While Congress and the sports world are busy condemning the use of steroids as "cheating," golfer Tiger Woods and other athletes have already artificially enhanced their natural abilities with impunity through Lasik eye surgery (improving vision to 20/15 or 20/10). More ominously, according to a Wired magazine story in March, the time will soon come when perfectly healthy baseball pitchers and other athletes choose so-called "Tommy John surgery" (until now performed only to repair ruptured arm ligaments), which can make an elbow even stronger than it naturally was, allowing pitchers to achieve higher velocity than ever. Other predicted enhancements include the removal, re-engineering, and re-insertion of leg, arm and shoulder muscle cells to add strength.

-- The North Dakota legislature voted in April to ease licensing for carrying concealed weapons by removing the shooting test (to hit a miniature human silhouette at 21 feet), but that was over the objection of licensee Carey McWilliams, 31, who told an Associated Press reporter in March, "You've got to have standards." McWilliams, who hit the target 10 out of 10 in his most recent test, is legally blind, able to distinguish only shades of light (thus apparently giving new meaning to "concealed weapon" when he looks for his).

-- Veteran criminal George Kaminski, 53, complained in March to a Sharon (Pa.) Herald reporter about his most recent prison assignment, to a minimum-security facility in Mercer, Pa., because the grounds were short on clover. Kaminski has collected 72,927 four-leaf clovers in the last 10 years, entirely on the grounds of various prisons, but he is alarmed that an Alaskan man now claims to have 76,000 and has applied to the Guinness Book for recognition. "The (Alaskan) guy's got the whole world," said Kaminski, "(but) I have two or three acres."

-- The Netherlands Healthcare Inspectorate issued a report in March accusing some dermatologists at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam of concealing the local outbreak of a sexually transmitted disease in 2003 just so they could publish a first-in-time article about it in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases later that year. Infections of lymphogranuloma venereum went from 14 at the time of initial outbreak to more than 100 now. (The EMC doctors acknowledged not reporting the initial outbreak, but said the disease was not at that time on the list of diseases required to be reported.)

-- A 24-year-old woman was hospitalized in April in Nassau County, N.Y., after her boyfriend, tossing sticks to his dog, decided to toss his knife, instead, but the knife's handle loop caught on a finger when he flung it, and it snapped back, lodging in the woman's neck. She corroborated the story, and the man was not criminally charged. (An officer asked him, "When you threw the knife, what did you expect the dog to do?")

-- Burglars who fall asleep on the job is a retired News of the Weird category, but Steven Jakaitis, 42, was arrested in Quincy, Mass., in March outside a CVS pharmacy, where police said he fell asleep while preparing to rob the place. His car was idling; a stocking was on his head and a pistol in his pocket; and the piece of paper beside him read, "I have a Gun DO NOT Press any Alarms or let Custermors (sic) know Empty the All (sic) the register."

Gasoline-sniffer Brian Taylor, 36, was sentenced to three months in jail in March for violating a UK "anti-social behaviour order" by loitering around the pumps at a gas station in Middlesbrough, England. According to evidence of multiple such incidents, Taylor often dangerously reeks of gasoline fumes and is sometimes aggressive in his pursuit of a fix, including jostling gas-pumping customers. Once, he was filmed on a security camera doing an uninhibited dance after taking a huff. He apparently prefers unleaded but will settle for diesel, and denies that he drinks any of it: "I'm daft but not that daft."

As many as 10 percent of Japanese youths may be living in "epic sulks" as hermits ("hikikomori"), according to a March Taipei Times dispatch from Tokyo, thus representing no improvement in the already alarming problem that was described in a News of the Weird report in 2000. Many of the hikikomori, in fact, still live in their parents' homes and simply never leave their bedrooms. Among the speculation as to cause: school bullying, academic pressure, poor social skills (after obsessively whiling away hours at video games), unaccessible father figures, and an education system that suppresses youths' sense of adventure.

-- John W. Hill of High View, W.Va., was arrested near St. Louis in March after sheriff's deputies had stopped to investigate why he was parked alongside I-70. He was shirtless, wearing an Indian vest, cargo pants and combat boots, had several loaded pistols, an assault rifle, a two-shot Derringer, two long rifles, a serious knife, 400 rounds of ammo and various drugs. He said only that he was headed to South Dakota Indian country to deliver supplies and a sack full of Bibles to children, and that he was armed because the West is "dangerous." He was charged with possessing a loaded weapon while intoxicated.

