Salt Lake City fashion designer Jared Gold recently began offering jeweled brooches featuring brightly colored Swarovski crystals affixed to a live, 3-inch-long Madagascar hissing cockroach that a woman can allow to roam a short distance around her dress or jacket via a silver chain affixed to the roach's back. The brooch sells for $80 at Gold's Web site. An April New York Post story quoted an animal-rights spokesman as calling the bauble "just the gift" for the "person who doesn't mind a small animal excreting on them throughout the day."

-- Teachers at several nursery schools in Oxfordshire, England, have been encouraging kids to learn the verse "Baa, baa, black sheep/Have you any wool?" without the word "black," but in its place a variety of emotions (e.g., "Baa, baa, sad sheep") or colors (including "Baa, baa, rainbow sheep") because they believe that kids with black skin might feel disrespected. According to a March Cox News Service dispatch from London, the campaign seems of a piece with a UK media flurry in 2003 suggesting changing the ending to Humpty Dumpty so that he receives merely a mild bump instead of shattering.

-- China's Xinhua news agency reported in March that the police department in Nanjing has gone beyond fingerprints and now has a data bank of smells taken from criminals and crime scenes to aid police dogs in investigations. Officials say that storing the scents at minus-18 degrees Celsius retards degradation for at least three years, and already, they say, the bank of 500 odors has led to the identification of 23 suspects.

-- In March, on state highway 2 near Papamoa, New Zealand, police stopped a 32-year-old man driving 121 km/hr (75 mph), with no license and also no arms, having kept relatively good control with one foot on the gas and the other on the steering wheel. He told officers he had been driving that way for years without incident, a fact that amazed police and an amputee interviewed by the New Zealand Herald. The man still got a NZ$170 (US$106) ticket.

-- (1) The Nigerian Football Association advised its referees in March that they could accept money from teams (since "bribery" is considered part of the way of life in Nigeria), but that they should only pretend to agree to treat the briber favorably because they have a duty to call a game fairly. (2) Joshua Abeyta was charged with arson in Thornton, Colo., in February after he allegedly set fire to the Grand Auto Pontiac dealership, doing $300,000 damage; according to police, Abeyta had no connection to the company except that he was angry with his mother, who drives a Pontiac.

-- A Philadelphia woman who identified herself to reporters as "M. Smith" and who contracted AIDS and cancer more than 15 years ago, said recently that the company Life Partners has been threatening to back out of its contract to pay her health and life insurance premiums. She entered into a "viatical" contract in 1994, signing over her insurance death benefit to Life Partners in exchange for its promise to pay all premiums for her then-expectedly-short life. However, a new generation of drugs has kept her alive, rendering Life Partners quite unhappy with the deal it made. Although the company has not yet reneged on the contract, M. Smith reports that it constantly pressures her to begin paying the increasingly steep premiums herself.

An Arizona company told the technology Web site CNet.com in April that it has created a polyester fabric that neutralizes shots from a Taser gun, basically forming an electric loop on the cloth and sending the charge back into the gun. G2 Consulting Co.'s Thor Shield is now marketed only to law enforcement and military agencies, for their own personnel to wear. (2) Professor Greg Sotzing of the University of Connecticut at Storrs is developing clothing with electromagnetic polymers that can be manipulated to change colors while being worn, allowing the user to style himself depending on mood or whimsy (according to an April report in New Scientist).

-- Chiropractor James Burda of Athens, Ohio, advertises a miraculous cure in which he sends patients, via telepathy, back to the origin of an injury so they can understand the pain and make adjustments. Dr. Burda says he need not meet the patient, nor even talk by phone, because e-mail works perfectly well, even for people who want chiropractic treatment for their pet. According to his Web site, he discovered his skill by accident, while driving around one day. Not surprisingly, the Ohio State Chiropractic Board announced in April that it would hold a hearing to review Burda's work.

-- Long Island, N.Y., bus driver Michael Cianci, 38, was charged in April with child-endangerment for allegedly setting up a hierarchical social structure to enforce discipline among the Tottenville sixth-graders who rode what he called his "Death Cheese Bus." Cianci, who was the "Emperor," had a 12-tiered ranking system, from "Lord" to the low-end "Speds" ("special education" students). Police said Cianci permitted his high-ranking enforcers to rough up misbehaving kids.

