-- An obscure California law makes it shockingly easy for anyone to anonymously force a motorist into a formal hearing over his driving skills, according to a May story in the Southern California newspaper OC Weekly. The Department of Motor Vehicles said the so-far-underused law was designed to allow relatives of diminished-skill elderly drivers to ease them off the road, but that the legislation places no limits on who can use it. Any complaint, even a bogus one with no proof, leads to a formal hearing at DMV with license suspension a possible outcome, and DMV says it must enforce the law unless the legislature changes it.

-- May marked the debut of Minnesota's gun-carry law, whose critics complained that it is much easier on handgun-possession than even Texas' law. Licensees may carry guns openly in any parking lot in the state (except federal facilities), including school parking lots (although possession of a knife in a school parking lot is still a felony). Guns are still prohibited on other school property, but the law reduces licensees' penalty for that from a felony to a misdemeanor. Private establishments can prohibit guns, but only with a state-dictated sign at each entrance, and then the "penalty" for violation is to be told to leave.

-- New Product Launches: "Purring Kitty" software that makes Nokia cell phones vibrate continuously to create a "discreet massager" (according to the British firm, Vibrelet). A healing stone that when heated, is a smell-remover, a sterilizer, and a treatment for heart disease (according to the developer, the government of North Korea). A fashionable but electrically charged woman's anti-assault coat, with rubber lining and vinyl outer layer sandwiching 9-volt circuitry that, when armed, delivers a finger-in-a-wall-socket-type jolt to anyone who touches it (from Advanced Research Apparel). And the 4-year-old, but recently trendy, half-inch, gold-enameled good-luck charm in the shape of curled feces (from Ryukodo of Kyoto, Japan).

-- "We figured that (every small business) obviously worth doing is already being done by 50 other guys in Miami, so we had to do some thinking first," said "Anton" to the Miami New Times in April. That thinking resulted in Anton's belief that "thousands" of people would pay a dollar each to view his (and his partner "Frank"'s) painstakingly created display of exactly 1 million toothpicks. After hundreds of hours of counting and banding the picks, the two men were at last word ready to look at venues and marketing proposals.

-- While the average chief executive of a $2.7 million, not-for-profit organization is paid just over $100,000, the swimming coach who is head of the De Anza Cupertino Aquatics program in California's Silicon Valley last year earned over $350,000, according to an April report in the San Jose Mercury News. The CEO-coach Pete Raykovich took over the program (training swimmers, from toddlers through internationally competitive athletes) when it was small and gets 10 percent of revenues plus a salary of $85,000, and the board of directors appears to have no regrets about Raykovich's pay.

-- Lawrence Omansky was arrested in April in New York City and charged with kidnapping business partner Lawrence Schlosser, who had criticized Omansky's property management work at a meeting in Omansky's office in the TriBeCa section of Manhattan. Allegedly, during the meeting, Omansky bound Schlosser and forced him into a 3-foot-high crawl space under the second floor, where Schlosser remained for 28 hours before untaping himself and escaping. Said Omansky's lawyer, "The case will ultimately be viewed as a business dispute."

-- Doctors at Chimkent (Kazakhstan) Children's Hospital told the BBC in April that they had removed a fetus from a 7-year-old boy; it was thought at first to be a cyst but when removed, actually had hair and bones and is now believed to have been the boy's Siamese twin that grew in the wrong place. And in May, Groote Schnuur Hospital (Cape Town, South Africa) reported only the 15th documented case of a fetus developing in the mother's liver (and the fourth to survive).

-- Curator Mark Norman of Australia's Melbourne Museum revealed in January that he had captured and photographed the male of the world's most sexually unequal species. When the blanket octopus male (2 cm long) mates with the female (6 feet long), it uses a special extension arm to transfer sperm from its penis (after which the male dies). Females, which may weigh 10,000 times as much as the males, are typically found with several such extension arms lodged inside them.

