Happy New Year: Once again, authorities in the Hillbrow district of Johannesburg, South Africa, were unable to stop the traditional midnight celebrations, in which residents of high-rises toss refrigerators, ovens, beds, trash cans and other furniture off their balconies, and police, wearing crash helmets, try to dodge the fusillade. And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals pressured officials of Brasstown, N.C., out of the traditional New Year's Eve "possum drop" (lowering a caged opossum at the stroke of midnight, a la Times Square), causing the town to substitute a piece of roadkill. And Mr. Henry Earl was arrested in Lexington, Ky., on New Year's Eve for being drunk and disorderly; his 11th such arrest that month and number 804 since 1992.

Scientists on the cutting edge have recently developed cholesterol-free mice (by Quark Biotech), bisexual butterflies (by Butterfly Park in Singapore), and the "perfect" slice of buttered toast (by Arla Foods, Leeds, England). And a team of mathematicians using 200,000 computers found the largest "Mersenne prime" number ever, which is 6.3 million digits long; said a Michigan State grad student who worked on the project, "It's a neat accomplishment, but it really doesn't have any applicability." And New York University professor Steven Brams and colleagues developed a nuanced political-economic theory for efficiently dividing a cake among dessert lovers who insist on getting their fair shares.

In January, in Florida's first election using all touch-screen balloting (following the state's 2000 presidential fiasco), Ellyn Bogdanoff won a special election for a state House seat from Broward County by 12 votes out of about 10,000 cast, but the losing candidate was considering a challenge over the 134 "voters" who had gone into the booths but for whom no votes were registered. (By the way, in January in San Antonio, Texas, Chad Allen Tolleson was arrested for burglarizing a store by climbing in through a ventilation duct; however, he got stuck, and early-arriving employees who found him dangling from the ceiling now refer to him as "Hanging Chad.")

-- Over a two-month period in the American Indian Miskito community of northern Nicaragua, about 150 people contracted a hysteria whose symptoms included wandering naked in public, becoming severely violent, fighting imaginary enemies, and, later, lapsing into comalike states. Nicaraguan officials regard the illness, "grisi siknis," as culture-bound, with traditional healers more effective at treating it than medical doctors (in contrast to affluent societies' culture-bound illnesses, such as anorexia nervosa, which are often treated medically).

-- As an example of the stunning heritage of honesty of the Japanese, the Tokyo police's Lost and Found Center reported that the equivalent of US$23 million in cash found by strangers was turned in in 2002 (and almost $17 million eventually made it back to the rightful owners). Also, reported The New York Times in January, 330,000 umbrellas were turned in (but fewer than 1,000 were claimed).

-- Televangelist Joyce Meyer has risen from the pack of TV ministers (and from the ordinariness of her pre-preaching life) by her uninhibited pursuit of donations ($95 million in 2003), according to a December St. Louis Post-Dispatch profile. "Make your checks payable to Joyce Meyer Ministries," she shouted, "and 'million' is spelled m-i-l-l-i-o-n." Of once receiving $1 million in stocks from a worshipper, she said, "I didn't have that (gift) for five minutes and I said, 'OK, God, next I'll take $5 million." "Fear," she reminds her parishioners, as in their fear of making sacrifices in order to have more money to give her, "is the work of the devil."

-- The Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre is enjoying soaring income due to the Jewish mysticism's recent embrace by pop celebrities (e.g., Madonna, Britney Spears), according to a December New York Times report. Kabbalah bottled water (which has supposedly absorbed the energy of the Torah by osmosis from being in the same room with it and which "changes you on a molecular level," said a Centre employee) costs $3.50, and red string bracelets, which supposedly ward off negative spirits (which Jewish traditionalists say is an appalling oversimplification of their purpose) cost $26 to $36.

Ten months before election day, God has handicapped the 2004 presidential race as a "blowout" victory for President Bush, according to Pat Robertson on his Christian Broadcasting Network program "700 Club" (January). And Connecticut's besieged governor, John Rowland, who is in deep trouble for having taken favors from contractors and then (as he later admitted) lying about it, said he can't resign because God spoke to him directly and ordered him to hang in and defend himself (December).

In Clearwater, Fla., Mary Denise Flowers was arrested for stealing a $20,000 ring from Littman Jewelers, with the key prosecution evidence emerging only several days later when Flowers, whose modus operandi was to swallow the ring at the scene of the crime, finally "passed" it at a local hospital, where it was mined from her feces (December). And a home at 3715 Euclid Avenue in San Diego was completely demolished when a pilot light ignited the 19 bug bombs the homeowner had set; one canister would have been plenty lethal for the small area, but 19 yielded a bomb 28 times more powerful than necessary (December).