-- Creativity in Perversion: Paul Daniel Metcalf Jr., 39, was arrested in Asheville, N.C., in April and accused of two incidents in which he allegedly doused female department store shoppers with his semen, at least once (according to a store's surveillance camera) by spitting it at a woman through a straw.

(1) Children's Hospital of Orange County (Calif.) announced new rules to guard against wrong-site surgery after a January incident in which doctors opened up the wrong side of a child's skull to remove a brain tumor, only to realize, after finding no such tumor, that it was on the other side. (According to the surgeons, they merely sewed up the first site and proceeded to the correct side, without complication.) (2) Dr. Mary Ellen Beatty was suspended and fined $20,000 by the Florida Board of Medicine in April for a wrong-finger surgery, her third wrong-site error in five years.

Latest serendipitous injuries: In March, Donald Batsch, 54, was shot in the abdomen during a robbery in Bakersfield, Calif., but during surgery, doctors discovered a tumor that surely would not have been identified until much later. And in Southampton, England, in March, college professor Ronald Mann had a heart attack while driving, and his car smashed into a tree, but his body's banging against the steering wheel acted like a defibrillator and restarted his heart. (Doctors said that if the car had had an airbag, Mann would be dead.) And in February in Altamonte Springs, Fla., Ms. Arnie Fairclaw fell, broke her leg, and was taken to a hospital; later that night, a drunk driver lost control of his truck, which rammed her house and smashed into the bed where she would have been sound asleep.

People Who Shouldn't Have Played with Matches: (1) An unnamed man in his 80s, whom neighbors said "hated everybody," was killed in Downey, Calif., in January after attempting revenge by putting an explosive in a neighbor's home but accidentally setting his arm on fire, which then set off his bomb. (2) A 49-year-old woman died in a fire in Milwaukee in January when, trying to get her boyfriend's attention, she stood angrily beside his bed and flicked lit matches onto his sheet-clad body, until a fire started. She was eventually overcome with smoke, but the boyfriend and the five others in the house survived.

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

Leonard Brown, 47, sentenced in 1982 to 99 years in prison in Florida for armed robbery, was released in April after a fellow inmate (having looked over Brown's records) pointed out to officials that Brown's sentence was illegally long and that 15 years was the maximum time he could have been kept behind bars. The probable explanation, according to sources cited by The Tampa Tribune, was that Brown's judge (now deceased) misinterpreted whether Brown was ever armed. Thus, but for the fortuitous discovery of that eagle-eyed inmate, Brown would have spent his entire post-teenage life in prison.

-- (1) Kuwait Times reported in April that food inspectors shut down the Hawally bakery in Kuwait City after finding dough stored in a toilet, which the owner explained was so that the humidity would keep it moist. (2) Houston police officials started an investigation in March into whether Lt. Joseph Buttitta had sexually harassed a female officer. KPRC-TV reported that the female at first described a consensual relationship that she should have broken off sooner, but then "accidentally" (in a reporter's word) told Buttitta she loved him when she really meant to say goodbye.

-- Honesty Is the Best Policy: (1) Caught by police with illegal emergency lights on his car, Bradenton, Fla., restaurant manager Kenneth Holmes, 26, said at his February sentencing for impersonating a police officer that he did it "to get home quicker," that the flashers were "cool" and a "fantastic time-saver" that enabled him to drive through red lights. (2) According to a February police report on the Arizona State University student newspaper's Web site, an 18-year-old student, arrested at Hayden Library for masturbating openly while watching Internet porn, explained to police, "To be honest, the Internet connection at my dorm isn't good enough."

(1) Michael Oddenino, a lawyer in Arcadia, Calif., filed a lawsuit in March against the coach of his daughter's high school softball team for $3 million for her emotional distress from the coach's calling her a "2-year-old" and calling the players in general "idiots" for making insignificant mistakes. (A judge rejected it.) (2) In Cardiff, Wales, in March, Sabrina Pace, 26, sued the manager of the car rental firm where she works because, following her breast-augmentation surgery, she couldn't get the manager to stop paying attention to her breasts.

