Some of the well-intentioned donations for victims of the December tsunami are bewilderingly inappropriate (such as ski jackets and Viagra), according to a February Wall Street Journal dispatch from Sri Lanka. Relief workers are being distracted by shipments of, for example, moisturizing gel, sweaters, women's dress shoes, Arctic-weather tents and thong underwear. Crucial medicines were in short supply, but not Valium, anti-depressants, or drugs with labels in languages that local doctors could not read. As the Journal wrote, some doctors "appear (just) to have unloaded their sample bins."

A New York City jury in January awarded $450,000 in damages to a professional dancer whose career was ended in 2001 after surgery by Dr. Andrew Feldman at St. Vincent's Hospital. In a pre-op meeting, the dancer described the discomfort in his right knee, and Dr. Feldman wrote a large "X" on the spot of the pain, but 20 minutes later, he mistakenly cut into the man's until-then-healthy left knee.

(1) In December, Jean Eaton, mayor of the town of Albert Lea, Minn. (population 18,000), was arrested in what police charged was a spree in which she bought apparel from Marshall Field's department stores and then affixed their price tags to some older, used garments and "returned" them for refund. Police said a search of her home yielded evidence of tag switches totaling more than $800 in store credit. (2) And in January, Canada's immigration minister, Judy Sgro, resigned after pizza parlor owner Harjit Singh accused her of reneging on a deal she allegedly proposed: that she would help Singh with an immigration problem if he would deliver pizza and garlic bread to her campaign headquarters.

(1) Sergio Segundo Ruiz, 60, was hospitalized with multiple injuries in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in January after being hit by a car while crossing a busy street, but he was nevertheless charged with interfering with traffic, and a police officer was stationed outside his room poised to arrest him as soon as he is well enough to leave. (2) In January, a judge in Breda, Netherlands, officially ruled that a 46-year-old bank robber, who stole money worth the equivalent of US$8,400, could only be charged with a crime worth about US$6,100 because the court had to let the man offset the equivalent of US$2,300 that he paid for his gun, as a legitimate business expense.

-- In January, the Consumer Product Safety Commission turned down a petition from corporal punishment opponent Susan Lawrence to ban "The Rod," a 22-inch-long nylon stick marketed by an Oklahoma couple as an aid to Bible-based child-rearing ("spare the rod, spoil the child"). Vying for the same market are the 9-inch-long, polyurethane spanking paddles of a Bakersfield, Calif., man and wooden spanking paddles of a New Kingston, Pa., man, both sold with an explicit Christian message. (Lawrence, who said she is a devout Lutheran, said corporal punishment of children is inconsistent with Jesus' teachings.)

-- In a December Tampa Tribune feature, local Southern Baptist preacher Tom Rives was profiled in his part-time role as KoKoMo the Clown, enthusiastically delivering uplifting spiritual messages to kids and nontraditional church audiences. Said Rives (who estimates he has trained about 400 people for his clown troupes), "I don't think (preachers) should be going around with a Bible tucked under their arms and a scowl on their face." To his critics who say clowning is undignified, Rev. Rives said, "I tell them that all Baptist preachers are clowns. I just went to class and got certified."

Ali Joho, who lost a close election for the parliament of Kenya in December, filed a petition two weeks later asking the country's high court to nullify the contest because the winner, Anania Mwaboza, was allegedly spotted with some supporters under a bridge on election eve, sewing up the eyes of three cows and then drowning them, in order to cast a spell on Joho's partisans. Allegedly, as part of the spell, voters from out of the district appeared and voted for Mwaboza, and some polling places were opened late and closed early in order to frustrate Joho's supporters.

A jury in Nacogdoches, Texas, convicted Jerry Don Hartless in January of killing his former best friend, Billy Bob Wallace, during a group drinking bout one night along the Angelina River. According to testimony, Hartless believed that Wallace had stolen his boat motor but couldn't prove it. Then, that night, the group discussed a recent Jerry Springer show featuring a black man claiming to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and the alcohol-fueled Hartless insinuated that Wallace's girlfriend, who was there, craved sex with black men. (All the drinking group were white.) When Wallace objected, Hartless shot him. A witness to the shooting was Wallace's adult son, Wild Bill Wallace (which is his actual birth name).

