-- Some well-off taxpayers in Washington, D.C., are picking up an easy $30,000 or so from the U.S. Treasury, courtesy of a 1976 "historic preservation" tax code deduction, according to a December Washington Post investigation. About 900 properties qualify, and owners get the deduction merely by forgoing the right to alter the building's facade (which D.C. law restricts, anyway). Giving up this "right" "earns" them an 11 percent tax deduction, and the average value of qualified buildings (according to the Post) is $1 million (historic facades are not often found on downscale homes), meaning that a claimant in the middle tax bracket would get about $30,000.

(1) In November, the mind reader, The Amazing Kreskin, wrote to the acting governor of his home state of New Jersey that he wanted to help the state shed its image of unethical deals and thus volunteered to sit in government meetings and identify which officials are secretly up to no good. (2) Stephen J. Marks, 47, was driving in morning traffic on Nov. 3 near Nashville, Tenn., wearing a ski mask and gloves, though the temperature was in the 60s, and an alarmed citizen called police. However, Marks demonstrated that he has a medical condition that necessitates his wearing a ski mask except when the temperature is above 80.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (71) The dedicated or sanctimonious drunk-driving counselor or prosecutor who himself gets ticketed or arrested for drunk-driving, such as the aggressive supervising DUI prosecutor Lydia Wardell of Clearwater, Fla. (November). (72) Anyone who advertises goods (now limited only by the imagination) on Internet auction houses, such as Chris Doyle of Sydney, Australia, who, inspired by the recent $28,000 sale of a 10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich with toast marks resembling a visage of the Virgin Mary, listed a grain of unnamed breakfast cereal that resembles the movie alien E.T. (and was offered about US$800) (November).

Doctors at the Ballarat-Austin Radiation Oncology Centre in Australia have begun inserting three rice-sized grains of 24-karat gold against patients' prostates. The pellets (cost: about US$300 each) graft permanently onto the gland and help doctors aim the radiation with more precision. And in December, in Vancouver, British Columbia, local TV stations said they were reluctant to air a public service announcement provided by the Prostate Center at Vancouver General Hospital because it featured a prostate-examining doctor reaching inside his patient and pulling out a ticking time bomb (to dramatize the urgency for men to be examined).

Citing a police press release, the German news organization Deutsche Welle (DW-World) reported in November that the reason that motorist Julia Bauer of Bochum, Germany, lost control and smashed into a parked car and a lamppost was that she was preparing cereal and milk on the passenger seat while driving to work and tried to catch her bowl as it was falling to the floor. The cost of her breakfast (in damages) turned out to be about US$27,000.

-- Sex-despondency among women is apparently such a problem in Japan that business is booming for counselor Kim Myong Gan's 4-year-old company of trained male professionals who invigorate them, according to a November Agence France-Presse dispatch from Tokyo. Kim charges the equivalent of US$190 for the initial consultation and scheduling, and his men provide hands-on assurance to the clients of their attractiveness and desirability. Most clients are either middle-aged virgins or wives whose husbands have grown to treat them as their sisters.

-- Zimbabwe, facing a severe food shortage, is considering an unlikely program to bring rich foreign visitors to the country, according to a government announcement in November. The information minister proposed an "obesity tourism strategy," in which overweight visitors (especially Americans) would be encouraged to "vacation" in Zimbabwe and "provide labor for (government-confiscated) farms in the hope of shedding weight." Americans, the proposal noted, spend $6 billion a year on "useless" dieting aids and could be encouraged to work off pounds and then flaunt "their slim bodies on a sun-downer cruise on the Zambezi (River)."

In November, a Hindu seer in India's Orissa state drew large crowds, inspired by his calmness in the face of his announced, spiritually induced death, which was to come before noon on Nov. 17. At noon, however, he was still alive, and, according to Asian Age newspaper, the crowd of 15,000 suddenly turned ugly, berating him for not dying, and police had to intervene. The man, who is chief cleric of Srignuru Ashram, told reporters, "I wanted to leave my mortal body, but I could not. Please forgive me."

