Inappropriate Kisses: Malaysian Shahimi Abdul Hamid, 33, announced that on March 11, he will, as a matter of Asian pride, challenge the world record for speed-kissing a venomous snake, which is held by an American, and he smooched up a 9-foot-long cobra at his press conference. And last Oct. 31, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune police column, "An employee of a business ... complained that a former co-worker had been constantly showing up and kissing his truck, leaving lip marks all over it. Police warned the man to stay away."

-- In September, fertility experts interviewed by London's Daily Telegraph said an alarming number of women were choosing in-vitro fertilization not because of trouble conceiving but merely because "fast track" pregnancies better fit their busy lifestyles. (Said one clinician, "Some people are horrified by the idea that they have to have sex two to three times a week (to maximize the likelihood of conception).") And in October, an official at the Erasmus fertility clinic in Brussels, Belgium, said that because more lesbian couples were seeking insemination at a time of dwindling sperm supplies, the clinic might have to restrict its services to male-female couples.

-- The provincial government in Buenos Aires began in December requiring all retail clothiers selling to adolescent girls to stock a range of "plus" sizes in order to encourage larger girls to obsess less about being thin. And in November, researchers from the Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Ireland told a convention in Chicago that two-thirds of their patients who received injections into the buttock muscle had not received the full dose of medicine because existing needles are not long enough to reach beyond the fat.

(1) In a race between two African-Americans, Don Samuels was elected again to the Minneapolis City Council in November, despite (or thanks to) his 2004 statements that he can effectively serve the city's blacks because he descended from "house slaves" in the South rather than "field slaves." (2) City Council member Clark Griep failed in his bid for mayor of Broomfield, Colo., despite his "October surprise" of revealing that the incumbent mayor, Karen Stuart, had had an extra-marital affair eight years ago with him. (She denied it.) (3) Former Durham, N.C., city council member Jackie Wagstaff was beaten in the race for mayor last fall, having run as "J-Dub" on a "gangsta" platform, promising to bring "street teens" into her administration. (Eight of the 17 mayoral and council candidates in Durham, including J-Dub, had criminal records.)

-- Some of the most heavily armed park rangers in the world (carrying AR-15 and Galil automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns and protected by body armor) patrol 124,000 acres west of Mexico City, to protect monarch butterflies. The rangers keep loggers out of the area because the monarch population (22 million, this season) represents an 80 percent drop from the year before.

-- When Welsh Assembly Member Jenny Randerson was turned down in December in her request under Wales' Freedom of Information Act for government documents about the budget, the official explanation given in the letter of denial was that, "The exposure of some of these discussions to the public domain, via a freedom of information request, may lead to individuals ... being targeted for ridicule through the media." (Randerson pointed out that the act doesn't mention that defense.)

-- The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service once again in December rejected efforts to remove the gray wolf from the list of endangered species in Nevada, despite general agreement among biologists that the last confirmed sighting of one in the state was in 1941. (The agency said its hands are tied by the wording of the law.)

-- The Los Angeles Times, after a public records search, found in January that the city's Department of Water and Power had spent $1 million in the last two years in a campaign to convince residents that the city does, indeed, have top-quality municipal water, yet its employees spent $88,000 of taxpayer money during the same period on commercial bottled water.

In November, prominent, occasionally self-mutilating performance artist Marina Abramovic, 59, performed "covers" of other performance artists' seminal works (with their permission) in her "Seven Easy Pieces" show at New York City's Guggenheim Museum. In one, according to a New York Times profile, she covered her head in honey and gold leaf, cradled a dead rabbit, and whispered to it about pictures on the wall (original artist: Joseph Beuys). In another, she lay on a bed above lighted candles and made cuts on her fingers while slides of women painting their nails flashed on a screen (original artist: Gina Pane). However, she was stymied by the denial of permission for her fondest proposed "cover": Chris Burden's 1973 piece in which his hands were nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen as it was rolled out of a garage.

(1) From the Union Democrat (Sonora, Calif.), 11-20-05: "Big Oak Flat. A woman said an exhaust system stolen from her vehicle was returned and reinstalled" (2) from the Peru (Ind.) Tribune, 10-14-05: "(A) caller ... told the (sheriff's office) a man was in the middle of the road. The man told officers he was looking for his tooth that he lost yesterday while eating peanuts. He thinks he may have tossed it out the car window while he was tossing out peanut shells."

If the December robbery of a pharmacy went down the way McMinnville, Ore., police believe, it indicates the suspect, sheriff's deputy David Verbos, 36, had little respect for their crime-solving ability. Verbos allegedly took OxyContin at gunpoint in the robbery, but later called the McMinnville police to report that someone had stolen his license plates (perhaps hoping to insulate himself in case a witness had glimpsed the plate at the scene). However, when police arrived to take a report, they noticed that Verbos, a stocky man about 5-9, was wearing a black jacket, gray sweat pants, and white sneakers, thus fitting nearly dead-on the description of the man who had robbed the pharmacy.

