The inspirational Charles Gonsoulin of Los Angeles, pursuing a Canadian woman he had met on the Internet, sneaked across the border on foot in February from the North Dakota side (because a 1984 crime would have prevented his legal entry), heading for the bus station in Winnipeg, 75 miles away, even though he had no experience with sub-zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures. When police picked him up just inside Canada, he was disoriented and had such frostbite that he lost 10 fingers and most toes, but, he said later, "It was all worth it for me. It's the difference between sitting around dreaming about things and going out and getting them." "I know my life is complete." He was scheduled for deportation as soon as he recovers, and the pair still haven't met. The woman lives in a Montreal suburb, 1,400 miles from Winnipeg.

-- In March, Billy Reed, 49, of Fleetwood, Pa., lost a 19-month battle with the state Department of Transportation over his insistence that he has a right to have his eyes closed in his driver's license photo, because of freedom of expression and his "right to happiness." After a Commonwealth Court ruled against him, Reed (who said he studies law in his spare time) said he would probably appeal. "I didn't set out on this as a mission. It's one of those things that happen in life. Here you are. Life takes you down a path, and you end up where you are."

-- In 1989, after his release from prison on petty crimes, John L. Stanley undertook the serious study of criminology, lecturing and even hosting a Dallas radio program on crime, but in December, he confessed to robbing a Commerce Bank in Kansas City, Mo., because he needed to return to prison to further his study, telling the judge, "(T)here are some things about crime you can't understand unless you get into the belly of the beast" and that he needed to "be secluded and do the things I need to do while I still have the time." "You can take a butterfly and put it on a light stand, but until you are a butterfly and fly, you can't understand why a butterfly flies." (Stanley showed up for sentencing in March in a wheelchair, which was the result of his, not surprisingly, being beaten up by another inmate.)

-- A female Zimbabwean athlete who had won several track and field events at meets in Botswana and Mauritius was arrested in Harare in February after authorities discovered she actually had a small penis. Samulkeliso Sithole, 17, said she was born a hermaphrodite but that her parents had paid a traditional healer to make her totally female, and, "because" her parents failed to pay the healer's full fee, the penis had begun to grow.

-- Not My Fault: In separate incidents, trespassers Philip Dederer, 20, in Australia and Carl Murphy, 18, in England were awarded the equivalent of around US$1 million each in March after they were injured, even though blatantly trespassing on private property. Dederer, now a paraplegic, had disregarded "no diving" signs and continued to jump into the Wallamba River until an accident occurred. A sympathetic judge regarded the signs inadequate, in that none said that diving was "dangerous." Murphy, now partially blinded and with 17 metal plates in his head from a 40-foot fall in a warehouse, claimed that if a perimeter fence had not been broken, he never would have gotten in to have his accident.

-- Lame: (1) Farm hand Dean Schwankert, 37, was charged with lewdness in February for allegedly, while naked, pursuing his boss, a 75-year-old woman, through her house and asking for sex; Schwankert told police he was merely making a nude inquiry of what time it was (Lyndeborough, N.H.). (2) And Paul Callahan (who made News of the Weird last year when he attempted to rob a copy shop in Boston thinking it was a bank) asked for a lenient sentence for the two bank robberies he committed later that same day, claiming a motive (in the words of his lawyer) "to validate his being a man of strength" after having suffered sexual abuse as a Catholic altar boy.

During an emergency in December, Westminster (Md.) High School's policy on evacuating wheelchair-using students came to light, to the horror of two disabled students' parents. While smoke filled the building and the panicked students exited, teachers brought the two students to the second-floor stairwell and, rather than risk liability for mishandling them, teachers were instructed to get out themselves, and leave the students there to await trained firefighters. (A month later, a special committee clarified the policy, urging that the students be left only in smoke-free stairwells.)

Dr. Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University Medical School, told a conference in Brisbane, Australia, in March that he donates blood regularly because one of the key reasons why females outlive males is menstruation. Perls said iron loss inhibits the growth of free radicals that age cells. "I menstruate," he said, "but only every eight weeks."

-- In a February report to the U.S. Department of Education, the District of Columbia public school system revealed a chronic-truancy rate of 23 percent (15,000 of its 65,000 students absent without excuse at least 15 days a year), many times higher than the rate for adjacent or comparable jurisdictions. (However, a March report of the D.C. Inspector General partially undermined that number, pointing out that the schools' $4.5 million computer system was incapable of identifying which students are at which schools.)

-- In February, the Washington, D.C., Department of Health chose an elementary school cafeteria as the site for a weekend sterilization/vaccination program for stray and feral cats. Although workers put down plastic sheets and towels, when students and teachers arrived the next school day, they were overwhelmed with odors of ether and cat urine. Only then did officials decide to cancel lunch, and classes, for a complete cleaning and disinfecting.

Women's groups in Mexico City, working from a building donated by the municipal government, are preparing a retirement home for at least 65 elderly prostitutes, according to a March Reuters dispatch. Among the candidates that Reuters interviewed was Gloria Maria, who says she is 74 years old and "can't charge what the young ones do" but still has "two or three clients a day." [Reuters, 3-17-05]

Lawrence M. Small, the chief executive of the Smithsonian Institution, was convicted in 2004 for his collection of South American artifacts that include the feathers of 219 birds protected by the Endangered Species Act, and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service. Hearst Newspapers reported in February that Small had not yet begun his sentence, in that he is still negotiating for the right to serve it by spending 100 hours lobbying Congress to change the Endangered Species Act.

In October, two pilots of the regional Pinnacle Airlines, with no one else on board, told air controllers they were taking the craft to its highest listed altitude (41,000) feet "to have a little fun," but then engines failed. In their last communication before crashing (according to transcripts published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in March), the crew asked "Is that cool" if they took the plane to a lower altitude to try to restart the engines. And in separate fatal incidents, two 20-year-old men assumed that military flak vests are bulletproof. (They are designed only to protect against shrapnel.) A vest-wearing man in Orofino, Idaho, "dared" his friend to shoot him (December), and another, in Hobart, Ind., asked to be shot to prepare him for his upcoming military service (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.)

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.)