Not the Hardiest of Citizens: Windsor, Ontario, hair stylist Waddah (Martin) Mustapha was awarded the equivalent of about US$270,000 by a court in April after he testified that he became racked with depression upon seeing a fly inside a commercial bottle of water at his salon. Presumably, damages would have been more if Mustapha had actually drunk from the bottle (or even opened it). As it was, he and his wife vomited, and he required extensive psychotherapy for nightmares, loss of sense of humor, increased argumentativeness, lack of desire to shower regularly, and constipation.

-- In April, Laura and Edmund Gerstein of Boca Raton, Fla., who want to save their beloved backyard grapefruit tree from the state's citrus canker eradication program, formally claimed immunity for the tree under a provision in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Gersteins pointed to a paragraph on protecting crops needed for civilians' survival during wartime, in that, said Edmund, "As I understand it, (the U.S.) is in a state of war." (Responded a state Department of Agriculture spokesman, "That tree will be coming down.")

-- An arbitration panel in April issued a two-year suspension to champion cyclist Tyler Hamilton for having transfused another person's blood for a race in Spain last year. At the panel's hearing in March, according to an April New York Times story, Hamilton and his lawyers had denied the charge and raised the possibility that maybe Hamilton had a "vanishing twin" who had shared the womb with him during his first trimester, which would account for why he wound up with some blood that doesn't match his "other" blood.

-- More Compelling Explanations: (1) Police in Morrisville, Vt., who arrested a teenager in April for allegedly removing a corpse's head in a cemetery tomb, said the suspect had spoken of using the head as a marijuana bong. (2) A young woman who in December sued an Austin, Texas, distributor of steamy "spring break" videos, admitted that she had consented to be in a video topless, but now said she was only 17 at the time (and therefore a minor) and now fears the video's circulation will hamper her in "college," "career" and "church."

-- In March, Jonathan P. Mitchell, dressed in black and wet from crawling in the nighttime mud up to a store in the KOA campground near Watsonville, Calif., was found by police, stuck and dangling from the rafters after trying to climb in through the roof. However, the manager admitted that he had not locked the door that night and that Mitchell could have just walked in. Three weeks earlier, in Fostoria, Ohio, thieves broke in and carried off a safe in the office of a local organization that serves the poor (Fostoria Bureau of Concern), but director Susan Simpkins said that not only was the safe empty but the bureau had decided to junk it a while back and was looking for someone to haul it away.

-- Thanh Nhat Le, 51, was arrested in Dorchester, Mass., in April, when he tried to cash a check he wrote to himself for $7,550 on his account at a Sovereign Bank. He had opened the account two weeks earlier, handing over $171 in small bills. He was certain that he had plenty of money in his account, though, because in the interim, he had also mailed the bank three checks for deposit: one for $250,000, one for $2 million, and one for $4 billion.

In Springfield, Mass., in April, Thomas P. Budnick became the most recent man who was convicted at a trial in which he had persuaded the judge to let him act as his own lawyer, to then argue with a straight face on appeal that his conviction should be overturned because his trial lawyer was incompetent. (The decision is pending.)

(1) Homelier-looking kids get taken care of by their parents less attentively than do the good-looking ones (e.g., they don't get buckled into carts as frequently in supermarkets, and are allowed to drift further away in the store) (reported Dr. Andrew Harrell, University of Alberta, April). (2) Gay men resemble women in their approach to reading road maps (determining directions by, for example, use of landmarks, rather than the typical heterosexual male approach of spatial reasoning) (reported by psychobiologist Oazi Rahman, University of East London, February).

-- Arrested for murder recently: Darrell Wayne Maness, 19, Wilmington, N.C. (January); Timothy Wayne Ebert, 40, Cleveland, Texas (February); John Wayne Blair, 49, Sevier County, Tenn. (April); Derek Wayne Jackson, 18, Norristown, Pa. (April); Nathaniel Wayne Hart, 34, Austin, Texas (April). Convicted of murder: Donald Wayne Shipe, 37, Winchester, Va. (May). Sentenced for murder: Emmanuel Wayne Harris, 28, Bisbee, Ariz. (February). Executed for murder: Dennis Wayne Bagwell, 41, Huntsville, Texas (February); Lonnie Wayne Pursley, 43, Huntsville, Texas (May). Committed suicide while suspected of murder: Eric Wayne Jacobs, 27, Castroville, Calif. (April).