(1) A judge in Montgomery County, Md., ruled in January that angrily pulling down one's pants and "mooning" a neighbor (even in front of the neighbor's 8-year-old daughter) is not illegal in the state (though the judge did call it "disgusting"). (2) Widespread news reports in December at first said a Blue Springs, Mo., woman had "swallowed" her cell phone after an argument with her boyfriend, but of course, miniaturization technology is not quite that advanced, and, several days later, Blue Springs police said it was not a swallowing but an attempted cramming and arrested the boyfriend.

The family of a 55-year-old motorcyclist filed a lawsuit in December over the man's death, which allegedly occurred when he was hit on Highway 16 near Custer, S.D., by an airborne toilet. (The portable toilet had come off of a truck of Sander Sanitation Co.) And a 47-year-old passenger in a pickup truck on the way to work near Childersburg, Ala., in January, was killed instantly by an airborne deer (struck by an oncoming car and knocked through the pickup's windshield).

CORRECTION: Two weeks ago, I labeled the Colorado developer Bigg Homes as the "creator" of the community of Eagle Mountain. However, Bigg is only one developer, and many people who live there have no relationship with Bigg.

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

Former President Jimmy Carter told GQ magazine for a January article that he saw a UFO in 1969 in southwest Georgia as he was preparing to speak at a Lions Club meeting. He recalled that it was a bright light that got "closer and closer to us," but then "changed color to blue," then to red, then back to white, and then "receded into the distance." However, he said, "I've never believed it came from Mars." (In September, Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian minister of defense, asked Parliament to hold hearings on extraterrestrials. UFOs, he said, "are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head," and he fears the U.S. military might get Earth involved in an intergalactic war.)

(1) An October Agence France-Presse report noted the 2005 launching of the Paris gourmet bakery Mon Bon Chien ("my good dog"), featuring carob-flavored dog biscuits and foie gras dog cookies, and worldwide introduction of more than 400 new products for dogs, including stress-relief sprays, nail polish and hair coloring. (2) Gynecologists interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in December said business was booming for the $1,800 to $5,000 hymenoplasty (the re-creation of the hymen), for men who want to deflower their non-virgin women (surgery obviously good for one night only).

-- In December, according to police in Jersey City, N.J., Roselean Walker, 36, sat at one screen in a movie cineplex with her boyfriend while her 11-year-old son watched the longer Harry Potter film at another screen, but after her movie ended, she tired of waiting for the son and went home with the boyfriend to New York City. When police called her the next morning to come pick up the boy, she demanded that they drive him home. After officers ordered her immediately to the station, she showed up in a bad mood, threatening a lawsuit for the inconvenience, and wound up being charged with assaulting an officer (in addition to endangering a child's welfare).

-- According to the Nov. 10 Evening News of Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., a father was under investigation by police after War Memorial Hospital reported an assault on the man's 11-year-old son. Police said it appeared that the two were playing a video game, that the son had beaten his dad by using a secret upgrade that made his character more powerful, and that the dad, in anger, had spanked the kid, put soap in his mouth and slapped him several times in the head. (The father said only that he had punished the boy for lying.)

-- In June, a plaintiff's lawyer in the massive class-action litigation against asbestos manufacturers, under pressure from federal judge Janis Graham Jack of Houston, acknowledged that more than half of previous asbestos claims in one case appear to be fraudulent. The lawyer claims his clients contracted silicosis from asbestos exposure, but most of those same clients also claimed asbestosis from asbestos exposure, when experts say the two illnesses rarely exist simultaneously. Judge Jack found that one plaintiff's doctor, Ray Harron (who had given up his practice in order to interpret X-rays full-time, at $125 each), had detected asbestosis (but no silicosis) in all 1,807 X-rays he saw, and then, only a few years later, detected silicosis (but no asbestosis) in the same 1,807 X-rays.

-- Animals Gone Wild: A billy goat reportedly attacked Zimbabwe's strong-arm President Robert Mugabe during a gas-station stop en route to the mountain resort of Nyanga in December, injuring Mugabe's scrotum and large bowel. And Fremont, Calif., police officer Paul Rush, who was escorting a teenager home from a traffic stop in January, reported to a hospital emergency room afterward because five chihuahuas had attacked him at the front door of the teen's home, biting his ankles.

