While the Statue of Liberty remains shuttered for lack of $5 million in post-Sept. 11 upgrades, Congress in January mandated $10.7 billion in "earmarked" projects (also known as home-state "pork"), including: $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa, $50 million to make sure a Florida beach resort bridge remains toll-free, $450,000 to decipher the gene structure of rainbow trout, $225,000 to repair a public swimming pool whose drain U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons of Nevada clogged with tadpoles when he was a kid, $200,000 to introduce golf to youngsters, $90,000 for the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and, ironically, $500,000 for a University of Akron program that analyzes how Congress makes difficult budget decisions.

Pilgrims recently flocked to the following places: (1) Brancaleone, Italy, to see a life-sized bronze statue of the recently sainted Padre Pio supposedly weeping blood (December); (2) Passaic, N.J., to see a 2-foot-high tree stump whose shape resembles the Virgin Mary (October); (3) Bridgeport, Conn., to see a stain-like image on the ceiling of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church resembling the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus (December); (4) Bethlehem, to see a baby born with a birthmark across his cheek resembling the Arabic letters of the name of his uncle, a Hamas militant killed by Israeli soldiers (December).

In January, Trilane A. Ludwig, 24, called his mother from jail in Clark County, Ala., and asked that she grab the $500 from his wallet at home and come bail him out. As he almost certainly knew, the $500 was oversized, poorly made counterfeit bills, which put him in even more trouble. And in December, Tony Lee Hinrichs, 40, was arrested in Mesa, Ariz., based on video of him in the act of burglarizing the Extreme Surveillance shop; Hinrichs appeared not to be aware that the company is a security firm that might be expected to have cameras set up.

-- Brenda and Ronald Sager of Mount Pleasant Township, Pa., filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart in January for their pain and suffering after a plastic grocery bag broke open and its contents fell on their toes. The Sagers said the allegedly overstuffed bag contained a 32-ounce jar of Miracle Whip, a 46-ounce bottle of ketchup, three 15-ounce cans of fruit, an 18-ounce bottle of ranch dressing, and a 12-ounce jar of mustard.

-- Former policeman George Gilfillan won the equivalent of about $155,000 in an Edinburgh, Scotland, court in August against a widower for a neck injury he suffered when his patrol car collided with the widower's late wife's car, which had gotten in the way of Gilfillan's pursuit of a drunk driver. Gilfillan won the money even though the judge said he was going too fast and even though part of the money was for Gilfillan's "depression" over witnessing the woman die.

-- Charles R. Grady sued Frito-Lay in 1993 after he suffered an esophageal tear and bleeding while swallowing a Doritos chip. Grady has been trying for several years to be permitted to introduce as evidence a study by a retired University of Pittsburgh chemical engineering professor who measured the downward force and quantity of saliva necessary to chew and swallow a Dorito and found them dangerously hard and sharp. In December 2003, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with Frito-Lay, saying the professor's testing was not "generally accepted" science and therefore was not admissible.

-- Going beyond bar associations' supervision of lawyers' competence, clients Denzil Dean (in Clayton, Mo.) and Robert Butler (Toronto, Ontario) exacted their own remedies for what they believed to be their attorneys' substandard performance. Dean, complaining in court in January that he did not want Richard Hereford to represent him, punched Hereford in the mouth, and Butler, complaining in court in December about delays in his case, punched out attorney Iryna Revutsky.

-- Practitioners of the Santeria religion are such a presence in Miami area courtrooms, where they spread white dust on the furnishings to bring good luck to their friends and relatives, that attorneys have begun to complain about their higher dry-cleaning bills. Also found from time to time in those courthouses: remnants of Santeria-sacrificed chickens and goats, and mysterious candle formations. In a recent case, Haitian defendant Emmanuel Etienne claimed that his deceased victim had the power to turn himself into a headless donkey by "expelling three flatulents."

