Producers announced in February that they were still planning to bring the 3-year-old London stage show "Jerry Springer, The Opera" to America in early 2006, despite increasingly vituperative protests of religious groups. The show features "Jerry" mediating confessions in hell between Satan, God, Jesus, Mary, and various biblical characters, complete with a raucous audience periodically chanting "Jer-ree! Jer-ree!" Reportedly, 300 to several thousand curse words are in the script (depending on who counts), and the show's Jesus is a pudgy, diaper-wearing gay man who is apparently coprophilic (among the many alleged points of blasphemy). When the BBC televised a showing, it reported 50,000 complaints, with some physical threats directed to the station's staff and their families.

In January, police in Hong Kong arrested two men on suspicion of stealing a boatload of spiritually regarded pine trees, which they allegedly intended to sell to feng shui practitioners; the scheme failed when their boat, apparently lacking feng shui's "harmony" and "positive energy," broke down. Also in January, the Hong Kong company Life Enhance introduced briefs and boxer shorts that it says will bring harmony by virtue of the dragon on the front (which gives balance in this, the "year of the rooster"). Said a Life Enhance spokeswoman, "If you have a dragon on your underpants, you will be protected."

Circleville, Ohio, police officer Troy Brungs, 35, was still on the job in January (though a hearing on a DUI charge was pending) despite (in the last five years) three suspensions, seven written reprimands, eight written orders for counseling, and three patrol-car crashes. And in February, at Ohio's Mansfield Correctional Institution, two death-row inmates nearly succeeded in an elaborate escape attempt that the security supervisor, Maj. John Morrison, had been warned about a month earlier but apparently had ignored (as one of the inmates had been promoted to a trusted position two days before the escape).

A downtown problem in Manila (Philippines) is that pedestrians create a traffic hazard when many of them rush into the street almost indiscriminately to seek rides from passing cars. Thus, in January, police began to attach large wet blankets to some official vehicles roaming the streets, with the blankets flapping against the pedestrians, soiling their clothes and herding them back to the sidewalks. (Pedestrians who remain in the street after being flayed are arrested.)

In a December Rocky Mountain News report, Colorado's one-size-fits-all juvenile-sex-offender program was widely criticized as one of the nation's least sensible, with restrictions for a one-time incident of adolescent curiosity nearly as harsh as for teenage predators. In the former category was "Victor," who is barred from public venues where younger children go, must file an action plan with his treatment team to visit other venues, must phone his parents hourly, must avert his eyes if he inadvertently sees young children, and has formal requirements for which his parents must pay (group therapy weekly, individual therapy twice a week, periodic polygraph tests). Victor's exasperated therapist said he considers the boy "normal."

-- Jimmy Dean Watkins pleaded guilty in Fort Worth, Texas, in January for shooting his estranged wife to death and wounding her boyfriend, and was sentenced to four months in prison for the killing and 15 years for the wounding. (The jury found that he had acted against the wife with partially excusable "sudden passion" after discovering her with the boyfriend, but that shooting the boyfriend was more deliberate.)

-- "I'm Absolutely Positive": In late 2004, two men who had been convicted of rape based on confident identifications by the victims (Wilton Dedge of Florida and Dennis Brown of Louisiana) were exonerated after having served 22 and 19 years, respectively, before DNA evidence showed that the crimes were almost certainly committed by others. In the trials, Dedge's accuser had stuck to her recollection even after six alibi witnesses had come forward, and Brown's accuser said she observed her rapist's face up close for 20 minutes and was certain Brown was the man.

-- Train conductor Patrick Phillips, 52, won $8.5 million in an out-of-court settlement in February with Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, which was involved in a collision with a freight train in 2002. Phillips suffered a mild concussion in the crash, which he said then triggered his sudden desire to become a serious alcoholic (leading to his eventual dementia), whereas he said his drinking had previously been under control.

University of Michigan football player Larry Harrison Jr., 20, was charged with four felony counts of indecent exposure in January, and is a suspect in 12 other incidents, after being identified by several victims and police officers as the man shocking Ann Arbor, Mich., during the last half of 2004 in a public masturbation spree. And Charles J. Henry, 20, was indicted for indecent exposure in Fairbanks, Alaska, in February after four teenagers said he was similarly enjoying himself in his car while parked at Lathrop High School. (Henry defended himself to officers, claiming that he was under stress and that it was actually the girls' responsibility to avert their eyes.)