-- Stephanie Conley gave an agent for West Virginia National insurance company a $174 check on Aug. 15 (in 2001) for automobile coverage, received the "issued" policy on Aug. 30 ("effective" Aug. 15), and on Aug. 31 was involved in a collision resulting from her negligence. However, by then her $174 check had bounced, and the company considered the policy null and void. In December 2005, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Conley was nonetheless covered on Aug. 31 because the company had not given her 10 days' cancellation notice.

-- In December, the Bush administration's Department of Justice filed a "friend of the court" brief at the U.S. Supreme Court, supporting Anna Nicole Smith in her battle with the son of her late husband, J. Howard Marshall II, over his estate. Smith and the administration believe that a federal bankruptcy court (which backed Smith) should control the case and not a Texas state court (which had sided with Marshall's son).

-- With an Oakland Tribune reporter and 20 people looking on in November in a parking lot in Fremont, Calif., Tu Jin-Sheng, 50, "grandmaster" in one of the Chinese arts of Qigong, pulled a rental truck several yards using only a piece of fabric tied to the base of his genitals. Jin-Sheng is supposedly a leader of the branch of Qigong known as "Iron Crotch," whose 60,000 adherents worldwide believe that strengthening the genitals increases energy. To warm up for the pull, Jin-Sheng had an assistant kick him hard between the legs.

-- BBC News reported in September that Sandra Luchian, 15, from Moldova, managed to hand-copy the 607-page "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," filling five notebooks, after borrowing it from a friend in the U.K. (since it was not available anywhere in Moldova and she couldn't afford to have it shipped to her). She said it took her about a month.

Not Cut Out for a Life of Crime: (1) The robber of a Fastrip store in Joplin, Mo., ignoring a "Use Other Door" sign pointing to an unlocked front door, spent valuable getaway time trying unsuccessfully to bash in the companion (but locked) front door with a chair, then finally bashed in a small window along a side wall and crawled out to escape (December). (2) Landon McQuilkin, 21, arrested in November in Jacksonville, Fla., after he allegedly abducted a man and said he would kill him, relented to his victim's "last request" to visit his girlfriend before he died; with McQuilkin waiting in the car outside her house, the victim went in, locked the door and called police.

On the surface, it appeared that Michael Sargent, an unhappy, 29-year veteran postal worker in Anchorage, Alaska, had managed to work out his anger fairly passively by, according to prosecutors, merely accepting bulk mailings into the postal system without bothering to charge the mailers (cheating the Postal Service out of at least $106,000 in revenue and perhaps as much as $436,000). However, a search of Sargent's home turned up a federal gun-dealer permit in his name, along with 66 firearms, including silencers and a machine gun. Said the prosecutor, "He is a disgruntled public employee. Access to weapons is of concern."

Two men, aged 50 and 36, who had taken a taxicab home so they wouldn't be driving drunk, were killed when the cab was hit by a 21-year-old drunken driver (Albuquerque, November). And a 21-year-old Mormon man, riding in a truck at about 35 mph with his brothers, who were offending him by cussing, demanded that they stop or he would jump out; one of the brothers, perhaps jokingly, said, Go ahead, and the man did and was killed when his head hit the pavement (South Jordan, Utah, 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.)

Bangkok economics student Panupol Sujjayakorn interrupted his studies in November to defend his World Scrabble Championship in London, one of many non-English-speaking competitors who achieved top-of-the-line ranking by memorizing up to 100,000 words in English without ever knowing their meanings. Like the others, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Panupol learned first those premium words that overuse the prominent Scrabble letter tiles (such as "aureolae"). (Alas, this time around, a native English speaker, Dr. Adam Logan, a number theory researcher, won the title, building actual words like "qanat" and "euripi.")

-- Scientists at Syracuse University, recently describing for a British journal their study of body measurements of bats, found an inverse size relationship between a male bat's brain and testicles. The researchers hypothesized that both sperm and brains are metabolically costly to produce, and in species with relatively stable monogamous relationships, brains are allowed to grow, but where females are promiscuous, males that do not overdevelop testicles get left out of the race to procreate.

-- (1) In November in Murfreesboro, Tenn., U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs bureaucrats Joseph Haymond and Natalie Coker were charged with taking kickbacks from suppliers on government purchases of 100,000 rolls of red tape. (The tape is distinctive, red "security" tape used on packages of VA pharmaceuticals.) (2) According to a November Washington Post profile of federal examiner Russell Stormer, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has, since 1790, granted about 30,000 patents to people who have imagined unique ways to reinvent the wheel (or at least improve upon it).

-- Most Convenient Ambulance Chase: In November, according to an Indianapolis Star report of a local accident, an SUV driver collided with another car, causing the SUV to crash into an office building, partially smashing through a wall. Among the building's tenants: the personal-injury law firm Mitchell Hurst Jacobs & Dick, which specializes in automobile accidents.