Joy Wiggins (accidentally shot herself in the heart with a nail gun but was miraculously saved by doctors at Christus St. Elizabeth Hospital, Beaumont, Texas, October); Jed Bryant, 21 (accidentally shot by co-worker's nail gun, 3 1/2 inches into his skull, Rapid City, S.D., January); Roxanne Kirtley (absentmindedly stood up, forcing her head against a protruding nail that went 2 inches into her skull, Dallas, August); and a 34-year-old laborer (fell and landed seat-first on a rebar rod that, alas, impaled him through the buttocks, Toronto, Ontario, September).

While his dad was busy with a phone call 3 feet away, Timmy Novotny, 7, climbed through the 8-by-10-inch release door of a stuffed animal game machine at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Sheboygan, Wis., in January and couldn't get out. He spent an hour among the elephants and rabbits until firefighters dismantled the machine.

New York City (Port Authority) police officer Russell Bass pleaded guilty to having illegally videotaped an 11-year-old girl in a shower two years ago and blamed it on the stress he was under for helping with the 9-11 rescue at the World Trade Center. And North Little Rock, Ark., police arrested two alleged Internet-trolling pedophiles, one of whom had flown in from Arizona and the other all the way from South Korea, to meet teenyboppers, who were, of course, police officers running a sting.

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

-- Joy to the World! Jonathan Cantu, 39, and Charles J. Kern, 50, each feeling slighted at the other's Christmas gift, smacked each other over the head with flowerpots and were hospitalized (San Rafael, Calif.). And Brandi Nicole Nason, 20, also dissatisfied with a gift, allegedly tossed a Molotov cocktail into her ex-mother-in-law's house, causing $200,000 in damage (Hermosa Beach, Calif.). And a woman was arrested for beating a man with a Christmas tree after he complained that the gifts he was carrying were heavier than the tree that she was carrying (Victoria, British Columbia). And after Donna Simmons-Groover won her apartment complex's Christmas-lights competition, a losing neighbor ripped out part of her display in a rage (Jensen Beach, Fla.).

Noah Donell Brown, 24, running from police after allegedly robbing a Subway sandwich shop, was caught after being slowed by his baggy pants, which caught on a fence post (Hendersonville, N.C., October). And a 14-year-old boy was fatally hit by a train while playing on railroad tracks with friends, when he tripped, got his baggy pants caught on a rail, and could not free himself (Dayton, Ohio, November).

Kenneth Martin, 44, and Earle Sharpe III, 30, were arrested for kidnapping in Providence, R.I., in December after abducting a 24-year-old man who supposedly owed Martin money. According to police, after taking the man to an apartment, Martin pointed his gun at him but then realized the magazine clip had fallen out. Martin and Sharpe went outside to retrace their steps in search of the clip after first giving the victim a stern warning not to leave. However, he did leave and called police.

-- The Singapore government decided in December to list its high-tech sewage-water conversion plant as a major tourist attraction; Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong drank a bottle of the purified waste to demonstrate that it is not only safe but tasty. And sanitation officials in Oslo, Norway, said they will soon create an adventure park within the city's sewer system, including rafting, theater performances, artwork on the walls, and an area for weddings and parties.

-- As New Yorkers frolicked in the fresh snow from the city's Dec. 7 blizzard, Gilberto Triplett, 28, set up a street-corner kiosk to sell snowballs for $1 each. According to the New York Daily News, he sold six, then created a fresh inventory, and moved four more before calling it a day.

-- Questionable New Products: Triumph International, the Swiss maker of unmentionables, presented a prototype of an anti-smoking brassiere containing perfumes (including lavender and jasmine) that are turned unpleasant by tobacco smoke. And in November, Jones Soda Co. of Seattle bottled 6,000 units of turkey-and-gravy soda, which, remarkably, has the consistency and taste of pureed turkey and gravy; also remarkably, the entire run sold out, with some bottles offered at a huge premium on eBay.

-- For New Year's, the Japanese department store Mitsukoshi Ltd. offered traditional "bento box" meals, but expressly for dogs (at least, dogs whose owners were willing to pay about US$175 each). The ornate, two-layered container housed 30 delicacies, including pork dumplings, black beans, strawberry mousse and green tea, and was a bold attempt by the store to pitch to Japan's growing upscale pet market.

-- A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that a woman who conceived three sons with her husband was biologically unrelated to two of them. Doctors posited that the woman herself was part of an nonidentical-twin pair that fused at an early stage of her mother's pregnancy and that only her blood cells are hers, alone, while cells from her eggs and other tissues may have come from her sister's fetus.