The world did not end on May 15, contrary to warnings by Japan's 1,200-member Pana Wave Laboratory cult, whose public activities (covering themselves and their property in white sheets for protection against electromagnetic waves beamed by "communists") had drawn media attention just before "doomsday." The Pana Wavers are believed not to be dangerous, although one member said that if the group's guru, Ms. Yuko Chino, soon succumbs to her (supposedly) microwave-induced cancer, the cult will, in revenge, exterminate "all humankind."

At the May court hearing in Nashville, Tenn., for Denza D. McGee, 19, accused of fatally shooting a man, McGee's buddy Gerald Cunningham, 23, showed up to give moral support. However, the witness who was in court to identify McGee said she also recognized Cunningham as McGee's partner in the home invasion and shooting, and Cunningham was pulled out of the gallery and arrested.

As reported in News of the Weird in March 2002 (to apparently many skeptical readers), the 37-year-old female inmate who died at the Pine Grove Correctional Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada, succumbed from a toxic reaction to methadone that she had consumed by drinking the vomit of a fellow inmate who was on a methadone maintenance program. A coroner's inquest in March 2003 heard witness after witness describe inmates' practice of trading their methadone-laced vomit for various inmate favors, and the two inmates who admitted vomiting for the victim have since been additionally sentenced for drug trafficking.

British circus trainer Roger Perkins stole the show at the Royal Easter Circus in April with his prize sow, Miss Piggy, who climbs a ramp to a diving tower and then free-falls into a swimming pool. And Pete Ondrus and his wife, Barb Lambert, told the Greenville, Mich., Daily News in May that they were looking forward to a summer of ballparks and fairs in which they would stage races between their favorite cow, Dusty Roads, and two other trained race cows.

Lynda Taylor, 38, was arrested in Stuart, Fla., in May and charged with aggravated assault, specifically, wearing perfume, spraying Lysol and lighting scented candles. She and her husband, David, have been having marital trouble, and David, who suffers from extreme chemical sensitivity, says Lynda is purposely trying to kill him to get his recent worker compensation settlement check.

After protests, organizers of a children's beauty pageant changed their minds and decided that their original plan to have "swimsuit" and "sexy body" categories was not a good idea (Bangkok, Thailand). A motorist drove his car into a self-service car wash hoping to drench a small fire in his engine, but by the time he realized he didn't have any coins, the fire had spread, eventually destroying four of the car wash's eight bays (West Seneca, N.Y.). A 38-year-old man attempted to dispose of gunpowder by tossing it into his lighted fireplace, resulting in burns to his head and arms (Pike Creek Valley, Del.).

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

-- While two co-appellants chose to have lawyers represent them before the Supreme Court of Canada in their challenge of their marijuana convictions, David Malmo-Levine spoke for himself, addressing the justices for 40 minutes on May 6, arguing that his right of "substance orientation" was similar to someone's right of sexual orientation. After his session (which he began by waving hello to the justices), Malmo-Levine revealed that his entire courtroom wardrobe was made of hemp and that he had taken a few hits of hashish beforehand. Said he, "I was happy, hungry and relaxed, but I was not impaired."

-- The annual World Pole-Sitting Championships began May 1 in Berlin (and if the winner is decided after Nov. 17, he will have a new world record). Contestants sit on a 15-inch-by-23-inch platform, 24 hours a day, and electronic sensors detect if anyone leaves the platform for any reason except for the 10-minute break every two hours. The event's organizer said the Dutch are the sport's "purists," that in Dutch competitions, "you don't get to sit on a board, and you can't come down (for restroom breaks)."

A juror in the recent London trial in which five Irish car-bombers were convicted was let go by the judge for inattention because she carried out spiritual rituals in the jury box while clutching a witchcraft book in one hand and placing the other, as required by the ritual, on the floor. And in York, Pa., trial is nearing for Matthew Turner, 22, who was arrested last year after pursuing a man for his adrenal gland, which he thought would bring a week-long high if licked or eaten; allegedly, he had stabbed the man in the side, and when the man escaped, Turner chased him relentlessly through town, knife drawn, until police caught him.

