A 2003 British documentary, "Fat Girls and Feeders," debuting on Australian TV in April 2004, profiled an Arizona couple, "Gina" (once one of the world's largest women) and her husband, "Mark" (who has a sensual or psychological desire that she be ever-larger). Because Gina is apparently comfortable with her role, Mark is merely an "enabler" in the "fat administration" subculture, but more dominant men are called "feeders," who may even "grow" their partners by pouring liquid fat down their throats. Gina once weighed 825 pounds (with a 92-inch waist), but had settled down at around 400. The filmmaker's point is said to be that objectifying fat women is only somewhat more offensive than objectifying thin ones.

In March, a 62-year-old man was ejected from the Spring Haven Retirement Community (Winter Haven, Fla.) after he punched one resident (age 86) and bit another (age 78) in a brawl over his apparent habit of foraging at the communal salad bar for his favorite kind of lettuce. (His 80-year-old mother, also a resident, conceded that "it did appear that he was playing with the food.") And in February in Tamarac, Fla., the family of a 74-year-old man who died in 2002 after being sucker-punched by a 69-year-old man in a theater-line fight, filed a lawsuit against the movie house for not providing security, claiming there had been several other theater-line altercations between seniors.

Saudi businessman Saleh al-Saiairi, 64, who has been married to 58 women (but not more than four at one time), announced he would soon take two more brides and was preparing to randomly select the two current wives he would have to divorce (March). And David Boyd announced as a candidate for the Canadian Parliament, from Halifax, on a platform of marriage reform, specifically to permit same-sex, group and human-android marriages (March).

-- A 73-year-old retired electronics specialist sat for a long interview in December in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, patiently explaining that the $300,000 nest egg he had just lost on a familiar Nigerian scam was really the fault of "corrupt governments" and not the dishonesty of his Nigerian "friends" who had no choice but to ask him to pay ever-escalating investment amounts. The man repeatedly insisted that his "friends" couldn't possibly be scammers, but toward the end of the two-hour interview, finally remembered that they "never did really explain how they got my name."

-- Former Harvard professor Weldong Xu, who was arrested in March for his alleged scheme to bilk colleagues out of $600,000 to fund a bogus SARS research institute in China, admitted to Boston police that he spent part of the money on what the detectives recognized as a traditional Nigerian money-laundering scam, although Xu aggressively insisted that it was a legitimate deal. Said Detective Steve Blair, "(The Harvard professor) never caught on."

-- Todd Lorin Nelson, a 13-year employee of the Miami-Dade (Fla.) county clerk's office, was summoned for jury duty in April 2003, reported to the courtroom, and was quickly dismissed. However, according to police, he repeatedly called his boss over the next few months to say that he had been selected as a juror for a big case but couldn't talk about it (all the while drawing his $35,000 government salary), and it was not until October that the boss finally investigated, resulting in Nelson's arrest.

-- From a January "Parenting" column by John Rosemond in the Providence (R.I.) Journal: Reader: "I can't keep my 20-month-old daughter out of the dog's food. I've tried scolding, distracting, time-out, nothing has worked." Rosemond: "(F)rom a strictly nutritional standpoint (a nutritionist told me), most dog food is superior to the diets of many Americans." "(A pediatrician said) he has yet to see a child who suffered ill effects from eating dog food," except for chunk-type that might get stuck in the throat.

-- From a February "Ask Dr. (Peter) Gott" column in the Herald News of suburban Chicago: Reader: "(M)y grandson ... told me that his fifth-grade teacher (a female) instructed the class that hand-washing (following urination in a public restroom) is unnecessary; urine is sterile." Dr. Gott: "Bless your grandson's teacher." "As a general rule, the urogenital area is cleaner than most other body parts are, and it need not be washed nor should hands be washed after urinating." "You and I, reader, are the products of our upbringing. It's time to make a change."

Troy D. Nunes, 37, became the latest ordinary burglar to die at his crime scene. He broke into a Hollywood Video store in Quincy, Mass., in March by tossing a brick through a window, but a shard of glass remained protruding, and as Nunes was leaving, he accidentally slashed his right femoral artery and died of blood loss just down the street. However, another clumsy burglar is still alive (and was arrested in Columbus, Ohio, in March), despite apparently habitually cutting himself at crime scenes. Columbus police said they had found what they believe is his DNA in seven different burglarized stores in Columbus and Cleveland.