Tampa, Fla.: Driver Terry Lee Crouch, 29, accidentally ran over his 6-year-old son while, he told police, playing a game in which the boy tries to cling to the rear bumper while Crouch starts and stops the car attempting to dislodge him (November). And in nearby New Port Richey, Fla., a 400-pound man fell to his waist through the floor of his home at the Orangewood Lakes Mobile Home Community and said he had been trapped there for two days; a neighbor had called on him during his ordeal, but the man declined help (October). And in nearby Largo, Fla., according to police, a 41-year-old woman offered to pay three teenagers $20 to come beat up her son (but told them to be careful with the furniture) (January).

In December, a federal judge rejected the latest appeal of David Cobb, 66, a former teacher at the prestigious Phillips Academy in New Hampshire, who made News of the Weird in 1995 with his attempts to seduce children by dressing as "Pumpkin Man" and encouraging kids to fondle him. He had challenged the child pornography counts against him, claiming that some of the nude photos he had were not of children, but of adults onto whose bodies he had meticulously glued head shots of kids cut out from magazine and catalog ads.

Hunter "Red" Rountree, who pleaded guilty to having robbed a First American Bank branch in August at the age of 91, was sentenced to 12 years in prison; it was his third bank robbery in five years (Lubbock, Texas, January). Daniel Putzel, 87, was arrested and charged with running a house of prostitution (Guilford, Conn., November). An October Boston Herald column hailing the Boston South End neighborhood's alleged top cocaine dealer, Philip "Sonny" Baiona, said the fact that Baiona is 80 is a sign that the city's crime rate is tapering off.

A cleaning crew forgot to lock up at a Bank of the West branch, and a customer had the whole place to himself when he came by on the Martin Luther King holiday (but he notified the police) (Long Beach, Calif.). Officers ticketed a 19-year-old driver for running into an ambulance, charging that the man was distracted by reading a speeding ticket he had just received (South Brunswick, N.J.). A bill was introduced in the Indiana legislature permitting life-without-parole inmates to voluntarily choose to be executed.

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

National Geographic TV reported in January on designer-breeding of dogs, with emphasis on the not yet officially recognized species of Labradoodle. Breeding decisions must be carefully made because, say experts, some interspecies pairings create unhealthy offspring. For example, mating a pug with a Pekingese would likely create a dog whose eyes would fairly easily dislodge from their sockets, and a Newfoundland-Saint Bernard match-up would produce a dog particularly vulnerable to hip dysplasia. On the other hand, Yorkipoos and schnoodles appear to be safe, and the Labradoodle is a low-allergy, lightly shedding version of the Labrador retriever.

People Who Accidentally Shot Themselves Recently: Anthony McCoy, 20, Edwardsville, Pa. (while he was playing with a gun, said police, it fired, nicking his scrotum, July). Maceo Price, 32, a bodyguard for singer R. Kelly, Marietta, Ga. (accidentally shot himself in the leg while removing his gun at a nightclub, September). Randy Robinson, 19, Toronto (fatally shot himself while pocketing his gun as he fled a taxi robbery, December). Thomas Morris Van Dyke, 40, South Buffalo, Pa. (fatally shot himself in the neck while climbing into his shoddily made hunter's tree stand, December). And police officers in Collinsville, Ill. (December), and Hopatkong Borough, N.J. (November) (the Collinsville officer shot his foot during a drug raid, and the New Jersey officer shot his leg during his annual firearms qualifying test.

Police in Franklin Township, N.J., charged a 20-year-old man with shoplifting two pythons from the Animal Trax pet shop and driving away with them. The man's poor judgment was not the reason police caught him, but when they did later encounter the stolen snakes in the man's house in January, he admitted that one of the snakes had wriggled out of his pocket during the getaway, wrapped itself around his leg, and bit him in the "groin area."

