Obsessed executives have always taken business home at night, but increasingly they take it into the bathroom, with laptop computers, high-speed connections, flat-panel televisions and speaker phones, according to a February Wall Street Journal report. (Said one, "I'm beside myself when I can't get my e-mails.") However, there are problems, e.g., "sound-chamber" sound (the hollow voice created by typical bathroom acoustics usually gives away one's location) and the "BlackBerry dunk" (with one Houston repair shop saying it gets a half-dozen jobs a day of portable devices accidentally dropped into the sink or tub, "or worse").

-- In January, a police SWAT officer in Fairfax, Va., accidentally shot and killed an unarmed optometrist on whom the swarming team was serving an arrest warrant for suspicion of gambling. (In April 2005, a SWAT team arrested 24 community poker players in Palmer Lake, Colo., but at least there were no casualties. In October 1998, a passive but startled security guard was killed by a SWAT team moving in on a club in Virginia Beach, Va., suspected of housing gambling.)

-- Tough Love: (1) Australia's Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, announced in December that terrorist suspects being held under house arrest would routinely be sent to anger management classes, to help them address their alienation. (2) In December, a 75-unit apartment house opened in Seattle, funded by grants from the local, state and federal governments, as free housing for what the city considers its most incorrigible drunks, on the theory that keeping an eye on them would be less costly than leaving them free to cause mischief and overuse emergency rooms.

-- The Times of London reported in January that according to recently released government files from the 1980s, the administration of Prime Minister Thatcher appeared seriously concerned that poachers posed a threat to the Loch Ness monster (if and when it revealed itself). (Also in those files, as reported in News of the Weird in 2004, was a letter from Swedish officials seeking advice from the Nessie-experienced British on protecting Sweden's own underwater Lake Storsjo monster.)

-- At Fort Polk, La., the Pentagon has created elaborate, Hollywood-like sets of buildings and homes but representing village scenes in Iraq and Afghanistan under realistic conditions of war, to train soldiers preparing for deployment. Among the fine details (according to a January Harper's magazine report): hiring amputees and using fake blood to simulate horrific injuries; piping in the scent of vomit and other emblems of battlefield chaos; bringing in U.S.-residing Iraqi natives to heckle soldiers in Arabic; conducting press briefings before hostile reporters; and at one venue, fighting in modern city blocks of buildings, presumably for guerilla wars of the future.

(1) In December, a self-employed market analyst in Chimacum, Wash., requested from the IRS a copy of the 2003 Form 1040 and instructions, so he could revise an old tax return, and three weeks later received instead two shipments totaling 48,000 copies of 2005 Form 1040 and instructions. (2) Tax officials in Valparaiso, Ind., admitted in February that they mistakenly valued one house at $400 million (though its previous assessment was $121,900), and even though they recomputed the owner's bill, they failed to erase from the city budget the $8 million in tax revenue they were expecting from the property, including $3 million that they had already disbursed.

(1) With Clinton Dearman about to be sentenced for burglary and assault in Christchurch, New Zealand, in January, his lawyer asked for sympathy. Dearman had been surprised mid-burglary by his victims, who were all seniors who proceeded to beat Dearman up and hog-tie him (a photo of which made the newspapers). Thus, the lawyer said, Dearman had become a "laughingstock" among prisoners and would "never be able to hold his head up in criminal company again." (2) In January, Alexis du Pont de Bie Sr., 62, who grew up in a du Pont family mansion and inherited $7 million, filed a lawsuit in New York City accusing his estate's trustees of mismanagement that has reduced his wealth to $2 million and necessitated a cut in his allowance to $3,000 a month, making him, he said, "literally destitute and homeless."

