(G)Ass Backwards: To support its December rate-increase request, the Connecticut utility Yankee Gas Services said it needs more money because too many of its customers have lowered their bills by heeding calls to conserve energy. And a November report commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce included the proposal that Congress replenish the federal Highway Trust Fund by imposing a special tax on gas-saving hybrid cars (in that those cars consume less fuel than regular cars and therefore pay less in gasoline tax).

-- In South Korea, which has the highest rate of high-speed Internet use in the world, more than one-third of the population plays video games, with the result an alarming number of obsessive gamers requiring counseling (and, so far, two deaths after, respectively, 50 and 86 straight hours of playing). According to an October Associated Press dispatch from Seoul, at the many Internet cafes, gamers "typically live on instant (noodles) and cigarettes, barely sleeping and seldom washing." Video games are also a spectator sport: Three cable channels show matches, and the government is building an electronic-sports "stadium," where competitions will be shown on big screens.

-- Update: In 2001, News of the Weird reported on the Mosuo people's (in southern Tibet) tradition in which females nightly choose the men who will be their bed partners, but a September BBC News dispatch emphasized females' dominance in other aspects of the society, e.g., only women have the right to inherit property or raise children, with the "father" barely an occasional presence. BBC reported that the picturesque Mosuo region around Lugu Lake is now so popular with visitors that commerce is superseding Mosuo traditions.

-- (1) Police in Hampton, Va., knew who the suspect was for the robbery of a Wachovia Bank in October (a man named David Wescott, 44), but he got away. They learned his identity because, said witnesses, after he fled the bank with the money, he ran to a nearby cellular phone store to pay his bill before leaving the area. (2) Quebec's La Fromagerie Boivin announced in October that, even with divers and high-tech equipment, it had given up on finding the nearly 1 ton of cheese that it had sunk underwater in 2004 north of Quebec City in a plan to improve its taste.

-- Andrew Uitvlugt, candidate for mayor of Kelowna, British Columbia, proposed in November to coax drug addicts into public jobs, such as trash collection, by rewarding them with crack cocaine, on the theory that the work would be so fulfilling that they would ultimately decline the drugs. (He finished fourth out of five candidates.)

-- Hair Mania: (1) Pontypool, Wales, bus driver Mark Davis had his hair colored red, with an actual (small) fir Christmas tree woven in, along with a string of lights (according to a December BBC News report, with photo). "It gives everyone a laugh," he said, but "(i)t's very difficult to sleep with it." (2) An October profile in the Jamaica Star reported on barber Darain Housen, 40, who is well-known in St. Thomas parish as the guy who has shaped his bristly hair in the form of a baseball cap, with the bill extending out a couple of inches over his forehead.

-- In September, scientists from the Institute of Marine Research in Vigo, Spain, described, for likely the first time, the probable mating ritual of giant squid (which are typically 50 feet long, with eight legs and two tentacles, living in the blackness of the ocean a mile down). Based on examining five squid stranded on a beach in Spain, they posited that the larger female could rather easily resist the male, whose 8-foot-long, hypodermic needle-like penis is wielded so clumsily that he could mistakenly inseminate another passing male, or his own tentacle.

-- Even though bonobos (small chimpanzees found in the Democratic Republic of Congo) are among the most copulating animals on Earth, poaching has dropped their population by 90 percent in the last 25 years, according to a September dispatch in London's Daily Telegraph. Explained the director of a primate orphanage in Kinshasa, mellow bonobos enlist for sex immediately upon sensing any danger, stress or friction: "They also have sex for pleasure, but most of the time, it's a way of making peace."

-- In New Braunfels, Texas, in November, Robert Villarreal, 34, was sentenced to 50 years in prison after he sold drugs to the same undercover officer for the third time in a 14-year period. He had actually argued "entrapment," claiming that for the first sale, in 1988, he was so young that he shouldn't be expected to remember later what the officer looked like.

-- In September, Washington, D.C., police charged George Haynes with three robberies and suspect he is the man who committed two dozen more in the area since being paroled in 2004. Haynes was fingered for the latest robberies after he violated parole in July and was fitted with a global positioning satellite tracking device, linked to his ankle monitor. He apparently was not aware that police then knew his whereabouts 24 hours a day, to within a few feet, and found that Haynes was in the exact area of the three robberies at the exact, odd hours in which they occurred.

