Defensive back Randall Gay wore a New England Patriots jersey as a member of this year's Super Bowl-winning team, but when one of his former college professors tried to order a personalized jersey in tribute to Gay in mid-February, she was turned down. The National Football League's official online merchandiser, NFLshop.com, refused to imprint "Gay" on the back of a Patriots jersey because it was a "naughty" word, one of 1,159 the shop has banned. (Two weeks later, after the Web site Outsports.com picked up the story, the word was removed from the list.)

-- Public Servants in Action: (1) New Hampshire state Rep. Christopher Doyle, 26, was arrested in March and charged with slapping elections supervisor Gail Webster, 61, to the floor on election night after learning that he had lost his race for town selectman in Windham. (2) Shirley Martin, a member of the school board in West Orange, Texas, was convicted in February of disorderly conduct for threats against colleague Beth Wheeler. At a meeting, Martin had continued speaking after her colleagues had ruled her out of order, and subsequently Martin angrily told Wheeler, "I'm going to stomp a mud hole in your ass."

-- Despite state funding problems in health care and other areas, New York's Department of Transportation completed a $3.3 million beautification project in January in which intricately decorated "flora and fauna" designs of bronze were inlaid in two 2,400-square-foot granite wall coverings whose purpose was merely to decorate an underpass below New York City's Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. According to the New York Sun, the walls are beside an off-ramp that's across a pedestrian-unfriendly street from a Burger King, and the site was selected primarily because it is at the intersection of the jurisdictions of three community boards (thus making possible a seemingly always-desirable joint petition for funds).

-- The St. Petersburg Times, profiling retired pro basketball player Matt Geiger in February, described his $13 million, 28,000-square-foot, custom-built suburban mansion (whose 40 satellite-equipped TV sets include 18 wired together so he can play video games with his high school friends) and mentioned his 27 exotic animals that roam the grounds, earning him an unspecified "tax break" (although he told the Times he loves animals and would have them anyway).

-- According to a February Cox News Service dispatch from Mexico City, the government nearly killed its export market for the fabled mezcal, a liquor (similar to tequila) traditionally sold with a worm floating in the bottle. Bureaucrats had recently proposed to ban the worm because of its high fat content, even though as much as 70 percent of mezcal sales are based on the worm (with alleged sexual or hallucinatory powers), but changed their minds.

-- In 1992, News of the Weird reported that artist Janine Antoni carved huge blocks of chocolate and lard using her teeth, but at New York City's "LMAKprojects" gallery in February, artist Emily Katrencik gnawed sections of the drywall separating the gallery's exhibition space from the director's office, for 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Katrencik said she concentrates on thinking of "the things in the wall that are good for me, like calcium and iron." But, she said, "I prefer cast concrete because it has a more metallic flavor."

-- The mother of all of those recreation-room paintings of dogs playing poker is the series of nine originals by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in 1903, sponsored by a Minnesota advertising company, and in February, two of those masterpieces were sold by the Doyle New York auction house for a total of $590,400. Explaining the high price, Doyle's director of paintings pointed out that the auction coincided with both New York's Westminster Dog Show and the recent popularity of televised poker.

(1) Sally Hampton, 64, testified in February against the man who hit her with a beer bottle in a brawl last year in Immokalee, Fla., sending him to a 12-year sentence, but in the interim, Hampton has been recovering from brain surgery. As doctors examined her after the attack, they discovered and treated an unrelated tumor that they would not have found in time had she not received the beer-bottle concussion. (2) In December, Bill DiPasquale unexpectedly came out of a two-week coma at Massachusetts General Hospital, five minutes after a friend whispered him a message from their boss, who had said, "You tell him to wake up, get out of bed, and get his ass back to work."

Management at the Globe Hotel in Topsham, England, reported in February that a guest had dismantled and removed the entire shower unit out of his room. And Norwegian Arild Nicolaysen told reporters in February, after arriving at his mountain cabin for the weekend, that the in-ground swimming pool was missing (steel lining, plastic liner, filter, hoses and pipes). And in March, police in Lindale, Texas, arrested two men who they said had taken a house apart, brick by brick, board by board, over a three-month period and sold the materials for drugs.