-- In April, when the Republicans on the New York City Board of Elections killed a plan to repair voting machines that had underrecorded votes in the 2000 election (with most of the unlucky voters being Democrats), Republican Commissioner Stephen Weiner denied that his party's disinterest in properly functioning machines showed bias against Democrats: "There are some people who don't want (their vote) register(ed), but who report to the polls for civic reasons."

-- Maximizing the opportunity to avoid detection, some illegal immigrants from Mexico choose to enter the United States through a desolate mountain-desert area east of Yuma, Ariz., but in May 2001, 14 of them died of dehydration in a blistering sun. In April 2003, their families filed a $42 million lawsuit in Tucson against the U.S. Interior Department for having failed to install water stations in the area.

-- At a May court appearance in Melbourne, Australia, to answer charges of unsanitary food at his Rajah Sahib Tavern and Tandoori Grill, Larry Mendonca denied that the moldy items that inspectors found were part of his restaurant's fare. Moldy relish and 8-year-old pickles? Mendonca said they were his personal foods, not the restaurant's. A bowl of chilis topped with mold? His. A moldy jug of salad dressing? His. Besides, he said, "It was scum, not mold."

-- Responding to a February incident in St. Clair Shores, Mich., in which a girl performed oral sex on a boy during a middle-school class (both were suspended), the superintendent and the principal wrote to parents: "Just like our country was shocked into awareness when never-before acts of terrorism occurred in New York City, our district was shocked into awareness when middle-school students engaged in indecent acts in the classroom." (The boy's parents filed a lawsuit over the suspension, pointing out that their son was a "victim" in that, when the girl started, he had no "legal duty" to resist.)

-- Pennsylvania's attorney general and prosecutors in Arapahoe County, Colo., made similar interpretations of child pornography laws recently in defending their decisions not to reveal information. The attorney general said he could not publicly identify Web sites he had ordered suppressed by Internet service providers because, to identify those sites would be "disseminating" child pornography. And the Colorado prosecutors refused to show defendant Joseph Verbrugge the 200 photographs it would use against him (as is required in all criminal cases) because to do so would be to disseminate child pornography to him. (In January, a Colorado appeals court rebuked the prosecutors.)

Convicted killer Roderick Ferrell, 23, asked for a new trial in March, telling a judge in Tavares, Fla., that he had an inadequate defense at his 1996 murder trial. Ferrell had admitted then that he was the leader of a teenaged, goth-outfitted "vampire clan" that often cut their arms open to suck each other's blood and which murdered the parents of one of its members. Ferrell told the judge this time that he had been seeing a psychiatrist in 1996, whereupon the judge asked who had originally told him he needed help; Ferrell replied, "The school, the sheriff's office, my mom. Basically the whole city."

Cat-hoarder Heidi Erickson, 42, had two Boston-area homes raided in April and May, at which authorities rescued a total of 112 sickly cats and found several cat carcasses. Erickson is one of the more aggressive hoarders on record, both for her proclivity for litigiousness (40 cases in seven years) and the circus-like atmosphere she created at a subsequent court hearing (during which she denied the accounts of numerous witnesses that the cats were ailing). She told one person her mission was to breed the "imperfections" out of Persians. Erickson said she was a victim of discrimination (epileptic disability, sexual lifestyle) and would challenge any eviction or any restrictions by authorities in Beacon Hill and Watertown, Mass.

A man escaped in February after robbing a Wienerschnitzel drive-thru in North Long Beach, Calif.; identifying him was difficult because he had smeared what appeared to be chocolate pudding over his face. And Edwin Lockhart, 48, had less success than that robbing a Sun Trust bank in Palatka, Fla., receiving a 10-year sentence in April; he was identified despite having stuck several sanitary napkins on his face.

In May, a second Indian mayor, Amarnath Yadav of Gorakhpur, was removed from office because "he," a eunuch, had run as a female but was declared by a court to be just an effeminate male and thus ineligible to seek a female-reserved electoral office. Also in May, the South African Rugby Football Union fined its Golden Lions about US$4,000 for momentarily having only two black players on the field, when league rules require a minimum of three at all times.