-- A British farm couple recently handed officials of the East Lindsey District Council a surveillance video of an elderly couple that they said have been driving by from time to time and leaving pairs of new shoes (with price tags still affixed) on their property, with no explanation. The farmers, Jason and Claire Foster, said more than 30 pairs have been dropped off since December, and the council's investigation was continuing, according to a March BBC News report.

-- One News of the Weird "No Longer Weird" category was apparently retired prematurely, in that there has rarely been a sighting of it for years now. However, on April 7, a 48-year-old man drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Anchorage, Alaska, failed to come to a complete stop, bumped into a wall of the building, backed up, parked, walked inside nonchalantly, and got his driver's license renewed. Although workers in the accounting offices of the building were shaken up (one thought an earthquake had hit), no one inside knew exactly what had happened until police arrived. The driver failed a coordination test and was charged with DUI based on a prescription medication he was taking.

-- Urban Legend Come to Life: A San Diego Union Tribune report of a March 28 attempted robbery seems accurate, though reminiscent of reports that have been hoaxes (including one, from The Dallas Morning News, that News of the Weird fell for in 2002). A 32-year-old woman reported that a robber accosted her and her dog in an upscale San Diego neighborhood that night, demanded her money, grabbed a bag she was holding but quickly threw it down, and in frustration, tried to shoot the dog (but the gun failed to fire). He finally fled. His frustration was because she was carrying no money, and the bag contained nothing but the results of cleaning up after the dog.

According to police in Lake City, Mich., the plan of the 19-year-old man in March was to stab himself lightly in the chest, call 911, and blame the "attack" on a neighbor with whom he had been feuding, but he handled it badly and bled to death. And police in Corpus Christi, Texas, said that the 42-year-old man who died of a brain hemorrhage in March was at the time trying to steal a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary from Turner's Gardenland nursery.

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

Ivy League Blues: In March, a Princeton University graduate student in applied mathematics, Michael Lohman, was arrested, suspected by police of being the guy who has been assaulting Asian women on campus for weeks by snipping locks of their hair or by furtively doctoring their drinks with unspecified "bodily fluids" in the dining hall. And a week after that, in Rockport, Mass., a chaired professor of economics at Harvard, Martin Weitzman, was charged with larceny after a farmer said Weitzman has long been trespassing and hauling away manure for his own nearby farm, thus denying the farmer his market price of $35 per truckload.

-- (1) Mr. Mamadou Obotimbe Diabikile was shot by police and arrested after his unsuccessful attempt to rob the Mali Development Bank in Bamako, Mali, in March, in part hindered by the nearly seven pounds of magic charms he was wearing to make himself invisible. (2) Musician Edna Chizema went on trial in March in Harare, Zimbabwe, for allegedly defrauding Ms. Magrate Mapfumo by convincing her to pay the equivalent of US$5,000 for Chizema to fly in four invisible mermaids (folkloric goddesses of revenge, according to the Shona people) from London to help recover Mapfumo's stolen car.

-- Kim Chan, 40, of a village in the Cambodian province of Kampot, announced in March that he had a cow that was heavenly possessed and could cure illnesses by exposure to its bodily fluids, but local official Khun Somnang immediately discounted the claim, saying, "We had a holy cow here a year and a half ago (and you) don't get two that close together."

-- According to a February report in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, Itzik Simkowitz is suing a pet shop owner in Beersheeba for selling him a sickly Galerita-type cockatoo (price: the equivalent of about US$2,000) that died shortly after Simkowitz got him home. As in a classic Monty Python sketch, the shop owner initially insisted that the parrot was merely lethargic and needed time to adjust to his new surroundings, but when the parrot (to use the Python dialogue) was shown to be "a late parrot," "an ex-parrot," "a stiff," and to have "joined the choir invisible," the shop owner still refused to return the money.