News of the Weird has reported twice on incredibly long daily commutes to work (a 25-year U.S. Navy Department employee, 342 miles round trip from Trenton, N.J., to Washington, D.C., reported in 1992, and a 39-year veteran rural West Virginia newspaper carrier, 200 miles round trip, reported in 1996). A January 2004 Boston Globe profile of retirement-fund analyst Stephen Jordan described his 340-mile daily round trip from his farm in Augusta, Maine, to his downtown Boston office, but unlike the other two, who drove all the way, Jordan drives only to Portland and takes a train to Boston (on which he "get(s) a ton of work done," he said).

Raymond Rodriguez, 25, was found not guilty in the murder of a 77-year-old drinking buddy after he testified to having, at the crime scene, hallucinations of bologna and cheese dancing around in the refrigerator and, in the freezer, a green man who told Rodriguez, "Catch me if you can." (San Antonio, December) And Patrick Hutchinson was sent for a mental exam in February after police in Lexington, Ky., accused him of murdering his wife. Hutchinson explained that she had been taken over by aliens and that he (as one of only 735 "true humans" left in Lexington, out of 260,000 population) had to stop her, using a weapon supplied by a cobra that was speaking on behalf of God.

An American Airlines flight was canceled after the local Transportation Security Administration official ordered a bomb search (which proved fruitless) based only on information that he said came from a psychic (Fort Myers, Fla.). And a Chicago attorney was permitted to withdraw from representing a 75-year-old alleged serial bad-check-writer after he sheepishly admitted that he had taken a check from her for his retainer, but that it had bounced.

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

As the Romanian government hurries to improve law-enforcement sophistication in its campaign for European Union membership, villagers in the Transylvania region are resisting police crackdowns on their traditional practice of vampire killings, according to a March Knight Ridder News Service report. Vampires (unlike Hollywood conventions using crosses and garlic) are just people who go bad upon death and cause continuing grief to family members unless they are re-killed. The body is dug up; the heart is removed with a curved sickle and burned (but it will likely squeak like a mouse and try to escape unless held down); and the ashes are mixed with water and drunk. Villagers are outraged that some may face criminal charges for disturbing the dead, which carries a three-year prison sentence.

Former judge Bob Sam Castleman and his son pleaded guilty to mailing a poisonous copperhead snake to a neighbor with whom they were feuding (Pocahontas, Ark., January). And an Absa Bank Ltd. customer, upset about a car loan, was charged with setting five poisonous puff adder snakes free in the bank's lobby (resulting in one worker being bitten) (Johannesburg, South Africa, January). (In October, a small, nonpoisonous snake was found slithering around a courtroom, in Danbury, Conn.; it was believed unrelated to the dispute being heard, even though that was a divorce case.)

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) Drunk-driving arrests of people who were leading public campaigns against alcohol abuse, such as Dr. James Billow, who resigned as director of a county alcoholism prevention program after being charged with DUI in February in Newark, Ohio. And (70) the jewel thief who ingeniously swallows gems at the scene but who is then caught by police, who must wait patiently for nature to take its course so they can recover the evidence, such as Kevin Lynch's swallowing a 2-carat diamond ring from a Salem, N.H., jewelry store in February (which he passed two days later).

-- Thinking Small: Mayor Herman Lee Edwards of China, Texas, was indicted in December for mowing the lawn outside city hall and then pocketing the fee that had been set aside for the yard work contractor. And police in Tokyo announced in January that they had charged two men recently with illegally hooking up to stores' electricity at night in order to power their mobile phone and portable stereo, respectively, cheating the stores out of the equivalent of about 1 cent (U.S.) each.

-- Police Reports: From The Recorder, Greenfield, Mass., Nov. 13, 2003: "A man reported buying a car and when he went to get into it with the intention of sleeping in it, there were three people, including the prior owner (a)lready sleeping inside the car." From The Leaf-Chronicle, Clarksville, Tenn., Nov. 6, 2003, reporting the aborted robbery of a convenience store by a man who pulled a knife and demanded money after he had already given the clerk his credit card to pay for a purchase: "The complainant (clerk) looked at the suspect like he was crazy ... the suspect quickly signed the sales receipt and left."

-- At a special Friday evening session of the New Mexico House of Representatives in February (on health insurance taxes), Democratic leaders needed Rep. Bengie Regensberg for a vote and sent state police to retrieve him at the motel where he was staying temporarily. Troopers reported having to subdue and handcuff Regensberg, who was naked, combative and "likely intoxicated." (Regensberg said the troopers were too rough with him.)

