Is It Safe Yet? The head of security at Boston's Logan Airport revealed in December that travelers continue to appear so unfamiliar with restrictions that, three years after 9-11, his screeners still seize 12,000 prohibited items per month. Nationwide, the total since 2002 is nearly 17 million, including 2,200 guns, 79,000 box cutters and 5 million knives. And in December, a Republican congressman blasted the Department of Homeland Security for making "a joke" out of President Bush's 2003 order to compile a comprehensive list of potential domestic terror targets. The list so far (of 80,000 sites) is termed by critics both too large (unlikely targets inexplicably included) and too small (imaginable targets inexplicably left off).

In December, a California appeals court ordered a re-hearing on a zoning case because the petitioner, who was denied an extension of business hours, had not had a fair chance to argue to the Los Angeles City Council. A videotape of the hearing showed that, during petitioner's presentation, council members talked on the phone or among themselves, wandered around the room, and read their mail, and the appeals court ruled that "due process" requires them to pay attention. And Councilman Dennis Pate of Eagle Lake, Fla., said in January that a formal rule was needed to prohibit spitting at meetings, in that a former city manager allegedly tried to unload on at him at a December session (but she denied it).

(1) Following the Dec. 5 Newtown, England, charity Santa Claus race (in which 4,000 Saint Nicks in full costume competed), police had to use noxious spray and nightsticks to break up a brawl of about 30 Santas when the festive spirit got out of hand. (2) Researchers at the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, England, told New Scientist magazine in December that they're studying why ostriches are able to run so fast (about 20 mph) even though they are heavy (over 200 pounds) and awkward-gaited. The team's work: They observe 15 ostriches running on treadmills.

In Durham, N.C., in December, gang member Robert D. Johnson was sentenced to 15 years in prison for shooting off the genitals of a fellow Blood who was trying to leave the group. The jury rejected an even harsher penalty, for "malicious castration," settling on "nonmalicious castration" because of evidence that Johnson actually shot the man in the leg but that the bullet just happened to exit his thigh and hit his penis.

-- Mr. Jerry Colaitis of Old Brookville, N.Y., died of complications from spinal surgery in 2001, and the next year, his family filed a $10 million lawsuit blaming everything on the Benihana Japanese restaurant chain. Benihana hibachi chefs engage in colorful hand acrobatics while skillfully slicing and grilling food at tableside, and on the night in question, Colaitis flinched at a shrimp the chef had tossed his way. The flinch jarred two vertebrae in his neck, which eventually required surgery and then a second surgery, after which complications developed, leading to Colaitis' death. In November 2004, a judge cleared the case for trial.

-- In February 2004, two 11-year-old boys cut classes at the Ronan Middle School in Ronan, Mont., found some alcoholic beverages, and hours later died of hypothermia in a snow-covered field. In November, the parents of the two filed a lawsuit, asking $4 million in damages from the local public schools for not preventing the truancy. School personnel should have known, according to the lawsuit, that the kids were of Native American heritage, with a high rate of alcoholism in the community, even though neither boy had any alcohol-related incident on his record.

-- Ladell Alexander, serving a 16-year sentence for molesting a child in a public library in South Bend, Ind., filed a lawsuit in 2004, asking for $4 million in damages, charging that his predicament is actually the fault of the library's security company because officers should have seen him with the boy in a staff-only area of the building and kicked him out before he could do anything bad. (A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in December.)

-- In February 2004, a 20-year-old woman stole OxyContin and Xanax from The Medicine Shoppe pharmacy in Wood River, Ill., and gave some to her boyfriend, Justin Stalcup, 21, who died of an overdose the next day. In December, Mr. Stalcup's family filed a lawsuit against The Medicine Shoppe, claiming that the reason for their son's death was that the pharmacy didn't safeguard the drugs from the thief.

Victoria Pettigrew started VIP Fibers three years ago in Morgan Hill, Calif., and according to a December 2004 report by the Knight Ridder News Service, has an enthusiastic clientele of pet owners who pay her to make specialty items (blankets, pillows, scarves) from their animals' hair ("Better yarn from your pet than a sheep you never met"). For example, client Bob Miller of Carmel, Calif., brought in enough collected sheddings of his golden retriever for a blanket, two couch pillows, a small teddy bear, a scarf and a picture frame. Pettigrew has also created items from the hair of cats, sheep, alpaca, bison, rabbits, hamsters, cows and horses.

Floyd Elliot, 22, was charged in December in Independence, Mo., with filing a false police report by claiming an assailant carved the vulgar slur "fag" on his forehead. Police were immediately suspicious because the letters were backward (as if made by someone looking in a mirror). Also in December, when Nicholas J. Valeri, 19, was arrested for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a Wendy's restaurant in Hempfield Township, Pa., he claimed innocence, saying that he inadvertently acquired the bill shortly before, while selling $240 worth of marijuana.

Several times over the years in News of the Weird, bad things (including death) have happened to drivers who make the poor decision (usually while inebriated) to stop along the side of a highway at night to urinate but then fail to deal properly with the various dangers. Usually the dangers involve wandering out into traffic or falling over an embankment, but in November, Henry Turley, 77, started to exit his pickup truck to urinate near Kingsbury, Ind., and when rescue workers arrived 20 minutes later, Turley's truck was in a ditch, and Turley was lying on his back with his left foot caught between the wheel well and the left front tire and his right foot caught between the driver's side door and the front seat. (A nearly empty bottle of whiskey was on the passenger side.)

In December, a wheel from a tractor-trailer on Interstate 84 in Idaho (glowing hot from an overheated bearing) came off, rolled across a frontage road, and started several fires after it crashed into the home of Charisse Stevenson. According to a report in the Times-News (Twin Falls, Id.), Stevenson, seeing her 10-year-old son trapped by flames on the second floor of their home and separated by the red-hot wheel, moved it out of the way (though it weighs 250 pounds), scooped up her son (135 pounds), and carried him to safety. Afterward, of course, Stevenson was found to be unable to lift either the wheel or her son.

Dr. Mary Holley, an obstetrician who heads Mothers Against Methamphetamine in Albertville, Ala., offered this assessment of meth at a December task force meeting in Chattanooga, Tenn. (presumably intending to discourage use of the drug): "The effect of an (intravenous) hit of methamphetamine is the equivalent of 10 orgasms all on top of each other lasting for 30 minutes to an hour, with a feeling of arousal that lasts for another day and a half." (But after about six months' use, the effects turn negative, she said.)

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

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.)