Tennessee state Sen. John Ford testified in a juvenile court hearing in January that his child support payments should be reduced, in accordance with a state law that he had introduced on behalf of fathers with many children. Ford owns two homes, lives part-time in one with his ex-wife and their three children (with another on the way), and lives part-time in the other with an ex-girlfriend and their two children. Hence, he said, he should have lesser payments to a third woman, who is the mother of his 10-year-old daughter.

In March, accused U.S. fugitive securities-swindler Frederick Gilliland, living on the lam in Canada, was tricked into coming back across the border, just for a free meal. A vengeful private investigator offered to buy Gilliland lunch at Brewster's in Point Roberts, Wash., and then alerted authorities, who intercepted the super-hungry Gilliland as he approached the restaurant.

The police report column in the March 16 Newton (Mass.) Tab newspaper listed a "hate crime" committed by someone who apparently left the familiar Nazi symbol on the dirty window of an SUV. The police report read: "On the rear hatch someone with their finger traced out 'wash me' and below that was a swatz sticker symbol." (The officer is not the only one unclear on Nazi history. In 1994, News of the Weird reported that a murder defendant in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., had asked a judge for permission to wear a Ku Klux Klan robe in court and to be addressed by the "honorable and respected name of Hi Hitler.")

Apparently important to actor Robert Blake's acquittal on a murder charge in March was the lack of credibility of the prosecution's witnesses, including an alleged methamphetamine abuser who once thought his house was surrounded by large, horned animals and "people dressed like sagebrush or Joshua trees." To testify that drug users are unreliable witnesses, the defense presented a UCLA psychopharmacologist who revealed that in the course of his own drug use 25 years ago, he had once crawled into a cage of monkeys that were smoking crack cocaine.

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

Sales of bottled water for dogs (with prices similar to that for people) are growing, according to a March Wall Street Journal report, spurred not only by sudden concern about vitamin deficiency but apparent certainty among some owners that their pets find tap water disagreeable and thus are dangerously at risk of dehydration. Of course, veterinarians cited by the Journal are puzzled by this recent rejection of municipal water and suggest it might be a food-bowl-smell problem rather than a new dog generation's preference for fine beverages. (Also, some vets believe dogs prefer the cooler temperature of, say, toilet-bowl water to that of food-bowl water.)

On Thika highway in Nairobi, Kenya, in February, frenzied and hungry villagers brawled for access to meat from a baby hippopotamus (about 1,700 pounds) that had been killed by a passing vehicle. Amidst the kicking and punching, two people were stabbed. Two weeks earlier, in the London suburb of Edmonton, 6,000 Ikea customers rioted, vying for on-sale sofas (80 percent off) and other bargains. Said one customer, "There were people diving on sofas" and "tugging at two different sides of the same sofa and shouting 'mine, mine.'" At least 20 people were taken by ambulance to hospitals.

In London, 35 Greenpeace protesters rushed onto the floor of the International Petroleum Exchange in February, intending to paralyze oil trading on the day the Kyoto environmental initiative took effect, but, unexpectedly, the traders turned on them, punching and kicking the protesters until they ran for their lives. (Two were hospitalized.) Said one protester, "I've never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view." And New Zealand computer technician Simon Oosterman, 24, who says he goes naked everywhere in public to protest society's dependence on the automobile, paused outside an Auckland district courtroom in February, took clothing from his backpack, and got dressed to step inside to enter his not-guilty plea to an earlier charge of indecent exposure.

-- After several incidents of teacher-student sex in Florida, it was almost a relief in January that Perry, Fla., teacher Natalie Whalen, 58, was accused only of biting a student (who had tried to take a CD player from her desk) or that, in February, Orlando high school chemistry teacher David Pieski, 42, was accused only of teaching his class how to make a bomb. But the crisis returned in March when a man revealed in a divorce deposition that not only had he had trysts with his son's Boynton Beach elementary school music teacher, Carol Flannigan, but so had the son.

-- The Transportation Security Administration removed a screener from Newark Liberty International Airport in February, and scheduled retraining, after a passenger reported that she had inadvertently been allowed to pass a checkpoint with a butcher knife in her purse. The passenger, Katrina Bell, 27, was not charged with a crime because she had merely forgotten about the knife, having put it there earlier in the week before heading out on a "blind date."

