In April, choreographer Jenefer Davies Mansfield staged her "NASCAR Ballet" production at the Roanoke (Va.) Ballet Theatre, featuring 20 colorfully unitard-clad dancers, wearing corporate patches of the theater's sponsors, prancing and leaping around a banked-racetrack stage (to new-age music and the sounds of revving engines), "racing" but occasionally crashing into each other, to be rescued by other dancers who are the "pit crews." Mansfield was hoping for a big crossover audience of NASCAR fans gathered for a big race in nearby Martinsville. "In this business," she said, "you've got to take chances."

In December, police in Lewiston, Maine, chased down a patient from St. Mary's Regional Medical Center who, apparently fed up with his hospital regimen, had fled the building on foot, clad only in his gown in the icy rain, and dragging his wheeled IV pole behind him. And Gary C. Laine, 48, wanted on a fugitive murder warrant from California, turned himself in to police in Kerrville, Texas, in February and, apparently seeking to look cooperative, had already handcuffed himself before walking into the station.

William Rhode, 53, was arrested in February and charged in several incidents in which he visited daycare centers in the New Jersey towns of Hardyston, Jefferson and Pequannock and inquired about employment, even though at the time he was dressed in pink women's tights and wore a large diaper. The first two visits were alarming enough to officials, but police arrived in force after the Holy Spirit School in Pequannock reported that Rhode had actually relieved himself in front of students.

-- Thinking Outside the Box: It was a black male police officer who arrested her, and a black female officer who searched her, but drunk-driving suspect Donna Mills, who is a black New York City judge, still played the race card at her March trial. According to a New York Post report, Mills' lawyer said that the presence of the black officers meant that Mills' race-card defense was being undermined, and that that in itself might be evidence of police racism. (Mills was acquitted, but in subsequent interviews, jurors said the racism argument was inconsequential.)

-- Lame Excuses: In Los Angeles in February, Michael Marks, 25, raising an insanity defense to attempted murder, said he was drug-crazed at the time of the crime because someone on a balcony above him had spilled PCP on top of his head and that it must have affected his thinking. (He was convicted.) And Michael Cammarota, 57, asked a judge in New York City in February not to imprison him for engineering a multi-victim investment fraud but rather to send him to a mental institution because he needs help with what he called his "addiction" to "money." (He got four to 12 years.)

-- Missouri high school principal Robert D. Blizzard, 58, was arrested in Oklahoma in December and charged with indecent exposure after he was reported driving with his inside light on and his pants down, flashing motorists. When the arresting officer asked him how he could still keep control of the car like that, Blizzard modestly explained that it was no more difficult than "talking on a cell phone." (And in April, a Toronto musician was ticketed on the very busy Highway 400 after an officer spotted him behind the wheel of his VW Jetta practicing the violin.)

-- In Cleveland in March, John Struna won his lawsuit against a convenience store owner who had sold him Ohio Lottery tickets, claiming that the man ought to have explained a Lottery rule to him (even though the rules are printed on every ticket). Struna had bought 52 tickets playing the same numbers in a game that pays $100,000 per winning ticket, but somehow he never noticed that the payout would be capped at $1 million, meaning that his 52 winning tickets would be worth only $19,230 each. Despite being a heavy lottery player (spending $125,000 a year), Struna said it was up to the store owner to explain that rule to him, and the jury agreed.

-- Frank Chancellor filed a lawsuit against Burger King in Greenville, S.C., in March, claiming that, unknown to him beforehand, his chicken sandwich was too hot and that it scalded his mouth. And two months earlier in West Palm Beach, Fla., Thomas Gould filed a lawsuit against Raindancer steak house, claiming that, unknown to him beforehand, his baked potato was too hot and that it scalded his mouth and esophagus, sending him to the hospital.

Serial thief Colin Sadd, 41, pleaded guilty in April in Sheffield, England, to his latest capers, including swiping five cars that he had gotten dealers to let him test drive. As with his previous car thefts, Sadd drove them around, cleaned them up inside, and washed and waxed them before abandoning them. Said his wife, "(H)e desperately needs help with his obsession." And Debra Janan Goins was charged with theft in February in Mount Carmel, Tenn., after writing three checks taken from a purse she stole, but each time carefully filling in the check register with all the details of the illegal transactions.

Cardinal Rules, Broken: (1) Don't Carry Around the Holdup Note: Christopher Alexander Fields, 42, was charged in Hillsborough, N.C., in January after police found him acting suspicious in front of a Central Carolina Bank branch. The only real evidence of his intention was a note in his backpack reading "I want $10,000 in $100 bills. Don't push no buttons, or I'll shot (sic) you." (2) If You're Paying With Counterfeit Money, Pay and Go: Anthony Lee Lamb, 20, and two alleged accomplices were arrested in Berea, Ky., in March after Lamb paid for a meal at a McDonald's and then sat down to eat it, thus giving the manager a chance to examine Lamb's $20 bill more carefully.

A 21-year-old junior at the University of California at Berkeley became the latest drinking-contest fatality, in a March game among friends repeatedly downing shots of tequila, vodka and whiskey. ("(He) was a competitive guy," said his roommate.) And a 20-year-old Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario) student plunged to his death in February during a contest to see who could spit the farthest off an 11th-floor balcony. He had taken a running start.

In a heavily Hindu section of Bali (Indonesia), dozens of couples participated in a traditional good-luck public "kissing" festival until Muslim clerics showed up with buckets of water and drenched them for their immoral behavior. And a 24-hour camera on a German Internet site, showing only an extended family of wild boars, drew 1.5 million viewers in its first two weeks. And businessman Sam Walls, at first competitive in the Republican primary for a seat in the Texas legislature, lost after recent-year photographs surfaced of his cross-dressing days as Samantha Walls.

