-- The Palo Alto, Calif., City Council scheduled for a final vote in May a proposed code of conduct that includes (in order to coax civility among members) an official admonition to avoid even nonverbal forms of disagreement with each other, such as rolling one's eyes or shaking one's head or frowning. One former resident told the San Jose Mercury News that the proposal is a prime example of the "Palo Alto mind-set."

-- At the height of the war in Iraq, Army chaplain Lt. Josh Llano, 32, a Southern Baptist, commandeered 500 gallons of water to fill his baptismal pool at Camp Bushmaster near Najaf and offered exhausted, grimy soldiers a chance for a refreshing dip, provided they agreed to formal baptisms following a 90-minute sermon. Llano told a Miami Herald reporter: "It's simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized." (The Army's chief of chaplains said he would investigate.)

(1) "Indian Testicle Attack 'Is Murder'" (a January BBC News report of the Supreme Court of India ruling that a fatal kick to the testicles in an assault should not be regarded as mere manslaughter). (2) "Doctor's 32 Percent Error Rate 'Not Unusual,' Says Inquiry" (a February London Independent story interviewing medical experts who defended an accused physician by pointing out that epilepsy diagnoses are easy to get wrong). (3) "Mayor Denies Claims She Masturbated Businessmen" (a February Brisbane, Australia, Courier-Mail story on the mayor of Maroochy, Queensland, who was a masseuse before being elected to office and who some people suspect had "known" some of the town's influential businessmen).

Wilma Bennett, 79, carrying a .22-caliber revolver and increasingly agitated at having to wait in line at a grocery store, was arrested after brawling with a 31-year-old security guard who tried to calm her down (Akron, Ohio, January). Gertrude Raines, 84, was charged with shooting her son-in-law dead at 200 yards in the midst of a longstanding family feud (Murfreesboro, Ark., January). Deer hunter Clinton Hurlbut, 89, pleaded guilty to reckless use of a gun after accidentally shooting the horse that a 12-year-old girl was riding (Browns Valley, Minn., November). On the bright side, J.C. Adams, 74, owner of a Pac A Sac convenience store that was being robbed, propped himself up on his walker and fired his shotgun at the three perps, killing one, wounding another and causing the third to flee (Decatur, Ga., January).

-- Widow Maggie Smith and her two adult children won $1.2 million late in 2002 (reduced from an August jury award of $3.5 million) in their wrongful death lawsuit against Dr. Franklin Price, having convinced a jury that Price did not do enough to help the late Lawrence Smith avoid his fatal heart attack. Mr. Smith, of University Heights, Ohio, was 54, overweight, a long-time smoker who ate a poor diet, got little exercise, had diabetes and high cholesterol, and admitted to being stressed at work; Dr. Price said he gave Smith repeated admonitions about his bad habits, but apparently not enough of them.

-- In Riverhead, N.Y., in December, Oscar Novick, 69, filed a $5.5 million lawsuit against the New York Dinner Theater of Manhasset for injuries he suffered when a dancer from the show (being performed on location at an Office Depot employee holiday party) slipped and fell on top of him during an audience-participation number. The bigger-than-he-is dancer had convinced Novick to step out onto the floor, where she twirled him around to a fast number, "bounced (my head) back and forth into her breasts," and "lowered me down into a dip," but then lost control, with both falling to the floor (Novick with a fractured ankle).

-- Expensive Boo-Boos: Ann Laerzio filed a lawsuit against the Octavia Hair Design in Clinton Township, Mich., in February, claiming a shop technician nicked her finger with cuticle scissors (allegedly causing the loss of a nail) and asking for $500,000. And in March, Ms. Robin Laybutt won her lawsuit against her former employer, the Australian doughnut maker Balfours, because of a cut on her finger (which she now says makes her unable to use her arm for any gainful employment) caused by the alleged malfunction of a doughnut machine; she was awarded about US$240,000.

-- In a January ruling on the federal Tariff Code, the U.S. Court of International Trade declared the Marvel Comics X-Men characters to be "nonhuman creatures," thus enraging the characters' fans, who know perfectly well that the X-Men are humans. However, it was a Marvel Comics affiliate that called them nonhuman to begin with; the company was importing X-Men figurines, and at the time that the dispute with U.S. Customs arose, imports of "human" re-creations (called "dolls") were taxed at 12 percent while imports of nonhuman re-creations (called "toys") were taxed at 6.8 percent.