-- In a suburb of Houston in February, a 16-year-old boy was charged with shooting his father, Jacob Hughes, 43, because he mistakenly believed Dad was beating up Mom. However (according to KPRC-TV), sheriff's deputies, after investigating the alleged domestic abuse, said that the couple were merely having robust sex, during which the mother apparently got really loud, which awakened and frightened the boy and his younger brother.

-- The executive director of Chicago's New City YMCA was fired in December following a major scheduling snafu. The facility's pool had been reserved for a kids' swim meet beginning on a Sunday morning at 7 a.m., but the facility had also been reserved (for Saturday overnight, until 8 a.m. Sunday) for a ball and fashion show for transsexuals. Parents arriving with their kids had to pass gaudily dressed men on their way to the locker rooms and allegedly found the floors littered with cigarette butts and condoms.

Beverly Fisher, 48, was arrested in Smyrna, Ga., in February for allegedly throwing cans of beer at one son and beating another because he had refused her request to roll marijuana joints for her. And police in New York charged in February that when Christopher DiMeo robbed the jewelry store in Glen Head and murdered a salesperson (one of an alleged string of brutal jewelry store robberies and murders), his mom, Maryann Taylor-Casey, was driving the getaway car.

Dallas artist James Sooy, 22, weary of his eyeglasses constantly slipping down his nose, had a practical piercing done in December, inserting a bar through the upper bridge of his nose and having his prescription lenses affixed to it. Sooy seemed to believe there was money to be made with the idea, but an optometrist interviewed by the Houston Chronicle said prescriptions would be harder to adjust "if you have a hole in your face," and a Houston body-modification technician said work like Sooy's would require a longer-than-normal healing time.

Matthew Porter, 25, was arrested on the Bear Creek Park Frisbee Golf Course in the Dallas suburb of Grapevine, Texas, in February, and charged with possession of marijuana after a police officer said he smelled dope in a group of men that included Porter. Porter had no marijuana on him at the time, but while the officer was checking the men's identification, Porter's Labrador retriever, J.D., emerged from an adjacent pond, apparently having obediently (though unwisely) "fetched" a plastic bag containing 4 grams of marijuana.

Another baseball fan sued after being hit by a foul ball that he allegedly first tried to catch (this time being Elkins Park, Pa., dentist Neil Pakett's lawsuit against the Philadelphia Phillies, in February). And the U.S. Forest Service again exercised its brand-new authority to send a bill to a person who started a major fire (this time the 2003 fire in California's Mendocino National Forest, for which Jason Hoskey, 26, was asked in February to please cover the firefighting cost of $18.2 million). And once again, a plane crashed into a cemetery, strewing bodies among the graves (this time killing two at the St. Lawrence Cemetery, Knottsville, Ky., in December).

Also in the news recently, the Norwegian tree ski-jumping championship was held in Hallingskarvet, in which the object was to ski into a tall tree and hang from it at a higher point than anyone else (March). And parent Peter Dukovich was acquitted of most charges in the post-game assault of a high school basketball referee after he testified that he didn't know the man was a referee (despite the striped shirt and his repeatedly blowing a whistle during the game) (Allegheny County, Pa., January). And two financially unsavvy Ramsey, N.J., teenage burglars were arrested after taking $100,000 in cash from a home but ignoring $900,000 in fully negotiable bearer bonds (January).

In February, Amanda Monti, 24, of Birkenhead, England, was sentenced to 30 months in jail for ripping off one of her ex-boyfriend's testicles with her bare hands in a rage over his refusal to have sex. (According to witnesses, Monti briefly hid the testicle in her mouth, but a friend retrieved it and handed it back to the man, saying, "That's yours.") Also in February, Welsh rugby fan Geoff Huish, 26, was so certain Wales would lose to England that he told club patrons in Caerphilly that he'd "cut (his) balls off" if Wales won. Immediately following Wales' 11-9 victory, Huish went home, fulfilled his promise, and walked, gingerly, back to the club to show that he was a "man" of his word.

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

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.)