-- Scientists at the University of Southern California will soon begin testing an artificial brain prosthesis (a silicon chip that mimics the hippocampus), which, if successful, can help people who cannot store future and recent memories of their experiences. One problem with the project (according to a March story in New Scientist): Subjects might not remember anything about the research or consenting to participate in it. (Another problem: Nearly everyone is glad not to be able to recall some negative experiences.)

-- The small Jewish Skver sect of Hasidim (New Square, N.Y.) was energized in March when a fishcutter in the sect (along with his Christian co-worker) swore they heard a 20-pound carp shout apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew. The co-worker thought the carp was merely Satanic, but Zalmen Rosen, 57, said the fish's soul was cautioning that the end is near, perhaps because of war in Iraq. Although the news spread throughout the community (aided by a feature in The New York Times), the carp itself met an inglorious end when the co-worker butchered it and sold it for gefilte fish.

In March, former Northwest Airlines flight attendant Daniel Reed Cunningham was charged with slyly drugging the apple juice of a severely rambunctious 19-month-old baby during a 2002 flight. The mother became suspicious after tasting the juice and so slipped some into a container for later testing (which revealed Xanax).

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (61) Parent(s) who leave young children home alone for days at a time, certain that they can care for themselves, while they frolic, as a 31-year-old Placentia, Calif., woman did in December, leaving her kids, ages 7 and 4, for three weeks to go see a North Carolina man she had met on the Internet. (62) And men who steal industrial (slow-moving) vehicles and apparently try to outrun pursuing police cars, as a 29-year-old man did in February with a farm tractor (towing an 18-foot-wide chisel plow), piddling along for 20 miles from near Wheaton, Minn., into South Dakota, "chased" by sheriff's deputies until he finally crashed.

-- Israeli Aircraft Industries Ltd. is now testing an "airplane" the size of a credit card (flight time: 20 minutes), containing cameras and transmitters to relay intelligence from battlefields, or from the insides of buildings by going through open windows. And the company TrapTec (Escondido, Calif.) is now in the final testing of "anti-graffiti" sensors that are so responsive that they can identify taggers who use spray paint just by the distinctive hissing sound of the aerosol can (and automatically tell police the taggers' location, via global positioning system technology).

-- According to a January Los Angeles Times profile, biologist Gerry Kuzyk recently came upon, in a remote area of the Yukon, an 8-foot-high, half-mile swath of what he learned was caribou droppings; since no caribou had been sighted in the area for over 100 years, Kuzyk concluded that it was a massive, centuries-old accumulation that had been frozen but recently melted. And the Reuters news service reported in February that Antarctica's oldest building has become largely unvisitable because it is being blocked in by droppings from the area's 100,000 Adelie penguins.

-- In a three-hour operation in February at the Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College Hospital in Calcutta, India, doctors performed what they claimed was the world's first penis transplant. Dr. Ashok Ray, lead surgeon, had been in the process of removing a troublesome second penis on a 1-year-old boy when someone elsewhere in the hospital informed him that a baby boy had just been born without one.

-- New Concierge Services: In Melbourne, Australia, in March, John Stark, 60, and his wife and son pleaded guilty to running a scheme in which the Starks "ordered" large quantities of upscale goods, which two shoplifter-associates would then go "acquire" for them so that the Starks could resell them in the family's Shopaholic discount stores. And a burglary ring in New York City was even more specific: According to March indictments, they stole only items specifically requested by individual patrons who had heard by word of mouth that they could drop off a wish list and then buy the items at a deep discount when the goods "came in."

-- New Frontiers in Advertising: In February, a British ad agency began paying college students about $20 for each three-hour stint in which they walk around in public with a company's logo semipermanently tattooed on their foreheads. And in December, another British agency signed up Sony Ericsson to pay for draping its advertising messages over large dogs (St. Bernards, Great Danes) whose owners accepted free dog-walking service in public parks in exchange for allowing the "moving billboards."

Recent Obsessions in the News: Stanley Jollymore, 90, was written up in Toronto's National Post for the "ball" he made out of 139,620 metallic wrappers from cigarette packages from his 70 years of smoking (February). And Gary Duschi, 52, was written up in the Virginian-Pilot (Hampton Roads, Va.) for his 8-mile-long chain of chewing gum wrappers (38-year habit, a million wrappers) (March). And Carl Masthay, 62, was written up in Riverfront Times (St. Louis) for compiling (over the last 12 years), and self- publishing, an exhaustive, 757-page dictionary for translating between French and the Illinois Indian Kaskaskian dialect (a language no one has spoken for hundreds of years).

