Eating disorders have such a hold on many young women that some Internet sites glorify anorexia and bulimia as a quasi-divinity, using religious language to command obedience to a goddess of thinness known as "Ana," according to a May story in Minneapolis' Star Tribune. Said one Minnesota college freshman, "Ana is definitely a higher power, not higher than God, but higher than myself." There are Ana prayers, Ana psalms and Ana commandments. One site has instructions for a ritual at an altar, culminating in a blood contract "with the anorexia deity." An Arizona doctor reported that a 13-year-old anorexia patient suddenly spoke "an incantation, like a hex, as if to scare me off."

-- In April, the Fat Duck restaurant, in the countryside west of London, was voted in a poll by 500 industry experts as the world's best (in spite of specialties such as "sardine on toast sorbet" and "leather, oak and tobacco chocolates"). (It had rallied from a bad health inspection report the year before, according to The Guardian newspaper, in which it was graded "borderline" for staphylococcus and listeria, and experienced "cross-contamination" and hand-washing problems.)

-- Almost ready for release is Spanish designer Pep Torres' "Your Turn" washing machine, developed to encourage sharing of housework. Household users, such as a husband and wife, initially register their fingerprints, and Your Turn will not then operate by the same person's print twice in a row. Another product, still in development, is Briton James Larsson's use of lie-detector technology on restaurant utensils so that socially incompetent diners can better gauge how their dinner dates feel about them, by measuring stress as they eat. Reasoned Larsson, "Geeks have major challenges dating."

-- Tobin Bros. funeral home in Melbourne, Australia, introduced a rental option this year for families that seem to have gotten over their grieving: a leather-upholstered, chrome-outfitted van, with mini-bar and DVD player, so that the family can relax on the way to the cemetery (with room for the casket in back). Owner Martin Tobin said the van might not be for everyone.

-- Professor Mikhail Sokolshchik of Russia's National Medical Surgical Center performed a two-stage penile lengthening early this year on a 28-year-old virgin, adding 5 inches to what was an almost dysfunctionally small organ. Sokolshchik first removed the tip and stitched it onto the patient's forearm so that he could graft more tissue onto it (from elsewhere on the arm). After the tip lengthened, he reattached it to its proper place. According to an April dispatch from Moscow in London's Daily Telegraph, Sokolshchik is optimistic that all functions will be restored (though he said the man will probably be permanently semi-erect).

-- In April, two former Cornell University entomologists, in what they said was a show of respect, named three new species of beetles that feed on slime mold after President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. "We admire these leaders," said Quentin Wheeler, for their "courage" "to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy ...." The Agathidium bushi are found in Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina, while the cheneyi and rumsfeldi are native to Mexico.

-- A French biologist, writing in an April issue of the journal Nature, described a species of Amazonian tree ant that not only builds complex traps (using plant fibers, regurgitated vegetation and organic mold) but then lies in wait to grab a passing insect with its jaws so that it can stretch it out in the trap in a manner resembling (according to an Agence France-Presse report on the article) "a victim on a medieval rack."

-- In 2001, News of the Weird, summarizing a report in the Chicago Tribune, wrote that physician Krishnaswami Sriram of Lake Forest, Ill., had been charged with 64 counts related to Medicare fraud based on billings for, among other improbabilities, two 70-hour days, one day with 131 house calls, and 32 patient-visits subsequent to their dates of death. In April 2005, following hearings on the charges and the sorting out of Sriram's records, federal judge John Darrah absolved Sriram of trying to cheat the government and found him guilty only of "chronically inept" bookkeeping (at a total loss to the government not of $15 million, as prosecutors claimed, but $1,258). Sriram pleaded guilty to three counts and was put on probation.

-- News of the Weird has already reported that some people have a fondness for inserting 3-inch steel hooks in their skin and hanging from pulleys for minutes, or even an hour, at a time. In April, about 100 such aficionados attended a gathering in Providence, R.I., and participants seemed thrilled, according to a Reuters dispatch. A Connecticut teen: "It was euphoric. It was spiritual. I'd do it again today if I wasn't so sore." A woman, watching her boyfriend slowly swing: "Look at his face. He's so serene. We've had some really rough times this year, and he needed this really bad." A Canadian man: "The first couple of times, I didn't enjoy it. The first time, I blacked out, and one time I was convulsing. But the third time I got better. I wasn't blacking out anymore."

-- Vickey Siles, 35, was arrested in New Haven, Ind., last year and charged with altering a check from the Globe Life and Accident Co. The check was for $1, but Siles had badly obliterated the amount and written in "$4,000,000.00." Furthermore, she believed that she could cash a check for that amount at a neighborhood check-cashing shop (but a clerk alerted authorities). The job was so pitifully done that in March 2005, a judge gave her only a suspended sentence and probation.

-- A Chicago gas-station clerk tricked a robber in February by the simple ploy of telling him there was more money "up there," pointing toward the ceiling. The robber looked, then said, "What are you talking about? There's no money up there." However, there was a surveillance camera there, and police were grateful for a full-face shot of the robber, according to WMAQ-TV.

Accidents by elderly drivers who police suspect momentarily confused the gas pedal for the brake: Age 88, crashed into a bank (killing a customer), St. Pete Beach, Fla. (February). Age 85, crashed into a post office, West Salem, Ore. (December). Age 87, crashed into an animal hospital, Lynchburg, Va. (December). Age 88, hit two cars and two people in a Wal-Mart parking lot, Pembroke Pines, Fla. (January). Age 81, crashed into a car dealership after hitting her husband, a salesman, a car and a tree, Fort Myers, Fla. (April). Age 84, crashed into her son, waiting to be picked up at the front door upon discharge from a hospital, Manchester, N.H. (May) (He had to be readmitted.).

In Hong Kong in March, a 21-year-old man, reportedly upset about a recent breakup with his girlfriend, responded in a manner familiar to readers of News of the Weird: He tossed almost everything in his 35th-floor apartment out the window. (No injuries were reported.) And in Gang Mills, N.Y., in March, after neighbors reported a disturbance at the home of Billy Abbey, 31, police surrounded the house and, for the next 11 hours, tried to coax him out, but, as some perps have done in the past, Abbey slept through the whole thing, oblivious to the siege.

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

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.)