"Fishermen" using pistols, shotguns and assault rifles are permitted on two U.S. lakes (in Vermont and Virginia) for a few weeks each spring to fire away at pike and several other species, according to a May report in The New York Times. Sportsmen (who wait in tree "fish blinds") aim just in front of their prey to kill by concussion because a direct hit renders the fish inedible. Describing the fascination, one shooter struggled in awe: "It's something that once you've done it ..." The relatively few shooters are so avid that attempts to ban the activity have gone nowhere.

The West Virginia secretary of state ordered the polls still to be open in the town of Littleton for the June 8 municipal election, even though no candidates ran for any of the seven offices and write-ins were disqualified. (The town will probably disband.) And in May, former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who presided over the state's 2000 presidential recount, revealed that her absentee ballot in a March 2004 local election was not counted because she forgot to sign it. And in March, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, trying to persuade traditionalist men to let women register to vote, said in a speech, "Please, my dear brothers, let your wives and sisters go to the voter registration process. Later, you can control who she votes for, but please, let her go."

(1) According to an April New York Times dispatch, the quiz show "The Mission," on the satellite TV channel of Lebanese militants Hezbollah, challenges contestants in categories such as naming Arab suicide bombers, with the winner receiving points toward the game's ultimate destination, "Jerusalem" (the retaking of which is a unifying theme of all the channel's programs). (2) Craig Gross, 28, and Mike Foster, 32, run the Christian Internet site "XXXChurch," designed to help the faithful overcome pornography and masturbation, according to a May Wired magazine report. (Recent advice: "Remain calm and tell yourself, 'You don't own me, masturbation!'" Recently, several online "parishioners" commenced a 40-day abstinence, to match the time Satan tempted Jesus in the desert.)

Alaska is reputed to be the state most laden with congressional overspending (thanks to its powerful U.S. Rep. Don Young and U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens), and an April New York Times dispatch described two proposed, marginally useful bridges for the state that will eventually cost taxpayers more than $2.2 billion. One, almost as big as the Golden Gate bridge, would connect Ketchikan (pop. 7,800) with a 50-resident island and the town's modest airport (and would replace a five-minute ferry boat ride), and the other, a 2-mile-long span, would connect Anchorage, according to the Times, to "a port that has a single regular tenant and almost no homes or businesses."

-- Universal Health Care (for Prisoners): A judge in Wilmington, N.C., had to officially "release" accused murderer Shirley Spaulding in May, as a ploy, to get the state to start picking up her medical bills. Brunswick County was running out of money because it has paid nearly $400,000 to treat her respiratory illness while she awaits her death-penalty trial. (Fortunately, she was too sick to depart custody.)

-- Donnie Newsome, the chief administrator (called the "judge-executive") of Knott County, Ky., was convicted in October 2003 of buying votes, then denied bail during his appeal because the judge found him a "danger" to the community, and then sentenced in March 2004 to two years in prison. But Newsome still manages the county's affairs from a detention facility in Lexington, getting briefings from an assistant during visiting hours. (Kentucky law does not require the resignation of convicted officials until their appeals are exhausted.)

-- In April, London's National Portrait Gallery showed an hour-long video of star soccer player David Beckham, sleeping; artist Sam Taylor-Wood said she wanted to do an original of the ubiquitously photographed Beckham and realized there was not much that hadn't already been done. And at a March exhibit at London's Nelson's Column, guest performers took turns reading Japanese artist On Kawara's book that consists only of 271,000 selected dates that occurred between 998,031 B.C. and A.D. 1,001,980. (Said a gallery director, "On Kawara's work speaks simply and directly about a subject relevant to us all, the passage and marking of time.")

-- Not only does San Francisco's Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center (i.e., the city dump) have an "artist in residence," but sculptor Rick Carpenter is actually the 43rd person to hold that position, according to an April San Francisco Chronicle report. Carpenter said his specialty is discarded bulk items, citing, for example, the weaving he made from 40 orange extension cords, and his latest, an object stuffed with the contents of a 5-gallon bucket of wigs someone tossed.

William Basil Armstrong, 56, was charged with robbing the Clark Mart in Akron, Ohio, in May; he gave up partway through, though, and had to ask the clerk to please run out to Armstrong's car and retrieve his oxygen tank, which he requires for a respiratory condition. And in November 2003, Mark Shleifer, 48, pleaded guilty in Doylestown, Pa., to possessing more than 1,000 pictures of child pornography, even though he is legally blind.