People who accidentally shot themselves recently: A 22-year-old driver, in the abdomen (gun in waistband) while reaching down to pick up money (Colorado Springs, Colo., October). A 34-year-old hunter, in the foot, where his rifle was pointed while he was loading it (Barrington, N.H., November). A 15-year-old boy, in the hand with a shotgun he was building based on instructions he had downloaded from the Internet (Round Rock, Texas, November). A 59-year-old man, in the hand, while removing his gun from a hook in the men's room at a gun show (Faribault, Minn., November). A 22-year-old man, in the leg, when his propped-up rifle fell over while he was posing for photographs with a deer he had just killed (Lawrenceburg, Tenn., December).

More Pain-Resistant People Scamming Insurance Companies: A 50-year-old dentist in Amsterdam, Netherlands, received only a suspended sentence in November for a scheme in which he had chopped off a finger but then staged a car accident to claim the equivalent of about $2.2 million for the finger-maiming under his auto policy. Also in November, a 35-year-old man in St. Johann, Austria, was arrested for trying to claim the equivalent of about $1.17 million in insurance based on his severed finger, from a bicycle injury, when, according to police, he had actually placed his finger on a rail and let a train run over it.

(1) A 23-year-old man was found dead of smoke inhalation in a burning house in Billings, Mont., in November, and police said, to the best of their knowledge, it was the man who started the fire in two rooms to cover up the burglary he had just committed but that he wasn't able to get out of the house in time. (2) And in Reseda, Calif., in September, one man was killed and his pal wounded in a shootout as they attempted a random carjacking but didn't realize that men in the targeted car were FBI agents on surveillance.

CORRECTION: In News of the Weird's previous installment of Weird Animal Mating Habits (in November), concerning a great white shark tracked 12,400 miles over nine months ostensibly in search of sex, I reported that the shark was a male. It was female.

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

If you spent your year worrying about Angelina and Brad or Tom and Katie or Nick and Jessica, or, heaven forbid, even the important things like Delay, de war and de natural disasters, you probably missed the good stuff. Herewith is our compilation of the most disturbing, underreported stories of the year.

The genesis of those dogs-playing-poker paintings is the series of nine 1903 originals by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, and in February, two of them were sold by the Doyle New York auction house for a total of $590,400.

St. Petersburg Times, March 4

-- In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, in response to the question whether President Bush is a "uniter" or a "divider," 49 percent of Americans said uniter, and 49 percent said divider.

CNN, Jan. 19

-- As a registered sex offender in California, James Andrew Crawford was required to notify authorities if he adopted a new "domicile" for more than five days. He was arrested in May for noncompliance after he had been camped for two weeks in a theater line waiting for "Star Wars: Episode III" to open.

North County Times (Escondido, Calif.), May 19

-- Virginia capital-murder inmate Daryl Atkins, who had previously registered an IQ lower than the minimum-70 needed for execution, scored a 76, and a jury then sent him to death row. Legal experts attributed the improvement in IQ to the intellectual stimulation Atkins received from discussing his case with lawyers.

ABC News-AP, Aug. 14

The communist government of China presented its quinquennial Vanguard (or Model) Worker award (in the past, given to loyal factory workers, dedicated public-outhouse stewards and the like) to Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets' basketball player who earns about $15 million a year playing and endorsing products -- about 15,000 times what the average urban Chinese worker makes.

Washington Post, April 29

South African Sonette Ehlers invented a tampon-like sheath that she says will reduce the country's disturbing number of rapes, but local anti-violence leaders are skeptical -- and alarmed. The 1-Rand (about 15 cents) device folds around the penis with microscopic hooks and, once engaged, requires medical intervention to remove. Critics say it is nearly useless, since a woman must wear one constantly to be protected.

The Times (London), June 8

Oklahoma state Sen. Frank Shurden proposed legislation to revive the "sport" of cockfighting, which the state outlawed in 2002, but to make it more rooster-friendly, he suggested the birds wear tiny boxing gloves instead of razor cleats and wear fencing-type electronic vests to record hits.

