Those Hardy Floridians: Rudolph Jessie Hicks Jr., 30, was arrested in Brooksville, Fla., for trespass, but not before he had gotten up from a police dog takedown, five Taser shots, and an entire can of pepper spray (December). And police in Port St. Lucie, Fla., were considering whether to charge Ms. Robin Bush, who strangled a 130-pound Rottweiler after it would not let go of her tiny Yorkie (December). And a 20-year-old man suffered only minor injuries after driving his car through a fifth-floor wall of a parking garage and landing inside the second floor of a store at the Shoppes of Sunset Place in South Miami (December).

(1) Police in Denton, Texas, arrested two teenagers in October and charged them with robbing two visitors who were passing through town from Montana; the victims said they were on their way to Baton Rouge, La., because they needed money and had read on the Internet that a medical school would pay $100,000 for testicles. (2) The Dutch retirement home Seniorenpand, in Rotterdam, bills itself as the world's only old-age community for incorrigible heroin addicts and has a long waiting list for its few rooms, according to a December dispatch in The Scotsman. (One satisfied resident bragged that he had some "pretty good stuff" the night before.)

A 59-year-old veteran NASCAR driver from Scottsdale, Ariz., was killed in November when he fell off of a Segway scooter (going 5 mph) at a Las Vegas go-cart race and hit his head. And in China's Guangxi Zhuang region in September, five people asphyxiated while conducting a ceremony in a dangerous lead mine (frequently shut down by the government), including a prominent feng shui expert there to advise on improving harmonic energy flow. And in Aliquippa, Pa., in October, a 28-year-old man was electrocuted on his first day at work as an electrician.

(1) Britain's Office of Communications, which rules on viewers' complaints about TV programs, decided in November that the on-air, manual collecting of hog semen on the "reality" show "The Farm" did not violate standards in that, in the office's opinion, the pig did not feel "degrad(ed)" by the experience. (2) Because a British Broadcasting Corp. employee got a toe trapped in a revolving door at company offices in Birmingham (cracking a toenail), executives in December sent a memo to the workforce of 800, using stick-figure drawings, with instructions on how to walk through the doors.

In October, as part of the government's vigorous "social order" anti-drug campaign, dozens of police officers in Bangkok, Thailand, raided the trendy Q Bar late on Saturday night and locked it down, detained the nearly 400 customers, and passed out plastic cups so that each one could submit to an on-the-spot urinalysis. Said the bar's manager, "(The raid is) pretty much an annual event. It's a little bit like Christmas."

-- In Salt Lake City in November, federal judge Paul G. Cassell, remarking that mandatory-minimum sentencing laws gave him no choice, sent a 25-year-old, small-quantity marijuana dealer to prison for 55 years (because he had a gun on him during two of the transactions). Two hours before that, in a crime Cassell described as far more serious but not subject to the same mandatory minimums, he sentenced a man to 22 years in prison for beating an elderly woman to death with a log.

-- In November, Jens Orback, Sweden's minister for integration and gender equality, who had been under fire for not being aggressive on the job, denied on the radio program "Ekot" that he was intolerant of sexual minorities. Said Orback: "I had a wonderful aunt who lived in Canada with a horse. I thought it was wonderful. Let people live as they wish." Later, attempting to explain himself, Orback insisted that the aunt's relationship with the horse was platonic.

-- A St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter, interviewing neighbors of the people who shared a St. Croix Falls, Wis., home that was condemned after being overrun with 450 cats, found that most neighbors had failed to notice the house's putrid smell. Several said that the awful odor from the neighborhood's fish hatchery and the awful odor of the neighborhood's sewage treatment plant probably overrode the awful odor of the house.

-- Brigham Young University's Newsnet reported in November on Marilyn and Elton Pierce of Provo, Utah, who because their telephone number is easily confused with a BYU information line, estimate they have received 25,000 wrong-number calls in 14 years (averaging to five per day). Marilyn, in her 70s, said she didn't have the couple's number changed because she doesn't mind the calls and in fact rather enjoys talking to people.

A 39-year-old man in Chillicothe, Ohio, was hospitalized in December after an unsuccessful suicide attempt that accidentally blew his own house to pieces and did heavy damage to neighboring homes. The man had turned on the natural gas to kill himself, but then realized that other houses might be in danger, and just as he dashed to the basement to turn off the electricity, the house exploded (probably from an electrical spark) and was leveled. A month before, the man had tried to kill himself with automobile exhaust and a garden hose, but his car ran out of gas before he could die, and he then hooked up a propane tank for the same purpose, but once again, he outlived his fuel supply.

In 2002 News of the Weird reported that H. Beatty Chadwick had served 6 1/2 years in jail in suburban Philadelphia for civil contempt of court for not producing $2.5 million in marital assets that he was supposed to split with his ex-wife, with the U.S. jail record for contempt believed to be 10 years. As of October 2004, he is still in jail, closing in on the record, and the amount owed is up to $4.2 million, with Chadwick sticking to his defense that the money had long since been spent. Said Chadwick's lawyer, "This (nonexistent) money is like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We are the Saddam Hussein of the marital world." [Washington Post, 11-11-04]

News of the Weird reported as far back as 1998 on optimistic pet owners preparing to pay large sums for a cloned model of a deceased dog or cat, mentioning a lab at Texas A&M University planning to clone a collie-husky named Missy (who was, of course, according to her owners, "perfect"). The lab's Dr. Mark Westhusin and his team managed to clone its first dog, "cc," in 2001, and has subsequently cloned cattle, goats, pigs and a cat. In December 2004, another outfit, Genetic Savings and Clone (of Sausalito, Calif., and Madison, Wis.), announced that it had delivered a kitten to a woman for $50,000 that is a DNA replica of Nicky, a cat that died last year at age 17.

Paul Eugene Levengood, owner of the Tasty Flavors Sno Biz dessert shop in the Chattanooga, Tenn., suburb of Red Bank, was charged with two counts of sexual battery in November when two 19-year-old female employees said he had occasionally spanked them for workplace errors (for example, once for forgetting to put a banana into a smoothie drink). A defensive Levengood pointed out that the women had each signed a form, "I give Gene permission to bust my behind any way he sees fit." Police found at the store many photographs of women's posteriors, even though a Sno Biz executive called Levengood a "very Christian person."

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

-- 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.)