-- Making a claim on British television in March that should alarm all News of the Weird readers, James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) said he saw no reason why "stupidity" could not some day be corrected by gene therapy just as other "disorders" are now being addressed. "If you're really stupid, I would call that a disease," he said, on the Channel 4 documentary "DNA." "I'd like to get rid of (stupidity)."

-- Two TV stations reported in February that Paul West of Winsted, Conn., had taken the then-current Homeland Security alerts very seriously and covered his entire house, top to bottom, with 3,500 square feet of plastic sheeting to "protect" against "radiological or biological or chemical attack," he said. West, his wife and two children live on a farm outside Winsted, in northern Connecticut, about 120 miles from New York City. Said West, "I just have all this energy from tension and anxiety (about terrorism), and I don't know what to do with it."

According to a December Federal Trade Commission lawsuit, Mark Nutritionals Inc., of San Antonio, Texas, earned $190 million in four years selling a $40 solution that guaranteed weight loss even if the user ate lots of pizza, beer, tacos and doughnuts. And in November, the new Kaiser Medical Center hospital in Fremont, Calif., staged a special ceremony, by the hospital's chaplain, using symbols and inspirational words on rocks, to battle "spirits" that some nurses believed were responsible for beds moving and doors slamming on their own. And at a press conference in Boise, Idaho, in December, Genesis World Energy spokespeople introduced the Edison Device, which they said will produce 20 years' electricity for a home using only a bathtub's worth of water as fuel (but reporters could not examine it or ask any questions about it).

-- Charles Edward Jones was convicted in February of robbing a Wachovia Bank in Miami with the key evidence being a DNA match to two gold teeth that were knocked out of his mouth when he stepped into a street during his getaway and was hit by a school lunch van. Compounding his lack of clear getaway thinking was the fact that he had just fired his gun into his pants as he tried to stuff it into his waistband.

-- In Washington, D.C., in February, Ronald T. Stephenson, 20, was convicted of murder in an out-of-control June 2000 robbery. The key police evidence was a videotape of Stephenson subsequently confessing to the crime in a visit to the home of his partner, Dwight Walker (who had, unbeknownst to Stephenson, become an informant). On the tape, Stephenson is heard to tell Walker that there is no way the police can get him for the murder unless, for example, they somehow caught him admitting on videotape that he did it.

-- Timothy Baker was back in jail in Waco, Texas, in January, hours after he had escaped while being held for aggravated robbery. His getaway had taken him to Baylor University, where he broke into a building in order to find a change of clothes from his orange jumpsuit. The building was the Fine Arts Center, where Baker raided a costume closet. He apparently thought he would be inconspicuous if he changed into a 19th-century green wool costume (with rubber galoshes) that made him look like a "leprechaun," said the sheriff later, after Baker was spotted on the street and re-arrested. Said the chairman of the theater department, "He just really stood out."

-- Police in Overland Park, Kan., arrested a 29-year-old man from Virginia on New Year's Eve (but his partner escaped) and charged him with defrauding the Embassy Suites Hotel by using two stolen $500 money orders to obtain cash. By the time the hotel discovered that the money orders were bogus, the two men had checked out of their rooms, but fortunately, the 29-year-old man had just returned to the hotel because he had forgotten to get his $20 room deposit back. He was arrested without incident.

-- In Northampton, Mass., in December, and several months earlier in Spokane, Wash., marijuana traffickers' operations came to an end when they made routine business deposits of cash but failed to notice that their money reeked of the scent of marijuana. Arlene and Martin Santor of Wallingford, Vt., handed $50,000 in $20 bills to a smell-sensitive jailor in Northampton to bail their daughter out on drug charges, and Kathleen Jenny and Virginia Erickson made cash bank deposits to a smell-sensitive teller in Spokane (which led to their trafficking conviction in January 2003).

-- In January, Devon Harris, 19, and Shemone Gordon, 23, were charged with kidnapping millionaire investment manager Edward Lampert outside his office in Greenwich, Conn., and attempting to ransom him, but Harris' mother and Gordon's aunt both told reporters later that their boys are just not smart enough to pull off a kidnapping like that. The kidnappers abandoned their plan after three hours and released Lampert, but were arrested a short time later when police traced their whereabouts after the men used Lampert's credit card to order a pizza delivery.

-- Rick Kowalewski, 41, and Matthew Bracelin, 20, were charged with fraud in November for selling bogus designer clothes from a booth in Osage, Iowa. Police seized $25,000 worth of shirts with Tommy Hilfiger, Nike and Ralph Lauren logos but whose neck tags said Fruit of the Loom.

-- Aaron Bell, 19, was convicted in December of robbing a Kentucky Fried Chicken store in Philadelphia 12 months earlier. It was the same KFC where Bell had worked for the previous two years; he wore no mask or disguise, and all the employees recognized him. He might have learned in those two years that the store's safe is time-locked at 9 p.m., but he started the robbery at 9:15 and thus got no money. Nonetheless, Bell successfully hid from police for three days. On the third day, he decided to report for work at the KFC, acting as if nothing had happened. The manager called police.

-- In Manchester, England, in December, Thomas Clark, 30 (described by his lawyer as "intelligent" and "highly educated" but spiraling into depression), was convicted in the stabbing death of a 71-year-old man. Among the evidence against him was the result of an Internet search he had performed on his computer: "What sentence would I get for stabbing somebody in an unprovoked attack?" (The response, from the "Ask Jeeves" Web site, was not introduced as evidence, but the correct answer, it turns out, is "life in prison.")

Leonard Garland, 20, and a partner were arrested in Ashland, Mass., in February, after Garland had the bright idea to crash a party at a private home he just happened to be driving by, thinking that a party was a good place to find customers for his drug business. Garland walked in and struck up a conversation, eventually enticing a guest to ask him about drugs. Garland had cocaine on him, but when his "customer" wanted more, Garland made a phone call to his connection. However, the connection said he would not go near Ashland because Ashland's main narcotics detective, Mark Gutwill, was too aggressive. Unknown to Garland, the soiree he happened into was an off-duty party of police officers, and the potential "customer" he had randomly chosen to talk to was Detective Mark Gutwill, who soon arrested him.

The Department of Health in Great Britain (which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Western Europe) drew criticism for its latest school sex education program, which suggests to kids the merits of oral sex instead of intercourse. And a woman was detained for shoplifting from a Price Chopper grocery store in Rutland, Vt., with about 100 unpaid-for items (including ice cream, meats and videotapes), all skillfully tucked into her coat, purse and bag. And a state child welfare agency seized half of an 11-year-old boy's $220 savings account (built up by doing chores) because his father (whose name was on it, too) was behind on the kid's child support payments (Des Moines, Iowa).

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

-- 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.)