Chicago Tribune-AP, Jan. 28

The Kansas City Star, reporting on a Missouri legislative debate on the Confederate flag, quoted Rep. Jim Avery that the 1803 Louisiana Purchase involved a battle with France, instead of a land sale: "Well, we fought over it. We fought over it, right? ... You don't think there were any lives lost in that? It was a friendly thing?" (And Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick told a middle-school class that the U.S. Congress is different from the Texas legislature, in that in Washington there are "454" members on the House side and "60" in the Senate.)

Kansas City Star, May 9

Austin American-Statesman, April 16

Laura and Edmund Gerstein, keen to save their beloved grapefruit tree from Florida's citrus canker eradication program, claimed immunity for the tree under the 1949 Geneva Conventions (the 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."

South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 5

Reba Schappell, of Reading, Pa., a professional country music singer who is also a conjoined-at-the-head twin with sister Lori, told a BBC radio audience, "When I am singing, Lori is like any other fan, except she's up on the stage with me (covered by a blanket to reduce the distraction)." Said Lori: "I do not ask for anything from Reba. I don't get in to her concerts free just because she's a conjoined twin. I have to pay, just like every other fan ...."

BBC News, Sept. 21

Among the most frightening occasions celebrated in 2005: The world's first "international festival of mimes," in Shfaram, Israel; the convention of Clowns of America in Grand Rapids, Mich., with 300 in attendance; and two attempts, in Kimberly, British Columbia, and St. John's, Newfoundland, at shattering the world record for the number of people simultaneously playing accordions for a half-hour (644 in Kimberly, eclipsed by 989 in St. John's).

YNet.com (Yedioth Aharonoth, Tel Aviv), April 11

Grand Rapids Press, April 22

Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Aug. 11

Canadian Press, Aug. 6

Transsexual prostitute Monica Renee Champion, 37, was picked up by police in Richmond, Va., after arrest warrants for indecent exposure had been issued against her in the city's South Side, as a male, and in the North Side, as a female.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Aug. 27

Hard-core bestiality cases usually involve some hapless man abusing a poor critter, but the death of a 45-year-old man in Enumclaw, Wash., after man-horse sex, was extraordinary, in that the horse was the penetrator (and the man died of acute peritonitis from a perforated colon). According to videotapes seized by authorities, a local farm (apparently known in Internet bestiality chat rooms) was a covert haven for sex with livestock. Washington is one of 17 states with no specific anti-bestiality law; thus, had the man lived, he would not have been prosecuted because the state's animal-cruelty law requires a showing that the horse, not the human, suffered.

Seattle Times, July 15

City council member Yvonne Lamanna, 58, filed a worker compensation claim against the city of Penn Hills, Pa., after she threw her back out while taking her seat at the Feb. 7 council meeting.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 9

Gregory Withrow and an associate staged a protest at the California capitol in Sacramento, against the U.S.'s Iraq policy and in favor of white supremacy, among other issues. The associate's job was to nail Withrow's hands to a cross so he could stand as a martyr. Withrow had brought notes with him from a Butte County, Calif., health official (OK'ing Withrow's plan to hurt himself) and from the Sacramento Parks Department (acknowledging that no permit was needed for the crucifixion).

Contra Costa Times-AP, April 22

-- Dallas artist James Sooy, weary of his eyeglasses slipping, had a bar inserted through the bridge of his nose and his spectacles affixed to it. Sooy seemed to believe there was money to be made with the idea, but an optometrist pointed out the difficulty in adjusting prescriptions "if you have a hole in your face."

Houston Chronicle, Feb. 23

-- The Oregon board that enforces teachers' standards and practices put Central Linn High School coach, teacher and dean of students Scott Reed on two years' probation after he admitted licking blood from the wounds of at least three students, though, after a hearing, the board was still unclear on his motive.

Associated Press, Aug. 4

Dr. Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University Medical School, told a conference in Brisbane, Australia, that he donates blood regularly because a key to females' ability to outlive males is menstruation (in that, he says, iron loss inhibits the growth of free radicals that age cells). "I menstruate," he said, "but only every eight weeks."