In 2002, the director of Washington, D.C.,'s National Zoo was criticized for impeding a Washington Post investigation into a spate of animal deaths at the zoo; the director had refused to release the medical records of a giraffe on the ground that she had to protect the animal's right of "privacy." In May 2004, the policy of the University of Georgia's veterinary hospital was also revealed, in an Associated Press report, to voluntarily give privacy rights to animals similar to the rights hospitals are required to give to humans under federal law.

Joseph Micale, 34, charged with manslaughter in the death of his wife, said she accidentally died while being choked during sex to heighten her orgasm (Syracuse, N.Y., January). And Sheila Davalloo, 34, was convicted of attempted murder, though she said her husband was accidentally stabbed during one of the couple's consensual rough-sex sessions (Pleasantville, N.Y., February). And Donald Marks, 40, abruptly pleaded no contest to murdering a 38-year-old prostitute, though he had claimed for over a year that she accidentally died while he was choking her in consensual rough sex (Honolulu, May).

A small crime wave hit south Philadelphia streets late last year, with a gang of five or more men randomly attacking pedestrians, seemingly for fun, and in at least three of the incidents, the men wore boxing gloves to beat up their victims. And in April, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of part of the Patriot Act (a public document) but couldn't publicly reveal what its lawsuit claimed because such disclosure without Justice Department permission is forbidden by the Patriot Act. (The Department OK'd a heavily censored press release 22 days later.)

Several George W. Bush-supporting punk rock bands have gained prominence in the United States recently to challenge the generally assumed dominance of rock music by political liberals, according to a May dispatch from New York by BBC News, which reported that bands such as Gotham Road and Bouncing Souls "are not raging against the machine, they are raging for it." A Rolling Stone writer attributed the upsurge to conservatives' general pugnaciousness, but one maven of "conservative punk" laid it to Republicans' and punk's joint "emphasis on personal responsibility."

(1) After a 10-year study with a global positioning satellite system (reported in February), researchers at England's Oxford University concluded that homing pigeons do not get their bearings from the sun, as previously thought, but rather just follow roads and highways home. (2) Mr. Jian Feng, of Hegang in northern China, suspicious when his wife gave birth to a baby he regarded as seriously ugly, got her to admit that, though she was not adulterous, she had herself been seriously ugly before she met Jian, but had had major plastic surgery in South Korea and now did not much resemble her genetic look. (Even so, Jian divorced her and in May sued her for fraud.)

The Miami Herald reported in April that BellSouth called state Rep. Julio Robaina three times by cell phone on the floor of the Florida legislature during debate on a massive telephone rate increase and ordered him to abandon his Democratic Party cohorts and vote for it; BellSouth had influence with Robaina because for the nine months a year that the Florida legislature is not in session, Robaina is an installer for BellSouth, and he was described as close to tears at BellSouth's lobbying. And in Tennessee in January, state Sen. John Ford, faced with a claim for increased child support from the mother of his 9-year-old daughter, formally challenged the constitutionality of the state's child-support rules; however, among the rules challenged were those ushered through the state General Assembly last year by Sen. John Ford.

-- In March in Hartford, Conn., Rebecca Messier, who was convicted with her husband, Joseph, in 1998 of giving $8,500 to a prosecutor to get a lenient sentence, petitioned in Superior Court to get her $8,500 back. And Jeffrey Cameron Fitzhenry, 17, was arrested in Palm Desert, Calif., in May after walking into a clinic with a 9 mm handgun and shooting his girlfriend because she was about to abort his baby.

-- In February and May, respectively, Father Paul Shanley and Father Robert Meffan were finally defrocked by the Catholic Church for having had sexual relationships with boys (Shanley) and nun-recruits (Meffan), starting in the 1960s, according to church records. Included in the church's actions were notifications that the men are now officially "dismissed from the obligation of clerical celibacy." (Shanley is still scheduled to stand trial in Massachusetts, though most of his alleged activities are protected by the statute of limitations.)

-- Robert Hesketh was acquitted of drunk-driving in Chilliwack, British Columbia, in March because police were actually too zealous in getting him a lawyer. After arresting Hesketh, Constable Rick Murray asked him several times if he wanted a lawyer, but Hesketh each time refused, until Murray himself called one on Hesketh's behalf. Only after the lawyer and Hesketh talked did police administer a breathalyzer test, and Judge John Lenaghan ruled that that was too much of a delay and tossed out the test's results.