Burglars broke into a county Humane Society office and stole about $1,800; they apparently entered by squeezing through a dog door (Pittsburgh, January). And Macy Panel Products was fined by an industrial tribunal after machine operator Keith Sanderson accidentally chopped off the tip of his thumb and then, showing bosses how the accident happened, accidentally chopped off his entire index finger (Newcastle, England, March).

A 23-year-old professional snowboarder (in Nagano, Japan, for a competition) fell about 50 feet to his death while playfully sliding down the handrail of a staircase at the Panorama Land Kijimadaira hotel (February). A 13-year-old boy drowned while trying to swim with a heavy tow chain around his waist (inspired by a scene in the movie "Blue Crush," where a surfer trains by swimming while towing a large rock) (Port Salerno, Fla., February). A 28-year-old student actor accidentally hanged himself while rehearsing, alone, a scene in which his character survives a hanging (Baton Rouge, La., December).

News of the Weird from time to time reports on the vile, anti-homosexuality crusades of the indefatigable Rev. Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church, Topeka, Kan.) and his extended family. The latest: The clan plans to be in Pittsburgh on April 13 to picket several organizations that had been associated with the late Fred Rogers, whom the Phelpses believe led kids in "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" to feel that being gay was acceptable. Said one of Phelps' daughters (a Westboro attorney): "This country has forgotten God and effectively flipped Him off, and Fred Rogers is in part responsible." (At a November demonstration at the University of Maryland, the Phelpses carried the sign, "Thank God for Sept. 11," an event which they view as proof of God's wrath.)

New Salem Missionary Baptist Church members voted 67-10 to fire pastor Stanley Hall, who had refused to reschedule his consecration service even though it conflicted with the telecast of the Super Bowl (Birmingham, Ala.). A 19-year-old woman learning to drive took a turn too fast and mowed down her two kids, her sister and her niece (all survived) (Santa Ana, Calif.). A 39-year-old driver, celebrating his car's 100,000th mile with a bottle of champagne, accidentally smashed into a tree (Boulder, Colo.).

(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 New York Daily News investigation revealed in March that the Postal Service has spent at least $3.6 million of stamp buyers' money in recent years sending its Inspector General staff through a series of executive conferences that featured exercises in wrapping each other in toilet paper and aluminum foil, building sand castles in freezing weather at the beach, and freely making animal noises, all because the conference sponsors convinced Inspector General Karla Corcoran that those exercises would improve job performance and make the staff work together better. Other therapeutic tasks included dressing in cat costumes and asking make-believe wizards for advice.

-- A 36-year-old man from Arcadia, Fla., checked himself into a counseling clinic in March after being identified as the one who had been pretending in public to be choking on food and persuading women to grasp him in the Heimlich maneuver, after which he would hug them lavishly and attempt clumsily to develop a relationship. A sheriff's spokesman in Charlotte County, site of the most recent reports, said the man probably had done nothing illegal. (Novelist Chuck Palahniuk, author of "Fight Club," recently published "Choke," whose storyline roughly matches the man's actions, but apparently some Florida incidents predated the book's publication.)

Three men fell to their deaths into a 40-foot latrine pit in Mombasa, Kenya, in March, all because the first man chivalrously climbed down a ladder into the pit to retrieve a woman's cell phone but fell off and suffocated. The other two men then climbed down, but also fell off, attempting to rescue the one before him. A search crew finally brought up the three bodies four hours later, but no cell phone.

Belgian actor Benjamin Verdonck lived nearly naked in a cage with a pig in Ghent for three days in November hoping the pig would "teach" him why there is such strife in the world (results not reported). And James Albert Ernest Togo, 20, of Brisbane, arrested for mooning a policeman, claimed in December that Australia's Constitution gave him the right to stick out his bare buttocks in political protest, which he said was part of his Aboriginal tradition. And in October, in the midst of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals anti-milk demonstration at an Aberdeen, Scotland, high school, about 100 milk-loving students spent 10 minutes angrily drenching PETA's cow-costumed spokesman with milk.

-- Gerald F. Berg gave police a false name when stopped, saying he had left his wallet at home, but when police spotted the wallet in Berg's pants pocket, along with methamphetamine, Berg quickly professed confusion, telling police that the pants he was wearing weren't his (Spokane, Wash., October). And when Marcus J. Thomas, 20, who was being discharged from jail, was discovered to have eight rocks of crack cocaine in his rectum, he quickly told police that the drugs weren't his (La Crosse, Wis., February).

