-- Tony Alleyne, 50, recently placed his small Leicestershire, England, apartment on the market for the equivalent of US$1.7 million, a price he said was realistic because he has spent nearly 10 years crafting the premises as a finely detailed model of the "Star Trek" starship Enterprise. Included, according to an April report in Australia's Herald Sun, are a life-size transporter control, a gigantic warp core drive, voice-activated lighting and security, and an infinity mirror. "If you're going to do something," he said, "you have to go all the way." Alleyne said he started the project as therapy when his wife walked out on him.

-- Connecticut's Supreme Court heard arguments in April on a rather fine point in "Miranda warning" law: whether the police can use a drug suspect's vomit against him (or at least use the eight bags of heroin that came up with the vomit). Arresting officers apparently asked suspect Vincent Betances if he had just swallowed heroin, and Betances (without a Miranda warning) said that he had, leading officers to summon medical help. Betances now says the officers' question was unconstitutional "interrogation," even though without immediate treatment, he could have died.

Pro wrestler The Great Sasuke won a seat in Japan's Iwate Prefectural Assembly, and said he would continue to wear his trademark mask to work ("This is my face," he said.) (April). And many members of India's lower house of parliament, opposed to the finance minister's attempt to raise the price of fertilizer, did the Indian equivalent of a U.S. filibuster by screaming raucously for more than four straight hours on March 15 until the minister withdrew the proposal. Also in March, India's prime minister came under vicious attack from members of the opposition Congress party, who played Indian political hardball by accusing him of eating beef.

-- The school board that governs Lombardy, Ontario, acceded to the request of an offended parent in February and removed the word "gun" from a primary school spelling-test list. Also in February, the head teacher at the Park Road nursery school in West Yorkshire, England, issued instructions that "The Three Little Pigs" and other stories featuring pigs not be used, in order not to offend Muslims. (The Muslim Council of Britain immediately denounced the decision, and the instructions were rescinded.)

-- In December, a judge in Fort Myers, Fla., cleared immigration lawyer Maria Lara Peet, 40, to practice again, excusing her theft of $73,000 from a client the year before, as long as she paid it back. Peet was found to have been mentally ill at the time of the theft but competent to practice law again a year later. (Several years before that, she had been involuntarily hospitalized for a mental illness.)

-- The CIA convened an open panel of scientists in January to discuss potential terrorist uses of life-science research, and the panel concluded that, despite the risks, openness in scientific study was absolutely crucial; in April, the CIA suppressed the panel's conclusions on openness as classified. And in March, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accepted an award by the Cleveland City Club for his contributions to freedom of speech, which Scalia said he would be glad to accept at the club's meeting provided no television or radio coverage was allowed.

-- Psychiatrist Charles Gould, 69, was scheduled for a disciplinary tribunal after allegedly belting a patient with a frying pan and a wine bottle when the patient said Gould should retire because he was "past his sell-by date" (Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland, April). And Catholic high school theology teacher R. Scott Jones, 44, was fired for passing out joke valentines to students reading, "I hate you, I wish you would die" (Phoenix, March). And Fletcher Vrendenburgh, director of the New York City government's customer-service office, was fired for posting a Web site essay on how "dumb," "whining" and "stupid" he thought New Yorkers and city workers are (December).

-- What Goes Around, Comes Around: Lisandro Mateo, 16, and Justine Hayes-Hurley, 18, were charged with criminal mischief in Central Islip, N.Y., in March after vandalizing a car. The car belongs to Winston Hill, 20, who both girls thought was their exclusive boyfriend until they began innocently discussing their love lives at school and realized they were both talking about the same man, at which point they decided to touch up Hill's windshield and paint job with hedge clippers.

Heredity theory got a boost in March when CNN reported that Mr. Shirl Mitchell, 83, the father of accused Elizabeth Smart abductor Brian Mitchell, blamed himself for the way Brian turned out. Shirl said he showed Brian sexually explicit photos at age 7, which perhaps provoked Brian's arrest years later for indecently exposing himself to a 3-year-old girl. Shirl also described himself as a voyeur and the author of a two-thick-volume personal theology that is sexually explicit, dealing largely with diet and reproduction (and having nothing to do with Brian's own tract that authorities found when they arrested him for the abduction).