In May, a county human services procurement officer in Portland, Ore., mindful of the sometimes-quixotic needs of the agency's mental-health clients, included in a list of potential resource requirements a person fluent in the "Star Trek" language Klingon (but later said no actual job openings are envisioned). And in May, Microsoft's British division announced it was developing an Internet-ready portable outhouse with computer and plasma screen, to be unveiled this summer at various British festivals; Microsoft headquarters then told reporters the project was a hoax, but after consulting with the British division, headquarters conceded that it was a real project but said it was being discontinued.

Police chief Beverly Lennen instituted an advance-reservations system at the jail, to serve activists who wanted to be arrested protesting a visit by President Bush (Santa Fe, N.M.). The museum director who housed Marco Evaristti's installation, in which patrons were invited to turn on a live goldfish-containing blender, was acquitted of animal cruelty charges because the two unlucky fish died instantly (Copenhagen, Denmark). Five stowaways, having boarded a ship in Buenaventura, Colombia, bound for Miami, emerged joyously when it docked after five days at sea, but then learned that it wasn't Miami, that mechanical trouble had forced the vessel back to port at Cartagena, Colombia.

(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 prime minister of Latvia, Einars Repse, announced in January the formation of an anti-"absurdity" bureau to deal with the government's excessive "foolishness" and lack of order and the "laziness" of civil servants. The agency, according to a newspaper in the capital of Riga, now receives about 10 complaints a day and has made 460 responses, including referring seven to government prosecutors.

-- The Moral Authority of the United Nations: Dining-room workers at the U.N. staged a wildcat strike at lunchtime on May 2, causing the building's restaurants to be locked down, but what Time magazine called a "high-ranking U.N. official" ordered them unlocked so that staff members could eat (perhaps to pay for food on the honor system). What ensued, according to Time, was "Baghdad style (looting) chaos," in which staff members ran wild, stripping the cafeterias and snack bars bare not only of food, but also silverware and liquor, none of it paid for, including bar drinks taken by "some well-known diplomats."

-- Government at War With Itself: The San Francisco Chronicle reported in March that local priest and accused child-molester Austin Peter Keegan was able to avoid arrest for six months largely through government funding (i.e., the Social Security Administration, which continued to pay his benefits until he was arrested in Mexico on March 1). And prosecutors in Tampa urged a federal magistrate not to grant bail to accused terrorist supporter Sami al-Arian, on the grounds that if granted bail, he surely will flee the country; meanwhile, immigration authorities announced that they have begun the legal steps necessary, in the event al-Arian is granted bail, to deport him.

-- A March investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that it is the policy of the Social Security Administration (even in times of terrorist alerts) that when someone presents what is obviously a phony ID in order to receive a Social Security card, the ID is merely returned to the person and he is asked to leave the building. No document is retained; no report is made; and law-enforcement is not called.

-- Public Officials Gone Tacky: Detroit City Council member Kay Everett outdid colleagues who use the city's printing plant for mere personal fliers and business cards; she had the plant publish for her a 12-month calendar of herself, "Hat's on Me in 2003," featuring a different, fashionable photograph of herself for each month. And Rhode Island state Rep. Joseph S. Almeida was convicted in February of assaulting a repo man who was lawfully confiscating Almeida's girlfriend's car; Almeida's version was that the repo man voluntarily banged his own head into his truck's door three times, smashing his own eyeglasses and mangling his own face.

-- In February, municipal inspectors in Boston threatened sculptor Konstantin Simun, 68, with fines of $50 per day if he didn't soon clean up the eyesore that is his yard, even though he has repeatedly pointed out that he just happens to work in the medium of "junk." "It's my life's work," Simun said at a hearing, referring to the old tires, traffic cones, plastic milk and water bottles, painted buckets, old golf bags, a broken trampoline and other choice items. (For instance, he made a version of Michelangelo's "La Pieta" entirely from cut-up plastic milk bottles.) Simun's work was once housed at the prestigious DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park near Boston, as a "curator's choice" exhibit. (Noted Philadelphia sculptor Leo Sewell also works in this medium.)

