Most Competent Criminal: Jeffrey "Roofman" Manchester, 33, was finally recaptured after six months of inspired police-dodging in Charlotte, N.C., after having smuggled himself out of a previously escape-proof prison nearby. According to a January profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Manchester (a handsome, athletic, personable man who got his nickname from a multistate series of ceiling-entry burglaries) built an ingenious home behind a cubbyhole at a Toys-R-Us, then at an abandoned Circuit City next door, outfitting both digs with various conveniences, such as a protective surveillance camera. The dashing Manchester volunteered at a church, befriending the pastor and dating a parishioner, who eventually helped police capture him. Said a police sergeant, "(W)e can learn a lot from him."

In articles in recent issues of Current Biology, researchers separately studying the dance fly and the rhesus macaque monkey concluded that males will be males. The male dance fly was found by a team from the University of Western Australia to sometimes present a female with worthless tokens for the opportunity to mate with her, but by the time she discovered their worth, he had already hit and run. A team from Duke University found that the male monkey will forgo his own rewards (juice) in exchange for being permitted to view pictures of female monkeys' bottoms.

The following people accidentally shot themselves recently: Joey Lujan, 22, shot himself in the head trying to show that his gun wasn't loaded (Rialto, Calif., December). Abran Godoy, 20, shot himself while tucking his gun into his waistband after a robbery (King City, Calif., November). A 20-year-old man shot himself in a femoral artery while showing off for friends (Salt Lake City, November). Latie Whitley, 34, shot himself in the face while allegedly robbing a delicatessen (New York City, December). Jeffrey Wagner, 22, shot himself while tucking his gun into his waistband after showing it to a friend (Dayton, Ohio, January). Lance Cole, 24, won $2,500 in damages from the police after an officer kicked him in the groin two days after he had shot himself in the genitals (St. Louis, Mo., January).

(1) According to a January Associated Press dispatch, an outfit called Rent-a-Priest supplies independent Catholic clergy to perform mass and communion on board cruise ships, even though the reason some are independent is that they're no longer in good standing. (The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said it has begun to screen out unqualified candidates for cruise line jobs.) (2) In a January CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, in answer to the question whether President Bush is a "uniter" or a "divider," exactly 49 percent of Americans said he was a uniter, and exactly 49 percent said he was a divider.

-- Farmington Hills, Mich., elementary school teacher Nancy Seaman, 52, on trial for murdering her husband, said it was self-defense, even though a reported autopsy said he had been stabbed 21 times and struck with a hatchet 15 times. (She was convicted in December.) And University of Virginia student Andrew Alston, on trial for fatally stabbing a firefighter after a night of bar-hopping, said the victim had actually inadvertently stabbed himself during aikido horseplay (even though there were 18 stab wounds, spread among the heart, arms, back, shoulder and face). (Alston was convicted of manslaughter in November.)

-- Ms. Sandu Florenta, 18, a Romanian, was arrested for shoplifting at a Tesco store in Wrexham, Wales, in December with "four packs of frozen lamb, three fresh chickens, three packs of stock cubes, finger chillies, a packet of burgers, garlic, peppers, socks and underwear, plus almost five pounds of oranges and apples" in a special sack under her robes. She told police that not many stores in Romania have carts, and thus, this is how people shop.

-- Pro boxer Hector Macho Camacho Sr. was arrested in Gulfport, Miss., for a Christmastime incident in which he, feeling morose, broke into the computer store next to his office in order to get his computer (in the shop for repairs) so he could e-mail family members, and that meant climbing over a wall and onto ceiling panels, which gave way, sending Camacho crashing onto several computers. Said Macho, according to police: "I don't see myself looking too good." Later, describing his motivation for the break-in: "I guess I ran out of ideas."

-- Alan Johnson was arrested in Taunton, Mass., in November and charged with burning his girlfriend's 19-month-old boy with a cigarette lighter while baby-sitting. Johnson's explanation: The boy went into a seizure, and Johnson, recalling his lifeguard training, thought the solution was to raise the boy's body temperature to alleviate the seizure.

Recent Sexual Obsessions: (1) surgical masks (Norman Hutchins, 53, was convicted in Leeds, England, in January, of tricking hospitals into sending him masks for his collection). (2) underwater photos of strangers' legs and buttocks (U.S. Army Maj. James V. McGovern was convicted in January of taking numerous such photos at the swimming pool at Yongsan Garrison, South Korea).

Kyle Hans, 24, drove his car through the front of a Target store in Fort Wayne, Ind., in January, down an aisle, where he told employees he had a gun and wanted to see his estranged wife so he could reconcile with her. When the employees informed Hans that his wife didn't work there anymore, he got frustrated and took one of them hostage, forcing the evacuation of the store and an eventual standoff with police. Officers talked Hans down, got the hostage freed and arrested him.

"I don't think I've done more than two days' work in three years," said the New York Liquor Authority's director of wholesale services, Patricia Freund, explaining to the New York Post in December that she is another example of how bureaucracies deal with "problem" workers who are hard to fire. Freund was exiled to an office with no work and no responsibilities (though continuing to draw her $82,000 salary), which she said was in retaliation for raising a stink about Gov. George Pataki's Christian prayer breakfasts and Jesus-laden mementoes, which she said was discriminatory toward Jewish employees, such as her.

Thinning the Herd: A 23-year-old woman, attempting a handstand on a hotel balcony railing in North Fort Myers, Fla., fell to her death but only after shouting to friends to "watch to see what I can still do" (January). And a 21-year-old student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln was killed when, not belted in, he was ejected from the back seat of an SUV in a crash; the student was prominent for his libertarian political views, including a defiant stand in the student newspaper against mandatory seatbelt laws. (He described himself as one of "a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up.") (January).

In January, sanitation workers in Nairobi, Kenya, finally, after 10 years of complaints, cleaned up the Wakulima Market (the country's largest fruit and vegetable facility), dislodging an estimated 750 tons of garbage, 38 tons of human waste, and about 6,000 rats. Also in January, Cleveland paralegal Austin Aitken filed a lawsuit against the TV show "Fear Factor" for $2.5 million, claiming that the episode in which contestants ate dead rats made him ill, causing him to vomit, become dizzy, and hit his head as he ran from the room in disgust.

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

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.)