-- And a Classic Middle Name Special: In April, in New Scotland, N.Y., Jean Balashek, 86, was found murdered, and police charged her daughter, Corianna Thompson, with the crime. Thompson's birth name was Corey Wayne Balashek, and before his sex change, he had served nine years for another killing. (Thus, Thompson/Balashek may be the first American ever charged with homicide in both genders.)

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (73) Pranksters who playfully carry away a prominent local mascot figure and abuse it or subject it to a "ransom" demand or photograph it in zany places, such as people who took the stuffed buffalo from the field house at Milligan College (Elizabethton, Tenn.) and suspended it from the ceiling of the campus chapel (April). And (74) the toddler who grabs the family's car keys and somehow manages to drive a respectable distance at least semi-safely, as did the 4-year-old boy in Sand Lake, Mich., who drove his mother's car a quarter mile to a video store in the middle of the night (February).

The Defense Department's March 30 progress report on the post-9-11 upgrading of its needs for foreign language professionals showed the Pentagon (41 months after the attacks) just now getting around to learning how many of its people already speak a foreign language. According to the document's chronology (reported in April by Slate.com), it was not until May 2004 that a formal decision was made to "assess (foreign) language needs" and form a "steering committee." By July 2005, the Pentagon is to issue "guidance" for how to manage a stepped-up program, and by December 2005 to create a database of personnel with foreign language skills. The management system for how to run such a program is to be in place by September 2007, after which, presumably, attention to the actual upgrading of skills can begin.

In January, a 69-year-old minister at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oviedo, Fla., suffered a fatal heart attack in mid-sentence during a sermon, as he was quoting the scholar John Wesley, "And when I go to heaven...." And in April, at least 52 Hindu pilgrims drowned in India's holy Narmada River when a power-generation dam upstream released water. And in February, at least 59 worshipers were killed in a fire in a mosque in Tehran, Iran, when a worshiper's veil ignited from a kerosene stove.

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

Jeanette Hall, 29, one of the world's few female taxidermists, enjoyed a mainstream practice in Nevada (elk heads, bear rugs, even some novelties like deer testicles) until she decided recently to create sofa pillows with one side made from the actual fur of her clients' dogs and cats (horses and cows handled, also), for fees of $65 to $150. Though her customers were satisfied ("Most people," Hall said, "were happy that Fluffy was still on the couch"), Hall said others considered her work "sick," and she was deluged with "hundreds of hate e-mails from all over the globe," from "people threatening to burn down my house." (Consequently, she has temporarily retired her pillow work.)

-- Tattoo/piercing parlor owner Paul Collurafici lost a contentious race in April for mayor of the Chicago suburb of River Grove, Ill., the victim not so much of his opponent, Marilynn May, but of her ardent supporter, local official Raymond Bernero, who ranted publicly about Collurafici's work. Bernero disclosed that Collurafici's Web site previously displayed photos of genital and nipple piercings, among other examples of his craft. Said Bernero, "I'm a big fan of vaginas, but this is really gross," "with stuff stuck through there." Bernero later apologized for his candor and requested that people stop asking him if there was an actual "fan club" they could join.

-- Are We Safe? (1) Congress' Government Accountability Office reported in March that, mainly because of gun owners' privacy rights, the FBI or state officials were unable to stop 47 of the 58 gun purchases by people who were on the FBI's own terrorist "watch list" (during a nine-month period last year). (2) A February report of the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general accused the agency of intentionally disbursing seaport-security grant money widely across the country instead of greatly increasing inspections at the 10 ports through which nearly 80 percent of trade moves (a practice that resulted in maritime grants for Oklahoma, Kentucky, New Hampshire and Tennessee).

-- The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported in April that last year's hurricane season in Florida caused 123 storm-related deaths, but that 315 families managed to convince the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for their relatives' funerals as storm-related. And in April, the scheduled elections for town offices in Monticello, Wis., never took place because, as Town Clerk Walt Weber told Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel, "We forgot."

