British store owners seeking to drive away obnoxious, congregating teenagers have turned to security consultant Howard Stapleton's recent invention, similar to a dog whistle, that emits a high-frequency sound audible to most teens but few older people. "The Mosquito" (it's "small and annoying," Stapleton told a New York Times reporter, who vouched that she couldn't hear it, either) emits what one merchant called a pulsating chirp, not painful but surely irritating. A professor of neurophysiology verified that the ability to hear high frequency dissipates with age but that some people in their 20s and 30s could probably still hear it.

-- (1) Robbin Doolin, 31, accidentally fell from her car while driving on U.S. 71 in Kansas City, Mo., in July when she opened the door to spit and leaned too far. (She quickly jumped up and chased her car, which left the road and ran down an embankment.) (2) In Amarillo, Texas, Bobby Reynolds, 74, and his son Gary, 43, were hospitalized in July after an incident in which their car got stuck on tracks at a railroad crossing. After unsuccessfully trying the move it, reported the Amarillo Globe-News, they somehow fell asleep in the car and were later hit by a train.

-- In November, Parker Houghtaling, 23, standing on a station platform in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was hit in the head when he leaned out too far over the tracks as a Metro-North train was arriving. The Poughkeepsie Journal reported that Houghtaling was similarly hit by a New York City subway car in 2002 when he leaned out too far. (He was hospitalized both times.)

Barnard Lorence filed a $2 million lawsuit in Stuart, Fla., in November against the First National Bank and Trust, accusing it of falsely advertising that it cares about its customers. He said he had been charged a $32 fee for overdrawing his checking account by $5, was unsuccessful in asking for a waiver, and said the stress from the incident exacerbated a 2001 brain injury.

-- The Boston Globe reported in September that the elite Palmer & Dodge law firm in Boston had been awarded almost $100,000 in fee reimbursement after putting a partner and three other lawyers to work representing a prison inmate upset mainly at being restricted in his use of the prison law library and being prevented from receiving "sexually explicit" photos in the mail. The complainant, Daniel LaPlante, murdered a pregnant woman and her two children, reportedly smirked at the jury, and was described by his trial judge as so detestable that the judge would have "no problem" personally executing him.

-- Inmate Robert Murray refused to appear at a court hearing in September in New York City because he "found it humiliating" to have to wear Hannibal Lecter-type restraints. (The HIV-positive Murray had admitted to at least four attempts to infect police officers by spitting blood at them.) And Biswanth Halder, facing 338 felony counts, including aggravated murder, in a shooting spree in Cleveland, declined to come to court in November until the judge let his lawyers go buy him a hairpiece. (The judge acquiesced.)

A judge in Santa Maria, Calif., ordered Nobel-prize-winning physicist John Robert Schrieffer, 74, to prison for two years in November after he acknowledged that he killed a man and injured seven others when he fell asleep at the wheel of his car, at more than 100 mph. Schrieffer had nine previous speeding tickets and was driving at the time on a suspended Florida license. He also admitted that he lied to police about the cause of the collision. (Schrieffer and two others shared the 1972 Nobel for their theory of electrical superconductivity.)

(1) Singer Kenny Chesney, explaining to Life magazine in October how profoundly he felt the loss when he and actress Renee Zellweger ended their recent, brief marriage: It was "like opening the door to your house and having someone come in and take your big-screen TV off the wall during the big game, and there's nothing you can do about it." (2) Kelley Borland of Evans, Colo., who in September received a $100 ransom demand for the return of his missing dog, authenticated by what was supposedly a sample of the dog's droppings: "It looked like my dog's poop, but I'm not a dog poop expert."

-- "Cargo cults" have made News of the Weird several times in this column's 17 years and still flourish in Papua New Guinea, whose police arrested 320 cultists recently for practicing sorcery. (The cults typically believe that Western products, brought by missionaries before World War II, are gifts from God, and they even worshipped the airstrips on which the goods-bearing planes landed.) A female leader of one of the groups involved in the recent arrests said she "found strange teachings about women and their monthly period" in the Bible's book of Leviticus. The leaders concluded that menstrual blood was sacred water that let them see "invisible things," according to a Reuters report quoting The National, a newspaper in Boroko.

