-- Lawsuits were filed in Chicago in February and in Hangzhou, China, in January demanding that theaters stop showing advertisements (not just the "previews") that run past a movie's announced starting time. Lawyers Mark Weinberg and Zhang Yang charged the theaters with fraud because of the three- to four-minute ad blitzes they endured recently after they had been expecting the films to get under way. The Chicago lawyer demanded a refund plus $75 in damages; the lawyer in China demanded a refund plus the equivalent of $4.50.

-- Eve Ensler's play "The Vagina Monologues" (a series of explicit speeches on sexuality and repression) was performed at a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in March, by Ms. Ensler and a troupe of local actresses (bundled in their traditional clothing) to an invited audience of 150, who apparently loved it, according to a report in Toronto's Globe and Mail. "If (the play) can happen here, it can happen anywhere," said Ms. Hibaaq Osman, a Somali Muslim activist, who in a fit of enthusiasm renamed the capital city "Vaginabad." "Having these Pakistani women talking about vibrators (is) what it's all about."

Police in Edinburgh, Scotland, put out an alert in March after a man claiming to be raising money through stunts for a charity tricked a young female shopkeeper into allowing him to cover her bare feet in baked beans and other vegetables from cans, before taking several photos and leaving. And in February, a motorist reported as 40ish and balding stopped on the campus of Missouri Western State College in St. Joseph, grabbed a passing female student's arm, licked it, and quickly drove off.

-- A couple in Tianjin, China, in a February newspaper advertisement, offered an amount equal to $15,300 for a man aged 25 to 35 to step up and marry their recently deceased daughter, who was 28 and is now, according to a dream the mother had, lonely. In exchange for the dowry, the man must remain "faithful." (These "ghost marriages" were an ancient custom until outlawed by the communist regime, but have made a small comeback in recent years.)

-- Recent Annual Rituals in India: Females aged 14 to 21 in Malajpur village in Madhya Pradesh state had evil spirits once again expelled by broom beatings (sometimes severe) after they stepped into chilly waters to bring the spirits out in the open (January). And women in the city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu state once again allowed a priest to walk on them wearing shoes containing nails in their soles, as an act of devotion and penance at a traditional festival (March). And nude worshipping by female Hindus continued at a festival in Chandragutti village in Karnataka state, celebrating the goddess Renukamba, despite the annual effort to make the women get dressed (March).

-- Ashoura day, the annual Lebanese martyrdom-inspiring tribute to a Muslim saint (grandson of the Prophet Muhammad), was celebrated on March 13 by thousands of Shiite worshippers who slashed themselves on the head. Many in the crowd marched through the city of Nabatiyeh while bleeding profusely, until their faces and clothing were nearly completely red.

-- Recently, many Lithuanians, whose country is poised to join the European Union next year, were cringing at the insistence by President Rolandas Paksas to continue to rely for advice on local mystic Lena Lolisvili. Among Lolisvili's methods for healing people: She wraps them in toilet paper, which she believes God has energized for her.

Larry Ray Pratt, 48, became the first person charged under Kansas' new food-supply safety law after he was arrested in January for allegedly urinating on packages of chicken in the walk-in freezer at a Dillon grocery store in Olathe. (Police said he had a grudge.) And in Bennington, Vt., in December, Lori T. Pratt, 30, was charged with shooting her husband after she found a pornographic video under the couple's bed. (Also, News of the Weird readers will recall a November story on Ms. Kelli Pratt, 45, who was arrested in Modesto, Calif., after allegedly, viciously biting her husband's scrotum in a fit of anger at his refusal to have sex with her, bites that caused an infection from which he died six days later.)

News of the Weird reported in September on a San Antonio lawyer called for jury duty but who told the judge that he'd serve only if the court paid him his regular rate of $100 an hour. (He of course changed his mind when the judge directly ordered him to come in.) In January, Charlotte, N.C., physician Charles Ferree similarly rejected his jury-duty notice, telling the judge his patients came first and that if any patient died (or even suffered) while he was on jury duty, the judge would be held responsible. Ferree also threatened to judge any cases he had quickly and harshly and made fun of judges' relatively lax hours (compared to those of harried physicians). Only Dr. Ferree's subsequently expressed remorse kept him out of jail for longer than the 10 days (for contempt) the judge handed down.

New York City P.S. 192 principal Evelyn Peralta-Tessitore (an anti-alcohol crusader) was charged with DUI after police spotted her at 2:30 p.m. on a February day, alongside a Bronx road, standing by her car, urinating. And Mary Ann Swissler, a part-time professor at Seton Hall University (South Orange, N.J.), was fired after she responded to negative student course reviews with an e-mail calling most of her students "mental midgets" and the most "homophobic, sexist, racist, lying sacks of (word represented as "s t" in a news story) I have ever met in my life."

In January, at a scout camp (for ages 11 to 14) in Denmark, organizers established a game of tag in which kids were the Jews (wearing Stars of David) and the adults pursuing them were designated as Nazis; one scout official admitted later that the game "may have crossed the line." And in February, during the international debate on whether the forcible disarmament of Iraq needed the moral sanction of the United Nations, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia accused many of the U.N. peacekeepers in the region of the enthusiastic off-duty patronization of sex slaves and child prostitutes.

(1) A 43-year-old man was murdered at 9 a.m. on Jan. 31 at a gas station on a busy street in Washington, D.C., to utter indifference by a fellow gas-pumper, who (according to the surveillance tape) stared at the body, finished pumping and drove off. (2) A 911 call on a fatal house fire in Washington on Jan. 6 was not picked up for several minutes (as many as 40, said some residents) because five operators had gone temporarily off-duty without permission. (3) A new, part-time Washington, D.C., high school coach was accused of fondling two students in January. He had been convicted on a sex charge in 1994 and his file marked "do not rehire," but this time, two principals did not bother to check his file.

John Gladney, 40, was arrested by Columbus, Ohio, police about a block from the National City Bank that he had allegedly robbed a few minutes earlier on March 27. According to the officers, Gladney was easy to spot because of his conspicuous gait, demonstrating pain, in that he had stuffed the money bag down his pants, only to have the bank's chemical dye pack explode near his groin.

Sister Mary Catherine Antczak (Order of Dominican Sisters), armed with financial backers' money and aiming to raise even more for an elementary school in South Los Angeles, won about $200,000 by picking six straight winners at Santa Anita racetrack. And a health-conscious New York City couple went on trial for "assaulting" their baby (through starvation) by earnestly feeding her mainly mixtures of dandelions, oat straw, cherry bark, slippery elm, kelp and an herb called horse tail. And the Kentucky Supreme Court approved the "character and fitness" of lawyer-applicant Ms. Taylor Strasser, despite the state bar association's rejection of her for a pre-law-school arrest for prostitution.

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

-- 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.)