Northern Ireland's chief constable told reporters in January that the meticulously executed December robbery of Belfast's Northern Bank earned the thieves (who the constable believes are Irish Republican Army members) the equivalent of about US$50 million, but that because of a peculiarity of the U.K. banking system, Northern Bank can, and will, legally cancel and replace all the currency that was taken, rendering the stash, in the constable's words, "the largest theft of waste paper in the history of Northern Ireland." If the robbers hadn't taken so much money, the cancellation might not have been a worthwhile option.

Tammy Jean Warner was charged in February with negligent homicide in the 2004 death of her husband, Michael, who suffered acute alcohol poisoning (0.47 blood-alcohol level) caused by having ingested three liters of sherry wine, allegedly provided by Tammy via enema. The Lake Jackson, Texas, widow told reporters that she was only trying to help Michael (who she said had been addicted to enemas since childhood) and that he also did enemas with coffee, "castile soap, Ivory soap. He had enema recipes. I'm sure that's the way he wanted to go out (die) because he loved his enemas."

-- Judith Clark, 55, serving 75 years in prison for her part in the deadly 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored truck in the course of a plan to fund a "Republic of New Afrika" out of former "slave states," such as Mississippi and Alabama, filed a writ of habeas corpus in New York City in January, claiming that her trial judge had denied her a constitutional right. Clark became the latest inmate to claim that when a judge gave in to her aggressive demand to act as her own lawyer at trial (a job at which she proved unsuccessful), he violated her right to competent counsel.

-- New York City health officials are still investigating the October death of a baby shortly after a circumcision by Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer, who uses a rare, ultra-Orthodox procedure of drawing the infant's blood with his mouth. Officials found that the baby and two others circumcised by Rabbi Fischer had contracted herpes. (The rare procedure was condemned by Israeli physicians in a medical journal article mentioned in News of the Weird in September 2004.)

Attorney Wayne G. Johnson Sr. was arrested for drunken driving shortly after leaving a court hearing in which he represented a client accused of drunken driving (McKean, Pa., January). And Tammy Lynn Price, 28, in court as a defendant in a drug case, was charged with stealing the judge's gavel when he stepped out (Farmington, Mo., January). And Leonardo Leyva, 44, was arrested for public intoxication after calling 911 at 3:50 a.m. to complain that his wife wouldn't have sex with him (Turlock, Calif., January).

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

In January, days after a crackdown by Mexican President Vicente Fox on corruption at the La Palma jail near Mexico City, a full-page ad appeared in the daily newspaper Reforma, supposedly placed by higher-profile inmates, who, according to the ad, were now suffering under "subhuman" conditions, treated "like dogs, like animals, like we are worthless ... scum of society." What the government had done was to confiscate the drug lords' and organized-crime leaders' big-screen TVs, computers and cell phones (which they were using to retain control of their operations from behind bars), break up their prison rackets, and even end their personal pizza deliveries.

The Roanoke (Va.) Times reported on Jan. 17 that a Wytheville police officer had to rescue a 9-year-old boy who, with time on his hands waiting for a school bus on a "bone-deep cold" morning, decided to find out what would happen if he licked a metal pole. While awaiting someone to bring warm water to free the boy, the officer and the kid had the following conversation: "Have you learned anything?" "Uh-huh." "Are you going to do this again?" "Uh-uh."

In 2002, Germany legalized prostitution, primarily for tax revenue and to make sex workers eligible for health care benefits, and at the same time, it specifically declined to exempt brothels from those places of employment at which the jobless might be required to work in order to maintain their benefits. In December, there was a press report of a 25-year-old unemployed waitress complaining that she had been called for an interview at a brothel and feared that if she declined the job, her benefits would be cut. Germany's Federal Labor Office said it would not do that, but a Hamburg lawyer said there have been cases of unemployed female call-center workers being offered telephone sex-line jobs via the government.

(1) "Fireworks Explode in Pants, Burn Boy" (a January story in New Orleans' Times-Picayune about an 11-year-old boy improvidently carrying bottle rockets in his pants while holding a sparkler). "Cleric Suspect Misses Hearing Due to Long Toe Nails" (a January Reuters dispatch from London, reporting that radical Islamic rabble-rouser Abu Hamza al-Masri found it too painful to walk to court). "Cops: Mom Used Hammer on Son Over Homework" (a January Associated Press report in which police charged a St. Louis woman with excessive supervision of homework, which allegedly also included pliers).

