The Sacred Institution of Marriage: In February, Hindus in a village near Pondicherry, India, in a traditional ceremony believed to bring relief to a drought-stricken region, tried to appease the god of rain by "marrying" a neem tree (the bride) to a peepul tree (groom). (In 2002, News of the Weird reported the similar ceremony with two donkeys, and last year, in a wedding to vanquish bad luck from a 9-year-old girl, villagers in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, India, married her off to a dog.) And in Nice, France, in February 2004, Ms. Christelle Demichel wed her sweetheart Eric in a male-female ceremony. Eric, however, had died in 2002 (killed by a drunk driver), but French law allows the marriage to proceed if the paperwork had been completed and if President Chirac approved (which he did).

-- The Galveston, Texas, sheriff's office admitted that Louis Radzielski, 20, had escaped from lockup in December by merely walking out the front door. According to Sheriff Gean Leonard, Radzielski crouched behind a woman who was being legitimately released and remained in step with her as she walked past the two officers working the booking counter. And in January in a Miami courtroom, while the lawyer for defendant Raymond Jessi Snyder vociferously protested a prosecutor's demand that Snyder be locked up pending trial because he was a "flight risk," Snyder slowly eased from his seat and bolted out the door. (He didn't get far.)

-- Among the modest amount of information revealed at the CIA's new Science and Technology museum, according to a December Associated Press story, is that early versions of a tiny spy camera mounted to the back of a pigeon nonetheless failed because they were too heavy, forcing the pigeon in one test "to walk home."

Donald Johnson sued a West Palm Beach, Fla., Shoney's restaurant for $55,000 because he thought its clam chowder was potato soup, and the chowder left him with nightmares; in January, he won $407 in damages. And in January, Tanisha Torres of Wyandanch, N.J., filed a lawsuit against Radio Shack because she was offended that a clerk had listed her hometown in the store's records by a local joke name, "Crimedanch," which she said makes her feel like a criminal. And William Tremmel filed a lawsuit in September against a company repairing the boardwalk at Virginia Beach, Va., after he used its portable toilet without permission; some of the workers, fed up with strangers using their facility, blocked Tremmel inside for 25 minutes before letting him out, for which "mental suffering" he now wants $100,000.

-- The Ukraine-born, Sweden-based artist Nathalia Edenmont defended her work against animal-rights protesters in December by claiming a higher virtue in killing animals if she does it to make an artistic point. Her latest artistic points (according to the owner of the Stockholm gallery exhibiting Edenmont's work): Her photo of a hand with dead mice stuck on each finger represents the five stars of the former Soviet Union, which Edenmont believes was responsible for her mother's murder, and a photo of several dead mice all pointing in the same direction represents the "cowardice" of Swedish society. [Sydney Morning Herald-AFP, 12-13-03]

-- "The Empty Museum" installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov consists only of four walls, representing the walls of a 19th-century art gallery with nothing on them. According to a New York Times reviewer, "The blank walls and the spotlights suggest the cruel Minimalist reduction and dematerialization of art, and most specifically, perhaps, the death of painting." It is enjoying an apparently successful run through April in New York City.

Budget Necessities: The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported in January that the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego was hard at work producing a musical theater production based on the life of serial killer Andrew Cunanan, the 1997 murderer of his former lover Gianni Versace, for which the playhouse had received a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. And in October, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District revealed, in a request for more funding, that it was paying a man about $460 a day to scoop used condoms from the chlorine tanks at its Jones Island plant.

-- Police in Chartiers Township, Pa., arrested David Winniewicz, 36, in January after he allegedly used amateur subliminal sleep messaging to encourage his 10-year-old stepson to kill the boy's 4-year-old brother. Winniewicz's wife said she found an audiotape of the episode with her husband's voice instructing the sleeping boy on techniques (pillow over face, strangle with hands).

-- Teachers working on contract in California prisons sued the state in December over security restrictions that they say require them to deliver the curriculum standing outside inmates' cells (and in some cases, hollering the lessons through the meal tray slots, which are the only openings in solid steel doors). Said a prison official, downplaying the teachers' complaints, "It's kind of like modified distance learning."

In the midst of national anxiety over mad-cow disease in December, the Chicago Tribune reported that things were basically normal at Evansville, Ind., restaurants that served traditional (from German ancestors) brain sandwiches, especially fried cow brains on a bun. And officials in Hardisty, Alberta, tried to calm protests over the municipal water supply in September by adding chlorine and assuring residents that the water is safe to drink, despite the fact that iron and manganese residue in the pipes turns its color yellow (and even black) from time to time.

The latest African to die by gunshot while testing a magic charm "guaranteed" by herbalists to ward off bullets: witch doctor Ashi Terfa (Benue state, Nigeria, December). The latest driver who fatally hits a pedestrian, causing the body to lodge in the windshield and be driven around for a while before the driver decides to report the collision: a 29-year-old man, who at first told police that he was not sure what he hit (Seattle, November).

A great horned owl that was having trouble surviving in the wild because of cataracts was fitted with contact lenses by a University of Wisconsin-Madison veterinary ophthalmologist. And relatives of a kidnapper's victim, trying to follow ransom instructions, tossed the equivalent of about US$600,000 in a sack off of a highway overpass but accidentally hit a 57-year-old man on a motorcycle, knocking him to the ground and sending him to the hospital (Taipei, Taiwan). And a 28-year-old motorist escaped serious injury when, on River Road in Beaufort County, S.C., her car was hit by a hippopotamus (which had escaped from a nearby plantation).