-- In early March, as an edgy Washington, D.C., prepared for possible terrorist reactions to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Reena Patel, 22, and Olabayo Olaniyi, 32, were arrested at the Capitol as they sang and danced, with Olaniyi wearing a ceramic mask, and both with objects duct-taped to their bodies resembling the appearance of suicide bombers, but they maintained they were just artists. Said Patel, "We like to make things beautiful, to uplift, to make people happy." Said Olaniyi, "Duct tape is a hot item in D.C. I wanted my art to reflect what was hot here."

-- Prominent Columbia, S.C., surgeon Harry J. Metropol, appearing before a state legislative committee in April to argue that doctors shouldn't have to pay so much money in malpractice awards and insurance premiums, minimized the harm suffered by a woman (not Metropol's patient) who lost both breasts because of an error in cancer diagnosis. "She did not lose her life," Metropol said, sunnily, "and with plastic surgery, she'll have breast reconstruction better than she did before. It won't be National Geographic, hanging to her knees. It'll be nice, firm breasts."

-- The Cadbury company launched a major promotion campaign throughout Britain to fight childhood obesity by donating sports equipment to schools in exchange for candy bar purchases. For example (according to an April report in The Guardian), the company will donate a volleyball net and poles to a school if it hands in labels from 5,400 Cadbury chocolate bars. (In fact, a 10-year-old child getting a basketball for his school would have to play basketball for 90 hours just to burn off the calories in the candy he'd have to eat to get enough labels for the ball.)

Gerard Lancop, 58, was sentenced to nearly two years in prison for stalking a woman in connection with his psychiatrist-described fetish for women's coats (police found 236 in his home) (Windsor, Ontario, January). And Thomas William Hodgson pleaded guilty to harassing schoolgirls by either repeatedly stopping them on the street or leaving notes for them, offering to buy their cardigan sweaters, which he admitted he had a thing for (Christchurch, New Zealand, March).

News of the Weird reported in 2001 on the staffing problem of British circus knife-thrower Jayde Hanson, after his assistant walked off the job after being nearly hit in the foot, which would have been her third injury that season (which was the number of injuries an ex-girlfriend had suffered as Hanson's assistant before she walked off in 2000). In April 2003, Hanson was performing with his new girlfriend, Yana Rodianova, 22, on Britain's ITV program "This Morning," showing off his world-record form as a speed knife-thrower, but one of the knives hit Rodianova on the head, drawing blood before the live cameras.

Gary Lee Owens, 42, was arrested on drug charges in Stilwell, Kan., in April, even though police weren't looking for drugs when they knocked on his door. The police had received a tip that two fugitives were hiding at that address, and since Owens knew nothing about that, he matter-of-factly gave them permission to search the house but then added the restriction "everywhere but the garage." The police naturally decided that that comment was worth a search warrant, and later found the remains of a suspected methamphetamine lab.

Plymouth (England) University, with a small Arts Council grant, did not test whether an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare, but did test what six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys would do on a computer over a four-week period at Paignton Zoo in Devon. The Guardian newspaper reported in May that the monkeys produced about five pages of text between them, mostly consisting of the letter S. Said Professor Geoff Cox, they actually spent a lot of the time sitting on the keyboard.

An international organization of gay men who raise money for charities through drag shows came to the rescue of straight high school girls by providing loaners for those who could not afford gowns for prom night (Houston). Police blamed a traffic accident on truck driver Brian Anderson, who they said lost control on Interstate 75 while making himself a bologna sandwich (Burt Township, Mich.). A motorcyclist was killed on Interstate 95 when he crashed into a cow that had wandered out through a hole in a fence made by trespassers looking to get high from the mushrooms that grow on cow patties (Hobe Sound, 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.)