-- News of the Weird last reported on Hormel Foods Corp.'s Spam in 2002 when McDonald's was test-marketing a breakfast containing the luncheon meat in Hawaii, where Spam is a delicacy. It is perhaps even more highly revered in South Korea, where (according to an October Los Angeles Times dispatch) an estimated 8 million cans are sold each holiday season, and a gift set of 12 in upscale department stores goes for about $44. Jeon Pyoung Soo, the South Korean Spam brand manager, continues to be puzzled at the product's U.S. reputation: "I can't understand what is funny about Spam."

-- Latest Insanity Pleas: Ryan T. Green was convicted of murder in Pensacola, Fla., in October despite his defense that he was certain the "A" on his police officer-victim's hat was for Antichrist, whom he was obligated to kill. And Clayton E. Butsch was convicted of murder in Everett, Wash., in October despite his defense that he was part of "The Truman Show" movie and had been ordered to kill by a pet cat. And Reyes Olivares was charged with murder in Las Vegas, Nev., despite his defense in October that his construction-foreman-victim was a sorcerer who put a spell on him with his flatulence.

-- A November paper by Sheffield (England) University education lecturer Pat Sikes argued that not all teacher-pupil romances are bad and that, in fact, sometimes "the seductive nature and 'erotic charge' often characteristic of 'good' teaching" can provoke a "positive and exciting response." Dr. Sikes, 50, who met her now-husband in 1970 when she was 14 and he was a 22-year-old history teacher, estimated that 1,500 pupil-teacher affairs develop in Britain every year.

(1) "Hundreds" of Krispy Kreme doughnuts onto Vineville Avenue in Macon, Ga., in September, when a delivery truck overturned to avoid a dog. (2) 30,000 pieces of mail to IRS (mostly estimated-tax payments) into San Francisco Bay in September when a truck was involved in a collision on the San Mateo Bridge. (3) 35 tons of cooking oil onto already-icy Interstate 65 near Lowell, Ind., in November when a tanker overturned. (4) And just hours apart in June in Ohio, one truck overturned, spilling 19 tons of stick dynamite on Interstate 70 near Summerford (forcing nearby evacuations) and another carrying 16 tons of toilets overturned on Interstate 275 near Sharonville.

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

While Canadian "global warming" protesters express alarm at the dwindling outdoor hockey season (fewer months with ice, fewer days cold enough for hard ice), a growing number of "hockey" players are taking the game underwater, according to a November Associated Press story. With six breath-holding players per team, passing a puck with sticks at the bottom of a pool, and players surfacing for air as seldom as possible, dozens of club teams worldwide play (nearly 50 in the U.S.), with a championship tournament scheduled next year for Sheffield, England. Said a Cincinnati high school player of the respiratory challenge, "(W)hen you're close to the goal, you're like, 'Do I want to score a goal or breathe?' Most of the time I say, 'Score.'"

Performance artist Tomoko Takahashi, 39, working on a British government grant of the equivalent of about $8,600, gave an exhibition of inebriation in October at the Chapter arts center in Cardiff, Wales. Dressed in business suit and high heels, Takahashi drank a large amount of beer over a three-hour period, periodically checking to see how far she could walk across a narrow beam about two feet off the floor without falling. A Chapter spokesman called the demonstration a "powerful piece of art."

-- Albania's Gen. Pellumb Qazimi told Reuters in October that the military is scrapping its fleet of obsolete Chinese-made MiG fighter jets, which the country never used in battle but in which 35 Albanian pilots died over the years in operational mishaps. And the Hindustan Times revealed in September that the local New Delhi government's 97 paid rat-catchers have not caught a single rodent since 1994. (And residents complain that rats are not difficult to find in New Delhi.)

