A documentary, "The Indigo Revolution," debuts in January, with World Indigo Weekend scheduled for Jan. 27 to Jan. 29, touting "special," high-energy kids regarded by their doting parents as psychic and endowed with an identifying, indigo-colored aura. Indigos are said to act imperially and to be astutely rebellious at authority (though cynics say they're just routinely self-centered brats, the product of excessive parental coddling). One Indigo parent told the Orange County (Calif.) Register in November that the numerous instances of her own child's prescience led her to offer her services as a facilitator to other Indigo parents (at up to $400 for workshops). Indigos "have a temper," she acknowledged, but not an ordinary temper. "(It) seems geared toward philosophical and existential issues."

-- The latest technologies and sophisticated biomechanical gaugings are being used to design brassieres to liberate women from the discomfort of which most complain (and especially buxom women, since a D-cup bra normally carries breasts weighing from 15 to 23 pounds). Leading work (according to a November Wall Street Journal report) is being done in China by engineers for Top Form Inc. (suppliers to Victoria's Secret, Playtex and Maidenform) and by biomechanist Deirdre McGhee at the University of Wollongong in Australia. A British professor, David Morris, teaches "bra studies" at De Montfort University in Leicester, and Hong Kong's Polytechnic University recently created a degree program in bra studies.

-- Still More Breast News: The Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands, announced recently that retail studies student Wendy Rameckers had designed a wall with rows of silicon breasts in various shapes, primarily, she said, to help male shoppers decide what size bra to buy for their women. And prominent British futurist Ian Pearson of BT Laboratories told reporters in October that he could see the day when breast implants housed MP3 players (sending signals to a woman's headphones), to give the implants some actual functionality.

-- Where the Best Surgeons Are: The increased expectations of fans have driven today's bullfighters to use riskier moves than their predecessors did, and competition has pressured them to return to work quickly after being gored. As a result, according to a November Wall Street Journal dispatch from Madrid, up to three dozen elite surgeons, highly skilled in complicated procedures, follow the bullfight circuit, on call to repair serious injuries that formerly would kill or maim a matador. In fact, most bullfighters today have already endured several critical gorings but remain eager to work.

-- The gigantic hit TV series "Frasier" grossed $1.5 billion during its 11-year run, but according to the show's executives (responding to a recent lawsuit by the program's creators for a greater share of the "profits"), the traditional Hollywood accounting methods reveal that the show earned no profit over its lifetime but actually lost $200 million.

-- According to a 2004 study by Georgia State University researchers, based on public information, one "investor group" substantially outperforms not only the stock market as a whole but also financial houses' top stock-pickers. That investor group is U.S. senators, who somehow between 1993 and 1998 beat the market by an average of 12 percent annually (whereas fund managers are regarded as "stars" if they beat the market by as little as 3 percent). The findings received heightened attention recently, following revelations that a prominent senator this year made a huge profit selling stock from his blind trust at just the right time.

-- (1) Wasps (Research by a Department of Agriculture scientist and a University of Georgia professor, reported in December, showed that with five minutes' training, certain wasps can detect drugs, bombs and dead bodies as well as dogs can). (2) A parrot (The wife of Frank Ficker of Freiberg, Germany, filing for divorce, said in November that she learned of her husband's infidelity when her parrot, Hugo, imitating Frank's voice, continually cried out for some woman named "Uta.")

-- Animals Being Animals: (1) The Harbor Commission of Newport Harbor, Calif., met in emergency session in September after news that 18 200- to 800-pound sea lions had jumped onto a 37-foot sailboat and sunk it. (Elsewhere on the coast, sea lions eat boogie boards, vomit on docks and bark cacophonously, and efforts to disperse them are ineffective because they are protected by a 1972 federal law.) (2) In September, an exceptionally rare American veery (a thrush-like songbird) landed in Britain's Shetland Islands and briefly excited the country's birdwatchers, but just as word was circulating, according to Scotland's Daily Record, a local cat ate it.

-- Readers' Choice: In November in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, as the staff of the television company Endemol NV were working to set up 4 million dominoes in an attempt at a new Guinness Book record, a sparrow flew in through a window, landed on the formation, and toppled about 23,000 of them before built-in gaps stopped the collapse. (An exterminator with an air rifle tracked the bird down in the building and killed it, to the outrage of animal rights advocates.)

(1) Large Rubber Exercise Balls (Christopher Bjerkness, 27, pleaded guilty in August in Duluth, Minn., to slashing almost 100 exercise balls at fitness centers because of what he told police was a sexual urge). (2) Dryer Lint (A separate collection of it was found among the 3,000 items of women's underwear stolen by Mr. Sung Koo Kam, 31, who was sentenced in November to more than four years in prison upon conviction in McMinnville, Ore.).

Incomplete Thinking: Michael Drennon, 26, was charged with bank robbery in Bensalem, Pa., in October after accidentally dropping his pay stub at the scene, even though he had cleverly blotted out his name and address with a black indelible marker. (Bensalem's director of public safety said the stub was easy to read: "We just (held) it under a light.") (2) Louis Jasick, 34, and a friend, involved in a scavenger hunt, knocked on the back door of the police station in Fruitport Township, Mich., in November to ask if officers would please help with the next item on their list and pose for a photograph of a cop eating a doughnut. The officers obliged but one of them recognized Jasick from a recent felony warrant and arrested him.

Child Support Follies: News of the Weird has reported several times about hard-luck men who, believing they are biological fathers, agree to child support, only to learn via a DNA test that they are not, but whom judges will not let rescind those agreements. An even more ironic case emerged from the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal in December. A man had originally agreed to support his new wife's daughter, but then he and his wife divorced, and the court ruled he must continue to support the girl even though the wife has now married the man who is the girl's biological father.

David Smith Sr., who holds the world record for the longest flight of being shot from a cannon, was blasted about 150 feet in August from Tijuana, Mexico, into California, uninjured, as part of an art project about "dissolving borders." (He showed his passport before blast-off.) However, a November 2002 catapult shot of a 19-year-old Oxford University (England) biochemistry student (who was a member of Oxford's extreme sports club) ended badly, as an inquest in October 2005 heard; he was propelled almost 100 yards, which was just short of his landing net.

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

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.)