Harvard University this year hired a recent graduate as a full-time promoter and coordinator of social activities, apparently because so many at the school are too busy to relax. According to Associate Dean Judith Kidd, "(T)he kids work very, very hard here. And they worked very, very hard ... to get here. They arrived needing help having fun." (By contrast, two weeks later, a police raid in Durham, N.C., turned up 200 noisy Duke University students, many of them bikini-clad women, wrestling in a plastic pool of baby oil in the basement of a fraternity house, apparently inspired by a scene from the movie "Old School.")

(1) "Man Says Tight Jeans Caused Aggravated Assault Charge" (Sean Duvall, arrested for pulling a gun on police in Belle Vernon, Pa., said he was holding it only because it was impossible to stuff it in his pants; USA Today, December). (2) "Man Arrested for Dumping Dirt in a Forest" (Federal law prohibits unloading anything on federal land, even soil being returned to the Earth for ecology's sake; Associated Press dispatch from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, November). (3) "Lawmakers Asked to Take Helm, Donate Sperm" (To relieve a shortage at Australian sperm banks, some younger state legislators were asked to become role models by giving; Associated Press dispatch, January).

Among recent troubling news: After Rafer Wilson crashed into a parked car in Sydney, Australia, his blood-alcohol content (according to evidence at his trial in December) was tested at an almost death-defying .462, nine times the legal presumption of impairment. (Three weeks later, in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, doctors said a 67-year-old man had produced a blood-alcohol reading of .914, which supposedly stood up through four re-tests, and have stuck with the story despite worldwide alarm.) And Gary W. Rodgers was arrested in November in Lexington, Ky., and according to the county's offender database, it was his 96th arrest for public drunkenness in 2004.

-- In December, outgoing San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez turned over his City Hall office to graffiti artist Barry McGee, who orange-spray-painted the walls with various designs and the message "Smash the State" as Gonzalez's tribute to street art. (Mayor Gavin Newsom, a political opponent of Gonzalez, has been a vocal critic of street graffiti.) Gonzalez promised that, before he left office, he would restore the walls to their previous color.

-- A survey of 500 arts experts, conducted in November by the sponsor of Britain's prestigious Turner Prize, named as the most influential work of modern art (beating out two works by Picasso) Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain," which is merely a white porcelain urinal. (Duchamp was a central figure in the movement to present ordinary objects as art.)

-- In November at the Tate Britain gallery, sculptor Antony Gormley presented "Bed," a pile of 8,000 slices of bread arranged to resemble a large mattress but from which Gormley had first eaten an amount out of it that represented the volume of his body. Apparently Gormley did not devour the bread so much as chew it and then remove it and form different-shaped pieces, which he then dried out, chemically preserved, and displayed. The Tate Britain was so thrilled with the installation that it became the centerpiece in a room devoted to Gormley's lifetime body of work.

-- The Las Vegas Sun reported in January that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency has begun phasing in an underpublicized policy of ending all walk-in traffic. Eventually, all immigration offices, to improve efficiency, will do business only by appointments made over the Internet (even though many immigration clients, most notably migrant workers, obviously do not have convenient Internet access).

-- After five years of the New Mexico government always accepting Viola Trevino's child support claims against Steve Barreras (over the vasectomied Barreras' objections), a court in Albuquerque finally ruled in December that the child never existed. The judge concluded that Trevino had lied numerous times and had forged DNA evidence, birth certificates, and other documents and that Barreras had been unjustly forced to pay $20,000 in support, even though Trevino had never publicly produced the child. In December, having run out of excuses, Trevino borrowed a little girl from a stranger on the street and took her into the courtroom to "be" her and Barreras' daughter (but the stranger followed Trevino inside and exposed the ruse). Gov. Bill Richardson ordered an investigation as to how so many state officials had been hoaxed for so long.

In January, Rev. Clarence June Love, 83, pastor of the Assemblies of Jesus church in Bristol, Tenn., ejected sisters Reba Storey, 46, and Mary Steele, 64, from a service, rebuking them as possessed by demons because they were wearing blue jeans (in that Pentecostals believe that women should not wear pants). (Said Storey, "I'm glad I serve a God who can work through my pants.") The sisters were trying to visit with their 88-year-old mother, who allegedly was being kept away from them by a third sister, who is also Rev. Love's girlfriend. A few days later, a local judge urged the family to work things out.

In Vancouver, Wash., in January, Cuitlahvac Renteria-Martinez, 26, was arrested for jumping into an idling 18-wheeler and taking off. However, the rig had a global positioning system that made it easy to track Renteria-Martinez, and he was quickly arrested. He later admitted to police that he had taken a swig out of what he thought was the driver's coffee cup but learned too late that it was actually the driver's tobacco spit-cup.