News Limited (Australia), March 19

In an early-morning shootout on June 4 in the Homewood housing complex in Pittsburgh, two undercover officers and a suspect exchanged a total of at least 103 gunshots but never hit anyone.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, June 5

In court papers filed in 1994 but which only this year drew public attention, lawyers zealously representing the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., offered a countercharge to a child-support claim against Father Arturo Uribe: that the mother herself was culpable because she failed to use birth control.

Los Angeles Times, Aug. 3

-- Yamaha Corp. introduced the MyRoom, a customizable, soundproof, shed-like structure with 27 square feet of floor space, to install inside notoriously crowded Japanese homes, for privacy (or to be exiled to). The company expects a sales surge in 2006, when Japan's first wave of baby-boom salarymen retire and begin annoying their spouses at home.

The Times (London), May 27

-- Spanish designer Pep Torres said he was nearing a launch date for his Your Turn washing machine, which he developed to encourage sharing of housework. Users, such as a husband and wife, initially register their fingerprints, and Your Turn will not subsequently operate by the same person's print twice in a row.

BBC News, May 1

Among the most frightening occasions celebrated in 2005: The world's first "international festival of mimes," in Shfaram, Israel; the convention of Clowns of America in Grand Rapids, Mich., with 300 in attendance; and two attempts, in Kimberly, British Columbia, and St. John's, Newfoundland, at shattering the world record for the number of people simultaneously playing accordions for a half-hour (644 in Kimberly, eclipsed by 989 in St. John's).

YNet.com (Yedioth Aharonoth, Tel Aviv), April 11

Grand Rapids Press, April 22

Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Aug. 11

Canadian Press, Aug. 6

Transsexual prostitute Monica Renee Champion, 37, was picked up by police in Richmond, Va., after arrest warrants for indecent exposure had been issued against her in the city's South Side, as a male, and in the North Side, as a female.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Aug. 27

Hard-core bestiality cases usually involve some hapless man abusing a poor critter, but the death of a 45-year-old man in Enumclaw, Wash., after man-horse sex, was extraordinary, in that the horse was the penetrator (and the man died of acute peritonitis from a perforated colon). According to videotapes seized by authorities, a local farm (apparently known in Internet bestiality chat rooms) was a covert haven for sex with livestock. Washington is one of 17 states with no specific anti-bestiality law; thus, had the man lived, he would not have been prosecuted because the state's animal-cruelty law requires a showing that the horse, not the human, suffered.

Seattle Times, July 15

City council member Yvonne Lamanna, 58, filed a worker compensation claim against the city of Penn Hills, Pa., after she threw her back out while taking her seat at the Feb. 7 council meeting.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 9

Gregory Withrow and an associate staged a protest at the California capitol in Sacramento, against the U.S.'s Iraq policy and in favor of white supremacy, among other issues. The associate's job was to nail Withrow's hands to a cross so he could stand as a martyr. Withrow had brought notes with him from a Butte County, Calif., health official (OK'ing Withrow's plan to hurt himself) and from the Sacramento Parks Department (acknowledging that no permit was needed for the crucifixion).

Contra Costa Times-AP, April 22

-- Dallas artist James Sooy, weary of his eyeglasses slipping, had a bar inserted through the bridge of his nose and his spectacles affixed to it. Sooy seemed to believe there was money to be made with the idea, but an optometrist pointed out the difficulty in adjusting prescriptions "if you have a hole in your face."

Houston Chronicle, Feb. 23

-- The Oregon board that enforces teachers' standards and practices put Central Linn High School coach, teacher and dean of students Scott Reed on two years' probation after he admitted licking blood from the wounds of at least three students, though, after a hearing, the board was still unclear on his motive.

Associated Press, Aug. 4

Dr. Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University Medical School, told a conference in Brisbane, Australia, that he donates blood regularly because a key to females' ability to outlive males is menstruation (in that, he says, iron loss inhibits the growth of free radicals that age cells). "I menstruate," he said, "but only every eight weeks."

