in two obscure journals in 1998, but the study's sponsors otherwise squelched the news out of a desire not to harm the church's then-still-virtuous reputation.

The late composer John Cage's "As Slow As Possible," now being played once, lasting 639 years, at a church in Halberstadt, Germany, has so far taken 17 months just to get the organ's bellows inflated and now will take 18 months more just to play the composition's first three notes, according to a February BBC report. And former stockbroker Warren D. Matthei, 51, who has sat in jail in Philadelphia since 1996 rather than pay his first wife child support that now amounts to about $350,000, declined federal judge Jerome Simandle's offer of release in January, claiming that he did not want to put pressure on his 82-year-old mother (who would have to sign over a security interest in her home as a condition of release); Matthei lived it up in Europe with his second wife but then inexplicably returned home in 1996.

The burglar who apparently broke in to the A Little Bit of Country western emporium in Mineral Wells, Texas, on Feb. 8 was arrested shortly after the store opened at 9 a.m., in one of the state's easiest collars: He had fallen asleep on a bed in a furniture showroom. It was an interesting caper: A few coins (the only money on the premises) were scattered on the floor; he had left his gun in the store's restroom; and anyway, of all the places in town, he had picked a store owned by the wife of the Palo Pinto County district attorney.

A disabled woman, noticing a fire in her apartment but having no telephone, alerted neighbors as best she could by firing several gunshots through a wall and out a window (Omaha, Neb.). State Sen. Ben Robinson introduced a bill to require restaurants serving barbecue meat to supply cloth napkins (which he said a campaign donor had asked him to do 15 years earlier) (Oklahoma City). The tourist director in the nation of Liechtenstein (60 square miles, population 33,000, between Switzerland and Austria) said corporations interested in holding conferences there would be allowed to rent the entire country, with the cooperation of all local officials.