News of the Weird recently mentioned the Sinulator, a vibrating device operated over the Internet that permits thrusting movements (typically, by a male) at one computer to be mimicked by an insertable wand (typically, for use of a female) at another computer. For less excitable people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently developed The Hug, which allows one user (perhaps a grandparent) to squeeze a velour-covered, human-shaped pillow connected to a wireless phone and have that squeeze received (perhaps by a far-away grandchild) on his or her own human-shaped pillow, as if delivered by the grandparent in person. The pillow will also speak in the sender's voice and warm itself up appropriately.

Management consultant William Fried, who is a popular motivational speaker in public schools in the San Francisco area, probably wore out his welcome in January at the Q&A session following his "Secret of a Happy Life" presentation at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto. Asked why he had included "exotic dancing" on his list of attractive careers for girls, Fried said the pay was great: $250,000 a year or more, depending on a woman's chest size. "For every two inches up there," he told the class, "you should get another $50,000 on your salary."

A 34-year-old man performing a field sobriety test for a police officer alongside Route 130 in Bordentown, N.J., was killed when a tractor-trailer driver (who police said had probably been drinking) lost control and smashed into him (December). (The officer jumped out of the way in time.) And a 40-year-old New York City man was killed when, inebriated, he fell and broke a fish tank, fatally slashing an artery; he had recently purchased the tank to help his girlfriend's kids learn responsibility (December). And a 47-year-old man was crushed to death in Albany, Ga., when the tree he was cutting down fell on top of him (December).

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

Nonlethal war tactics suggested by an Air Force research team in the 1990s were made public in December by the military watchdog organization Sunshine Project and included a recommendation to expose enemy troops to powerful aphrodisiacs in order to distract them into lustful hookups with each other (irrespective of gender). (The Pentagon said the idea was dropped almost immediately, but the Sunshine Project said it was discussed as recently as 2001.) Other ideas: giving the enemy severe halitosis (so they could be detected within a civilian population), overrunning enemy positions with rats or wasps, and creating waves of fecal gas.

(1) In a December demonstration against the opening of a McDonald's in the Mediterranean town of Sete, France, about 500 protesters, using a homemade catapult, bombarded the restaurant with fresh catches of the area's renowned delicacy, octopus. (2) NASA announced in October it was retiring the KC-135 plane it had long been using to train astronauts for weightlessness in flight; an official told reporters that the air crews had kept track of the amount of astronaut vomit cleaned up over the years and that the total was at least 285 gallons.

Charged with murder recently: Jessie Wayne Walker (Greensboro, N.C., December); Michael Wayne Carter (Indianapolis, October); Matthew Wayne Ferman (Waverly, Ohio, October); Keith Wayne Graham (Merced, Calif., August); Justin Wayne Smith (Bay City, Texas, December). Suspected of murder when he committed suicide: Brian Wayne Pennington (Klamath Falls, Ore., December). Convicted of murder: Billy Wayne Cope (York, S.C., September).

-- A 21-year-old man was hospitalized in intensive care in Murdoch, Australia (near Perth), in December following a barroom stunt in which he put on a helmet connected to a beer jug, with a hose that ran between the jug and a pump powered by an electric drill. The idea was to facilitate drinking a large quantity of beer without the laborious tasks of lifting a glass and swallowing, but the flow was so powerful that he had to be rushed to the hospital with a 10-centimeter tear in his stomach.

-- (1) Samuel Woodrow was convicted of burglary in Santa Fe, Texas, in December, one of four men who had broken into a home. However, the men had fled, empty-handed, when they were scared away by overhearing a police call from the video game Grand Theft Auto ("We have you surrounded! This is the police!"), which the resident's three grandsons were playing in another room. (2) In January, a 22-year-old man robbed a Chevron station in Vancouver, Wash., and eluded police in a high-speed getaway, but he then got lost and wound up back at the same Chevron station, and, apparently not recognizing where he was, he asked for directions, allowing the clerk to notify police, who soon arrested him.

-- Charles Bonney, 67, and Victor Harris, 36, were detained by police in Godfrey, Ill., in December after squaring off in their vehicles (Chevrolet Camaro and Acura Integra) and repeatedly ramming each other in the street and then in the parking lot of C&W Auto Glass, because of their ongoing feud over a woman. Eventually, only Bonney faced criminal charges.

-- Amid a recent, stepped-up wave of parental violence in kids' sports contests (e.g., choking a basketball coach in Akron, Ohio; choking a hockey referee in Toronto), a woman was barred from the Greater Toronto Hockey League in December following an altercation between parents of the 11-year-olds who were playing. According to a witness, the woman lifted her top above her shoulders (in the style of guests on "The Jerry Springer Show") and "shook (her breasts, while wearing a bra) side to side," then yelled at other parents, "What the hell are you looking at? Have you never seen (breasts)?"