News Limited (Australia), March 19

In an early-morning shootout on June 4 in the Homewood housing complex in Pittsburgh, two undercover officers and a suspect exchanged a total of at least 103 gunshots but never hit anyone.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, June 5

In court papers filed in 1994 but which only this year drew public attention, lawyers zealously representing the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., offered a countercharge to a child-support claim against Father Arturo Uribe: that the mother herself was culpable because she failed to use birth control.

Los Angeles Times, Aug. 3

-- Yamaha Corp. introduced the MyRoom, a customizable, soundproof, shed-like structure with 27 square feet of floor space, to install inside notoriously crowded Japanese homes, for privacy (or to be exiled to). The company expects a sales surge in 2006, when Japan's first wave of baby-boom salarymen retire and begin annoying their spouses at home.

The Times (London), May 27

-- Spanish designer Pep Torres said he was nearing a launch date for his Your Turn washing machine, which he developed to encourage sharing of housework. Users, such as a husband and wife, initially register their fingerprints, and Your Turn will not subsequently operate by the same person's print twice in a row.

BBC News, May 1

William Woodard, suspected by police in the Trenton, N.J., area of more than 50 burglaries, was arrested after authorities said they could match him to one of the "signatures" of the crime spree: random splotches of excrement at several crime scenes. (In the course of the arrest, a nervous Woodard failed to control his bowels.)

The Trentonian, March 11

-- Thanh Nhat Le was arrested in Dorchester, Mass., 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, with $171 in small bills, but then subsequently tried to add to it by mailing in three checks for deposit, of $250,000, $2 million and $4 billion.

Boston Herald, April 7

-- A judge gave Vickey Siles of New Haven, Ind., just a suspended sentence and probation, ostensibly out of pity at the lousy job she did altering a check from Globe Life and Accident Co. Siles had badly obliterated the "$1.00" amount of the check, written in "$4,000,000.00," and then tried to cash it at a neighborhood check-cashing store.

Fort Wayne News Sentinel, March 19

-- Police in Twin Falls, Idaho, confiscated almost $1 billion in counterfeit money (which a man tried to leave as collateral for a loan) in a scheme doomed from the start because all bills were of the nonexistent denomination of $1 million.

Fox News-Twin Falls News-Times, Oct. 17

Mark Nuckols, a business student at Dartmouth, began selling the tofu-like Hufu, flavored to resemble what he believes is the taste of human flesh. His target audience is tofu eaters who want a challenge, plus any actual cannibals who might settle for artificiality in order to avoid legal problems and logistical hassles. Nuckols based his recipe on cannibals' reported descriptions of the flavor.

Stanford Daily, May 25

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution dispatch from El Alberto, Mexico (near Mexico City), profiled a theme park in which wannabe emigrants to the U.S. can test their survival skills in an obstacle course that touches on the rigors migrants must endure sneaking across the border.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 20

A Lake Jackson, Texas, woman was for a while under indictment for negligent homicide in the death of her husband, who suffered acute alcohol poisoning from having ingested three liters of sherry wine via enema, which authorities said she provided him. However, the woman freely discussed with reporters her husband's longstanding addiction to enemas, pointing out that he also did them with coffee, "Castile soap, Ivory soap. He had enema recipes. ... I'm sure that's the way he wanted to go out because he loved his enemas."

Houston Chronicle, Feb. 10

When a Japanese art collector had to choose between Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses for a big sale and quixotically asked the two to play Rock-Paper-Scissors for the privilege, Sotheby's chose Paper and lost out on the eventual $2.3 million commission. (A Christie's executive had taken the advice of one of his 11-year-old daughters, who said, "Everybody knows you always start with Scissors.")

New York Times, April 29

According to a Phoenix New Times cover story, local man Willie Windsor, 54, has for several years lived 24 hours a day as an infant, not only wearing baby clothes and diapers, but sucking on pacifiers and eating only Gerber cuisine, in a home filled with oversized baby furniture. And the diaper is not just a prop. Windsor said he worked diligently to make himself incontinent, even chaining his commode shut to avoid "temptation," and the New Times reporter admitted feeling "disconcert(ed)" that Windsor might be relieving himself at the very moment he was describing his anti-toilet training. Windsor is a semi-retired singer-actor and said, not surprisingly, that he's been celibate for nine years.