Mr. Mount Lee Lacy, 21, was arrested for animal cruelty after his girlfriend's mother sent police to his apartment in Gainesville, Fla. Lacy's aggressive mastiff kept the officers at bay momentarily, but once inside, police noticed another dog, a Jack Russell terrier, that had a bloody paw, and eventually Lacy cheerfully told them that he routinely bit the dog. According to a police sergeant: "(Lacy) said that biting the dog was good punishment and that's how you train them, that dogs bite (and) so that's what they understand."

Criminals who accidentally leave identification at the scene of the crime are (according to News of the Weird) "no longer weird," but it was nevertheless remarkable that on the night of Nov. 4, in Rapid City, S.D., two burglary suspects, in separate incidents, left ID behind. Both of them, Daniel P. Ader, 25, and Brian W. Crawford, 26, had apparently removed their pants, for different reasons, leaving their wallets. (Evidence suggested that the reason Crawford had removed his pants, after breaking into a law office, was to photocopy his genitals on the office copy machine.)

As senior citizens resist the idea of age-specific driver testing, accidents continue in which police suspect the cause was an elderly driver who momentarily confused the gas pedal for the brake. Recent examples: 90-year-old man, crashed into a pharmacy, Scarborough, Maine, November; 83-year-old driver, drove off the second floor of a parking deck, Las Vegas, October; 80-year-old driver, smashed into a Veterans Day parade (one death), Whitman, Mass., November; 74-year-old man, crashed into a coffee shop, Corvallis, Ore., December; 74-year-old man, mowed down pedestrians on a sidewalk (two deaths), Montreal, Quebec, November. And in the most prominent case, George Weller, 87, heads back to court in January, having pleaded not guilty to vehicular manslaughter in the 2003 Santa Monica, Calif., farmer's market "massacre" in which 10 people were killed and 63 injured when Weller couldn't find the brakes for 1,000 feet at 60 mph.

After Billy W. Williams, 53, skipped out during his trial for aggravated assault in 2003 in Dallas, he was found guilty in absentia, but Judge Faith Johnson apparently was not quite satisfied. When Williams was recaptured and returned to her courtroom in October 2004 for sentencing, Johnson organized a "party" in his "honor," with balloons, streamers and a cake, to create a festive backdrop for her gleeful announcement that she was sentencing him to a life term.

William Glenn Barefoot, 40, escaped from jail in Fayetteville, N.C., in October and soon after that called his brother John to report that he hadn't eaten since the escape and that he was cold, in part because he had had to break out quickly and had not had a chance to grab his shoes. (He was recaptured a few days later.) And from the University of Minnesota's Minnesota Daily, 12-2-04: "On Tuesday, University police took a report from a man (whose complaint was) that the word 'loser' was written in the dirt on his car's rear bumper."

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

-- University of Florida professor Thomas DeMarse revealed in December that he has constructed a primitive "brain" ("live computation device") out of 25,000 rat neurons and has taught it to maneuver an F-22 fighter jet simulation in a straight trajectory. The brain had to be "taught," he said, because at first, the plane kept crashing. DeMarse said an organic brain is potentially much more flexible than even the highest-tech computer. The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health are funding his work, as models for controlling otherwise-risky unmanned aircraft and for developing epilepsy-fighting drugs.

(1) Following an October worker compensation fine levied against a ranch in Australia's outback, after a cowboy fell off a horse and hit his head, the losing ranch owner said he would require all his wranglers to wear helmets instead of the classic cowboy hats (and other ranch owners may follow along). (2) In November, the school district in Spurger, Texas, ended its decades-old, Homecoming Week reverse-roles day (in which girls dress as boys and vice versa) after one parent complained that the tradition promoted a homosexual lifestyle; in its place, the school urged kids to dress in military camouflage.