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

Art Comes to Life: In a 1999 episode of TV's "The Simpsons," Homer became a temporary multibillionaire by accidentally inventing a "tomacco" plant that sprouted tobacco-bred tomatoes that were hopelessly addictive from even a single bite. Inspired (and hoping to draw attention to the show's anti-smoking message), Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Ore., tried to grow such a plant and has somewhat succeeded, although a forensic researcher believes that only the plant itself, and not the fruit, contains nicotine. In February, he announced that he would auction off the golf-ball-sized fruit.

-- Ronald Paul McAllister, 43, allegedly robbed a Bank of America branch in Tulsa, Okla., in January, during which incident he was quoted as advising a teller, "Don't do anything stupid, lady." Moments later, as McAllister fled with his loot, he forgot to take his holdup note, which was a pre-printed withdrawal slip with his name on it. He was easily tracked down, and police now say McAllister had robbed another bank in October.

-- Ariel Alonso, who lives near Roanoke, Va., was indignant when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration wrongly accused him of setting up a methamphetamine lab, and asked rhetorically, after the charges were dropped in January, "How do I get my ... dignity back?" The laboratory of Alonso (and his then-partner Jonathan Conrad) was in reality making the so-called "fluid of life," which they goaded customers into buying (at $20 to $40 a dose) by claiming that it is the component of human cells and can cleanse people internally and build new tissue, even though it was just potassium chloride and white grape juice. (That, apparently, is the business plan that gave Alonso "dignity.")

-- Convicted murderer Robert Ivey continued to tell a court in Montreal, Quebec, in December that (contrary to a jury's finding) he is not guilty of killing the 42-year-old victim and that if only he had enough money to challenge the conclusive DNA tests (which showed that his blood was all over the victim's apartment), he would be a free man. A few moments later during his recitation to the court, Ivey asked the judge for credit toward his sentencing because of his conscientiousness in having spent "seven hours" cleaning up the crime scene and the victim's body.

-- North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who is widely believed by United Nations officials and Far East experts to be tolerating the starvation deaths of perhaps millions of his countrymen, launched a nationwide campaign in January to improve national health by eradicating smoking, whose practitioners, said Kim, are one of the "three main fools of the 21st century" (along with people ignorant about music and computers).

-- In November, Jacky Bibby, 52, of Whiskey Flats, Texas (near Fort Worth), first sat in a bathtub with 81 live rattlesnakes and then extended his own Guinness Book record by stuffing the tails of nine of them into his mouth. Protocol required that he band the tails together at the rattles and hold them in his mouth for 10 seconds while leaning forward. (The Associated Press reported that Bibby's day job is "marketing" for a drug treatment center.) (Also, in December, Brian Moffitt of Winnipeg, Manitoba, extended his Guinness Book record of 702 body piercings by inserting 900 surgical needles into his leg at the same time.)

-- Geologist David J. Siveter of Leicester University (England) wrote in the journal Science in December that he and his team had found a fossil 425 million years old that is probably the oldest record of an unambiguously male animal. They named the half-inch-long shellfish Colymbosathon ecplecticos, which they said means "swimmer with a large penis," referring to its organ that is one-fifth of its body length.

Eva Reyes, 71, the mother of convicted murderer David Maust of Hammond, Ind., said in December, upon being informed that Maust had been charged with three more murders: "I love David, but, yes, (the death penalty) would be the right thing to do for him (if convicted)." Also in December, Lynda Nixon, the mother of convicted double murderer Ian Huntley (Soham, England), told The Sun newspaper: "I believe Ian should not live after what he's done. I truly wish we had capital punishment" (and she went on to specify an "electric chair").

(1) The first international camel beauty pageant was held in November in the Alxa League area of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous region of China, according to an Associated Press dispatch, featuring nearly 100 dressed-up camels judged (by veteran herders) for the shine of their hair and the uprightness of their humps. (2) And a Duke Medical Center study, announced in December, concluded that doses of nicotine might reduce age-associated memory impairment ("senior moments"), thus adding to the conditions (others: schizophrenia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) that can benefit from nicotine.

In January, doctors at the Selian Hospital, Arusha, Tanzania, removed a toothbrush from the stomach of a 54-year-old man who had become the latest person to swallow one while brushing his teeth. And in December in Cortland, N.Y., Ron Tanner was captured after about a year on the run as a fugitive from a prison in Wyoming, where he was serving time for theft. Tanner is now the latest innocent man (the Wyoming Supreme Court recently threw out his theft conviction) jailed for escaping from a prison where he was being wrongfully detained, and he faces up to 10 years behind bars if convicted.

Even after it had learned that its chief technology officer's claim of a college computer sciences degree was bogus, the Washington, D.C., Elections Board declined to fire her, reasoning that such a degree was not important to her job (January). And the D.C. Contract Appeals Board declined to suspend a paving firm that had pleaded guilty last year to bribing district officials, thus allowing it to resume normal contracting work (January). Also in January, a government audit revealed that the district last year had failed to use (and therefore had lost) $5 million from federal grants for breakfast and lunch programs for low-income children because it could not figure out how to spend it.

The 48-year-old father of a high school basketball player, riled at the officiating of a game, was charged with assault after allegedly biting two of the three referees in an on-court brawl (Colorado Springs, Colo.). And crude oil bubbled up from the toilet and sinks of Leila LeTourneau's home, covering the floors (possibly from an old, uncapped well under the home) (Longview, Texas). And two Cubans who had tried to land in Florida last year on their pontooned 1951 Chevy truck (but were turned back by the Coast Guard) tried again with a pontooned 1959 Buick (but were again turned back).

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

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.)