Phoenix New Times, June 9

A 1958 Pablo Picasso original, "Atelier de Cannes," went on sale on the Web site of the discount chain Costco, priced to move at $129,999.99. Costco began offering art on consignment from dealers last year, but "Atelier" (a crayon drawing authenticated by daughter Maya Picasso) is its most expensive piece.

New York Post, Aug. 12

Firefighters in Stamford, Conn., had to break a car window, against the owner's wishes, to rescue her 23-month-old son, whom she had accidentally locked inside along with the key. The kid had been sweltering for more than 20 minutes on an 88-degree July day when Susan Guita Silverstein, 42 (who was later charged with reckless endangerment), begged firefighters to wait until she went home to get a spare key so they wouldn't have to damage her Audi A4.

Stamford Advocate, July 26

Once again this year, as a public service, we release this crucial homicide data, all-new in 2005.

Arrested in 2005, and charged with murder:

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)

Kenneth Wayne Keller, Denton, Texas (August)

Ronald Wayne Lail, Burke County, N.C. (September)

Timothy Wayne Condrey, Caroleen, N.C. (September)

Roy Wayne Russell, Vancouver, Wash. (December)

Jeremy Wayne Hopkins, 22, Denton, Texas (November)

Reginald Wayne Thomas, 23, Huntsville, Texas (November)

Matthew Wayne Almand, 18, Melbourne, Fla. (November)

Convicted of murder:

Donald Wayne Shipe, 37, Winchester, Va. (May)

Sentenced for murder:

Emmanuel Wayne Harris, 28, Bisbee, Ariz. (February)

Tyler Wayne Justice, Alice, Texas (September)

Douglas Wayne Pepper, 44, Greensboro, N.C. (November)

Executed for murder:

Dennis Wayne Bagwell, 41, Huntsville, Texas (February)

Lonnie Wayne Pursley, 43, Huntsville, Texas (May)

Melvin Wayne White, 55, Hunstsville, Texas (November)

Committed suicide while suspected of murder:

Eric Wayne Jacobs, 27, Castroville, Calif. (April)

Michael Wayne Baxter, Edgewater, Md. (October)

Died of a drug overdose while serving two life terms for murder:

Russell Wayne Wagner, Jessup, Md. (February) (but buried at Arlington National Cemetery based on Army service in Vietnam, prompting Congress to propose to ban capital criminals from having military burials at Arlington)

One final note: Police in New Scotland, N.Y., arrested Corianna Thompson for the murder of her mother. Thompson's birth name was Corey Wayne Balashek, and before his sex change, he had served nine years in prison for another killing. Authorities believe Thompson/Balashek is the first American, let alone the first middle-name-Wayne, to be arrested for homicide in both genders.

SOURCES FOR CLASSIC MIDDLE NAME

Maness: Asheville Citizen-Times, Jan. 20

Ebert: Houston Chronicle, Feb. 22

Blair: WBIR-TV (Knoxville), April 28

Jackson: Pottstown Mercury, April 21

Hart: Austin American-Statesman, April 12

Keller: Dallas Morning News, Aug. 13

Lail: Charlotte Observer, Sept. 22

Condrey: Daily Courier (Forest City, N.C.), Sept. 22

Russell: The Columbian (Vancouver, Wash.), Dec. 4

Hopkins: Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Nov. 22

Thomas: Houston Chronicle, Nov. 23

Almand: Orlando Sentinel, Nov. 30

Shipe: Winchester Star, May 4

Harris: Sierra Vista Herald, Feb. 18

Justice: Alice (Texas) Echo-News Journal, Sept. 15

Pepper: Austin American-Statesman-AP, Nov. 8

Bagwell: Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 18

Pursley: Houston Chronicle, May 3

White: Houston Chronicle-AP, Nov. 3

Jacobs: Houston Chronicle, April 14

Baxter: The Capital (Annapolis), Oct. 8

Wagner: Washington Post, Aug. 5

Thompson/Balasek: Times Union (Albany, N.Y.), April 12

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

(Read more weird news at www.WeirdUniverse.net; send items to WeirdNews@earthlink.net, and P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

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.)