-- Police in Warren, Ohio, arrested Roger A. Hunt, 41, on New Year's Day and charged him with kidnapping his girlfriend, despite his story that the couple were just blissfully headed out to dinner in his truck. Police said their suspicions were aroused when they noticed that the woman was barefoot and Hunt tried to explain that by saying, "She's from Virginia. She doesn't wear shoes (when she goes out to dinner)."

-- Robert Paul Rice, serving 1 to 15 years in Utah State Prison, had filed a lawsuit demanding that the prison accommodate him as a vampire by providing special "vampire" meals and conjugal visits that would allow him to partake "in the vampiric sacrament" ("drinking blood"), but an appeals court turned him down in October. A prison spokesman said that no one gets conjugal visits in Utah, blood-drinking or otherwise.

In March, after someone reported a brick thrown through his window, authorities went to the neighboring home of Phillip and Jerry Logan in Wyandotte, Okla., to question them. The Logans put out the word for other family members to come by and help them, and there soon broke out a series of fights that eventually involved 30 law enforcement officers from eight agencies. Six Logans (including the 61-year-old patriarch and the 55-year-old mother) were taken into custody. According to the Ottawa County sheriff, the immediate members of the Logan family have been charged with 250 crimes in the last five years.

The Transportation Security Administration revealed in March that, in the last 12 months, airline passengers at U.S. airports had been found by screeners to have tried to board with 4.8 million prohibited items, including 1.4 million knives, 1,100 guns, 125,000 incendiary items and 40,000 box-cutters. And in February, a 45-year-old Japanese tourist attempted to board a flight at Miami International Airport carrying a canister of gasoline, two boxes of matches and a barbecue grill, and he was taken into custody when he refused to give them up.

University of Manitoba professor Rod Yellon's appeal of his 1998 traffic ticket for running a stop sign (reported in News of the Weird last year) was rejected in February, and it appears he will now have to pay the fine, equal to about US$35. Yellon's strategy alternated between complaining of being oppressed and boycotting court proceedings, and in fact he was convicted in absentia. He refuses to pay the ticket because he thinks the word "stop" on a stop sign is too vague and that the government should set precisely calibrated standards of what it means to "stop."

(1) $2,000 (Virginia C. Ramsey pleaded guilty in January in Seattle of selling hers, using the money to buy two Sony PlayStations and pay a traffic ticket, among other things). (2) $1,150 each for twins, plus a used car and other considerations (Kelly Lutz gave up the kids for adoption to a subsequently suspended Medina, Ohio, lawyer, revealed in December court papers). (3) $500 (Kenneth Parnell, who served time for kidnapping, admitted in a January newspaper interview from his Dublin, Calif., cell that he had recently tried to buy a young boy after he got out). (Despite the interview, Parnell pleaded not guilty.) (4) $250 (Judith Ann Garland was accused by Baltimore police in December of selling hers and using the money to pay her bail on drug charges).

Top Pentagon and CIA officials met with the author of "The Bible Code," who said Osama bin Laden's whereabouts can be detected by connecting letters from ancient Hebrew (February). And eight hours before the U.S.'s "Orange" alert on Feb. 7, four heavily armed Cuban military men wandered through downtown Key West, Fla., unknown to anyone in Washington. (Turned out they had arrived by boat to defect and were looking for someone to surrender to.) And Jake Greenwald announced he would offer "terror tours" in Israel for $5,000 each to visitors wanting helicopter and simulated-games tours of West Bank bomb and battle sites (but has suspended the venture because of the war in Iraq) (March).

A 90-year-old woman was fatally crushed when a clumsy, 485-pound circus bear performing at a retirement home tripped over her wheelchair and fell on her (Hanover, Germany, August). A 52-year-old woman delivering newspapers before dawn on her motorcycle was killed when she accidentally ran head first into the rear end of a racehorse being walked along a road to a nearby stable (Utsunomiya, Japan, January). And, from a New Orleans Times-Picayune obituary that contains no explanation: "Eric D. 'Big Head' Vicks, a laborer, died Jan. 20 of a head injury."

A 43-year-old woman, wanting some fruit, was arrested at around 5 a.m., angrily throwing bricks through the front window of a grocery store just because it wasn't open yet (Hot Springs, Ark.). Hillside Cemetery received a bill in the mail from the phone company addressed to one of its "residents" (buried, 1997) for a call he supposedly made early this year (Auburn, Mass.). A first-grader became the latest kid suspended from school for having a nonweapon "weapon" (a plastic school cafeteria knife), but his parents threatened criminal charges against the school (for arming 6-year-olds with weapons) if the suspension stood.

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

-- 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.)