(1) Mutaa, the 1,400-year-old Islamic tradition of "temporary" marriage (typically, for one-night stands or for financial reasons), has proliferated in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, embraced by Shiites even though condemned by Sunnis, according to a January Los Angeles Times dispatch. (2) Under sharia law, a Muslim husband can end a marriage at will, but apparently there are formalities. In Kuala Lumpur in January, a judge said the declaration had to be made in court and thus fined a Malaysian lawmaker the equivalent of about $150 after he tried to declare divorce first by text-messaging his wife and then by voicemail.

Police arrested David Kennedy, 33, in January near Murfreesboro, Tenn., after he accidentally ran other drivers off the road, perhaps from being distracted by the open pornographic magazines that were in his front seat. And on a January afternoon, motorist Stephen Nielsen, 38, was stopped and finally awakened by Suffolk County, N.Y., police, who saw him driving 40 mph on the Long Island Expressway with eyes closed and mouth agape.

-- A familiar definition of "insanity" (attributed to Albert Einstein) is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results. Donald E. Neff, 38, of Pleasant Township, Ohio, launched his 27-foot boat in the Portage River to access Lake Erie on Nov. 12, but it ran aground, and Neff required a Coast Guard rescue. Despite warnings to wait for higher tide, Neff got another boat the next day and set out again. He of course ran the second boat aground and had to be re-rescued. Two days later, he persuaded a friend to take him out, but naturally the friend's boat ran aground, requiring the Coast Guard once again. Officials were contemplating as many as seven criminal charges against Neff.

-- On Super Bowl Sunday, deputies in Sheridan, Colo., found a car with its windows blown out, its doors bulging outward and the roof bent upward about a foot. The license plate led to Norman Frey, 46, who admitted that he had been on his way to a football party with a balloon filled with acetylene, which he planned to explode in celebration. However, the balloon ignited, perhaps by static electricity from the back seat, and Frey and a companion suffered shrapnel wounds.

(1) Documenting menopause in gorillas (at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, to show that not just humans experience menopause) (December). (2) Studying whether hamsters are happy or depressed (an Ohio State University project to determine whether non-humans experience seasonal affective disorder) (January). (3) Finding the gene for ear wax (conclusion: Africans' and Europeans' ear wax tends to be wetter, and that among East Asians drier, with other Asians' wax about midway between, though the Nagasaki University researchers failed to learn much else) (January).

In July 2005, News of the Weird reported that former Florida judge Gary Graham had been charged with child molesting, based on statements by a former girlfriend, and as an added touch, the woman had described Graham's insistence that she present herself for sex in pigtails and with paint-on freckles, to give the effect of a young girl. In February 2006, a judge in Inverness, Fla., dropped all the charges after the ex-girlfriend admitted that she made everything up because she was angry.

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com (or www.NewsoftheWeird.com). Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Palm Beach County, Fla., created the controversial "butterfly ballot" in the 2000 presidential election that reportedly confused more than a thousand Gore-Lieberman voters such that they wound up marking their ballots for a minor-party candidate. In February 2006, local education officials told the Palm Beach Post that too many of the county's high school students apparently knew answers on the statewide comprehensive test but were incorrectly marking the answer sheets. The multiple choice questions require only one circle to be darkened on the sheet, but other questions require darkening digits of an actual numerical answer, apparently bewildering students into darkening too many or too few circles.

-- (1) Two "skinhead" teenagers were arrested in January after an altercation outside the Club Metropolis in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; according to a witness, one was a regular skinhead and the other a member of the apparently more enlightened SHARP, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. (2) A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist, quoting a spokesman for the telecommunications company Lucent in January, reported that "nearly a million people" in the United States still lease their house phones for around $60 a year (about 20 years after they were no longer required to), rather than buy them for as little as $20 each.

-- Lannie Lloyd Hendrickson, 24, was arrested in Bozeman, Mont., in December on charges that he aggressively bit two infants he was baby-sitting, ages 1 and 2, over their arms, shoulders and legs, because they would not fall asleep. According to police, Hendrickson said he could not recall how many times he bit each one, but did admit that he "bit the shit out of them."