-- Cameron Miller, 19, was arrested in Alexandria, La., on Christmas Day and charged with firing shotgun blasts at his mother, stepfather and stepbrothers as they drove away because Miller was unhappy that he did not get money for Christmas but instead got only music CDs. And on the day after Christmas in Feasterville, Pa., according to police, Steven Murray, 21, set his parents' house on fire because he was angry at having received no presents.

-- On Dec. 20, a United Parcel Service driver was involved in a crash on an icy road near Keene, N.H., suffered a head injury, and was taken to Cheshire Medical Center, where tests were to be performed, except that the required machine for them was broken (though parts were on order). After checking the status of the order, hospital personnel discovered that the parts had been shipped and were in fact in the crashed UPS truck, and someone was dispatched to the scene of the accident to retrieve them.

-- According to the British parents' organization Bullywatch, which issued blue wristbands to students to publicize the campaign against school bullying, any kid wearing the wristbands was immediately targeted for attack by bullies (December). And 1,500 cords of firewood were burned up when a fire broke out at the Ossipee Mountain Land Co., in Tamworth, N.H. (December).

Latest From the Class-Action Lawyers' Money Tree: (1) The six lawyers who helped 83 Wal-Mart workers win about $2,500 each (for being improperly denied overtime pay) asked the Portland, Ore., judge in December for fees totaling $2.57 million, about 12 times the clients' total winnings (citing the difficult work, Wal-Mart's contentiousness and the case's implications beyond their 83 clients). (2) And when phone company customers won $25 refunds in a September class-action settlement with Ameritech in Madison County, Ill., lawyers got $1.9 million in legal fees; a local watchdog group said (based on experience) only about 10 percent of eligible customers would bother to apply for refunds, meaning that lawyers' fees would ultimately account for about 60 percent of the amount Ameritech pays out.

A 70-year-old woman was fatally struck by two cars as she, wielding a knife, chased her husband into the street during an argument (Springfield Township, Pa., November). And a 43-year-old passenger was fatally injured, after he, sitting in the back seat, began beating up the driver, causing him to lose control and smash into a tree. (The driver survived.) (Newport News, Va., November) And a 54-year-old man was killed after a road rage duel with another driver when he got out of his car, lunged after the other car while it was moving, missed, and hit his head (Jacksonville, Fla., August).

(1) "(You'll) have no teeth left in (your) mouth (if you keep that attitude)" (allegedly said by Sister Catherine Iacouzze of St. Cecelia School in Iselin, N.J., to an 11-year-old boy who had sassed her). (The sister was fired in December.) (2) "(W)e do not think it rises to the level of a safety defect" (said Chrysler spokesman Max Gates in December, fighting a threatened recall of 600,000 Dodge Durango and Dakota trucks even though, Gates acknowledged, "upper ball joint separation" might make the trucks' wheels fall off).

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

Editor Frank Kelly Rich's bimonthly tribute to overdrinking -- the magazine Modern Drunkard -- is a 50,000-circulation glossy "about drinking and only about drinking, and not just drinking, but heavy drinking," he told the Los Angeles Times in January. Recent features included biographies of great drunks, a dictionary of bar slang, and a testimonial on how drinking cured one man's fear of flying. "The most accomplished people," Rich said, "have been drinkers," and he implied that people in the Middle East ought to drink more. Calling serious drinkers an "oppressed minority," Rich said he himself has about eight drinks a day, sometimes up to 30 (when he frequently blacks out). Said Rich's wife, of her husband's career, "When you find your calling, you have to go with it."

Austrian artist Muhammad Mueller started a project in November, as political commentary, in which two people at a time dig a tunnel from the city of Graz to Gradec, Slovenia, 42 miles away, using only shovels; he estimated the venture would take 5,600 years. And in July, a federal appeals court rejected the Environmental Protection Agency's leak-safety standards for the long-awaited nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain; EPA had found the proposed site safe until the year 12,000 A.D., but the court said that wasn't long enough (and noted that one National Academy of Sciences report recommended protection until the year 302,000 A.D.)

(1) In the fall of 2004, Ron Nunn Elementary school (Brentwood, Calif.) ended its "Golden Circle" program, which officials soured on because it honored only kids with good grades, and established in its place the "Eagle Society," which also celebrates personal, nonacademic achievements. The principal said he could not bear to see the sad faces of kids left out of the Golden Circle and wanted "all of our kids to be honored." (2) The city council of Ota (north of Tokyo) implemented a policy in January to require that male city workers take six separate weeks of paid leave sometime before their new child's first birthday so that (said one official) "men (get) involved in raising children." The men will also have to submit written reports on child-rearing.

