Vivienne, an interactive companion accessible on powerful, "third-generation" cell phones, was recently introduced by the Hong Kong company Artificial Life as a high-maintenance, video-image "girlfriend" who goes on dates with you, kisses, speaks six languages, converses on 35,000 topics, accepts flowers and diamonds, and may even marry you (though you also acquire a troublesome mother-in-law). Vivienne so far is prudish (no nudity, no sex), owing to Artificial Life's aim at marketing in modest cultures, but she will appear in Europe and some U.S. cities by the end of this year (at about $6 a month plus airtime). Said one Hong Kong video game player, characterizing Vivienne for the New York Times, "It's a little bit for the losers."

From the crime column of the Lewisville (Texas) Leader, Feb. 14: arrested on charges of drug possession, driving while intoxicated, and driving without a license: Mr. Fred Flintstone, 34. And taken into custody in February in Miami to begin serving a one-year sentence on alien-smuggling charges: a Chinese national whose given name is King Kong. And an obituary from the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, Dec. 2: Mr. Dom Perigion Champagne, whose parents were Mr. Jeron Champagne and Ms. Perfect Engelberger.

Porchia Bennett of Philadelphia was last visited by her father, Lester Trapp, when she was 1, then virtually abandoned by her drug-addicted mother, Tiffany Bennett, at age 2, to fall to the custody of Tiffany's drug-addicted sister and the sister's boyfriend, who lived in rat-infested squalor and who are now charged with killing Porchia at age 3 through starvation and physical abuse. In February, Trapp and his parents filed a lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia for failing to protect Porchia (with Tiffany also entitled to share the proceeds as Porchia's "beneficiary").

-- Missing the Point: In January, Richard Graybill, 42, pleaded guilty in Chester County, Pa., to unauthorized use of a vehicle. He had taken a car that had been parked, awaiting repairs, at a shopping center, but he was later discovered by the car's owner when he happened to pull up to the drive-thru window at the Wendy's restaurant where she worked. She confronted him, and he sped away, but he returned a few minutes later and tried to persuade her to sign over the title to him, in that he had put a lot of effort into fixing the car up after he took it.

-- (1) Richard Arredondo, 18, and two pals had to be rescued by sheriff's personnel in California's San Bernardino National Forest on Feb. 5 after getting lost while mountain biking; on Feb. 6, they went back in to retrieve their bikes, but again got lost and had to be rescued. (2) According to a study released in the Journal of Advanced Nursing in February, only 3 percent of people with nipple or genital body piercings sought professional health-care advice despite the fact that two-thirds eventually experience problems ranging from infections to interruptions in urinary flow.

-- In 2002, 17 U.S. pilots captured and beaten by Saddam Hussein's forces in the 1991 Gulf War filed a lawsuit asking for nearly $1 billion from Saddam's assets frozen by the United States, and in 2003, a federal judge ruled in their favor. However, an appeals court tossed out the case, citing a 2003 post-invasion law that removed jurisdiction for the lawsuit at the behest of the Bush administration, which wants to reserve the frozen assets for rebuilding Iraq. An even larger irony is that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has publicly conceded that the Iraqi detainees who were abused in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison should be compensated, even though the U.S. pilots endured perhaps worse abuse at the same Abu Ghraib facility in 1991.

-- More Ironies: (1) A large portion of the materials on plagiarism on the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh's Writing Center Web site was revealed in February to have been taken verbatim from Purdue University's Web page on plagiarism. (2) And a February report from the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), grading federal departments and agencies on five administrative performance criteria, concluded that the second-worst-performing agency was OMB.

-- The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, in a cost-cutting move in the wake of its priest-sexual-abuse settlement, announced in 2004 that it would close several churches and schools, including Our Lady of the Presentation in the struggling neighborhood of Oak Square. Rather than sell the school to an eager community group at market price, the archdiocese is converting it into offices for processing marriage annulments. (Americans are granted 70 percent of all Catholic annulments, and the total has increased 90-fold since the 1960s.)

-- In January, a coalition of lawyers, including two from the Legal Aid Society, asked a judge for $9 million in legal fees after San Francisco's school system agreed to demands to modify its buildings to increase access for disabled students. The sum included rates of $552 an hour for Legal Aid lawyers to $810 an hour for a partner at the top-drawer Skadden Arps firm (which boasts of "pro bono" civic-mindedness). The school system said a $1 million reduction in fees could pay for 14 new teachers, but the lawyers said the fees could be paid off merely by selling surplus school property.

-- According to Transportation Security Administration officials, New Jersey psychiatrist Esha Khoshnu, in a stopover in Phoenix en route to a professional meeting in San Diego in February, got "mouthy and snippy" with Mesa Airlines agents who wanted to examine her luggage, reportedly saying, "(Even if) I had a bomb, you wouldn't find it." Agents, following TSA protocol, detained her, causing her to miss her flight, and her luggage, loaded onto another flight, was eventually detonated on the tarmac at Lindbergh Field in San Diego.

-- According to an Agence France-Presse story from Wavrechain-sous-Denain, France, a 3-year-old mastiff named Pako, once again abusing a lamppost as he lifted his leg and relieved himself, was electrocuted when his stream hit the metal pole, which (following an act by vandals) had a loose lamp wire touching it.

-- In June 2004, Beth Rice and Stanley Blacker of Florida held a lavish wedding weekend in Las Vegas, before friends and family, said their vows, exchanged rings, with a rabbi presiding, in a traditional Jewish wedding. They came home, moved in together, and opened a joint bank account. However, according to a January report in the St. Petersburg Times, the couple purposely failed to get a marriage license. As a result, a judge ruled in January that under Florida law, Rice had not "re-married" and that her ex-husband must continue to honor the couple's divorce settlement and pay her $5,000 a month.

-- Six years ago, during a brief affair in Chicago, Dr. Sharon Irons manually inseminated herself with sperm from Dr. Richard O. Phillips, following oral sex. The result was a daughter, now aged 5, for whom Phillips has reluctantly been paying $800 a month to support while his lawsuit against Irons for deception travels through Illinois courts. A trial judge had dismissed all of his claims, but in February, the Illinois Appeals Court granted a partial reversal, ordering a trial on whether she inflicted "emotional distress" by a legally "outrageous" act. However, the court dismissed Phillips' claim that Irons had "stolen" his sperm, stating that "it was a gift, an absolute and irrevocable transfer of title to property from a donor to a donee" and that, without a specific agreement to return it, it was hers to do with as she pleased.

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

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.)