-- Are We Safe? In October, the federal Department of Homeland Security announced a $36,300 grant to the state of Kentucky, earmarked to prevent terrorists from using charity bingo and other games of chance to raise money. (One astonished bingo worker in Frankfort told the Associated Press that the need to protect bingo parlors from terrorists "would never even enter my mind.") Also in October, the Tampa Tribune reported that two lower-tier Florida tourist attractions (the Weeki Wachee Springs mermaid show and Dinosaur World in Plant City) were on Homeland Security's list of sites that the state had to "harden" against terrorist attacks, even though officials complained that major sports venues and more popular entertainment sites were not on the list.

-- The Democratic Process: Randy Logan Hale won election to the school board in Homeland, Calif., in November, despite having been incarcerated since September for a parole violation. (He gets out in February.) And James Skwarok campaigned for mayor in Victoria, British Columbia, as a one-issue candidate opposed to pumping raw sewage into open waters, appearing always in costume as a chunk of that sewage, named "Mr. Floatie." (Skwarok dropped out of the race in October.)

-- (1) Police in Fairfax County, Va., discovered, as one of their only clues in an October rape, a hockey puck from a junior league team in Wichita Falls, Texas, apparently accidentally dropped by the assailant. Said an officer, "It's the first time I'm aware of that a hockey puck has ever been left at a crime scene." (2) Also in October, a surveillance camera at Sonny's Pizza & Pasta in San Clemente, Calif., showed a burglar entering, pocketing cash, and then stopping to make himself a large pepperoni pizza from scratch (before being surprised by an early-shift worker and fleeing).

-- The bane of all fair-minded office sports teams is the "ringer," the super-athlete from outside who is imported to help the office team win. Former minor league baseball player Mark Guerra, 33, was accused by Florida authorities of being such a ringer, imported for the Apalachee Correctional Institution's team, which he led to victory in a Department of Corrections softball tournament. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrested Guerra in October and charged him with fraudulently accepting a $1,247 "salary" as a temporary Apalachee "employee" (but never actually doing any work).

(1) Michael Plentyhorse, 18, was charged with indecent exposure in Sioux Falls, S.D., in November, when he was discovered partially undressed, in a store, fooling around with a semi-nude female mannequin. (Said a police officer, "There was inappropriate activity between him and the mannequin. That's the only way I know how to put it.") (2) Registered sex-offender Sean Cobin, 20, was arrested in Milwaukee in November on suspicion of reckless endangerment for his role in pressuring a woman to drink concentrated drain cleaner, allegedly because he gets excited by making women vomit. (He was convicted in 2004 in a similar incident.)

(1) A new land speed record for a blind driver was set in September (Mr. Hein Wagner, 33, reached 160 mph in a Maserati V8 GranSport on an airstrip in Mafikeng, South Africa, with help of a navigator). (2) Harvard's libraries contain at least four books bound in human skin, including a treatise on Spanish law with an inscription calling the binding "all that remains" of a fellow named Jonas Wright (according to research by student Dan Alban, writing in the Harvard Law Record in November).

In accord with Thailand's cultural traditions and accompanied by much pomp and circumstance, officials married off Chuang Chuang and his gal Lin Lui, the country's only giant pandas (at the Chaing Mai Zoo in November), and Thong Kham and his gal Thong Khaow, a pair of dwarf Brahman cattle in Sa Kaew province in July (both ceremonies before thousands of spectators). And in Roseville, Mich., in November, Susan Laurer spent $1,200 to marry off a pair of pug dogs, Bobby and Gracie, dressed in formal wedding wear before 70 guests at the Evangel Christian Church. (The maid of honor was a Chihuahua.)

