A February report on mine safety regulation by USA Today found that complicated federal statutes and unvigorous Mine Safety and Health Administration enforcement have resulted in a structure of civil fines almost guaranteed not to deter dangerous conditions. The largest-ever MSHA fine (for a 2001 incident with 13 deaths) was $605,400 (as compared to, for example, the FCC's 2004 fine of CBS for the brief image of Janet Jackson's breast at the Super Bowl, which was $3.5 million). One attorney who represents coal companies claimed that fines are largely irrelevant to safety: "I really don't think any responsible mine operator makes any decision about safety based on civil penalties." [USA Today, 2-10-06]

-- American Pride: In January, spokesman Nick Inskip of the trade association of Australia's legalized brothels and strip clubs praised the American sailors who that week began several days' shore leave in Brisbane. "(T)he fellows are fantastic customers," he said. "They are so well-mannered. ... They're very aware that they're representing their country, and that's why they behave so well."

-- More Things to Blame on Bush: (1) Two gunmen robbed a 57-year-old woman in her Westerville, Ohio, home in February, but, according to a police report, argued among themselves about how to do the job, until one of the men, perhaps feeling sorry for himself, said, "This is all George W. Bush's fault. He screwed up the economy." All the two men needed, he said, was "gas money for the car." (2) A 29-year-old man was convicted in February after he jumped over a fence at the White House to meet up with Chelsea Clinton. According to an officer, the man seemed unfazed at being told that the Clintons no longer lived there but did say that "George Bush told me to jump the fence, and I jumped the fence."

-- After the secretary for the Miracle of Prayer Church in Grove Hill, Ala., was arrested in January on an outstanding warrant, the church's Prophet Ron Williams called congregation members (most of whom are African-American) to the Clarke County jail to protest, vowing that he wasn't going "no damn where" until she was released. As the crowd grew, and deputies warned Williams about inciting a riot, Williams became more defiant, screaming at deputies and pointing to his cell phone, yelling, "I got Johnnie Cochran on the phone right now!" (even though Cochran had passed away 10 months earlier).

-- After two boys at PS 14 in New York City taunted a 5-year-old classmate in January three times by grabbing his privates, school officials held a hearing and referred the boys for guidance counseling. Unsatisfied, the younger boy's parents in February filed a lawsuit against the already-budget-challenged New York City school system for $6 million.

-- Massachusetts inmate Joseph Schmitt, 41, filed a lawsuit for $70,000 against the Department of Corrections in December for restricting his ability to continue his writing career from lockup. Schmitt, now in civil detainment (as exceptionally dangerous) following completion of his sentence for child rape, previously earned up to $20,000 a year writing pornography (including at least one piece on child sex) and sees no reason why he can't return to that line of work.

Jacqueline Dotson was seriously injured in an accident near Winchester, Ky., in February that police say happened when she lost control of her SUV and ran several other cars off the road before overcorrecting, which caused the SUV to roll over a guardrail and land upside down. A rescue crew labored an hour and a half with the "jaws of life" to extricate her from the vehicle, but one of her arms was already free, severed in the accident and lying on the road, still grasping a cell phone.

In December, more than a month before "buckshot" would be all over the news (from a misadventure at a Texas ranch), the New England Journal of Medicine reported the odd case of a 73-year-old Inuit woman hospitalized in Nome, Alaska, whose abdominal X-ray revealed an enlarged and photographically opaque appendix, which doctors concluded was an appendix filled with buckshot. The Inuits, doctors said, eat so many ducks and geese downed by buckshot that inevitably some buckshot remains in the cooked meat and is eaten and digested, with some migrating to the appendix, where it is trapped. The appendix was enlarged and opaque on the X-ray simply because it was overstuffed with buckshot.

-- (1) In Japan's Wakayama prefecture in December, Miichiro Yamashita, 70, received a suspended sentence for bringing 25 sticks of dynamite to a hospital and threatening to blow the place up unless his doctor changed his mind and gave him the treatment he wanted for his stomachache. (2) Two women are at large in the Kenner, La., area after one slashed a Rally's restaurant manager in February with a razor blade because her requested substitution (mayonnaise for tartar sauce on her fish sandwich) was not honored. (3) In February, Kimberly Dasilva, 40, was charged in Boston with putting explosives into condoms and mailing them to people she believes are associated with her longstanding mistreatment by men, including two strip clubs where she used to work.

-- Stewart Jenkins, 33, was arrested in Des Moines, Iowa, in November for allegedly pulling a gun on a man he apparently thought was disrespecting him. According to the police report, Jenkins and Patrick Hickey passed each other in an alley, and Jenkins asked, "What's up?" Hickey responded: "What's up?" Jenkins asked again: "What's up?" Hickey (again): "What's up?" Jenkins: "I'll show you what's up!" He ran into a nearby house and emerged angrily with a .38-caliber handgun. (Unfortunately for him, Patrick Hickey is a plainclothes police officer. He arrested Jenkins and recovered about 15 grams of suspected crack cocaine from the house.)

Not Cut Out for a Life of Crime: (1) University of Colorado freshman Jonathan Baldino, caught by security personnel in November after he printed out a fake bar code, stuck it on a $149.99 iPod, and bought it for $4.99 at a Target store, immediately wrote a frenzied confession: "I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN, and I am once more terribly sorry. I'm only a kid! Help me out! ... Please! Please! Please!" (It didn't help.) (2) After Seattle police chased a carjacking suspect into a tree in February, bystanders gathered around and laughed, but the suspect, still defiant, yelled at them, "It's not funny!" (However, according to a KIRO-TV reporter, some in the crowd yelled back, "Yes it is!")

(1) "Australian Whale Vomit Find Worth a Fortune" (an Agence France-Presse dispatch from Sydney on a vacationing family's discovery of a solid fatty substance somehow actually used in the fragrance industry and which was expected to bring the equivalent of about US$215,000) (January). (2) "Why I Still Breastfeed My Eight-Year-Old Girl" (a News & Star of Carlisle, England, report on mothers who insist on breastfeeding as long as the child desires it) (February).

A 23-year-old man fell to his death off a balcony during a spitting contest with his brother and a friend (Mount Prospect, Ill., November). A 21-year-old man was shot to death inside a stranger's home at 1:45 a.m., perhaps after having missed the bumper sticker on the homeowner's truck, reading, "Gun control means using both hands." (Rochester, N.H., September). A 37-year-old man escaped a fire in his home but died of smoke inhalation after he decided to go back inside to look for his cell phone to call 911 (Greenville, S.C., December).

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

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.)