-- Visionary engineer Stefan Marti last year solved what he apparently believes is a profound social problem: how to decide whether to take a cell phone call during a conversation with associates. His Conversation Finder and "social polling" Finger Ring, according to a December item in the New York Times Magazine, require one's associates to wear special badges, which analyze speech patterns and find and synchronize themselves to one's immediate conversation. Each associate also wears a special ring, which vibrates upon sensing a cell call impulse within the group. Each associate then can rub his ring, which diverts the call to an electronic mailbox, or not, and if no one rubs, the callee, having thus avoided a catastrophic faux pas, takes the call.

-- A new "stress-relief" book by David L. Mocknick of Philadelphia, called "Who's Fred, Ha!" (described in December in New York's Newsday), prescribes a game based on the German name Frederick, which Mocknick said has curative powers. A stressed person listens out in public for words that rhyme with Fred, and hearing one (e.g., dead), he says, "Dead! Fred! Who's Fred, ha!" And that makes him feel better, says Mocknick. An accompanying CD suggests versions of the game based on double Freds or Freds with clues ("What's thermometer liquid called?" "Mercury." "Freddie Mercury (the late singer)! Who's Fred, ha!")

-- The Wichita Eagle reported in January that the BTK serial killer, Dennis Rader (now serving 10 consecutive life sentences), has been sued by a former employee, Mary Capps, for $75,000 because, while she worked for him, he used "abusive, intimidating language and physical gestures" toward her, damaging her career prospects with the Park City, Kan., government. Also named in the lawsuit was Rader's supervisor. Rader is unlikely ever to have $75,000 in assets, and besides, most people who were only verbally abused by Rader might feel lucky.

-- An exhaustive report in December on CIA operatives who staffed the so-called "rendition" program, secretly transferring suspected terrorists from U.S. custody to foreign governments, revealed sometimes-sloppy undercover work of the agents. In one rendition, in Milan, Italy, covert agents failed to remove their cell phones' batteries, thus enabling them to be electronically tracked even though the phones were off. Also, one clandestine operative left a clear trail of her whereabouts because, even though she booked herself at foreign hotels under aliases, she insisted that frequent-flier miles earned at the hotels be credited to her personal, non-secret frequent-flier account.

-- A psychotherapist and a children's theater director collaborated on a one-hour play, "Baby Drama" (about parenthood, birth and early life), that opened in January to sold-out performances in Stockholm, Sweden, despite the fact that its intended audience is infants, aged 6 to 12 months. Said director Suzanne Osten: "If you can speak to a 3-month-old baby and get laughter from them, you must be able to write an interesting play for them." Said one mother, "The babies are obviously having fun the whole time they are in the theater."

-- Life Imitates a Schoolyard Joke About the Bathtub: University of Maine geologists reported in December that dozens of methane fields off the coast of Maine were releasing large amounts of gas, disrupting the ocean floor and creating massive bubbles.

-- Life Imitates a Stephen King Movie: Gerard Glock, 39, filed a claim against the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y., in January to reimburse two months' wages he lost when he was too traumatized to work. He had been trimming weeds in a cemetery operated by the church when the ground collapsed, and he wound up waist-deep in his brother-in-law's grave.

New Fetishist Species: (1) Masafumi Natsukawa, 39, was arrested in Yokohama, Japan, in January for allegedly tricking more than 30 young girls to open their mouths on the pretense that he was checking for tooth decay, and when they did, he licked their tongues. (2) In January, former schoolteacher Michael Codde, 44, was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty in Santa Cruz, Calif., to felony child molestation. The case against Codde consisted mostly of testimony that he put whipped cream on teenage boys' toes and made them lick it off while he took photos (a practice the judge said that Codde engaged in for sexual arousal).

