The New Zealand agricultural company Summit-Quinphos revealed in March that it has a working model of an automated nitrogen-inhibiting sprayer that fits under a cow's tail, and that it has a government grant to develop the device. A company spokesman said nitrogen from cow urine, concentrated in small patches in a field, currently must be neutralized by expensively treating the entire field. However, the company's "tail-activated" gizmo immediately fires a blast of inhibiting chemical at the ground directly below every time the cow lifts her tail for a call of nature. (A New Zealand Herald reporter made Summit-Quinphos scientist Jamie Blennerhasset solemnly swear that the announcement was not an April Fool's joke.)

In March, an Iowa administrative law judge denied Barbara J. Dutton unemployment benefits, ruling that her firing as supply clerk at a 12-person Des Moines company was justified by her incompetence. According to records cited by the judge, Dutton had earnestly ordered office supplies during an 18-month period totaling about $230,000, including 16,000 Bic pens and nearly $15,000 worth of Scotch tape. Since there was no evidence of dishonesty, the company was left with the conclusion that she was simply overmatched in her job. Said she, "I didn't realize that I was not needing (everything)."

-- Communiques to Nowhere: TalkToAliens.com began taking orders in March, recording people's messages at $3.99 per minute and beaming them into space, aimed toward the Milky Way by a huge parabolic dish antenna in Connecticut on a relatively accessible FM frequency. And in December, German inventor Juergen Broether introduced his "telephonic angel" system (at about US$2,000), which is a battery-operated, underground loudspeaker that, buried at a gravesite, allows someone to speak into a microphone and have the messages amplified through the dirt to the departed for up to a year on a single battery charge.

-- A February Atlanta Journal-Constitution dispatch from El Alberto, Mexico (near Mexico City), profiled a theme park in which potential and wannabe emigrants to the United States can test their survival skills in an obstacle course that touches on the rigors migrants endure sneaking across the border. The cost of this rehearsal for a better life is an admission fee of the equivalent of US$13.

-- In November, Yeslam Bin Laden, one of 53 siblings and half-siblings of Osama, announced in Paris that he would soon bring to market upscale floral fragrances for men and women at about $30 an ounce, though the products will bear his first name rather than his last, for obvious reasons. (However, in February, the trademark authority in Switzerland, where Yeslam lives, resolved in his favor his long-held-up application to use the "Bin Laden" name commercially, in case he decides to.) Yeslam said he hasn't seen Osama in 17 years and is appalled by his Al-Qaeda activities.

-- Bureaucrats in North Korea's Communist Party, summarizing their understanding of the way the brain works, announced in January that, henceforth, all men would be expected to wear their hair short (2 inches, maximum) in that longer hair impairs function by taking oxygen away from the nerves in the head. (Balding men would be allowed another inch for comb-overs, and hair length of women was not addressed.)

-- In studies reported recently by mainstream researchers: (1) DNA-damaging cancers caused by heterocyclic amines were found reduced in rats that drank nonalcoholic beer instead of water (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry). (2) Tobacco-smoking apparently provides some protection against the onset of Parkinson's disease (Karolinska Institute of Sweden). (3) Overweight patients tend to survive better than nonoverweight patients the rigors of a certain cardiac-bypass procedure (coronary artery bypass grafting) (American Journal of Cardiology).

Heidi Erickson of Boston, one of America's more aggressive cat-hoarding women, made News of the Weird in 2003 when she raucously challenged her evictions from two homes where she allegedly was attempting to breed the "imperfections" out of Persian cats. Subsequently, she moved into the Plympton, Mass., home of Patricia Pima, a black hermaphrodite who raises champion horses. The friendship ended in February when passenger Erickson yelled at Pima for reading the Bible while driving on Interstate 495, resulting in Pima's ordering Erickson out of the car, which led to Erickson's filing a complaint with local authorities that Pima's home reeks so bad that it is a public health hazard.

(1) In six weddings this year in India, two boys and four girls were married in tribal-custom ceremonies to dogs, which is believed to bring better luck to children who have been cursed by teething first from the upper jaw ("dog teeth"). (Agence France-Presse reported that the four February marriages in Jharkhand state involved, thank goodness, dogs of the opposite gender from the spouse.) (2) In February, a Pakistani tribal council in Kacha Chohan (Punjab state) ordered a 2-year-old girl to marry a man, age 42, to punish the girl's uncle for having sex with that man's current wife (although the marriage will not be official until the girl turns 18).

The following people accidentally shot themselves recently: Off-duty sheriff's deputy Melissa Baird (while loading her gun to check out a noise in her yard) (Brandon, Fla., March). Accused home invader Paul K. Hardy, 40 (while unloading his gun as a goodwill gesture after he warmed up to his victims) (Martinsburg, W.Va., December). The one-legged Keith Caldwell, 32 (after grabbing his gun to investigate a noise, but deciding to hop around unsteadily rather than put on his prosthesis) (Tuscaloosa, Ala., January). Santiago Preciado-Alvarez, 54 (a typical waistband-for-a-holster accident while trying to scare off coyotes) (Rock County, Wis., February). Adrian White-Wolff, 20 (fooling around with his pistol in a car with friends) (Tucson, Ariz., March).

News of the Weird has reported on how single acts of sexual intercourse wound up costing men (e.g., tennis star Boris Becker) staggering amounts of money. In March, Harry C. Stonecipher resigned under pressure as CEO of Boeing for having an affair with a Boeing lobbyist, and the New York Post, examining regulatory filings, concluded that Stonecipher had thus forfeited bonuses and incentives that could have been worth about $38 million. While more than one act may have been involved, the pair were stationed in different cities, and published reports indicated that the affair had only recently begun.

In March, the Oregon board that enforces teachers' standards and practices charged Salem high school football and track coach (and science teacher) Scott Reed with gross neglect of duty after investigating parents' complaints that he routinely licked the bleeding wounds of his players to help them recover. In addition to knowledge he acquired as a teacher of science, Reed had also earlier taken the standard teachers' seminar on bodily fluid contact (which he was ordered by the board to retake).

The Maryland schoolteachers' union was found by the National Labor Relations Board to have violated labor law by obstructing two of its own staff members' challenges to working conditions (March). And a 59-year-old man drowned in a quarry near Hillsville, Pa., while testing his new water depth-finder (March). And two days before Easter, the city council in Mission Viejo, Calif., exasperated by the destruction of plants and shrubbery, authorized residents to shoot on sight the animals suspected of causing the damage: rabbits.

(CORRECTION: In the column released for March 20 publication, I reported that the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh had plagiarized some of the Web site text it posted to help writers on the subject of plagiarism. Actually, the plagiarized text concerned a different topic of help for writers. I apologize for the error.)

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

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.)