-- James C. Schaefer recently self-published an autobiography chronicling what he believes was his textbook case of Wisconsinaphobia (heightened anxiety attacks and debilitating back pains at any mention of the state or anything associated with it). After relocating from Milwaukee to California, he has become unnerved by people speaking with Wisconsin's nasal accents, mentions of Wisconsin companies (Harley-Davidson) and Wisconsin-made products, Green Bay Packers' scores, and even public utilities (since he had been a systems analyst for the largest utility in Wisconsin). Schaefer, 64, said he is now "90 percent" cured, after intensive therapy.

-- The attorney general of the Australian state of Victoria told reporters in February that the government would soon propose legislation to abolish the common-law practice of varying the death benefits for widows according to how pretty they are. Technically, the doctrine allows a discount on a widow's compensation if she has strong prospects of remarriage, and judges thus unavoidably take note of her attributes in deciding how much money she needs. (The widow most recently judged a looker lost about US$62,000 until an appeals court intervened.)

Police called on a woman in Kent, Ohio, in February, asking her to make adjustments to a female snowman in her yard whose breasts had been made, according to a complainant, "inappropriate(ly)" large. The woman, Crystal Lynn, at first acceded to the officer's request and draped the snowman in a tablecloth, but after giving more thought about the mentality of a person who would, in the year 2003, call the police about protrusions of ice, she removed the tablecloth, and the officer dropped the matter.

Antoinette M. Hooker, 40, was sentenced to 21 days in jail for, what else, prostitution (Berks County, Pa., February). The assistant pastor of St. Paul's University Catholic Center in Madison, Wis., who was placed on administrative leave in January after being accused of sexual improprieties: Father Bob DeCock. And a 21-year-old motorcyclist received a light sentence for causing a vehicular death because the judge viewed the collision basically as an accident rather than as caused by marijuana, which the man had admitted to using beforehand; the prosecutor, Ms. Mary Jane Kanabis, was disappointed at the sentence (Greenwich, Conn., December).

-- In February, in her last meeting as mayor of South Gate, Calif. (a Los Angeles suburb), after being overwhelmingly ousted in a special election by voters certain that she and some colleagues were corrupt, Ms. Xochilt Ruvalcaba, 30, sucker-punched nemesis Councilman Henry Gonzalez (age 67, who walks with a cane) in the face. The assault took place in front of 200 catcalling anti-Ruvalcaba voters, some video-recording the meeting. And three days before that, on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco, Mayor Willie Brown angrily confronted his nemesis, Aaron Peskin of the city's Board of Supervisors, thrusting his face within centimeters of Peskin's while screaming vulgarities (which were described in a San Francisco Chronicle story as "mother" and "s").

-- The Tacoma News Tribune reported in January that Washington state's halfway house for former sex offenders who are kept on for treatment after their prison terms expire is costing taypayers about $340,000 per "patient" per year (vs. about $25,000 per year to house a prison inmate). So fearful is the state that the three men now housed there will harm the 11 schoolchildren in a nearby elementary school that it has assigned three counselors, a director and a state trooper to watch the men around the clock. Gov. Gary Locke has targeted the program for a cutback, but legislators resist because of their fear of the three men.

-- Officials at Nevada's Yucca Mountain repository for high-level nuclear waste are struggling with a Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirement that the site post signs warning intruders of its dangers, lasting as far into the future as the year 12,000 A.D., even though no one knows whether any language now spoken on Earth will be spoken then. (The oldest known writing, Sanskrit, is about 7,000 years old.) Among the suggestions (according to a February Wall Street Journal report): drawings of someone vomiting while drilling at the site; and simply making Yucca Mountain also a global feces dump, to discourage trespassers.

-- A February report by Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation concluded that Enron Corp.'s tax-avoidance schemes in the 1990s (including 692 partnerships in the Cayman Islands) were, according to a New York Times reporter, "financial maneuvers so complex that the Internal Revenue Service has been unable to understand them." Even so, the IRS staff consistently failed to challenge Enron's maneuvers, passively accepting sophisticated opinion letters from Enron's law firms approving the arrangements (letters purchased by Enron at a typical price of $1 million each).

British boatman Andrew Halsey, 45, set off from Peru last Nov. 28 with 260 days' food, intending to row solo across the Pacific Ocean to Australia (about 8,000 miles). According to a BBC progress report on Feb. 8, after 72 days of fighting winds and currents and rowing probably 2,300 miles out, back and in circles, he was still 8,000 miles away. (A March 7 update in a British weekly reported that he had closed to within 7,600 miles of Melbourne.)

Gary Lee McMurray, 30, was arrested in February for grand larceny in Jonesville, Tenn. Police said McMurray telephoned Debra Letourneau of Long Hollow while she was at the home of another man, told her he had her upper plate of false teeth, and told her that if she did not pay him a ransom (amount not reported), he would stomp on them.

Ms. Selimy Mensah, 39, was hospitalized in Leonia, N.J., in February with second- and third-degree burns. According to police, Mensah started a fire in her second-floor apartment when she, for some reason, tried to open a canister of spray paint with an electric can opener.

Last year, after a KORB personality in the Davenport, Iowa, radio market offered listeners $30,000 a year for up to five years to tattoo "93 Rock" (the station's ID) on their forehead, Richard Goddard Jr. took him up on it, and Goddard's grumbling about the station's subsequent, alleged reneging on the deal got wide newspaper coverage. In January 2003, according to police, John and Mary Rushman of Colona, Ill. (with whom Goddard had been temporarily staying), were charged with beating Goddard in the face with a ball peen hammer because he was severely getting on their nerves with all of his complaints and suicide threats.

South Dakota Highway Patrolmen made a guns-drawn stop of a motorist in February, as suspicious because he was driving his van on Interstate 90 while wearing a gas mask (but he said he was just making a restaurant delivery of food that had an unpleasant smell). And Mikhail Kalashnikov, 83, inventor of terrorists' favorite assault rifle, expressed remorse for his invention recently, said he wanted to rehabilitate his name, and signed on with a German company to manufacture Kalashnikov umbrellas. And North Korea's Kim Jong Il turned 61 in February, which was an opportunity for countrymen to give Christmas-type presents to their kids, for Kim to celebrate by turning on the electricity at government farms for a whole 24 hours straight, and for the official news agency to remind people of Kim's accomplishments, including 11 holes-in-one in his first-ever round of golf.

Also, in the Last Month ...

A 48-year-old man was one of the big losers in the U.S. Supreme Court's recent approval of three-strikes laws and now faces life in prison for an office break-in; his previous convictions (many, many more than the required two) were for robbing women at gunpoint of the panties they were wearing (Orange County, Calif.). China's Yunnan province rolled out a fleet of 18 "mobile execution vehicles" to travel the countryside so that capital punishment (lethal drugs) could be imposed immediately upon a guilty verdict. And a 54-year-old German artist is set to open a "brothel" in which owners (for about US$30) could bring their dogs to have sex with each other in private rooms (Berlin).

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

-- 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.)