-- The Japanese navy created a TV ad in February to encourage enlistments and public support for its mission of sending security troops to Iraq. In the spot, according to a Reuters reporter, seven actors dressed, Village People-like, as sailors dancing on the deck of a ship, singing (roughly translated), "Nippon Seaman Ship, Seaman Shipo, For Love ... For Peace" and "I Love Japan, I Love Peace, The Maritime Self-Defense Force." (The ad is needed, said a senior officer, because "there are a lot of young people and women who don't seem interested (in the navy).")

-- In a December profile, The Washington Post examined the breezy American history curriculum being sold to schools by presidential brother Neil Bush (more in the news lately for his messy divorce). The course's premise is that future "hunter-gatherers" (i.e., rambunctious boys) don't have the patience to read and should be taught by music, graphics and other techniques. For instance, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 is taught in a rap song, "It was 55 delegates from 12 states/Took one hot Philadelphia summer to create/A perfect document for their imperfect times/Franklin, Madison, Washington, a lot of the cats/Who used to be in the Continental Congress way back."

A pickup truck driver was arrested by an Indiana state trooper because its cargo was blocking sight of the license plate in the back window; on closer inspection, the cargo was revealed to be 900 pounds of marijuana (Indianapolis, March). And in Lafayette, Ind., Joshua K. Kochell, 27, was charged with robbing two gas stations; his probation officer was able to track his whereabouts precisely that evening because Kochell was still wearing an electronic monitor from a 2001 sentence for theft (March).

-- More third-world visitors arrived at Western airports illegally carrying in their luggage indigenous meats destined for family festivals. A 48-year-old woman from Gambia was arrested at Gatwick airport in England with 13 pounds of goat and snail meat and 172 pounds of catfish (March), and at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport, a whole smoked monkey was confiscated from a woman arriving from Cameroon for a wedding reception. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official said these airport seizures are "only the tip of the iceberg" of the illegal importing of traditional meats.

-- (1) The Trufresh company (Suffield, Conn.) said in March that its method of freezing lobsters for restaurants has resulted in a few lobsters, frozen stiff for hours at a time, reviving on their own. (The company ships all frozen lobsters with claws banded, just in case.) (2) A photo technician at a CVS drugstore in Advance, N.C., notified police in March when someone dropped off film showing two male employees of a local Wendy's, in bathing suits, frolicking in the restaurant's pots-and-pans dishwashing sink.

A 37-year-old man, angry that a car splashed mud on him, was charged with slashing the tires on 548 cars (Bournemouth, England). And a jury assessed a girls' high school basketball coach $1.5 million for aggressively hounding a player to lose 10 pounds, which ultimately traumatized her into an eating disorder (West Windsor-Plainsboro, N.J.). And the bad-boy artist who once put goldfish into blenders at a gallery, almost defying visitors to turn them on (and one did), used 780 gallons of red paint to cover a 1,000-square-yard iceberg off the coast of Greenland.

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

Louis Paul Kadlecek, 21, who had never even been in an airplane before, broke into a hangar at an airport near Lake Jackson, Texas, on Feb. 29, and, using trial-and-error, got a Cessna 172 airborne for about a mile, intending to fly to Mexico, before slamming into power lines. Although the crash left the plane a total loss, Kadlecek climbed out and walked home, but sheriff's deputies, based on witnesses' descriptions, arrested him the next day. One Brazoria County aviation official estimated that stunt pilots might survive an incident like that one time in 1,000. Said another, "This guy used up all the luck he's ever going to have."

-- From a March Boston Globe interview with Morgan Lee, newly crowned Miss Gothic Massachusetts: (asked how she would describe Goth) "It's really a style and a way of thinking. Basically, you're miserable all the time. (W)e just see the darker side that other people tend to ignore. The most interesting people are always the saddest." (Asked what her boyfriend thinks of her): "He's very proud of me. (H)e's not a very descript person, kind of like an amoeba, but very cultured."

-- In a 2003 issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology, two Seattle radiologists described a 35-year-old man with severe abdominal pain but normal vital signs, who was found to have "multiple" heads from Barbie dolls lodged in his small bowel, which he attributed to his pursuit of the pleasurable anal sensation he gets from excreting them. After a straight-laced description of how doll heads show up differently from other objects on X-rays, the authors advised radiologists to "keep in mind that human imagination may not follow clinical algorithms."