(1) In Jackson, Mo., in December, Jacob Vandeven, 27, was caught by his judge at lunch, having a drink, one hour after the judge had convicted Vandeven of DUI and sentenced him to alcohol rehab with a do-not-drink order. (2) David Mulligan, 21, released from jail in Juneau, Alaska, in December after serving a 25-day sentence, allegedly stole a car a block from the jail three minutes later (and was arrested shortly after that). (3) Justin Fish, 21, who had just been bailed out on a charge of assaulting a car dealer in Framingham, Mass., in December, was almost immediately arrested again for assault because, as he walked out of the police station, he allegedly banged the door against an officer.

People who accidentally shot themselves recently: Lawrence Maner, Savannah, Ga., December (apprehensively put his gun in his lap after picking up a hitchhiker, who turned out to be harmless, but then a car swerved in traffic, and Maner's gun fell to the floor, and as he picked it up, it fired a shot into his leg). A 39-year-old man, Ocala, Fla., December (fatally shot himself while playing "cowboy action shooting" at a gun range). A 21-year-old man, Vancouver, British Columbia (shot his finger off playing with a gun in the bathroom on New Year's Day). A 29-year-old man, Columbia City, Ind., January (shot himself in the leg when he was unable to simultaneously lug a heavy trash bag and safely keep a gun in his waistband).

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com (or www.NewsoftheWeird.com). Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Dave "The Dragon" Lockwood and his tournament-tested sons, Max, 16, Jon, 13, and Ben, 10, of Silver Spring, Md., might become to competitive tiddlywinks what the Manning family of quarterbacks is to football, according to a January Washington Post story. Dave was previously ranked No. 1 in the English Tiddlywinks Association (and is currently No. 8, with Max No. 52). "Tiddlywinks doesn't sound very serious," said Max, but "(t)here's so much strategy." (For the uninformed: You mash a "squidger" down on a "wink" to propel it either into the "pot" or to "squop" it onto an opponent's wink to temporarily disable it.) Dave said he plans to get Britain's Prince Philip, a winker, to suggest tiddlywinks as a demonstration "sport" at London's 2012 Summer Olympics.

-- In November, the military ruler of Myanmar, Gen. Than Shwe, ordered his entire government to immediately pack up and move from Rangoon to a new capital 200 miles away in the small town of Pyinmana, based on dire warnings from his astrologer (though the move had been long-rumored). (Myanmar/Burma has a history with astrology and numerology, and in fact, democracy activists purposely commenced their most propitious demonstrations on Aug. 8, 1988, at 8:08 a.m.) Shwe was just named the world's third-worst dictator by Parade magazine.

-- The traditional Norwegian dish of smalahove is smoked sheep's head with all parts except the skull itself counted as delicacies. Especially tasty are the eyes, said a restaurateur quoted in a November Agence France-Presse dispatch from Voss, Norway, since they are the most-used muscles in the face: "(Eye) just melts on the tongue." A visiting Englishman, served eyes, lips, tongue and ears, remarked that it is "a bit of a visual challenge, but the meat is very good."

-- Recent News About the Scottish Meal That Melts on the Tongue: In September in Bethlehem, Pa., the annual haggis-eating contest was won by Darren Lucey of Brooklyn, N.Y. (1-1/2 pounds in 2 minutes), but the only female entrant, slow-eating Joanne Shaver, said she competed only to get the free haggis, which she loves. (Haggis is sheep stomach stuffed with tongue, heart, liver, oats and onions, best served at the enticing color of gray.)

-- In January, an Anglican church vicar in Cambridge, England, commenced twice-monthly services for goths (with black garments and rock music) at his St. Edward King and Martyr church. Vicar Martin Ramshaw, 34, said he is a goth himself and reports that his dozen or so worshippers go straight from services to a goth nightclub. (He will soon issue goth T-shirts with Jesus speaking, "If the world hates you, remember, it hated me first.") And in Waco, Texas, in January, in another congregation-building move, Catholic Monsignor Isidore Rozycki, attending a gala opening, blessed the city's new Hooters restaurant.