People Not Sound on the Fundamentals: Ronald S. Webb, 22, was arrested for fraud in Paris, Tenn., in December after presenting a pharmacy with a legitimate prescription, to which had been conspicuously added the narcotic hydrocodone, in a different color ink. And Vincent Festa, 44, was arrested at a Radio Shack in Oyster Bay, N.Y., in December when he attempted to return for refund a computer and about $1,500 in other "Christmas gifts" but which, according to police, he had loaded in his car a week earlier at the same store and driven off without paying for.

-- News of the Weird last reported on "furries" in 2001, after 400 of them gathered at a convention in Chicago, but the TV show "CSI" recently featured a similar convention as backdrop for a show, and the number of their practitioners has grown, with 1,700 attending "FurCon" in January in San Jose, Calif., for a weekend of dressing as animals, assuming animal personalities, petting and scratching each other, and even, after hours, engaging in what one called "cross-species mating." An estimated 300 were in full-body makeup (with lions, tigers and foxes popular) while most others wore partial outfits (a tail or perhaps whiskers or ears).

-- At the annual Muslim "stone the devil" ritual near Mecca in January, clerics had feared a repeat of 2004, when more than 250 people were trampled to death (among the 2 million in attendance), but fatalities dropped to the average level this year (just three, according to one report) after larger targets were installed so that participants did not have to get so close to stone them. On the other hand, in the same week, an annual Hindu goddess-worship ritual in Maharashtra state in India resulted in as many as 300 deaths when a fire broke out in a roadside stall near the Mandhar Devi temple, provoking a stampede.

The county coroner in Olympia, Wash., won a federal Homeland Security contract to buy a large shrink-wrapping machine in case of mass casualties, thinking that traditional body-bagged corpses are harder to transport and store (February). And police in Fontana, Calif., said passenger Michael Spearman, 31, caused his girlfriend to crash her SUV when he angrily grabbed the steering wheel (and threatened to kill the woman) because she would not turn around and go back home so he could retrieve his Bible (January). And police in Chicago arrested two boys, ages 16 and 17, for assault after a 12-year-old required medical attention from several wedgies the boys gave him (February).

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

-- Homaro Cantu (described by one customer as Chicago's "mad-scientist" gourmet chef) creates his signature dishes with the help of cutting-edge technology, such as fishless sushi made with edible, fish-flavored paper containing designs produced on an inkjet printer. Among the projects planned for his Moto restaurant: baking with a "class IV" laser (the kind used in welding and surgery) that will cook the center but not the outside; using helium and superconductors to make food levitate; and developing edible utensils, tables and chairs. Said Cantu, to a New York Times reporter in February, "Gastronomy has to catch up to the evolution in technology."

"This is so embarrassing. We had never done that before, and now she's in the hospital, and my cat's dead" (said a name-withheld New York City man in January, after he and a neighbor decided to have sex but then accidentally ignited a comforter with a candle, starting a major fire in his apartment). And, said Elaine Edwards of Mink, La., one of the last remaining places in the country to be without telephone service, until lines were installed in January: "It wasn't 15 minutes after that phone was in before a telemarketer called me."

(1) In January, Felipe Rose, a member of the Village People musical group and who is part Lakota Sioux, said he felt so remorseful at missing the opening last year of the National Museum of the American Indian that he donated his gold record the group received for the 1978 song "Y.M.C.A.," which is ostensibly about gay men looking for sex in the big city. (2) In late 2004, officials of the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris said they were forced to cordon off the statue of 19th-century journalist Victor Noir (who was reputed to be quite a ladies' man) because too many visitors were rubbing Noir's clothed crotch for good luck.

-- Harvey Kash, 69, and Carl Lanzisera, 65, were arrested while standing in line at the courthouse in Hempstead, N.Y., in January, only because, said court officials, they were telling anti-lawyer jokes, to the irritation of a lawyer within earshot. Charges against Lanzisera were dropped, but prosecutors actually referred Kash's case to a grand jury, which, three weeks later, refused to indict him. (Said Kash's attorney, "Crime must be at a record low in Nassau County for the grand jury to have time for this.")