(1) "Dangerous Chemical Found in Women's Breasts" (a March San Francisco Chronicle report on heavy tissue concentrations of a flame-retarding pollutant, most likely from inhaling foam insulation). (2) "Grisly Mexico Factory Breeds Man-Eating Flies" (a February Reuters story on the manufacture of sterile male fresh-blood-eating screwworms, which are used only to mate with wild female screwworms so that its population will die out). (3) "Girl Headed for Eye Doctor Ends Up With Teeth Pulled Instead" (a March story on the Web site of KTRK-TV, Houston, about the error by a Texas Medicaid worker who dropped the 5-year-old girl off with the wrong doctor).

News of the Weird has reported at least twice over the years on dogs playfully stepping on their masters' guns, with a paw innocently nudging the trigger, to tragic results. In Estes Park, Colo., in February, a 32-year-old woman was shot in the leg and hospitalized after her cat jumped onto a shelf, knocking off a .32 caliber Colt semi-automatic, which discharged a round when it hit the floor. (A second cat-shot-me story, by a 15-year-old boy in Tuscarawas Township, Ohio, in April, has been publicly doubted by the sheriff.).

A student at George Washington High School, Charleston, W.Va. (who was not identified because of his age), was disciplined after he accidentally wedged himself in behind the shower wall in the girls' locker room, after allegedly taking a choice vantage point for peeping. Virtually immobile, the boy waited until school was out for the day and called his father on his cell phone. The father went to the gym and rescued the boy but later turned him in.

A February Boston Globe dispatch from Guangzhou, China, reported that a recent favorite tactic of employees who are owed back pay is not to sue but rather to make serious attempts to commit suicide in public; said one construction worker who dangled from a high-rise, "There was no other way to get what the company owed us." And a 22-year-old man robbed a bank in Cleveland on March 12 by walking up to a teller and sticking a gun in his own mouth, threatening to kill himself if he didn't get the money. (Five days later the man was shot to death after he pulled a gun on an Akron, Ohio, police officer.)

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry officially declared that the country had no weapons of mass destruction and did not even believe in "any form" of them, except for its nuclear weapons. Firefighters in training, erroneously believing they had permission, set fire to a vacant house that belonged to the police chief, who was planning to fix it up for his parents (Elma, Wash.). Rev. William Keller (an evangelical Christian), who has led the Muncie, Ind., May 1 National Day of Prayer program for 10 years, said priests from other religions were welcome to attend but could not use the microphone to pray because he doesn't believe "in other gods."

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

-- An April Wall Street Journal report highlighted several states' elementary school "anti-bully" policies that have banned rough-housing, name-calling, and even "mean looks" and pointed gossip, and encouraged teaching the little kids a language of sensitivity and tolerance. However, one problem some kids fear from such training and language is that, as they move up to middle schools and run into other kids who will be baffled by such sensitivity, the tolerance-trained kids are even more likely to get beaten up.

-- In mid-March, as war started in Iraq, a resolution was introduced in the Seattle City Council offering support for U.S. troops. However, some council members wanted to use the resolution to express opposition to the war, while others wanted to go beyond troop support to commend the war itself. When the Council finally agreed on a politically bland-enough resolution on April 14, it meant that the members had been fighting over the wording of the resolution for a longer time than it took U.S. troops to enter Iraq and capture Baghdad.

A 17-year-old boy lost sight in both eyes in a "potato gun" accident in Denton, Texas, in April. The "gun" (a length of pipe in which a household explosive is ignited, propelling a potato out the other end, although in this case, it was not a potato but a frog) was being experimented with by several teenagers but failed to fire, and the victim, who had been a mere bystander, stepped up to have a look down the pipe to see what might have gone wrong, just as the gun finally fired.

-- According to an Associated Press report, six candidates for city offices in Charleston, W.Va., misspelled their party affiliations in their official filing forms in January. Among the variations were "Democart," "Democrate," "Repbulican" and "Repucican." In fact, one of the city council incumbents had, four years earlier, also declared himself to be a "Democart."

-- In Center Township, Pa., in January, Mark Ferrara called for paramedics when his daughter, 7, couldn't resist trying to lick a frozen metal pole at her school bus stop, and got stuck. And according to a BBC News report about a colder-than-normal January in Russia, a young man in the southern city of Stavropol, answering a call of nature behind a bus stop shelter, turned abruptly so that his exposed organ inadvertently stuck to the metal siding; a bystander hustled up a kettle of warm water to unstick him.