-- In the Stephen King novel, "Christine" was the name of the demonic car, but Christine Djordjevic of South Haven, Ind., is the owner of a car that started and drove off, unattended, in March and crashed into her neighbor's home. Police concluded that the culprit was Djordjevic's remote starter, which had been installed by the previous owner imprudently, in that, on stick-shift cars, it can work in gear.

-- Fred Simunovic was charged with armed robbery of a Key West, Fla., credit union, with "armed" referring to the pitchfork he was waving (March). And a man fled after attempting to rob a shopkeeper in Central Park Plaza in Jacksonville, Ill., in January by first threatening her and then slapping her several times with a fly swatter (January).

-- William Woodard, 39, suspected by police in the Trenton, N.J., area of more than 50 burglaries, was arrested in March, and authorities said they were confident they could match him to what had become one of the "signatures" of the crime spree: random splotches of excrement at several crime scenes. In the course of the arrest, a highly nervous Woodard failed to control his bowels, and police have submitted samples for DNA testing.

Christopher Garcia, 46, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was turned down for unemployment benefits in March because an administrative judge found that he was properly fired by a convenience store for misconduct in that he would not stop "air drumming" on duty (using real drumsticks), causing some customers to complain of feeling threatened. And in March in Rajahmundry, India (about 300 miles south of Hyderabad), officials termed "resounding(ly) success(ful)" their tax-collection tactic of sending several teams of two drummers to stand outside the defaulters' homes and pound their instruments until the debtors paid up.

Tony Young, 35, made the news in January in Flint, Mich., when he tried to stop the theft of his Mustang ("my pride and joy") by grabbing the spoiler and hanging on for 20 minutes as the thief drove through Flint and on two interstate highways at speeds up to 80 mph, trying to shake him off. Young still managed to call 911 on his cell phone and describe his route until police could join the chase, which ended when the driver fled on foot and was captured. (Two weeks later, "Young" was arrested and charged with breaking into a home, and police discovered that his real name is Anthony Barry and that he has served two stretches in prison.)

Two groups of Aryan supremacists who fled Germany to establish utopias in South America were in the news recently, regarding their descendants' colonies in southern Chile ("Colonia Dignidad") and in Paraguay ("Nueva Germania"). Colonia leader Paul Schafer, 83, who reportedly commanded total obedience from his sect of 300 farmers (who remain, culturally and technologically, in the 1940s), was arrested in Argentina as a fugitive from charges of having sex with his camp's children. And prominent California musician-composer David Woodard was reported by the San Francisco Chronicle in March to be carrying musical and electronic equipment to Paraguay to reinvigorate Nueva Germania as an "Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle" as per composer Richard Wagner's vision of an aesthetic outpost of Germanic culture.

According to police in New York City, schoolteacher Wayne Brightly, 38, who was having trouble passing the state's modest certification exam, paid a former mentor, Rubin Leitner, to take the test for him. Though Leitner is a learned man, he is also age 58, white, chubby and afflicted with the autism-like Asperger's syndrome, while Brightly is 38, black and thin. When Leitner (using the fake ID Brightly had supplied) scored high on the test, officials naturally wanted to interview Brightly to ask about his sudden brilliance, but Brightly decided to send Leitner to the meeting, instead, virtually assuring that the ruse would collapse.

In March 2003, as an edgy Washington, D.C., prepared for possible domestic terrorist reactions to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, David Olaniyi and wife Reena Patel were arrested at the Capitol, where they had embarked on an "art" project consisting of Olaniyi wearing a mask and objects duct-taped to his body, resembling the appearance of a suicide bomber. (Said Olaniyi at the time, "Duct tape is a hot item in D.C. I wanted my art to reflect what was hot here.") Apparently, Olaniyi continues to believe the Capitol police had no cause to be fearful of suicide bombers, for he filed a lawsuit in March 2005 against police and FBI agents for violating his first-amendment rights by arresting him.

(1) A pregnant woman named Akono was quoted in a March Agence France-Presse dispatch from London during demonstrations against U.S. policy in Iraq as saying she planned to intensify her own protest by soon going on a hunger strike, reasoning that she wants "to do everything I can to make sure my child has a secure future." (2) Montana State University student Jeffrey Pumo, 21, arrested in connection with some shootings of marbles at people in February, was quoted in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle as saying, "I'm looking forward to proving my innocence on the majority of these counts."

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.)