Even with the nation at war and casualties mounting, some Pentagon officials evidently believe that one way to reduce military families' stress is to teach them to laugh. Its "laughter instructor," retired Army Col. James Scott, holds therapeutic sessions around the country with National Guard families that feature walking like a penguin and blurting "ha ha hee hee and ho ho," according to a January USA Today story. Said Scott, "The guiding principle is to laugh for no reason (which is) one of the reasons it works so well for military families."

-- After her 11-year-old son was suspended for twice bringing a loaded handgun to school, Linnea C. Holdren, 43, said the matter was pretty much beyond her control. "I can't lock up his guns," she told police. "They belong to him, and he has a right to use them whenever he wants to use them." (The boy was expelled in January, and Holdren, who is a teacher at her son's Shickshinny, Pa., elementary school, has been charged with felony endangerment.)

-- Denmark's government ruled in 2001 that institutionalized citizens have the right to have sex and that caregivers must even take them to visit prostitutes. (Prostitution is legal in Denmark.) According to a January dispatch from Aarhus, Denmark, in London's Observer, Mr. Torben Vegener Hansen, 59, who has cerebral palsy and lives at home on government assistance, is challenging the government also to pay for prostitutes to make house calls, claiming that he is unable to have sex manually because of his illness and must be accorded this "human right" by a service similar to the government's meals-on-wheels program.

-- Scotland Yard agreed in January to pay the equivalent of about $52,000 to London police Sgt. Leslie Turner to settle Turner's claim that the reason he failed in a 2004 assignment was that he had been "overpromoted" to the job because he is black. Turner said he had been given a job as a guard for Prince Charles, and then for Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, without adequate training and, as a result, made mistakes that caused him to be reassigned.

-- Two physicians, in a December note in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, wrote glowingly of the ability of the Super Soaker Max-D 5000 squirt weapon to quickly and safely loosen severely impacted ear wax (knowledge learned from an emergency use when no standard ear-syringing equipment was available). In fact, they wrote, since the Super Soaker holds much more water than the standard equipment, using it would actually shorten patients' office visits. (However, the Super Soaker was obviously not anticipated for medical use; its awkward design assured that patient and doctor would be drenched by excess spray.)

-- "The Island of Dr. Moreau" Comes to Life: (1) Recently opened archives in Moscow show that in the 1920s, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered his top animal breeding scientist to create interspecies "super warriors." Stalin's half-men, half-apes would be "invincible," "insensitive to pain" and "indifferent about the quality of food they eat." (2) The Associated Press reported in October that Japan's Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., in the course of video-game research, is developing a joystick-controlled headset that disorients humans and makes them move in certain ways (a benign "virtual dance experience," according to one researcher, with potential uses such as keeping the elderly from falling).

-- Researchers for Finland's Helsinki University of Technology's Air Guitar Project recently demonstrated software that allows a player's finger movements along the imaginary instrument to be set to music from a library of guitar sounds. According to a November New Scientist report, the virtual guitar hero wears special gloves, allowing his gestures to be tracked by camera. Researcher Aki Kanerva expects players even to develop a distinct air guitar style.

Researcher Jean-Louis Martin of the Universite Claude Bernard in Lyon, France, found (for a December British Medical Journal article) that consuming cannabis (marijuana) doubled motorists' likelihood of a fatal auto collision, and alarming news headlines about the report followed. Less prominently noted in the article, and consequently in news reports, was that drivers impaired by alcohol were six times more likely than an unimpaired driver to have a fatal collision, thus suggesting that the generally illegal drug, cannabis, is only one-third as dangerous for drivers as the legal drug, alcohol.

In January, a parrot named Greeny inherited a half-million-dollar property in Boulder County, Colo., through an elaborate trust fund after its owners, Patricia Borosik, 49, and (a man with essentially four first names) Paul James Stewart Scott, 54, committed suicide. If Scott had lived a few more days, he would have had to report to court to be sentenced for offering $13,000 to two underage girls to have sex with him and then to asphyxiate him with a pillow.

Not Cut Out for a Life of Crime: (1) Three men who police say stole a car in San Jose, Calif., in October and drove it to Chico, Calif., were arrested in Chico when police caught them trying to break into that same car because they had locked the keys inside (or thought they had, since Chico Officer Jose Lara said he found the keys in one of the men's pockets, after all). (2) Adam Ruiz, 29, was arrested in Buffalo, N.Y., in January after he showed up at work as a trainee at the same Burger King he had allegedly robbed the week before (strengthening the conclusion that crime certainly does not pay if it pays less well than burger-flipping.)

More Courtroom Defendants Employing Ridiculous Legal Theories: Gregory Ignatius Armstrong, 42, was indicted for bankruptcy fraud in Greenbelt, Md., in December for claiming in all seriousness that he is a sovereign nation with unlimited contract powers and is thus owed $500,000 in copyright royalties by anyone who uses his name (in one case, by his Postal Service supervisor who wrote him concerning absences from work). And Oliver Clifton Hudson and Gregory Banks refused to attend their federal drug-conspiracy trial in Baltimore in November because they deny that the government has jurisdiction over their "flesh and blood." Hudson, for example, said the indictment against him was void because it listed his name in all capital letters, when the correct designation is "Oliver Clifton: Hudson."

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (75) People who are so enticed by the money they can make selling scrap-metal copper that they break into electrical substations to steal wire, at night, and touch the wrong thing, as the man did in Bellmead, Texas, two days before Christmas. (He "never even knew what hit him," said a utility employee.) (76) And animals in mating season (especially deer) that crash into homes and storefronts in their crazed search for sex, as did deer that appeared in January in an Evansville, Ind., video store and an Arkansas City, Kan., elementary school.

A Saratoga Springs, N.Y., telemarketer perhaps saved the life of an 85-year-old man in Ridott, Ill., in December when she happened to dial his number. The man had fallen the night before and spent the night outside freezing. Suffering from hypothermia, he had struggled to crawl back inside, and, although still unable to make an outgoing call, he managed to pick up the ringing phone and ask for help.

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

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.)