-- From a police report quoted in Seattle's newsweekly The Stranger (April 29): "(A) witness stated that he and another witness watched the suspect walk up to several different men (at the University Book Store on the University of Washington campus), get on his knees, and sniff their anuses. He would then lean forward as though he was getting a book off the lower shelf. (One witness) also said that when one male got up from a bench and walked away, the suspect walked over and started smelling the area where the male had been sitting. When the witnesses confronted the suspect about the incidents, the suspect said, 'Sometimes I forget myself and get carried away.'"

-- The May robber of a Bank of America branch in St. Mary, Fla. (near Orlando) was still at large at press time, but police released the surveillance tape showing the man in a bright Hawaiian print shirt, holding his newly acquired stash to his lips and kissing it, before making his getaway.

Thinking Outside the Box: Teresa Jones Smith, 44, was arrested in Lexington, N.C., in January after trying to spring her incarcerated boyfriend, Roger Johnson, from jail. According to deputies, Smith, who had been seated across from Johnson at a visiting room bench, was found with a mini blowtorch and other tools trying to cut through the Plexiglas shield that separates prisoners from visitors, but more smoke was created than she was prepared for.

News of the Weird reported in 2002 and 2003 on ever-more-daring exploits of "extreme ironing" athletes, who set up boards and press creases under competitively difficult circumstances, such as while sailboarding or bouncing on a trampoline. Several British "ironists" made a publicity tour of the United States in May in their campaign to make their obsession an Olympic sport. (Events are now judged at 120 points each, half of which is based on the quality of the pressing.) Founder Phil Shaw said he got the idea one day in 1997 when he faced a load of wrinkled shirts and thought he would be less bored if he hooked up a long extension cord and ironed while he went rock-climbing.

An 18-year-old man survived (but was in critical condition) after losing at a variation of Russian roulette (six open cans of Mountain Dew, one spiked with antifreeze) at a party (Princeton, W.Va., May). A high school student survived (at one time in critical condition, bleeding from the mouth) after drinking an unidentified chemistry-lab substance in order to win a $2 bet (Odessa, Texas, May). And Fidel Cueva, 41, survived with only scrapes and bruises after he bailed out of an emergency window of a Greyhound bus, at 55 mph, in the fast lane of California's 101 freeway at rush hour because the bus, an "express," had just bypassed his stop. (Ventura, Calif., May).

After an investigation, the FBI concluded that a motion sensor found on the tracks near Philadelphia's 30th Street rail station just after the Madrid train bombings was not related to terrorism but was put there by a employee trying to sleep on the job but worried about a supervisor catching him. And just as gasoline prices cleared $2 a gallon in May, Minnesota's Commerce Department levied a $70,000 fine against Murphy Oil Co.'s 10 stations for charging too low a price. (A 2001 state law requires that dealers make at least 8 cents a gallon profit.)

-- In January, University of Utah hospital surgeons removed half the skull of Briana Lane, age 22 and unemployed, in order to save her life after an auto accident, but because putting the skull back in place was not quite an emergency, it was delayed by negotiations over cost. The skull remained in a freezer for three months, with Lane battling serious pain (and wearing a plastic helmet for protection, feeling her brain "shifting" on her) while the hospital negotiated with the state Medicaid office, which pays only for long-term "disabilities." Her skull was finally reattached on April 30.

Oklahoma state Rep. Mike O'Neal, married with three children and the author of the state's proposed "Defense of Marriage Act," was charged with a felony in February for grabbing a woman's buttocks in an Oklahoma City bar; he was also accused of making lewd comments to, and chasing after, her. And one of the sponsors of Georgia's sanctity-of-marriage constitutional amendment (introduced in January), state Sen. Bill Stephens, was divorced in 1991 after 15 years of marriage but then had the marriage no-counted ("annulled") in order to marry a Catholic woman in 1994, according to a public records check by Atlanta's Southern Voice.

Adventures With Lubricants

In January, a National Park Service ranger arrested Marvin Buchanon for drug possession along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. Buchanon had been discovered sitting in a truck one evening, naked, covered with baby oil and with women's underwear at his feet. And in a widely reported incident in May, Roger Chamberlain, 44, was arrested in Binghamton, N.Y., after having allegedly smeared 14 containers' worth of petroleum jelly on nearly every inch of the walls and furniture of a Motel 6 room (and who was found shortly afterward at another motel, himself covered with the substance).