-- In March, a jury failed to convict Dr. Raul Ixtlahuac, 41, of sexually assaulting patients at his practice in Gilroy, Calif. (acquittal on one count, a hung jury on the other five). Ixtlahuac's lawyer believes the key evidence for his client was testimony by another doctor, who had measured Ixtlahuac's erect penis at 5 1/2 inches, which the lawyer argued made it impossible, due to the doctor's height and that of the examining table, for him to have committed the assaults in the manner that the victims described (unless, said the lawyer, he was an "acrobat").

In Lufkin, Texas, in January, Cody Carver, 19, was sentenced to eight years in prison for impregnating a 13-year-old girl but continued to insist that he and the girl could raise their child "if the world would only back off." The girl's mother knew the pair were sleeping together, according to a Child Protective Services report, but since she herself had had a baby at age 14, and her mother had had a baby at 14, and her grandmother had had a baby at 14, she thought there was nothing unusual. In a polygraph test, Carver admitted that his sexual partners had included two other underage girls, as well as a dog.

In Hamlin, W.Va., in January, a 19-year-old driver survived having her car hit by trains on two separate tracks (being knocked off one track onto another and then hit while on that track). She was in that predicament only because she had followed safe-driver guidelines by pulling off the road to make a cell-phone call, but the place she pulled off onto was a railroad track.

At a recent oral argument at the Missouri Supreme Court (reported in The New York Times in February), in response to a hypothetical question as to whether a death row inmate who had a thoroughly proper trial should nonetheless be executed even if there were new (but inadmissible) evidence of his innocence, the state's assistant attorney general answered, "That's correct, your honor." And an Associated Press report on convicted Nebraska murderer Carolyn Joy is the latest case to frame the debate over who deserves organ transplants; Joy was conditionally approved in February to join the 117,300 people nationwide waiting for a liver, raising again the possibility that a more socially productive or well-behaved person will not get one in time if Joy is medically judged more needy.

In Penn Hills, Pa., in March, a 42-year-old man was attempting to tighten screws on his granddaughter's crib using a knife, despite his wife's admonition that he use the more appropriate Allen wrench. The next thing his wife knew, according to a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he was running to her, bleeding at the throat and screaming, "Call the paramedics! I fell on the knife!" The man died of his wound at a hospital shortly afterward. The wife (who had assembled the crib and asked her husband only to tighten the screws) later said she could not even imagine how he could have fallen on the knife.

Hong Kong Tourism Board ads (promising that the city would "Take Your Breath Away") debuted in several British magazines just as the SARS epidemic broke. And the Utah Supreme Court upheld the right of an atheist to pray aloud at a city council meeting (prayer of choice: to be delivered from "weak and stupid politicians"), since the council always opens with a public prayer (Murray, Utah). And four city council members in Mount Sterling, Iowa, proposed an ordinance to forbid its townspeople to tell lies.

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

-- Two American Legion posts and two other veterans' groups in Pleasanton, Calif., sponsored a class on dowsing in March to study whether domestic terrorists could be identified by pointing sticks at suspicious people to see if the sticks move. One of the veterans' leaders (who vouched that "the government" and oil and mining companies regularly use dowsing) told the local Tri-Valley Herald, "You can't wait for the FBI and police to come up with solutions when you have the bad guys living among us." Following the 9-11 attacks, some Pleasanton veterans received training in so-called "remote (psychic) viewing" and are now reportedly bringing local families up to speed on their missing-in-action relatives from past wars.

-- In March, London's Daily Telegraph reported that North Korea's Kim Jong Il is so terrified of triplet babies that the government places them all in special orphanages. Quoting diplomats who have visited North Korea, the Telegraph said Kim might feel threatened because the number 3 in Korean mythology is associated with rapid rises to power. However, a North Korean official told the United Nations Human Rights Commission that Kim is actually helping the triplets by raising them in better circumstances than the parents could (because of the country's dire economy).

Brian J. Samdahl, 41, charged with stabbing a stranger 15 times at a Wal-Mart, told police he thought the problem was that his government-implanted computer chip was broken (Bridgeview, Ill., February). And Jesus Santana, charged with marijuana possession, told the arresting officers, "I guess God got y'all to get me," since Santana had been rolling his joints using pages torn from a Bible (Athens, Ala., February). And William Veach, charged with scamming friends and family members in a securities scheme, insisted that he truly believed (albeit erroneously) that, as per his sales pitch, he had indeed sold a high-tech keyboard idea to Microsoft for $17 million (Provo, Utah, March).

-- A jury concluded in February that Lonnie W. Hinton Jr., father of a 2-year-old girl who was severely injured when she fell into a swimming pool at an apartment complex in Hollywood, Fla., was responsible for only 1 percent of the incident, with the complex responsible for 99 percent because the gate to the pool area was broken. According to trial testimony, the faulty gate was fairly common knowledge among the residents, and Hinton had left the girl alone near the gate while he took barbecued food upstairs to the family's apartment. Far from being censured for his lax parenting, Hinton and his wife were awarded $10 million for their own pain and suffering resulting from the girl's injuries.