-- The Rent Stabilization Board of Berkeley, Calif., which regulates residential rates and fights landlord abuses but which is increasingly frustrated by the sky-high cost of local housing, adopted a tactic in February that could not be successful in many places besides Berkeley: It sponsored a "poetry slam" that invited local citizens to rant against the problems of tenants. The winner of the $100 first prize attacked the "platonic master/slave relationship" and recalled how his last landlord so traumatized him that he "chose to be homeless for nine months just to escape the memory."

-- Hopeless Recidivists: Eduardo Rivera, 43, in court awaiting a hearing on a charge of receiving stolen property, was rearrested after he carved his name into a courtroom bench (Reading, Pa., February). David Joe White Jr., 32, having just pleaded guilty to 42 burglary charges, was rearrested after swiping his lawyer's portable tape recorder from the defense table (Attalla, Ala., February). Chan Kwok-keung, 34, was sentenced to four months in jail for stealing a court interpreter's purse; he was in the courtroom at the time on theft charges (but had just been cleared) (Hong Kong, March).

-- In December, Saskatchewan's Court of Queen's Bench upheld a ruling of the province's human rights commission that four Bible verses (referred to in a newspaper ad) created illegal hate speech because they subjected gay men to "ridicule." The ad consisted of citations to verses that are considered by many Christians to condemn homosexuality, and a silhouette of two men holding hands, inside the symbol for prohibited behavior (a red circle with a red line through it).

-- Jeannie M. Patrinos, 32, was sentenced in February to five years' probation for sexual assault. A judge in Lancaster, Wis., found that Patrinos, who was estranged from her husband, broke into his home, climbed into bed with him, and was "having sex" with him, against his will. The husband's girlfriend was asleep in the same bed, until the man's protests woke her up.

In February, Wesley Fitzpatrick applied to a Kansas City, Kan., judge for, and was granted, a temporary restraining order against a female whom he said was stalking him (making him "scared, depressed and in fear for my freedom"). However, the order was rescinded when Fitzpatrick showed up to ask that it be made permanent, in that the "stalker" was actually his parole officer carrying out her lawful supervision. In fact, Fitzpatrick was immediately arrested for not having met with her. (Temporary restraining orders are usually granted by judges without investigation.)

Palmer, Mass., construction contractor Anthony Morales, tired of fighting customer Gail Kapulka over payment of his bill, planted the freshly severed head of a deer on the front seat of her car on Christmas night, according to police. And a frozen sheep's head was left inside a car owned by a Democratic political official in Lake Station, Ind., in January. And in March, at a rock concert in Oslo, Norway, the part of the act in which the lead singer of the death metal band Mayhem carves up a dead sheep went wrong, and the sheep's head was knocked into the audience, where it struck a fan in the head, requiring hospitalization. (Fan or not, he pressed charges.)

Door-to-door salesman Gerald L. Thompson, 19, was arrested in a neighborhood near St. Augustine, Fla., in February after he had become exasperated that no one was buying his magazine subscriptions; allegedly, he forcibly prevented one homeowner from closing the front door, then screamed obscenities, pounded on the door, and refused to stop ringing the doorbell. And Robert M. Suszynski, 47, was arrested in Rochester, N.H., in February after he allegedly slugged a neighbor with a baseball bat because he got tired of listening to the guy tell how much pain he was in from a recent fire.

A 77-year-old man drowned in February while fishing, after a tire flew off a car in a nearby auto accident, hitting him on the head, and knocking him into a canal (North Highlands, Calif.) And boulders estimated at 5 tons each rolled down hills and killed people near Honolulu in August (a 26-year-old woman asleep in her bed) and Navajo Lake State Park, N.M., in February (a 20-year-old man). And a 67-year-old man was crushed to death in Shamokin, Pa., in January when two paramedics, carrying him in his wheelchair up about 20 steps, accidentally dropped him, and one fell on top of him.

A British rock music fan offered to sell his own flu germs derived from Paul McCartney's recent bout of the flu (which the fan said he caught from a backstage session with McCartney), via either a coughed-into plastic bag or a vial of mucus. And a British designer introduced a 135-foot-high plastic inflatable church that he said Anglican Church vicars could carry around with them to recruit parishioners (inflatablechurch.com). And to express their new religious freedom, Iraqi Shi'ite pilgrims celebrated a long-suppressed holy day by the traditional, bloody slashing-open of their heads with swords (Karbala).

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

-- 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.)