Ms. Sierra Stiles, age 8, was credited with the first bear kill in Maryland in the limited October hunting season, downing a 211-pounder from 50 yards away with her .243-caliber rifle. (She had won one of the lottery-awarded permits and then aced the safety test.) And according to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer profile in January, Aidan Gold, age 8, of Bothell, Wash., recently climbed a 20,300-foot peak on Mount Everest in the Himalayas with his dad, adding to his previous climbs in the Cascades and the Alps. Aidan said the last part of the Everest climb (a 45-degree stretch of rock and ice) was "the (hardest) 3,000 feet I've ever done."

-- Katie's Pet Depot in La Verne, Calif., is one of the few grooming salons in the country for rats, according to an October Associated Press report. A special $10 treatment includes lustrous-coat shampooing, claw-clipping and flea and mite treatment, and employee Karri Garrison said the claw-clipping is the hardest: "They have very small feet."

-- Opportunities in Toilet Paper: (1) Rev. Rick Oliver of the First Church of God in Pendleton, Ore., decided last fall that the church's new fund-raising campaign would involve sales of toilet paper, specifically the upscale brand Angel Soft. (2) The Portuguese paper producer Renova introduced black toilet paper in France last fall (and expect to introduce it in the U.S. soon). A Renova statement called the tissue "elegant, rebellious, alternative and eternally fashionable."

-- In October in Louisburg, Kan., and January in Eau Claire, Wis., cats went missing after hiding behind drywall being installed in houses, eventually getting sealed in. The unnamed Kansas cat was in for three weeks before workers returned and heard an intrawall shuffling noise, and "Mary Poppins" in Wisconsin moved between walls and ceiling for five days before homeowners tracked her down with thermal imaging equipment.

-- China's Xinhua news agency reported in October that Ai Ai, the veteran chimp at the safari park in Shaanxi province, who is 27 years old and who started smoking cigarette butts at age 11 when her first mate died, has finally kicked her nicotine habit. Zoo officials attributed her success to distractions such as exercise, music (via a Walkman "borrowed" from a keeper), and better food, such as fried dishes and dumplings.

-- Pigs Fighting for Respect: Pigs' personalities are distributed much like humans', according to patiently observant British researcher Niamh O'Connell (interviewed for a November story in London's Daily Telegraph). Except for the largest ones, pigs are of two types: pushy ones that always fight for food and choice sleeping space, and meek ones that avoid confrontations. According to O'Connell, the aggressive ones have higher stress levels and make poorer parents, and besides, they ultimately lose out when they challenge the alpha pigs.

(1) Mike Bolognue opened what he believes is the only alcohol-free "sports bar" in America, in Plain Township, Ohio, near Akron. It was unintentional. He had already invested $560,000 in the bar before he realized that it was located in a dry district. (However, voters can un-dry the district on a ballot question in May.) (2) And in December, a typist for the Japanese bank Mizuho Securities hit the wrong keys and sold about 600,000 shares of an expensive stock that Mizuho owned only 1 share of, making the firm liable for the equivalent of more than $225 million. (The Tokyo Stock Exchange pressured some company buyers to cancel their purchases, but individuals got to sell their purchases back to Mizuho at a huge profit.)

(1) In a company employee style manual issued in late 2005 by Commonwealth Bank in Queensland state in Australia, workers were advised with great specificity how to groom themselves and practice good hygiene. Among the areas covered were proper brands of underwear, shapes for women's eyebrows, and frequency for shaving and for moisturizing one's hands. (In December, a Commonwealth executive issued an "if" apology, i.e., an apology "if" the bank had offended anyone.) (2) In October, Tony Price, managing director of the British firm WStore UK, reportedly threatened to give each of his 80 employees first a DNA test, and then when reaction to that went poorly, a lie detector test, after he accidentally got someone's discarded chewing gum on his trousers.

(1) Lucella Bridget Gorman pleaded guilty in Brisbane, Australia, in December to two counts of theft, the first count for stealing things from a department store and the second count for stealing the mugshot camera while police were booking her for the department-store theft. (2) FEMA subcontractor Frank Tanner, 47, was charged with looting in Slidell, La., in January after he walked out the front door of Darin LeBlanc's home with an armful of electronic equipment. LeBlanc was standing in his front yard at the time, but Tanner, in the hubbub surrounding cleanup efforts, apparently thought LeBlanc was just another contractor.

-- Selina Valdez, 28, was arrested in January and her suspected partner, Daniel Marquez, 41, was sought by police, on counterfeiting charges in Pueblo, Colo., after police walked into their foul-smelling home. No hoarded animals were present, but according to police, about a week before the arrest, officers had called on the couple, who had then hurriedly flushed the bogus bills down the toilet. After questioning them, police left, but the toilet clogged, and since then, the couple have been relieving themselves into plastic bags that police found strewn about the home.

-- Readers' Choice: Jessica Sandy Booth, 18, was arrested in December in Memphis, Tenn., and charged with hiring a hit man to help her kill four people so she could steal a brick of what turned out to be queso fresco cheese. According to police, Booth had seen the large block of crumbly, white, Mexican-cuisine cheese on a table at an acquaintance's home, thought it was a big pile of cocaine, and devised an elaborate plot to return later, steal it, and kill anyone in the house old enough to testify against her.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Jeremy Wayne Hopkins, 22 (Denton, Texas, November); Reginald Wayne Thomas, 23 (Houston, November); Matthew Wayne Almand, 18 (Melbourne, Fla., November); John Wayne Surratt Jr., 28 (Stanly County, N.C., December; escaped and recaptured, January); Curtis Wayne Campbell, 25 (Norman, Okla., January). Convicted of murder: Roy Wayne Russell, 45 (Vancouver, Wash., January). Sentenced for murder: Douglas Wayne Pepper, 44 (Greensboro, N.C., November). Executed for murder: Melvin Wayne White, 55 (Huntsville, Texas, November). Committed Suicide While Suspected of Murder: Don Wayne Moody, 26 (Laredo, Texas, December).

In 2003, News of the Weird reported on the grand design of Bill Martin to build a Christian-themed nudist park, Natura, in Florida's Pasco County (already the home of five nudist camps). (He argues that nakedness is more Christianlike than the expensive, garish clothes worn by worshipers at mega-churches' Sunday galas.) Martin plans to open later in 2006, despite legal challenges such as the one over the frank guidelines on Natura's Web site. Perhaps the most controversial is an essay reassuring men and boys that spontaneous erections seldom occur and should not discourage them from visiting. Though Christian organizations, and even the more staid nudist organizations, have objected to Martin's candor, he stood fast: "Erections," he said, "have got to be addressed."

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

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.)