On Jan. 16, as bonfires burned across Italy to commemorate the annual festival of St. Anthony, the town of Capena continued its yearly addition to the celebration: a day of smoking cigarettes. Residents, including children as young as 6, light up throughout the day in the town's bonfire. Italy's recent anti-smoking drive notwithstanding, many Capena parents encouraged the kids (honoring a centuries-old tradition that originated with smoking dried rosemary), pointing out that it was just one day a year, but Italian health professionals believe many kids will develop the habit nonetheless.

Jon Paul Divincenzo, 35, was arrested in Royersford, Pa., in November after police said he was the one who several times had elaborately set up and arranged mirrors in a restroom at Spring-Ford Intermediate school so that women and girls using it would be standing or sitting in just the proper locations as to be visible to Divincenzo as he hid behind an ajar door, away from their sight lines. A few days later, prosecutors charged him with having used a similar, intricate setup to spy on cheerleaders in a locker room at Methacton High School in Worcester, Pa.

-- In January, Judge Peter Garcia, driving relatives to his courthouse at noon in Covington, La., noticed an odd sight directly across the street in the municipal cemetery: Two women in pink lingerie, holding S&M accessories, were posing for a professional photo shoot among the gravestones. Garcia grabbed his camera to take his own souvenir photo, which apparently angered one of the women, who pursued Garcia back to his car, lecturing the unknown-to-her judge about various "rights" she thought she had not to be photographed. When Garcia ignored her, she began to thrash the judge's car with her whip before he finally drove away.

-- In November, according to the University of Chicago daily newspaper, Chicago Maroon, in a story about a protest by transsexual, gay and lesbian activists to designate more campus restrooms as unisex, an activist said he knew people who had contracted bladder infections from delaying their urination out of anxiety at being forced to choose between the "men's" room or the "ladies'" room. Said a lesbian activist, of the often-used ladies' room symbol of a silhouetted person wearing a dress: "Going into (that room) implies that we are willing to be associated with that image."

-- About once a month, the owners of the Marina del Rey (Calif.) Sportfishing bait shop reap a windfall. According to a January Los Angeles Times story, a Tibetan Buddhist study group drops by in a caravan after meditating on the "liberation of beings" and plunks down $1,000 to $2,000 to buy as much live bait as they can, after which they go to Marina del Rey Harbor and, in their terms, free the bait (whereupon, of course, much of it is immediately eaten by fish, anyway).

-- In January, convicted murderer Paul Charles Denyer, who told police back when he was arrested that he had picked three women to kill because he "just hate(s) (women)," began the application process at Barwon Prison (near Lara, Australia) for hormone treatment and surgery to become a woman.

-- Former Detroit police officer Adela Garcia, who retired in 1997 and who now owns the Adela's Place bar, was forced to shoot at two men in her parking lot late at night in order to stop them from allegedly assaulting customers. She fired one shot, which passed through both men, killing them. That was one shot more than she had ever fired on the street in 20 years as a police officer, even though she had several dangerous assignments.

-- The Indiana Department of Workforce Development, whose mission is to help unemployed Indianans (including those who have lost jobs because their work was contracted overseas), awarded a $15.2 million computer services contract to Tata American International Corp., to hire 65 programmers to work on the agency's information software starting in November. Two weeks later, state officials canceled the contract after realizing that Tata is a subsidiary of a Bangalore, India, company and that the 65 programmers were being brought in from India.

In December, a federal appeals court upheld Santos Reyes' 26-year prison sentence for the crime of trying to take the written portion of a driver's test for someone else (a sentence required by California's three-strikes law). And paroled sex offender Paul Frederick Goodwin, 39, of Melbourne, Fla., will be sentenced this month for purse-snatching; at his earlier parole hearing, Goodwin was so confident about going straight that he agreed that any further conviction of any kind would send him back to prison for 999 years. And in December, a Youth Court judge in Vancouver, British Columbia, went beyond guidelines to hard-sentence a now-19-year-old man for the fatal baseball-bat bludgeoning of a gay man; the hard sentence is two years in custody plus one under supervised release.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (69) Medical examiners (or funeral home officials or medical researchers) who accidentally misplace one or more parts when a deceased's body is returned to the family, as the Massachusetts medical examiner was accused of doing (the heart of one man, the brain of another) in October. And (70) the deadly annual Muslim Hajj stampedes, which result when tens of thousands of pilgrims try to get close enough to three pillars (representing Satan) in order to toss 21 stones at them, and which this year saw 244 trampled to death (January).

After several days of hard work, a team from the Russian army was able to rescue 10 tons of beer in kegs that had sunk in a truck in the Irtysh River near the city of Omsk and then were trapped under solid ice. (The truck itself could not be pulled out, but few cared about that.) (January) And a dead, 50-ton, 50-foot-long sperm whale, being transported by flatbed truck through Tainan City, Taiwan, to the National Cheng Kung University in January exploded because of a buildup of gases from decomposition, drenching bystanders and nearby cars in an awesome deluge of blood and innards.

A 24-year-old man was charged with several flashing incidents apparently directed only at Amish men and boys (Heuvelton, N.Y.). When mercury spilled from a Cub Scout's race car, not only was the Scout disqualified for cheating, but his father (who has a background in chemistry) may be liable for a $5,000 hazardous materials cleanup (Lawrence, Kan.). And the leading Swedish veterinary organization suggested that the increase in reports of bestiality since 1999 occurred because that was the year that Sweden first banned child pornography.

(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 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.)