-- Junior Allen, 63, feels 2004 will be his year. The North Carolina Parole Commission will decide soon whether to grant his application for release, after 25 straight rejections. Allen's only conviction, in 1970, was for stealing a TV set, which today would carry a probable sentence of probation only. Meanwhile, the same commission released Howard Washington on parole in January after 10 years in prison for murder; he committed his crime one week before the state eliminated parole as a possibility for murders such as the one Washington committed.

-- In December, New Hampshire's state drug abuse and prevention program was turned down for a $17 million grant on the sole ground, said the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, that its application was typed with smaller margins than permitted. The federal agency did not give the state an opportunity to correct the formatting, even though the victims of the rejection were not the grant-writers but drug-addicted patients.

-- Deborah Hayes, who was awarded more than $1.3 million by a jury in Beaumont, Texas, in November for the heart damage she suffered while taking the Fen-Phen weight-loss drug, said in December that that was too much money and that she thought she had demonstrated only about $588,000 in damages.

-- Wanda Hudson, 44, said she was inadvertently padlocked into her 30-by-10-foot locker by a careless employee of the Dauphin Island Parkway storage facility near Mobile, Ala., on Nov. 7, 2001, and did not get out until a neighboring unit renter heard her cries 63 days later. Hudson, who said she survived on canned foods and juice, was found weighing 85 pounds and in a clinical state of "advanced starvation." She sued Parkway for $10 million but in September 2003 was awarded $100,000 by a jury.

-- Americans continue to be divided over the wisdom of "zero tolerance" laws that require heavy punishment even for slight, technical violations, especially as applied to public school students. In December, for example, the Bossier Parish, La., school board voted to uphold the year-long expulsion of a 10th-grade girl for "drug" possession, specifically an Advil tablet. And in January, a Rio Rancho, N.M., middle school student was drug-suspended for five days for possession of a Gas-X tablet. (National media attention eventually caused both school districts to lessen the penalties.)

-- In December, payoff checks started arriving from Citibank's class-action lawsuit settlement that required it to refund overcharges for credit-card fees, but since the $18 million payout had to be split among 20 million customers and former customers, the checks were for as little as 4 cents, while the lawyers who brought the lawsuit shared $7.2 million. A major Citibank "abuse" corrected by the lawsuit: It was charging interest from 10 a.m. on the payment-due date but agreed to start charging it only as of 1 p.m.

News of the Weird reported in 2002 that Armin Meiwes, 41, had been arrested for killing and eating a 42-year-old man in Kassel, Germany, but presented videotaped evidence that the murder was consensual (which would still be a crime in Germany but with a lighter sentence). Prosecutors have since learned that the "international cannibal community" may include hundreds of men who communicate on the Internet, including several who visited Meiwes to discuss becoming his dinner but who changed their minds (and were permitted to leave). Among Meiwes' e-mail exchanges (revealed at his trial, which is ongoing), a potential victim wrote, of the symbiotic nature of their proposed relationship: "Hey, we seem to have discovered a market niche." Meiwes: "We could solve the problem of overpopulation and famine at a (single) stroke."

According to police in Spokane, Wash., two young men on a lark decided to stop their car at a Denny's on a cold Jan. 14 morning at 5 o'clock, take off their clothes, and give the customers and staff a thrill by cavorting through the restaurant. However, one customer had the last laugh. He left, got into the streakers' idling car (which contained their clothes) and drove off. The car turned up five days later, minus CDs and the clothes. (Remarkably, the streakers, and a third pal, who remained clothed, have not yet been identified by local media.)

German and Swiss engineers, finally connecting their respective parts of the new Upper Rhine Bridge in Laufenberg, Germany, discovered that one half had been built 54 cm lower than the other, requiring massive reconstruction. And a 16-year-old boy, after holding a week-long series of parties while his father and stepmother were away, and seeing the damage done to the $380,000 house, burned it down to hide the destruction, according to police (Cincinnati, Ohio). And a 28-year-old man was sentenced to 10 months in prison for embezzling money from his company (a law firm), which itself is under indictment for stealing money from its clients (Brattleboro, Vt.).

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

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.)