(1) In July, Winnetka, Ill., investment promoter Charles Harris made a last-ditch effort to get his clients' support, hoping they would not cooperate with authorities who were about to arrest him for fraud. Harris sent each a DVD in which he begged them to give his investments more time, but federal agents, after arresting Harris in September, said Harris probably shot that DVD from the Caribbean Sea, on the 62-foot yacht he had bought with clients' money. (2) In Cleveland, Tenn., Rob Smitty gained media attention in November after donating a kidney to a stranger, hoping the selfless act would make his daughter "proud"; however, Smitty was at the time 24 months behind on child support, and his daughter, Amber, sighed to reporters that Smitty had a poor record of visiting or calling, even on her birthday.

-- According to a female bailiff in Tampa, Fla., county judge Gasper Ficarrota (during a hotel-room tryst with the bailiff) laid out his robe on their bed for her to wear so that she could "feel the power that his black robe possessed." "Why do you think successful attorneys strive to become judges?" he asked. (The bailiff's remarks were written in her private diary, introduced by her husband at their divorce trial in November.) [St. Petersburg Times, 11-18-04]

-- In September, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Judith Retchin ordered Jonathan Magbie, 27, to jail for 10 days for first-offense marijuana possession (a virtually unheard-of sentence in D.C.), despite the fact that Magbie was a quadriplegic with permanent tracheal, urinary and stomach tubes and was often ventilator-dependent, in addition to having various other infirmities. (Magbie died four days later, after what the D.C. Health Department concluded in December was severely inadequate care in jail and in an emergency room.)

-- America's Creative Class: Farmer Randy Valicoff (of Yakima Valley in Washington) sold designer apples (at $6) this autumn, created by laying tiny, artistic stickers of "cougars" or "huskies" on ripening apples, leaving on the otherwise-red skin yellow images of either the Washington State University cougar or the University of Washington husky. And in November, Rice University MBA student Beau Carpenter introduced his battery-operated, glowing thong for strippers, with a two-hour charge, in neon colors, at about $50.

-- New Scientist magazine reported in September that Chris Melhuish (University of the West of England, at Bristol) was readying his EcoBot II, a self-powered robot that runs on energy produced by catching and digesting houseflies (and breaking down their sugars to release electrons). The major downside: The most efficient way to attract flies is with sewage, which makes EcoBot II unfriendly to humans.

-- In Ruthin, Wales, the owners of the bull Picston Shottle said in November that they believe that piped-in Mozart music helped develop his amazing productivity as a stud; his semen is sold out until April, with enough output to create about 500 "doses" a day (at a price of about US$65 a dose). And sheep farmer Barry Walker touted his flock's production of superfine Australian merino wool at his operation in New South Wales, helped along, he said, by a secret diet of grains and the piped-in music of Italian singer Andrea Bocelli.

-- In November, BBC News previewed an upcoming story for its wildlife TV magazine show "Spy in the Woods," derived from film footage from a stationary hidden camera in the Quingling mountains in northwest China. Featured on the show was a panda doing a handstand against a tree, apparently for the purpose of extending the vertical reach of his urine, to more dominantly mark his territory.

The super-reclusive, 280-person German cult Villa Baviera, holed up in Chile since 1961 and worshipping of former army nurse Paul Schaefer (now age 81, with whereabouts unknown), broke into the public eye in a November Reuters dispatch describing how most members have finally, after four decades, come to realize that they were mistaken in their belief that Schaefer is God's messenger on Earth. The cult lived frozen in time, with few modern conveniences, wearing clothing from the 1930s, and in total obedience to Schaefer, who had imposed many idiosyncratic policies, including an ironclad no-intimacy rule.

In November, a 46-year-old man climbed into an enclosed area at the Taipei (Taiwan) Zoo, apparently to attempt to convert a pride of lions to Christianity by informing them that Jesus is their savior. According to witnesses, the lion king sauntered over and briefly sank his teeth into the man's leg, but then, according to one account, "got bored" and returned to his previous state of lounging, as zoo personnel hustled the intruder away.