-- The town council in Enfield, Conn., was criticized in December for letting its insurance company pay settlements in two incidents last year to softball players who claimed they hurt themselves sliding into bases in city parks. Mark Brengi said he tore ligaments sliding into third base and settled for $45,000, and one week later, his brother Scott broke an ankle sliding into second base on the same field and settled for $90,000. Said one Enfield taxpayer (and former pro baseball player), "You're supposed to slide before you hit the base."

-- A jury awarded $51.1 million from the New York City budget in March to Darryl Barnes, who was paralyzed by an off-duty police officer's gunshot after he refused to drop his gun. (Barnes, a member of the "Five-Percenters" anti-police group, claimed he was shot in cold blood.)

-- A house cat named Princess survived after being stabbed in the head with a knife whose blade penetrated the skull down to the frontal sinus (Green Township, Ohio, February). And another cat, Fila, taken out of a family home in Yuba City, Calif., in December by a daughter who wanted Fila to live with her in Sacramento, escaped and made the 60-mile trip back to Yuba City five days later, winding up on the parents' doorstep. It was not known if Fila took one of the three roads from Sacramento to Yuba City (state roads 99/70 or 65, or Rio Linda Boulevard) or just walked across farms.

-- BBC News reported that officials at a prison in Sombor, Serbia, shot to death two guard dogs, execution style, in February after concluding that they had been lax recently in failing to bark when five inmates were escaping.

Michael J. Corbett and his wife, Sharon, were arrested in Beckley, W.Va., in March and charged with peddling copies of 53 different obscene videos on the Internet. The Corbetts' specialty: nude women answering nature's call. According to Justice Department and Postal Service investigators, customers bought 100 or more tapes a week (such as "Outdoor Pooping Paradise" or tapes using the Corbetts' inventive "bowl cam") at around $50 each.

Luis Chavez, 33, was arrested in Cypress, Calif., in February after he allegedly set off aerial fireworks in his condominium bedroom (motive unknown), leading to a $135,000 fire. And Patricia Martin burned down her Kings Mountain, N.C., house in February after she lit a piece of paper, then extinguished the flame, to create smoke to get rid of a nest of spiders in the house but failed to completely extinguish it. And a Massapequa, N.Y., high school student inadvertently set a fire that gutted the second story of the family home in January after he, in frustration, tried to burn some school papers on which he had done badly (and tossed them out a window, but an ember blew back in).

Jeffrey Lee Daniels, 27, confessed to killing a 58-year-old male acquaintance who had paid him $10 just to let him sleep next to Daniels but who then, to Daniels's apparent horror, touched him "in the area of his butt," according to a police officer (Barstow, Calif., December). And Robert Carnathan, 54, was charged with the beating death of a 79-year-old man in a fight over collecting lost balls on a golf course; it was Carnathan's regular turf, but the victim wanted one ball for his grandson (Quincy, Mass., November).

Arrested for murder: Randy Wayne Richards, 40, Courtenay, British Columbia, February; Curtis Wayne Pope, 40, Fort Worth, Texas, February (arrested in Watertown, N.Y.); Ralph Wayne Grimes, 26, Russell Springs, Ky., November; Joseph Wayne Cook, 30, Wilmington, N.C., January. Convicted of murder: David Wayne Pallister, 18, South Shields, England, November. One previously reported arrestee, Mark Wayne Lomax, 33, made history in March by actually getting convicted of "felony murder" even though his offense was causing a traffic death while intoxicated, which is usually treated merely as manslaughter (Houston, March).

Jerry Thomason, 41, was charged with aggravated assault in San Antonio, Texas, in April after police found his 45-year-old wife at home with a heavy chain and padlock around her neck. According to a witness, Thomason said he loves his wife and so regularly chained her at home to keep her from leaving.

A 6-year-old boy was permanently expelled from elementary school (after 18 months of failed discipline) as being too unruly and dangerous (but who, at home, is an angel, according to his dad) (Ashton, England). Officials of the prestigious Crufts dog show began an investigation of whether its current Supreme Champion (the Pekingese, Danny, which beat out 20,000 challengers) had had an illegal facelift (London). Florida family welfare officials finally put their foot down and suspended a woman who had become the fourth child protection investigator recently dating or marrying accused or convicted criminals (this one a convicted killer and accused child-support dodger) (Largo, Fla.).

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

-- 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.)