Bryan Perley, who apparently held a grudge against a child-support caseworker, was charged in Orlando, Fla., with several felony counts when he tried to arrest her by impersonating a military officer and holding a fake, handwritten arrest warrant. When the woman's colleagues would not cooperate with him, Perley actually called for police backup, according to a report by WFTV-TV. He told the dispatcher, "(The colleagues) don't understand the chain of command in government. I've warned them."

In October, the Tennessee Supreme Court finally dashed Knoxville prosecutors' hopes of convicting Thomas "Zoo Man" Huskey as a serial killer in a case News of the Weird first mentioned in 1992. Courts had tossed out Huskey's confession (the centerpiece of the case), finding that the incriminating statements were made not by Huskey but by "Kyle," his alter ego, and although Huskey himself had been given a Miranda warning, "Kyle" had not. ("Kyle" supposedly had a grudge against Huskey.) "Zoo Man" (named because a zoo was the venue for some of the crimes) is nonetheless serving 66 years in prison on other charges.

A 43-year-old motorcyclist was killed on Interstate 35 near Osceola, Iowa, when he tried to stand on his bike with his arms folded (and smashed into a guardrail) (October). A 19-year-old driver, performing for two pals who were videotaping, was killed in West Rutland, Vt., when he attempted a "Jackass"-like stunt by leaping from the car at about 30 mph (September). A 39-year-old bicyclist was killed when he raced, unsuccessfully, to beat an oncoming train through a railroad crossing in Oakland Park, Fla., and was knocked more than 100 feet (November).

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

The Official Shoe of Illegal Immigrants: Artist Judi Werthein's high-top sneaker "Brinco" went on sale recently ($215 a pair) at boutiques in San Diego and New York City, with tiny accessories (compass and flashlight on the shoelaces, secret pocket in the shoe's tongue), but she also gives away many pairs in Tijuana because she actually designed the shoe for Mexican migrants to wear when they sneak across the border into the United States. (The back of the shoe has a drawing of the country's patron saint of migrants, and a removable foot support has a crude map of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a November Associated Press report).

-- Until the policy was changed in October, cafeterias in the 18 schools of the North Penn School District (northwest of Philadelphia) had been supplying as eating utensils only plastic cutlery that was washed after each meal and reused, even though students had long expressed disgust at spoons and knives riddled with bite marks and had, defensively, taken to eating foods like yogurt and applesauce with their hands. (The district admitted that this recycling saved only $15,000 a year.)

-- Blond twins, Lamb and Lynx Gaede, age 13, of Bakersfield, Calif., sing professionally as Prussian Blue at white-supremacy concerts and rallies and on the white-nationalist Resistance Records label (with songs like "Sacrifice," which is a tribute to Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess), according to an October ABC News story. The girls' parents home-school them and are active in the Aryan movement (rancher-dad Ted Shaw's cattle brand is a swastika). Said Lynx, "We want our people to stay white. (W)e don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle."

-- According to more than 50 alleged witnesses in 30 pending lawsuits, former Seattle-area gynecologist Charles Momah, 48, not only sexually abused patients but also permitted his twin brother, Dennis (a doctor but not a gynecologist), to stand in for him during some patient appointments, during which he, too, sexually abused the women. Examples of suspicion-provoking behavior, according to witness statements: Sometimes their doctor was talkative, sometimes confused and nearly silent; sometimes he spoke English clearly, sometimes broken; sometimes he walked with a limp, sometimes not; sometimes there were scars on his face, sometimes not. The Momahs deny everything, but Charles was convicted in November of sexually abusing four of the patients.

-- In November, to calm down a growing number of apparently horrified Australians, the Food Authority of the state of New South Wales issued a statement assuring people that meat in their refrigerators that appears to glow in the dark is actually harmless. Said the authority's director, the light-emitting bacteria responsible for the glow "is not known to cause food poisoning" and, actually, is naturally present in most meats and fish.