Although ride-on lawn mowers have been used as transportation to and from crime scenes before (and even as "vehicles" that drunk drivers get charged with DUI while operating), it is rare that a suspect tries to actually outrun police while on one, as Steven W. Coleman, 37, did in Dover, N.H., in December; he was wanted for questioning in an arson at a former girlfriend's house, and when he saw the lights of a police cruiser, he opened the throttle and took off, for a couple of blocks, before a second cruiser cut him off.

The Sacramento (Calif.) Fire Department reported in November that a resident had dropped by the fire station on Granada Way in order to turn in a grenade he had found in his garage. It was later safely detonated. (As in many previous such episodes nationwide, Sacramento authorities requested that anyone who comes across a bomb or grenade should simply report its whereabouts, and not pick it up and, especially, not bring it to them.)

(1) Wildlife experts cited in a BBC News dispatch from Dar es Salaam said the probable cause of a lion's anti-human rampage in southern Tanzania in 2003 and 2004 (killing and eating 35 people) was an abscessed-caused toothache, which led him to seek an alternative to his favorite food, buffalo, which is difficult to chew. (2) A November Associated Press dispatch from Elyria, Ohio, profiled Jennifer Mitchell, who runs a "rescue mission" of sorts, acting as a home of last resort where people can leave rats that they initially kept as pets but grew tired of. At any given time, about three dozen are in residence.

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

"Freegans" are non-homeless Dumpster divers with a political or at least philosophical commitment not to waste perfectly usable discarded goods, including food, according to reports in Newsday (September) and the Houston Press (November). Most are driven by a belief that too many Americans have a fetishized view of newness, pointing out that restaurants discard much unspoiled food simply because they need to sell even fresher food. (Freegans don't eat table scraps.) Still, many restaurants elaborately protect their garbage from "Dumpstering" foragers, with locks and razor wire or by coating it with bleach. (Not usually counted as freegans are less-philosophical people who obsessively explore trash piles to carry away anything potentially useful.)

(1) Using parts she bought from the estate of a laser-tech engineer, Julie "Jitterbug" Pearce, 23, built a UFO-attracting device for the roof of her home in Duluth, Minn., and told the Duluth News Tribune in August that her machine's triangularly patterned strobe light design, looped radio transmissions, and laser light refracted through a quartz crystal may help signal aliens in the area. (2) In Johannesburg, South Africa, student John Smit, 18, caused a minor curriculum crisis when he willingly took a 30-point deduction on an important English exam because he could not bear to deal with a reading-comprehension question based on a passage from a Harry Potter book, which Smit regards as "witchcraft."

(1) Australia's High Court ruled in October that convicted drug dealer Francesco Dominico La Rosa could indeed write off a casualty loss of A$224,793 (about US$168,000) against his taxable income, even though the "loss" occurred when someone allegedly stole that amount that La Rosa had buried in his back yard and wanted to use for a heroin deal. (The Australian Tax Office went nuts at the ruling, and efforts are under way to change the law.) (2) Also in October, the federal appeals court in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit against the Navy, filed in the name of marine mammals, claiming that naval sonar disrupted their underwater communication; the court said federal environmental laws can be challenged only by people (or legal entities), not whales.

Controversial former chess champion Bobby Fischer, who fled to Japan to avoid U.S. visa-violation charges, and who is smarting from a recent Time magazine description of him as something less than a babe magnet, defended his virility to a Mainichi Daily News reporter in October by pointing out that he wears "size 14 wide shoes. Just keep that in mind when (they) say I'm not a dreamboat." After recounting an episode at a hot spring nude bath in Japan in which two fellow customers seemed in awe of his "size," Fischer then accused Americans of having persuaded Japanese authorities to lock him up in a facility close to a nuclear plant so that the U.S. government can "make me impotent."