-- Free-lance writer Jean Lund (her pen name), 51, disclosed to the Boston Globe for a November story that she suffers from Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (perpetually on the verge of orgasm) and hopes that her revelation will help people understand how uncomfortable the condition is. According to Lund and others, the arousal is much different than sexual desire and in fact is not satiated by orgasm. Suspected causes are chemical imbalances, seizures and irregular blood flow. "It's just a horror," said a 71-year-old sufferer; it "never stops, it never lets up."

News of the Weird reported in 1996 that Mr. Virldeen Redmon, then 67, had just been sentenced to 9 1/2 years in prison on three drunk-driving-related counts, the latest of his nearly 400 alcohol-related arrests since 1947. He was released from prison for health reasons in 2001, but has been arrested several times since then on similar charges (running his total to over 400), and in December 2003 was sentenced on three new counts to 17 years in prison. His driver's license was revoked in 1977.

Arrested for murder: Dennis Wayne Bryant (Richmond, Va., August). Committed suicide while wanted for murder: Rodger Wayne Chastain (San Francisco, August). Awaiting trial for murder (pending a competency evaluation): Elvis Wayne Botley (Palm Springs, Calif., June). Murder appeal rejected: Barry Wayne Riley (Vancouver, British Columbia, September). Acquitted of murder (Ouch!): David Wayne McQuater (Athens, Ga., May). Sought by police for a 1995 murder (in Bonita Springs, Fla.) and suspected in a 2003 murder (in Leeds, England): David Bieber (who, when he went on the lam in England, chose as his alias, for some reason, Nathan Wayne Coleman).

(1) "Westchester Ordered to Pay $2,500 to Pedophile Clown" (an August New York Times story about clown Richard Hobbs' winning a lawsuit against a county that had tried to keep him out of a public park). (2) "Champion Liar Accused of Cheating" (a November London Evening Standard report that this year's winner of the World's Biggest Liar contest in Cumbria, England, read from a script instead of extemporaneously lying).

In November, a 70-year-old businessman had just finished testifying against the Homer, Alaska, city council's proposed no-smoking ordinance (calling the reported dangers to health "baloney") when he keeled over, dead of a heart attack. (He had said that eating breakfast with smokers every morning "hasn't bothered my health any.") Also in November, in New York City, a 79-year-old man, who was using a blender to make a health drink for his wife, was killed when the appliance exploded, with a glass shard severing an artery.

A 21-year-old woman was charged with public nudity for being naked in a downtown bar, even though the police's only evidence was a photograph of her, naked, in the bar, that she had posted on the Internet (Lincoln, Neb.). Two armed robbers who kicked in a door and threatened a terrified woman backed off after she told them she had epilepsy; one of the men said his cousin is similarly afflicted, and he convinced his partner to call it off (Wichita, Kan.). A 36-year-old woman was arrested for stealing 50 antique glass eyeballs (which have little resale value) from a hospital display case (Owensboro, Ky.).

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

Derek Leroy McSmith of Forest City, Ga., has filed 10,618 formal open-records requests to local governments in the last eight months, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution report. Most were, he said, to satisfy his curiosity about how government works, but one day, he asked for 490 magazines and on another day, he checked out 100 books (and soon, according to the librarian, walked outside and dropped them into the return bin). Each request must be logged in and processed, and a Forest City clerk spends almost full-time on McSmith's work. Several officials said that after they locate his documents, he only glances at them (or, if there is a cost involved, declines the documents). A local First Amendment advocate said the situation was merely "one of the downsides of a free and open society."

(1) In November, police in Brooklyn, N.Y., set a trap and arrested a 44-year-old man and his 22-year-old associate for having kidnapped a teenager earlier in the day and having sought a $20,000 ransom from his mother; the sting was set up after the men, for some reason, released their victim (who went straight home) but continued to demand the ransom. (2) According to a December Miami Herald story, the condition of museum-goers who grow faint or suffer anxiety attacks while viewing art (or viewing too much in a short time) has a name, Stendhal's syndrome, that, although rare, has been studied for almost 200 years.

Steve Danos, 24, was arrested as allegedly the man who had been sneaking into young women's apartments to watch them sleep and to snuggle with them (and, sometimes, to fold their laundry) (Baton Rouge, La., October). And Stephen P. Linnen, 33, an assistant to Republican legislators in the Ohio House, was indicted on 56 counts stemming from an 18-month spree in which a naked man jumps out from hiding and photographs startled women's reactions (Columbus, Ohio, November). And Japanese men's fetish for schoolgirls' used underwear is such a problem, concluded a civic panel, that shops that cater to them are proliferating, thus enticing more and more girls to become suppliers (Tokyo, October).