-- Mr. Rayfran das Neves Sales was convicted in Belem, Brazil, in December of the widely reported murder of an American rain forest-activist nun, who was gunned down as she argued with Sales over who owned the land he was working. Sales claimed self-defense, in that, according to him, the nun reached into her bag as she was proclaiming that "the weapon I have (for fighting for preservation of the rain forest) is this," and Sales, sensing that she was about to pull a gun, shot her. The nun's "weapon," was, of course, her copy of what countless preachers refer to as a primary "weapon" against sin: the Bible.

-- After trying for 22 years to get Hattie Siegel, now 83, to mow her lawn and clear the other critter-infested vegetation from her yard according to regulations of the village of Tequesta, Fla., officials finally cracked down on the accumulated $1.8 million in fines they had levied, and in December, a bankruptcy court ruled that she must liquidate her estate to pay the tab. Two other properties of hers were sold, and she stands to lose more (everything except the Tequesta house itself, which is protected by state law). However, Siegel has finally sought help in the matter and plans to challenge the constitutionality of the village's fines.

-- A bold weight-loss program of the Life of Life Healing Spa in Hong Kong involves actually setting fire briefly to the parts of the body holding the most fat, according to a December dispatch in London's Daily Telegraph. According to owner Karen Chu, the fire follows an energy flow "reading," full-body exfoliation, high-pressure hose spray, and herb-and-potion and alcohol rub-downs (but wet towels and a fire extinguisher are at the ready in case of problems). Chu said about 100 clients have undergone the treatment, with no complications, and the ones interviewed by the Daily Telegraph reporter praised the service. Chu said the treatment is based on traditional Chinese medicine, but a Hong Kong doctor interviewed by Agence France-Presse said, "I have never heard of such a thing."

The land developer Bigg Homes, creator of the Eagle Mountain community near Salt Lake City, touted in its online promotional materials the fact that the development's "(b)lack race population percentage (is) significantly below state average." After hearing complaints, Bigg co-owner David Adams removed the phrase in November, blaming the agency that designed Bigg's materials. (Whoever wrote the phrase must have thought that Utah's "state average" of 1.3 blacks per 100 was somehow suffocating.)

In September, based on the complaint of only one letter-writer (and that man later said he was more being provocative than complaining), the band director of C.D. Hylton High School in Prince William County, Va., dropped from his playlist the popular Charlie Daniels Band song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," because it centers on Satan. Daniels, interviewed by The Washington Post, was appalled: "I am a Christian, and I don't write pro-devil songs."

Sidney Hale, 31, was arrested in Bluefield, Va., in November after enlisting a female friend to help him to, as he put it, sharpen his reflexes in case an intruder broke into his trailer home. The woman was to knock at the front door, and Hale was then to quickly grab his handgun. (A third person was to gauge Hale's reaction time.) According to a sheriff's detective, she knocked, and Hale grabbed the gun. However, it accidentally fired a slug through the door into the woman's back (but she is fine following surgery). And in December in Lake Worth, Fla., a 16-year-old boy found a .45-caliber bullet, began eagerly pounding it with a hammer and screwdriver, and shot himself in the stomach. (He was treated and released at a hospital.)

(1) Francisco Torres, 52, wanted for murder in New York City, was arrested at Lincoln Hospital in November, after he checked in at the emergency room. According to police, he had suffered a severe asthma attack apparently triggered by the gunpowder residue from the bullet he fired at his victim. (2) Former Miami police officer Jesus Gutierrez, 35, charged with having sex with an underage girl, was initially offered a plea bargain that would have meant probation and no jail time, but he decided to go to trial. In September, he was convicted, and in December, a judge sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

Guilty Despite Deformity: In November, engineering student Mischa Beutling, 22, became the most recent rape defendant to profess innocence by impossibility, arguing that his penis is simply too large to have committed the crime. Beutling, who stands 6-7 and weighs 240 pounds, called a urologist to the stand in Newmarket, Ontario, to testify that Beutling's is 8 1/2 inches long "semi-relaxed" and 6 1/2 inches in circumference and that a woman who has not given birth could not accommodate it without serious injury. (In December, a judge named Margaret Eberhard found Beutling guilty.)

Same Gun? Same Bullet!: In November, in Brooklyn, N.Y., Jon Shuler, 20, aiming to settle an argument with Kenny Berry, 27, over a small amount of money, got a gun and shot Berry. Seriously wounded, Berry struggled for the gun, wrested it from Shuler, and shot him dead, just before Berry himself collapsed and died. Also in November, in Sun City, Calif., an 84-year-old man put a gun to his head after a quarrel with his wife and killed himself. However, according to sheriff's deputies, the woman, 71, standing about 8 feet away, was also killed when the bullet passed through him and into her forehead.

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