-- Among the secret British military plans recently revealed from classified documents: (1) a huge landmine to be planted during World War II on the German plains (to prevent the Soviet army from overreaching), to be kept at a warm, detonatable temperature by the body heat of thousands of live chickens underground (according to Britain's National Archives in April), and (2) a post-World War II plan disclosed in May to equip pigeons as suicide dive-bombers carrying explosives and biological agents to a targeted area. (The military said its research showed that homing pigeons could be tricked via electromagnetic fields into sensing that their "home" was actually the target area, but pigeon experts say it is more likely the pigeons would have returned to dive-bomb Britain.)

-- At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's "Sex Out Loud" Health Awareness Fair in March, the Feminist Majority organization sponsored a "giant vagina structure" for which students could pay a dollar and stick their heads in to have their pictures taken. Said a spokesperson, "There are a lot of phallic symbols in society, and we wanted to put a vaginal one out there."

-- Despite the 39-day waiting list for brain operations at the Queens Medical Center in Nottingham, England, the hospital suspended neurosurgeon Terence Hope in March (after 18 years' service), not for substandard work but because he had been accused of taking extra croutons for his soup in the hospital cafeteria, without paying. (The suspension was lifted three days later.)

-- Nuanced Views of Ethics: Convicted wife-poisoner Paul Agutter (who served seven years for his crime) was hired by the University of Manchester (England) earlier this year to teach adult-education courses in ethics; an Imperial College London lecturer, asked to comment by Reuters news service, said that people who do criminal acts are also qualified, "logical(ly)," to think about ethical questions. And in January, John Harris (a professor of "bioethics" at Manchester University), speaking at a conference, argued there is no moral distinction between aborting a fully developed fetus at 40 weeks and killing the child after birth a few weeks later; although his position could be seen as antagonizing both sides of the abortion debate, anti-abortionists appeared to be the more outraged.

In Orlando, Fla., on March 10, a motorist was unable to come to a stop quickly enough after making a fast left turn in traffic and smashed into a Just Brakes repair shop. And a company in Buckinghamshire, England, announced in February it would start selling a Russian-invented MP3 audio player made to the specifications of an ammunition magazine to fit into an AK-47 assault rifle.

A 21-year-old man and his teenage accomplice were arrested in Austin, Minn., in April, after allegedly burglarizing the Tendermade Restaurant; officers called to the scene noticed that the cash register tape had come unspooled outside, and they followed the 100-foot-long roll into some bushes, where the two were hiding. And in Honolulu, in April, Gavin Bolosan, 26, was arrested and charged with stealing a woman's purse and using her credit card at a Longs drugstore (but he was caught after he filled out the Longs credit card ID form with his own name and address).

London's The Mirror released a list in March of the world's 20 inheritance-wealthiest animals, topped by the dog Gunther IV (now worth over US$320 million, from the late German countess Karlotta Libenstein), followed by Kalu the chimpanzee (about US$95 million, from the late Australian Olympic swimmer Frank O'Neill) and the dog Toby Rimes (about US$80 million, from the late New Yorker Ella Wendel). The list consists of 10 cats (four of them American), five dogs, a hen, a tortoise, a parrot, Kalu the chimp, and a herd of cattle supported by a British royal trust. (Most on the list are offspring of the original recipient, with trust funds even larger because of investments.)

A 61-year-old retired biochemist who had been teaching high school chemistry in recent years was killed while stirring homemade marmalade on his kitchen stove, after inadvertently inhaling carbon monoxide from the stove's faulty gas line (Walk, England, April). And a 16-year-old honor-roll student, and member of her school's anti-drinking organization, passed out and died at her cousin's birthday party, with an empty vodka bottle nearby and a blood-alcohol reading of 0.439 (legal limit, 0.08) (Bartonville, Ill., April).

In February, an unidentified audience member was led away, still shouting, after attempting to debate former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani at a University of Oklahoma speech about Sept. 11's effect on the city; contrary to Giuliani's blaming the attack on al-Qaida, the man insisted that the culprit was Wal-Mart (Norman, Okla.). And in May, several senior Japanese women (ages from their 50s through their 70s) met to discuss the revival of the sport in which they had once excelled during its heyday, female sumo wrestling, a gathering that included an exhibition by the 61-year-old Ms. Mikako Shimada (Mikatsuki, Japan).

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