-- In October in Evansville, Ind., Terrence L. Mackey, 63, was sentenced to 29 years in prison for a May 2005 bank robbery, but not before he tried to defend his behavior to Federal Judge Richard L. Young, blaming the robbery on federal corrections officials. He would have turned his life around before now, Mackey said, if officials had just sent him to a prison close to his mother's home in Florida when he was locked up for a 1982 crime. And as to the charge that he shot at police as he fled the bank robbery, he claimed self-defense: "The police were shooting at me."

-- David Duvall and his 2-year-old daughter were hospitalized with burns on the head suffered during the Maryland Renaissance Festival in Crownsville in October after a female acrobat mishandled a flaming wand. The woman, seeking a volunteer from the audience, asked Duvall, in front of his family, if she could set fire to his bald head, and Duvall said, "Sure." Said Duvall's wife, later, "We thought they knew what they were doing."

-- Cary, N.C., software developer Brian T. Schellenberger, 43, told FBI agents in December 2003 that he had been influenced by a workplace motivational poster, "Achieve Your Dreams," that energized him to fulfill his own dreams. His major life transformation, unfortunately, was that "I decided to get rid of the obsolete idea of morality." Specifically, he told the agents that he was inspired to move beyond his mere passive collecting of pornography and to begin creating his own child pornography to satisfy long-held fantasies about young girls. (He also later enlisted a man, unsuccessfully, to kill his wife in exchange for pornography from his collection.) In October 2005, Schellenberger, though subsequently remorseful, was sentenced to 100 years in prison.

-- Jim Porcellato endured about 30 seconds of excruciating pain in October in Sooke, British Columbia, when he attempted to shut off a Bobcat construction vehicle but accidentally stepped on the floor lever that raises and lowers the vehicle's bucket, at the same time that he was, unfortunately, straddling the bucket. Porcellato, with one foot and his body's weight on the lever, had no leverage to stop the bucket, which as it moved, trapped his head and other leg. A co-worker rescued him, but the result was "many" lost teeth and the need for "hundreds" of stitches in his face, according to the Sooke News Mirror.

-- In Fargo, N.D., in September, Justin W. Fraase enthusiastically called the police to tell them that he had a videotape that would prove that the woman who had a judicial stay-away order against him actually wanted him back. The tape was of the two having sex, and when authorities viewed it, they realized that, for one thing, the sex itself violated the judicial order and, second, the woman appeared not to be enjoying herself at all. (Indeed, she later said that Fraase had coerced her, and he was charged with three felony counts relating to the assault and the violation of the stay-away order.)

From the newspaper The State (Columbia, S.C., 11-14-05), regarding fugitive Rodney Dane Higginbotham, wanted for criminal domestic violence: "Alleged Crime: Police said Higginbotham argued with his wife because she had not cooked anything. When she began cooking, he started making spaghetti while eating crackers and squeeze cheese. They argued, and he squeezed cheese on the kitchen floor. She squeezed the cheese on his truck, and he squeezed the cheese in her hair before fleeing in his truck. The wife said she washed her hair before the officer arrived to take her complaint."

In November, NASCAR announced it had contracted with the romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises to arrange for steamy women's novels with car-racing themes, beginning with Pamela Britton's forthcoming book "In the Groove." And according to an October Los Angeles Times report, the trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America contracted to pay two writers a "six-figure" fee to write a novel about a national panic resulting from a fear that drug lobbyists had actually been trying to spread in Congress, specifically, that terrorists might poison lower-priced drug imports from Canada. (The Times reported that the association recently killed the project and blamed the whole idea on an unsupervised lower-level executive.)

The body of a 36-year-old woman was found stuck halfway through a rear window in a house in St. Louis in October, the result (according to police) of an unsuccessful burglary attempt; she had asphyxiated, and in the course of her struggle to break free, her pants had somehow come off. And a 42-year-old woman in Frederica, Del., hanged herself from a tree on the Tuesday before Halloween, and though she was spotted at a distance soon afterward, neighbors did not call police for 10 hours, figuring at first that the body was just a Halloween decoration.

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