-- In February, free-lance photographer Robert Levin filed a $50 million lawsuit against the Waste Management company for the injuries (including brain damage) he suffered while trying to take photographs at New York City's Ground Zero in December 2001. Levin had surreptitiously climbed atop one of the company's garbage trucks to get a better vantage point when the driver pulled away, causing Levin to fall, which Levin now says showed Waste Management's "failure to respect (my) rights as a pedestrian."

-- British postal worker Alan Pugh filed a lawsuit in Birmingham County Court (England) in December against a Wolverhampton University religious studies teacher who he said had put too much outgoing mail in a letter box, causing Pugh to injure himself trying to haul it away. The lecturer had mailed 270 oversized envelopes, totaling around 50 pounds.

-- According to the New York State Police, Stephen Pappadake, 17, was speeding (80 mph in a 30 mph zone) and passing multiple cars illegally on the morning of April 29, 2003, and he eventually lost control of his car, crashed and died. In January 2004, Pappadake's parents filed a lawsuit against the last driver that Stephen was illegally passing, who they said had veered to the left, causing Stephen to leave the road and crash. The lawsuit made no reference to the police's conclusions.

-- On the morning of July 7, 2001, a vandal tossed detergent into the fountain in Canal Park in Duluth, Minn., producing a massive, continuing mountain of bubbles. About four hours later, Kathy J. Kelly, walking by the still-foamy mound, failed to steer clear enough, fell on the soap-slippery sidewalk, and suffered several injuries including, eventually, gangrene. She sued the city for not having cleaned the fountain or roped off the area. In March 2004, a jury ruled in her favor, finding that 30 percent of the fault was hers for getting too close but that 70 percent was the city's. (Jurors were not allowed to assess the fault of the original vandal.)

In February, the chief justice of Singapore, Yong Pung How, 77, rejected attempts at leniency by a 25-year-old ex-policeman who had argued that his arrest for receiving oral sex (as a "crime against nature") was an anachronism. In upholding the law as a salutary part of Asian culture, Justice Yong sentenced the man to 12 months in jail, pointing out, "There are countries where you can go and suck away for all you are worth," "but this is Asia."

Keep a Low Profile? Sandy L. Warren, 43, was arrested in March and charged with stealing an 8-ton cherry-picker from a construction equipment dealership in Redmond, Wash.; a dealership employee had spotted the cherry-picker parked in Warren's front yard in Redmond with a for-sale sign on it ("$28,990 OBO"). And Ronald Plaster, 21, and Amber Plaster, 20, were arrested in Meadville, Pa., in February after an investigation of sexual assault against two teenagers; the investigation was started when Amber walked into a police station and asked, out of curiosity, whether it was legal for a 21-year-old man to have sex with a 15-year-old girl.

"Repressed memory" was a popular psychiatric diagnosis in the 1980s, with well-credentialed doctors convincing patients that the cause of their unhappiness was a history of sordid sexual episodes that they had buried deep in their subconscious. Three doctors persuaded Chicago-area resident Elizabeth Gale that she had been the victim of a satanic cult that had used her to breed children just for sex and pornography, and she acceded to now-widely discredited treatment (druggings, tie-downs, hypnosis, a tubal ligation, and 18 hospitalizations covering 2,016 days during her 12-year ordeal). In February, Gale settled a lawsuit against the doctors and two hospitals for $7.5 million. One of the doctors, Bennett Braun, lost a similar case in 1997 for $10.6 million.

An 18-year-old man drowned near Eudora, Ark., in December, when the he accidentally fell into a pit of water while attempting to drown his pit bull (which he thought was too old and docile), and the man's father also drowned when he jumped in to save his son. (The dog survived.) And when a construction trench collapsed in New York City in December, a worker was buried up to his neck, and emergency crews were summoned, but before they could arrive, a co-worker manning a backhoe tried to dig him out, but accidentally decapitated him.

A woman with a near-record short name, Ms. Li Uv, 80, passed away in Providence, R.I., survived by her daughter, Ms. Ep Te. And scientists from all over the world headed for the village of Mohammad Pur Umri, India, following news that one of every 10 births there in recent years resulted in twins (vs. the worldwide probability of 1 in 300). And a 35-year-old motorist (stunned by the Madrid bombings) pleaded guilty to trying to run down a pedestrian who resembled Osama bin Laden (who dodged the car, leaving it to crash into a tree) (Montpellier, France).

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