(According to Weber, none of the incumbents, including himself, would have been challenged anyway.)

-- To conceal an enormous open-cast mining operation about 10 miles from Newcastle, England, and to reduce the cost of carting away millions of tons of debris, the mining company recently hired artist Charles Jencks to incorporate the waste into a reclining female sculpture, a half-mile long, running along the A1 highway, with breasts forming peaks 100 feet off the ground. The "Goddess of the North" is expected to take three years to finish, will have footpaths over and around it, and be slightly larger than the "Angel of the North" metal sculpture 15 miles to the south.

-- German artist Winfried Witt has invited about 30 people to his latest installation, which will be to observe the late-May birth of his and wife Ramune Gele's first child, in Berlin's DNA-Galerie. Though more than 100 million babies are born every year on Earth, Witt promised that his viewers will participate in "an exceptional experience" in that "man, because he is unique, is an existential object of art." Witt wants to "show living people, perceived at the same time as object and subject, through a kind of magnifying glass and to expose man in the situations of his personal life."

Animal welfare professors at Britain's Bristol University, preparing for a June conference on Compassion in World Farming, said they will present research to show that cows experience pain, fear and happiness; can form friendships in a herd; are good problem-solvers (with encephalograph-measured brainwaves suddenly active when they searched for a path to food); and can hold grudges against other cows for months or years.

-- Travis Williams, 25, and his passenger, Brandon Calmese, 27, were arrested in March when sheriff's deputies decided to pull them over after seeing them driving on Interstate 380 near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at 55 mph with the hood up and both men craning their necks out the window to see where they were going. A week before that, in Hemet, Calif., a 21-year-old man was hospitalized (with DUI charges pending) after hitting two parked cars, a tree, a fence, and a bus, driving a car with the hood sticking up and deployed airbags flapping in the wind.

-- Joseph R. Holland, 23, who escaped in February from prison in Schuylkill County, Pa. (near Allentown), but who was captured the following day, wrote to a judge in March disputing the escape charge against him: (1) The warden never told him he couldn't escape, he said (in his syntax-challenged petition). "(I) was never provided with any orientation, a handbook or ever signed any contract ... I was never informed to follow any rules, cause I knew no rules!" (2) "I wasn't gone over 24 hours, and all my personal belongings were ever here. I had every intention of coming back, who's to say any different?" (3) And besides, he said, the guards actually opened the gate for him (even though it was really for another inmate coming in, with Holland managing to sneak out at the same time).

A News of the Weird icon, New York public-transit devotee Darius McCollum, 39, was sentenced in April to three years in prison for his latest commandeering of a train and subsequent joyride. Court records showed this was his 20th incident involving trains or buses, an obsession that has so far caused him to spend about a third of his life behind bars. "I just love trains," he had told arresting officers. (A week later, police in Melbourne, Australia, charged a 15-year-old boy with two recent incidents of commandeering municipal trams and acting out the role of transit driver, picking up and discharging passengers on the routes. He told police he hopes to be a tram driver when he grows up.)

News of the Weird has reported several times on the celebratory but bloody Easter week crucifixions practiced in the Philippines, especially in San Pedro Cutud, which has become an international tourist destination for the exhibitions. This year, Pampanga province police officials decided to fold department discipline into the ceremonies by offering 20 wayward officers who had earlier been absent without leave to do penance by carrying wooden crosses in the festival and that officers with more than 120 absent days volunteer to be crucified, after which they would be reinstated.

(1) Manuel Fraga, a local official from Galicia in northern Spain, speaking in January in support of the Vatican's tough position on contraception: "I have spent my life telling the truth without condoms, and I plan to die without ever having worn one." (2) Science executive Douglas Carpenter (of the high-tech defense contractor Quantumsphere), on the difficulty of convincing the Pentagon to graduate to weapons made of "nanometals," which pack much more explosive power than current weapons: "Getting the government to change the way they kill people is difficult."

In mid-April, the Arab-Israeli town of Shfaram (near Haifa), to promote peace and brotherhood, was scheduled to play host to the world's first international festival of mimes. And the following week, the city of Grand Rapids, Mich., was descended upon by about 300 practitioners in this year's Clowns of America International convention.

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

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.)