Olga Abramovich, 49, was arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y., in October and charged as the person who, in a rage, had painted as many as 20 swastikas on buildings and cars in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods; police said Abramovich, a Christian, was upset that her ex-husband had re-married to a Jewish woman 14 years younger than she. And Julie Rose, 37, was convicted of assault in Yeovil, England, in October, for angrily slapping a new neighbor; the victim had apparently provoked Rose by declining her welcome-to-the-neighborhood suggestion that the Roses and the new couple engage in mate-swapping.

According to an October Los Angeles Times dispatch from Yemen, one government solution to "tam(e) the violent underside" of the nation's tribal culture is to fund itinerant poets to roam the country and channel lawlessness into constructive thoughts. Illustrative of most Yemenis' opposition to both American influence and their own government is this verse: "The Arab army is just to protect the leaders/They build their rule on the pain of the people/Democracy is for the rich/If the poor man tries it, they'll call him a thief." (And in October, National Liberty Fund published a book of poems by Sami Al-Arian, written from his cell while awaiting trial in Florida on federal charges of aiding the terrorist Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Sample: "(Was it) worth playing global police/even if it meant half-million Iraqis deceased.")

-- Thailand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's November project to bring peace to strife-torn southern provinces fell short of its goal, as resistance by separatists hardened. Shinawatra had airdropped about 100 million origami paper peace doves (which, unfortunately, wound up more resembling cranes) from military aircraft, some with prize coupons attached, hoping to distract people from their grievances.

-- The renegade Mormon splinter group headed by Warren Jeffs and holed up mostly in a few small towns in Utah and Arizona was largely responsible for the collapse of the Bank of Ephraim, according to Utah regulators interviewed for a December Associated Press report. Church officials had taken a secret oath to borrow, furiously, as much money as they could, because according to Jeffs, the world was about to end anyway, and they wouldn't have to pay it back.

-- Antonio Hernandez, 29, pleaded guilty in Salt Lake City in December to hijacking a Greyhound bus that had just left Green River, Utah, intending to use it to smash into his estranged wife's trailer home. He was stopped at the hijack scene, but if he hadn't been captured, he would still have had to drive the bus all the way to the woman's home, in Lexington, Neb., 500 miles away.

-- Sylvain Didier (a mechanic by profession) was found guilty of sexual assault in Longueuil, Quebec, in December stemming from a self-invented procedure (the "Slimtronic") he was offering to female customers of his wife's weight-loss clinic. The Slimtronic supposedly took off pounds via electrical currents passed through rubber patches placed on the vulva, and one woman who agreed to the procedure filed charges against Didier after he kept moving the patches around with his probing fingers.

Howard Goldstein, 47, was charged with murdering his landlord and fellow Orthodox Jew, Rabbi Rahamin Sultan, in October in Brooklyn, N.Y., in a rent dispute, and police said that when they knocked on the door to investigate Sultan's disappearance, Goldstein answered dressed (according to the New York Post) in a gray blouse "with a plunging neckline," slacks, and pink high-heeled shoes, and wearing bright red lipstick and blue eye shadow "that clashed with his long beard." A search of his room turned up pre-beard snapshots of Goldstein in an array of fashions and wigs.

Stephen Kauff, 33, was arrested in Westerville, Ohio, in December in a police Internet sex sting but told officers, when he arrived for a long-arranged meeting with an alleged "14-year-old girl" at an apartment complex, that he really wasn't interested in sex but was just curious whether police actually do set up sex stings over the Internet. (Answer: Yes) And Ian Finlay, 28, also caught in an Internet sex sting, had denied that he had sex on his mind when he showed up for a long-arranged meeting with a "15-year-old girl" at a McDonald's in Hempfield, Pa.; Finlay claimed that he knew "she" was a cop and wanted to outsmart the cop by pretending to be a sex predator and that he was angry at being arrested before he could reveal his "hoax." (He was convicted in January.)

Latest in Upscale Pet Care: Much plastic surgery on dogs, said Brookline, Mass., veterinarian Scott Groper, is done for medical reasons (e.g., Boston terriers' small noses interfere with breathing), but vanity (but not the dog's vanity) sometimes plays a role, as Los Angeles surgeon Alan Schulman told the Boston Herald in January. "Most of the time," he said, "it's women who have already done everything they possibly could to themselves and are starting to (make over) their dogs," with pooches' low-hanging lips and drooling problems being the primary reasons for dog face-lifts.

British garbage collector Tim Byrne is not only eager to get to work every day, according to a report in London's Sun newspaper, but for the past 11 years, he has voluntarily hauled trash alongside local collectors while on holiday in vacation spots such as Tenerife and Mallorca. Said Byrne, "(R)ubbish plays such a large role in my life that I simply don't need to (get away from it).

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