-- Chutzpah: John Michael Dunton's infant daughter died in September when Dunton accidentally left her in his minivan, having forgotten to drop her off at the baby sitter's before work. However, upon learning that no criminal charges would be filed against him, Dunton appeared at a press conference, boasting that a jury would have acquitted him, anyway, and then imploring automakers to invent something to keep parents from forgetting about their kids.

-- Antoinette Millard, 40, filed a lawsuit against American Express in November to cancel her credit card charges, blaming the company for her $950,000 shopping spree at New York City's priciest stores (in that AmEx imprudently issued her its prestigious black Centurion Card). Millard, who recently portrayed herself as "Princess Antoinette" of a Saudi royal family and as a former Victoria's Secret model, said she suffered from "anorexia, depression, panic attacks (and) head tumors," which made her such an impulsive, frenzied shopper that she just couldn't stop spending. (According to prosecutors, Millard is a divorced woman from Buffalo who was working in an office in Manhattan.)

-- According to a transcript obtained by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in September, convicted rapist John Horace, 60, was turned down by the New York Parole Board after offering a new excuse for his crime (which was committed against a nursing home resident in a near coma). Horace, then an aide at the home, said he had read in a medical book somewhere that the sensation of pregnancy would snap a woman out of a coma and that he was thus only trying to help.

-- In a September issue of the London Review of Books, trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zisek made the point that the essential ideological differences in German, French and British-American societies, as noted by G.W.F. Hegel and others, can be represented by their countries' respective toilet designs. The German toilet's evacuation hole is in the front, facilitating "inspection and analysis," but the French design places the hole in the rear, so that waste disappears quickly. The British-American toilet allows floatation, which of course signals that society's "utilitarian pragmatism." Zisek described his theory as an "excremental correlative-counterpoint" to a framework identified with French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss.

-- In a June lawsuit in Albany, N.Y., Mark Hogarth, 45, asked a court to protect his constitutional right to privacy by exempting him from child-pornography laws so that he can reclaim 269 lewd photos of himself, taken when he was a kid, but which his now-deceased father had hidden away in another country. In his petition, he said that his father approved of, but did not participate in, the photo sessions (some of which featured other children) and that Hogarth would like to keep the pictures as, basically, mementos of his childhood.

Jason Rodd, clocked at 90 mph on Interstate 91 near St. Johnsbury, Vt., in November, tried to evade police by the clever ploy of pulling off the highway, dousing his headlights, and turning in to a farmer's field for cover. However, unable to see very well without lights, he promptly drove into a manure pit, immobilizing his car, and was tracked down a few minutes later.

Six weeks ago, News of the Weird reported on two New Hampshire mothers who had been arrested for viciously assaulting their own children over rather petty provocations. Later, in November, came Nicole Mancini, 29, who was arrested in Rochester, New Hampshire, after she, wearing pajamas, walked into the St. Mary's Church with her three children and was overheard mumbling about the need to "sacrifice" the kids on the "altar" "before 3 o'clock." After charging her with three counts of child endangerment, a police lieutenant said, "Eighteen years I've been doing this, and I've never come across anything like it."

In Kent, Wash., in November, a 24-year-old man, whose reasons will probably never be known, tried to heat his lava lamp on a stove; he was killed when the lamp exploded and propelled a piece of glass into his heart. And on Thanksgiving day in Worcester, Mass., Frank Palacios, 24, apparently got tired of being criticized for picking at the turkey with his fingers and stabbed his cousin and his uncle, sending both to the hospital.

Among the latest "miracles": a fiberglass statue of Jesus, which washed up on a sandbar on the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass, Texas, and which has now drawn thousands of worshippers (September); an inflated balloon with a rubber smudge in the image of the Virgin Mary, decorating the car lot of Payne Weslaco Motors, Weslaco, Texas (giving at least one worker there "chills") (August); and the spontaneous falling over of the statue of the Virgin Mary at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, which was taken to be a holy signal that the church, which had been scheduled for closing by the Boston Archdiocese, should remain open (October).

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