-- Timothy Paul Kootenay, 43, jailed in Aspen, Colo., in November on a California warrant for probation violation, said he would fight extradition on the ground that he is a citizen of the notorious "Republic of Texas" and that, actually, Aspen and Vail are located on a sliver of land that is also part of the Texas nation. Kootenay's separatist colleagues (some of whom have taken up arms) believe that Texas was never legally annexed by the United States and is thus a sovereign nation that should respond only to international law.

-- In a deposition earlier this year as part of his divorce proceedings (and released in November), the president's brother, Neil Bush, admitted that he had had sex with several women while on business trips in Asia, but that he did not seek them out, insisting that they simply came to his door. Asked his ex-wife's lawyer, "Mr. Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her." Responded Bush, "It was very unusual."

-- In October in Hennepin County, Minn., Rafiq Abdul Mortland, 38, was sentenced to eight to 10 years in prison as the man who habitually asked store clerks whom he robbed to also hand over some Rolaids. When asked by police why he did that, Mortland said it was to relieve the stress he got from committing robberies. [St. Louis Park Sun/Sailor, 10-15-03]

-- The parents of a teenage girl, who had inhaled nitrous oxide from "whippet" propulsion cartridges just before a car crash that left her with permanent brain damage, filed a lawsuit in Boca Raton, Fla., in December against the store that sold her the canisters. However, a store manager claimed that, even though his is a video store whose whippets are sold from an "adult" room, he believes that his customers are not inhalant-abusers but just people who want to make their own whipped cream.

-- In September, a government appeals board in Melbourne, Australia, changed its mind and ruled that organizers of a lesbian festival could not, after all, limit attendance to just those lesbians who were born female, because that discriminates against transsexual lesbians. The female-born organizers had said they needed to exclude ex-males in order to affirm their identity and "consolidate our culture."

-- Spain's Catalonian High Court ruled in November that the Barcelona construction company Perez Parellada Promotions had improperly fired a worker who admitted smoking marijuana on the job, finding that he only smoked during meal breaks and did not smoke enough to affect his work.

In November, Michael Patrick Mikitka, 35, was arrested and charged as the man who had held up six banks in one week in the Pittsburgh area, including one in which he had written the holdup note on a check issued to him when he opened his account. In the final robbery, at the PNC Bank in Wilkinsburg, he was on his way out the door when the security guard said that the teller needed to see him again, and as he walked back in, the doors locked, and the guard grabbed him. Pending trial, Mikitka was sent to drug rehabilitation, but he left the facility on Dec. 22 and was re-arrested the same day when he allegedly robbed the same National City bank that he had robbed twice during his November spree.

When Dan White killed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1978, but argued successfully that he had diminished capacity because of a depression that was exemplified by eating too much junk food, the "Twinkie Defense" was born. In December 2003, U.S. Rep. Bill Janklow of South Dakota was convicted of manslaughter for causing a traffic fatality, despite a defense that he had diminished capacity due to low blood sugar from his diabetes. Presumably, then (though Janklow did not specifically say so), the accident, the death, and his conviction would never have happened if only he had eaten some Twinkies.

In November, a jury in Montgomery, Ala., ordered Exxon Mobil to pay the state $11.8 billion in punitive damages based on its conclusion that the company, having allegedly inflated its expenses, underpaid the state $63.6 million in natural gas royalties (a penalty of more than 18 times the state's alleged loss). Exxon Mobil said its expenses were legitimate, that it owed the state nothing, and that it would appeal. One juror said afterward that the fact that the Alabama government is in such dire financial straits and needs the money might have influenced his vote (though that was not legally proper).

A 20-year-old woman died in a one-car collision in Bridgewater, Mass., in November; according to police, she lost control of her car while talking on a cell phone and crashed into the Cingular Wireless store on Route 106. And a 16-year-old student in Indianapolis was killed in November on his morning school bus ride when he stuck his head out of a window to see a dead raccoon in the road and was clipped by a tree.

A woman was summonsed for dangerous driving after she tied the child's seat carrying her 20-month-old infant to a backseat door to keep it from swinging open (Perth, Australia). About 50 inmates at a Portuguese prison refused to eat special Christmas lunches because the bread, usually freshly baked, was not, due to bakeries having closed early the day before (Belas, Portugal). Police said a 29-year-old woman ordered her 11-year-old daughter to help her shoplift clothing, including some items the woman later returned to the girl as Christmas presents (Fort Myers, 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.)