Among the anticipated products at the February American International Toy Fair in New York City (according to the New York Post) were a gun that shoots boogers, a squeezable doll that smells like rotten eggs, a flea (based on a pro wrestling character) that emits rank body odors after warning "I'm gonna blow," and a dissectible brain that oozes slime. Also at the show, St. Petersburg, Fla., inventor Tim Engler was pushing his pump-operated, heavy squirt-gun artillery that mounts on bicycles. (Not at the fair, but currently a hot Internet pass-around ad is a color poster for Japan's Kaba-Kick, a pink toy gun shaped like a hippo that appears designed for children to play Russian roulette, but with the loser merely kicked in the head by the hippo. The Kaba-Kick was discontinued by Takura Toys in 1992, but its ad apparently lives on.)

Albuquerque emergency room physician Sam Slishman is working to launch his Endorphin Power Co., which is a homeless shelter providing drug rehabilitation based on vigorous exercise at on-premises workout stations. However, Slishman also wants his center to help pay for itself by selling the electric power that could be harnessed by his down-and-out population's daily workouts (pedaling, lifting, working the treadmills). Endorphin Power, Slishman says, will be the city's inspirational flagship for "social rehabilitation and renewable energy."

Dentist Mohamedraza Huss Bhimani (Orland Park, Ill.), whom police say fondled three female patients, was arrested in his office while he happened to be working on another patient, in mid-filling (October). (The patient had to rush to another dentist to finish the job.) And Dr. Leon Gombis (Oak Lawn, Ill.) had battery charges filed against him after he, wielding pliers, ripped a cap out of the mouth of a 58-year-old patient, believing (mistakenly) that she was behind on her payments (January).

-- At press time, U.S. Air Force Capt. Jacqueline Chester was scheduled for court martial in Dover, Del., for having tested positive for cocaine; in her defense, her now-ex-husband said that during their marriage, he had occasionally rubbed cocaine on his genitals for pleasure-enhancement and that the otherwise-drug-free Jacqueline might have absorbed it through her own genital walls.

-- From a Jan. 1 police report in the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun: A motorist who was clocked at 15 mph over the speed limit in Waldo, Fla., claimed that since state troopers' policy is to give a 5 mph leeway before ticketing, and since Waldo police often claim to give a 10 mph leeway, he thought the two leeway speeds could be combined to allow him to drive 15 mph over the limit.

-- Lame Excuses: According to a police report in January on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Web site, a driver in the Newfoundland district of Bonavista-Clarenville denied that he had an illegal radar detector, claiming that the black box on his dashboard was a "moose detector" that indeed had so far kept him safe from moose. And Joseph Hubbert, 34, explained to Minneapolis police on Christmas morning that the reason he got stuck in the chimney of Uncle Hugo's Mystery Bookstore was not because he was up to no good, but because he had accidentally dropped his keys down the chimney and had to crawl down to get them.

-- In January, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council turned down the complaint of a radio listener in Calgary, Alberta, ruling that a song by the a cappella group Da Vinci's Notebook was not necessarily obscene, in that it could also be about self-esteem. The song, "Enormous Penis," included the lyrics "I've got the cure for all my blues / I take a look at my enormous penis / And my troubles start a-meltin' away" and "I gotta sing and I gotta dance / When I glance in my pants."

-- Author Irwin Schiff, at war with the IRS for years over his aggressive claims that paying federal income tax is voluntary, may finally have turned defensive. In a back-tax-collection case in Las Vegas in January, Schiff told the court in a filing that he suffers from delusions, including a fantasy that he is the only person qualified to interpret federal income tax law. Schiff's psychiatrist said Schiff has been paranoid for years, stemming from his having lost heavily in a tax shelter that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme.

In Tarpon Springs, Fla., William Ray Hunter, 41, was arrested and charged with defrauding a series of at least 19 Northerners who had paid him a total of $33,000 in advance to rent his mobile home for the winter starting Jan. 1. Hunter apparently had made no effort to move out by the time the tenants started arriving. Said Sheriff's Sgt. Bob Hart, "I don't think he thought too much about what would happen when everybody showed up. Most people have a plan. (Hunter) had the first part, but he didn't have the second part."

The owner of the German shepherd crossbreed who made the news last year for having trained "Adolf" to raise his right paw on hearing the command "Sieg Heil," was found guilty in Berlin of displaying Nazi symbols, and he told the court that Adolf had since injured his paw and could no longer salute (February). And the McKees Rock, Pa., police dog Dolpho, that was sent for re-education in 2002 after having senselessly attacked a black child, and that was making progress in his rehab effort, backslid, senselessly attacking a black teenager (February).

A 46-year-old motorcyclist, speeding, yelling obscenities, and shaking his fist alongside an 18-wheeler that had made a left turn of questionable etiquette on a Corpus Christi, Texas, street, lost control of the cycle, fell off, and was fatally dragged underneath the truck (October). And in Tampa, Fla., a 20-year-old man chased down another driver (both in pickups), finally jumping onto the first driver's door so he could punch him through the window. The distracted driver continued on for two blocks but finally hit a tree, which caused the truck to roll over onto the man clinging to the door, and he died at the scene (October).

The owners of FM 106.7 in York, Pa., having ended the station's country-music format but not yet having introduced a new one, played "Pop Goes the Weasel" 24 hours a day during the interim (February). And a recently active methamphetamine lab (fuel, tubing, foil, coffee filters, and a liquid compound) was discovered in a search of cells in the Pikeville, Tenn., county jail (December). And a Pacifica, Calif., father filed a $15,000 claim against the school district, saying officials have not stopped students from taunting his 12-year-old son, who is an internationally acclaimed ballroom dancer (September).

(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 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.)