-- In January, the Fox TV network, concerned about an FCC crackdown on "indecency," voluntarily blurred out the unclothed rear end of a cartoon character on the adult program "Family Guy" (even though the network had run the same image, intact, five years earlier). Also in January, the Design Review Board of Snohomish, Wash., rejected the mural planned for the side of the BBQ Shack restaurant, in part, reported the owner, because its five pink pigs were naked.

-- In a stroke of luck, the defense case file of Florida death-row inmate Curtis Beasley, 56, turned up after having been virtually abandoned in a commercial storage locker rented by his court-appointed lawyer, Michael Giordano, who had failed to make payments and had become unreachable by state officials. If a storage employee hadn't called the Florida attorney general's office in December, the records might have been destroyed. The incident was reported in the Tampa Tribune's January coverage of state Supreme Court justice Raoul Cantero, who characterized the work of some court-appointed death-penalty attorneys as "some of the worst lawyering I've seen."

-- News of the Weird reported in September on Koko, the gorilla that knows about a thousand words in American Sign Language, and in February, she was back in the news at her home at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, Calif. Two of Koko's female handlers filed a sex discrimination and wrongful discharge lawsuit against the foundation because its president, Francine Patterson, had allegedly pressured them to display their breasts to Koko in order to better "bond" with her. According to the lawsuit, Patterson herself had been bonding with Koko for quite some time and thought Koko needed a little variety.

Wade Harris, 39, was arrested in Pittsburgh in December and charged with stealing at least 100 (maybe as many as 400) parking meters. According to detectives, a meter usually contains only $10 to $15 in coins but requires about 90 minutes "of hard work" to break into (and the job creates a risk from the noise made by the initial removal of the meter from the street).

-- Roy Allen Boothe Jr., 18, was arrested after allegedly attempting to rob a Delta One Shop convenience store near York, Pa., in January. When he threatened the two female clerks with a tire iron, the women started punching and kicking him, until he begged for them to stop. After a few minutes (but with police on the way), he managed to wiggle away and run (though one clerk slugged him with his own tire iron on the way out).

-- People Just Not Paying Attention: (1) In January, Daniel D. Salazar, 20, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for attempting to rob a Bank of America in Kansas City, Mo.; he first came to the attention of police when he called a station house and offered to turn in his partners in the crime in exchange for the $5,000 reward. (2) And in Hong Kong in October, Ho Heng-chau, 20, pleaded guilty to drug possession and was fined the equivalent of about US$500, on a day when he chose to show up in court wearing a T-shirt with "COCAINE" across the front.

In November 2003, when last we left America's most uninhibited public gay basher, Topeka, Kan., preacher Fred Phelps, he was proposing a statue to celebrate the murder of a gay man. In December 2004, his Westboro Baptist Church issued a press release praising God for the "Tsunami & 2,000 dead Swedes!!!" after he assumed that Swedes were among the vacationers who drowned at resorts in Thailand. Phelps had denounced Sweden for jailing a gay-condemning preacher (Rev. Ake Green, since released). According to Phelps, the Swedish homosexuals who died were "vacationing on their fat expendable incomes without kids to bother with and spend money on."

On a July evening, two girls, ages 17 and 18, decided to bake cookies as a gesture of kindness for their neighbors and then to deliver them right away (with notes reading, "Have a great night!"). Their town of Durango, Colo., is small enough (population, 14,000) that nighttime visits can sometimes be made without creating anxiety, but apparently not at Wanda Renae Young's house. She was so traumatized by the 10:30 knocking at her door that she wound up in the hospital emergency room the next day, then sued the girls for that expense, and in January was awarded $900 by a judge, sending the girls into tears. (However, townspeople chipped in to pay the $900.)

-- The City Council of Sweetwater, Fla., decided to raise money by selling a dealer all the guns confiscated by its police, but the dealer chosen was Lou's Gun Shop in Hialeah, Fla., identified by authorities as the nation's leading retail source of the guns eventually used in crimes (January). And a committee of the New York State Bar Association proposed in January to expand the civic work lawyers could get professional credit for ("pro bono" activities) to include political lobbying, including lobbying to cut back on required pro-bono work.

(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 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.)