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

In March, at the latest trial of a former executive charged with looting his company during the 1990s, ex-employees of Adelphia Communications said that company founder John Rigas (1) was once taking out so many cash advances that his son (also an Adelphia executive) had to limit him to $1 million a month; (2) required extensive prodding to return 22 company-owned luxury cars after he resigned in 2002; and (3) in a familiar finding in cases like this, had Adelphia pay for a $700,000 golf club membership and the extravagant wedding of another son, Michael.

Junior-lightweight boxer Nate Campbell, a heavy favorite to beat Robbie Peden in Temecula, Calif., in March, controlled the fight and began to taunt Peden in the fifth round, even dropping his hands to his side, daring Peden to hit him; Peden then immediately knocked Campbell out with one punch. And in a December Boston Globe story about wild bears roaming Denville, N.J., animal control officer Meredith Petrillo reported solving the problem of one bear's nesting ("denning") underneath a homeowner's deck: Petrillo advised the resident to have her husband urinate under the deck (after which the respectful bear began denning elsewhere).

Catholic Cardinal Gustaaf Joos declared that only 5 to 10 percent of gays and lesbians are genuinely so and that the rest are "sexual perverts" (Brussels, Belgium, January). And the commissioners of Rhea County, Tenn. (site of the 1925 Scopes "evolution" trial), voted 8-0 to ask the state to help them keep gays and lesbians out of the county (but rescinded the vote two days later amidst heavy criticism) (March). And the Georgia House of Representatives voted 160-0 to prohibit piercing of female genitals, even of adult women eager for the procedure (March). (One sponsor, Rep. Bill Heath, when told that some women seek such adornment, was incredulous: "What? I've never seen such a thing.")

-- Four months after the universally followed gubernatorial recall election in California, Ken Blodgett, the president of the Ochoco West Sanitary District Board (Crook County, Ore.), was recalled by the voters (39 votes to 29), with the main issue Blodgett's having stopped payment on a $14.03 invoice for office supplies, which Blodgett said was not properly authorized.

-- In March, the Saunders County (Neb.) Board of Supervisors reaffirmed that it would not reimburse Register of Deeds Don Clark for the price of a sandwich he ate while out of town on business, even though Clark insisted there was money in his office's budget to cover it. The board said its own rules supersede Clark's budget and instructed the county attorney (who seemed to oppose the board) to hire an outside lawyer to deal with the matter.

-- And They Say Government Is Inefficient: When her 14-year-old son died in a farming accident last July in Beaumont, Texas (pronounced dead at 2:20 p.m. on the 31st), Melissa Devillier knew that the boy's Social Security survivor's benefits (from his dad's death in 1992) would be terminated, but government was startlingly swift to act. On Aug. 11, it told the mother that since the boy had not lived out the entire month of July, he didn't qualify for July benefits, and federal law required her to pay back the $1,025 July advance she had already received.

-- Toronto, Ontario, artist Jason Kronewald, 29, creates claylike portraits of celebrities, but using hundreds of pieces of used chewing gum instead of clay, according to a March profile by Reuters news service. He said he doesn't chew, himself, but buys gum and asks his friends to chew it. "I'm not into picking it off seats in the theater. I like the gum to be mine." His "Gum Blondes" series includes Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson.

-- Another Toronto artist, Istvan Kantor, won one of the country's most prestigious awards in March even though he (called "Canada's leading shock artist" by The New York Times) is best known for bloody performance art scenes, such as wearing the dripping carcasses of cats as a hat and posing himself in various positions to allow blood to drip from body apertures in a series that one critic said was a tribute to blood as "the spurting, contagious prima material of life." (Also, a February BBC News profile touted Madras, India, artist Shihan Hussaini's dedication to using blood to paint 50 portraits of his hero, a Tamil Nadu state official named Jayalalitha. At one point, Hussaini was drawing so much of his own blood that he had to hire a nurse.)

In Santa Fe, N.M., in March, after police recovered $46,000 worth of jewelry near an abandoned safe in a ravine, they concluded that burglars had stolen the 180-pound safe from a nearby home, taken it down the road and tried mightily to break it open, but failed, finally just pushing it down the ravine, at which point (unknown to them, because they had left) it finally burst open.

Corinth, Vt., farmer Chris Weathersbee's house was raided by state police in February and the 44 most-sickly of his goats were seized, leaving him 70 still residing in the house, which is outfitted for them with hay covering the floors to a height of about 2 feet (and, of course, including manure). Weathersbee, 63, told the Valley News (Lebanon, N.H.) that he personally only started sleeping in the house in January (because of the weather); before that, he had slept in the barn with the goats that couldn't fit in the house. An educated man with a nimble mind, he denied that he is a hoarder and asked authorities for more time to find a home for his goats, since he believes that any confiscated by the state would surely be killed (or neutered, which he said violates animals' "right" to procreate).

After a bout of heavy drinking, a landscape worker, riding home with his buddies, fell to his death while trying to urinate out of the open door of their car at about 25 mph (Croesgoch, Wales, November). And a 46-year-old man became the most recent to fall to his death on the side of a highway after stopping his car in the dark and searching for a place to urinate (but falling 300 feet off a cliff) (Columbia, Calif., March).

An Optimist Club (affiliated with Optimist International in St. Louis) opened in Baghdad, reported The New York Times. And Brazilian legislator Antonio Jose de Moraes Souza was removed from office for allowing a physician-supporter to hand out free Viagra at his campaign rallies. And from March 29 to April 6, there were no reported gunshot injuries in the New York City borough of The Bronx, the first such week in at least a decade and probably much longer, in that during the equivalent week 10 years ago, there were 30 shootings and 12 murders.

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

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.)