-- (1) Sehnsucht restaurant opened in Berlin recently, catering to people with eating disorders, with a tasty cuisine for anorexics, to encourage weight-gain, but also serving bulimics, some of whom will quickly disgorge the tasty meal. (2) And frog farmers in the village of Bo Talo, Thailand, struggling with a glut in the local market, developed an export product for those who don't require their frogs to be fresh: frog-in-a-can (which they hope will catch on as chicken and duck sales falter because of avian flu).

-- The Japanese company Trane KK recently introduced the "lap pillow," a large foam headrest, in the shape of a woman's kneeling lower torso so that the target audience of men can rest their heads on "her" legs. It was probably created in response to an earlier product from the company Kameo of a pillow with a "man's" arm extending downward, targeted for women to hug the arm as they drift off to sleep.

A landmine-detection outfit in Mozambique has upgraded from explosives-sniffing dogs to giant African Hamster rats, according to a December Agence France-Presse dispatch, because the lighter, more plentiful rats have noses that are just as sensitive and don't suffer dogs' need for affection and constant reassurances. And Northern Arizona University Professor Con Slobodchikoff, who spoke to the Albuquerque Journal in December about his two decades of elaborate, patient, desert research, said that prairie dogs he has studied at three locations in the Southwest speak in different dialects but would likely understand each other, can even invent sounds for new things, and perhaps can even gossip.

-- In a tourist park next to the zoo in Chiang Mai, Thailand, handlers have toilet-trained seven elephants. In photos published in Bangkok's The Nation in January and now available on the Internet, a 5-year-old elephant is shown using a giant white, Western-style concrete toilet as if he were human, including using his trunk to pull a cord to flush.

-- Recurring Themes: Michael Henson's dog became the latest one to "drive," after he pawed the gearshift of Henson's idling truck, sending it through the front of the O'Reilly Auto Parts store in Springdale, Ark., in December. And Matthew Harper's hunting dog became the latest one to shoot someone, stepping on a shotgun's trigger and blasting Harper in the arm, near Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon in October. And Leana Beasley's rottweiler assistance dog became one of the latest to save her client's life by (as per training) nose-punching a telephone's 911 button upon seeing Beasley suffer a grand mal seizure and then barking furiously into the receiver (Richland, Wash., October).

Paul Kelvin Hardy, 40, was arrested in Martinsburg, W.Va., after he broke into a couple's home on New Year's Eve, robbed them of $540, held them at gunpoint for more than hour, and then, when he noticed a piano in the house, ordered the husband to play two songs while Hardy sang. After the songfest, Hardy suggested they order pizza and meanwhile began playing with his gun. The siege ended, and police were called, when Hardy joined a long list of people chronicled in News of the Weird for accidentally shooting themselves.

Not Cut Out for a Life of Crime: (1) Earmon Wilson, 44, walked in to police headquarters in Buffalo, N.Y., in January and confessed to two burglaries at his apartment house, even though he wasn't a suspect; he said his conscience was bothering him, which is also what he said in October 1994 when he unsolicitedly turned himself in for robbing a Buffalo bank. (2) In Cincinnati in December, Ronald Godfrey pleaded guilty to a burglary, which he was forced to attempt alone because, according to a prosecutor, his brother James (also a burglar) refused to work with him, saying Ronald was too dumb. In the December burglary, Ronald accidentally hit himself in the head with a crowbar, splattering the scene with blood, which police traced back to him.

In a widely publicized move in January, Oklahoma state Sen. Frank Shurden proposed legislation to bring back the "sport" of cockfighting, which the state outlawed in 2002. To appease critics, Shurden, apparently serious, suggested that the roosters wear tiny boxing gloves instead of the razor cleats on their legs and also wear electronic-sensitive vests in order to record hits so as to non-lethally determine the winner of a match.

A 29-year-old woman who was killed in a one-car crash on New Year's Day in Rohnert Park, Calif., was "wearing" a live boa constrictor as a fashion accessory, which friends later said she liked to do. And two hospitals affiliated with Duke University notified about 4,000 patients in January that they had accidentally "cleaned" surgical instruments in a petroleum-based hydraulic fluid (leaving them slightly sticky even though they were subsequently sterilized before use). And Purdue University student Danlei Chen was arrested in January and charged with stabbing her husband during a sexual episode following the couple's having watched the movie "Basic Instinct," which has a famous similar scene.

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

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.)