-- Evangelical Christian minister Rob Schenck and two colleagues entered a U.S. Senate hearing room the day before the January confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and daubed each seat with "holy oil" to bless the proceedings, saying that things had gone well when they had done the same thing for Chief Justice Roberts' hearings. "God ... is interested in what goes on" there, Rev. Schenck told a Wall Street Journal reporter.

-- Illinois Sentencing Guidelines: (1) Judges in Springfield, Ill., twice failed to order jail time in November for Jason Holman, 27, for the two latest of his 185 traffic tickets, opting merely for what amounted to probation. (2) After a Jacksonville, Ill., judge, in September, gave Oscar Cushionberry, 49, three years in jail for a probation violation, the prosecutor praised the judge for finally sending Cushionberry "a message that, at some point in time, you run out of options," that one only gets "so many chances at probation." In the past 10 years, Cushionberry has 93 arrests and 29 convictions (including some felonies).

-- The University of Florida announced in January it would provide health care and other benefits to domestic partners of their employees, provided the employee certifies that the pair are having sex (specifically, having a "non-platonic" relationship). A University human resources official said such a pledge is "increasingly standard" in domestic-partner programs, even though married couples are not required to certify that they actually have sex.

(1) Hunter Raybon E. Upton was tracked down and rescued by his worried wife near Mount Holly, Ark., in December, after he spent almost nine hours hanging upside down from branches following his entanglement in his tree stand. He was hospitalized with hypothermia and required surgery. (2) A fire rescue officer had to pull Australian Robin Toom, 38, out of a commercial washing machine in Townsville, Queensland, in January after he got stuck while playing hide-and-seek with his kids.

(1) In a Washington, D.C., pedestrian tragedy in December, prominent urban designer Charles Atherton, 73, was fatally struck down by a driver, but then when paramedics arrived, they discovered that D.C. police had already been there and had issued Atherton a $5 jaywalking ticket. (2) In December, a special committee of the D.C. Council, seeking to move the annual Martin Luther King Day parade from January to a warmer date, chose "April 1." (Committee members later said they never realized that that was April Fool's Day.) (3) The Washington Post found in December that the D.C. medical examiner's backlog of autopsies stood at 1,038, including 84 homicides more than a year old.

Techno Wizards: (1) Boris Alvarado, 31, was arrested in September and charged with violating his Texas probation for a 2004 conviction for soliciting an underage girl online for sex. Alvarado made it easy for investigators because he was still using the same screen name he had used in 2004. (2) Ten people were arrested on counterfeiting charges in Phoenix in November, helped along when two of them brought a computer printer to a shop for repair, and technicians found it clogged with counterfeit money. [Press release of Attorney General of Texas, 9-20-05] [Arizona Republic, 11-15-05]

(1) The bestiality count News of the Weird reported in October against mortgage broker Brendan McMahon in Sydney, Australia, was dropped in November, but McMahon is still charged with abusing rabbits in other ways. A court psychiatrist said McMahon probably genuinely believed he was helping the rabbits. (2) Former Oklahoma district judge Donald Thompson was finally scheduled for arraignment in January, 12 months after he was charged with indecency for allegedly using a noisy masturbation aid under his robes during trials and other court business. An additional count was recently filed based on a court reporter's statement that she saw him shaving his pubic hair during a trial.

Twice recently came news reports of people attempting suicide by sticking their heads in toilets: a 23-year-old woman being held in Chicago for three murders and using her cell's toilet (unsuccessful), and a man being held on a murder charge in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., in December (successful, in that his head lodged in the toilet during flushing). And in Belmont, N.H., in January, a suicidal man was successful with his elaborate, homemade guillotine, although the blade merely left a gash in his neck, causing him to slowly bleed to death. (He also had wired fire bombs to burn down the house as he died, but he apparently forgot to flip the electrical trigger before the guillotine came down.)

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