-- In March, Fredericton, New Brunswick, anti-abortion activist David Little, 60, resisting his upcoming trial for tax evasion, informed the judge that he would need an indefinite postponement because his wife and stepdaughter are possessed by Satan and require exorcism. He told the judge that some exorcisms work quickly, but that he knows of one that has lasted 16 years. The judge said bring in some evidence of the possession. (Little has openly refused to pay taxes because some government money funds abortions.)

-- More Religious Messages: (1) Stan and Stella Hagarty began an Internet business recently as the Wholly Love shop from Bridgend, Wales, specializing in sex products for Christians "to enhance your sex life with your spouse," including Pure Arousal Super Stretch Rings, Silver Clitoral Charms and the Snail Trail Vibrating Tickler (but no pornography or bondage or anal-use items). (2) Convicted Iowa sex offender Scott Smith petitioned a judge in February not to make him wear the electronic ankle monitor as part of his five-year probation because his Brotherhood of Christ sect regards electricity as one cause of why people disobey God. (The judge's decision was not reported.)

-- In February, several patients at an unlicensed mental health facility in Columbus, Ga., told the local Ledger-Enquirer newspaper that they had recently worked security at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta during football games of the University of Georgia and the Atlanta Falcons. The facility, the Greater Grace Community Center, has recently been shut down, but the newspaper was able to verify much of the patients' story. Among the facility's patients are those diagnosed with anti-social personalities or bi-polar disorder or homicidal tendencies.

-- The Seattle Times reported in February that Edith Macefield, 84, living in a tiny, rundown, 106-year-old house in an industrial neighborhood, across from a chemical plant, had rejected a final buyout offer from developers amounting to nearly $750,000. "I don't care about money," she said. "It's (been) my home (for 54 years now)." ... "What would I do with that kind of money anyway?" The developer has purchased the rest of the block and will build around her tiny lot, boxing her in with walls 60 feet high.

(1) Matt Brownlee, 33, with a long record as a drunk driver, was acquitted of criminal DUI charges in Ottawa, Ontario, after psychiatrists concluded that his latest accident was the result of a sincere belief that singer Shania Twain was helping him drive the car. (A 1996 brain injury might have given him a disorder in which he believes that celebrities communicate with him telepathically.) (2) Following a hung jury in England's Winchester Crown Court in April, Linda West faces retrial in the 2005 death of her husband, which she said was accidental, in that her gun slipped while she was energetically performing a Shania Twain number ("Man! I Feel Like a Woman") in what she described as the couple's sex game.

-- Madison County, Ill., lawyer Gary Peel, 62, who was battling an ex-wife over alimony, filed for bankruptcy to reduce her chances of getting anything, and then when she challenged his filing, he allegedly tried to blackmail her into silence. According to federal charges against him in March, he told his ex-wife that, unless she relented, he would shock her elderly parents by giving them decades-old nude photos of him with the ex-wife's younger sister. However, Peel perhaps forgot that the sister was allegedly only 16 when the photos were taken, and he has been charged with possessing child pornography.

-- Waco, Texas, attorney Paula Allen personally agreed to bond in October on behalf of client Rolando Castelan (accused of drug offenses), but when Castelan skipped a court date, she was charged the $5,000. According to prosecutors, Allen, with three men, then picked up Castelan against his will at his wedding in December and detained him, while forcing him to telephone his friends for loans to pay her the $5,000. Eventually, Castelan's ex-wife (one of the call recipients) helped him escape from Allen and her cohorts, and Allen was charged with kidnapping.

News of the Weird has several times visited the issue of people (mostly men) who are dissatisfied with their bodies because of the imagined unsightliness of their limbs or their genitals and who seek voluntary amputation ("body integrity identity disorder"). In March, three men were arrested in rural North Carolina and charged with castrating several such needy men who had read about the unlicensed "surgeons" on the Internet and traveled from other states (and one foreign country) to get relief. (Under North Carolina law, the specific crime is "castration without malice.")

Still More Reasons Not to Smoke, Beyond What the Surgeon General Told You: In February, the cigarette of a 46-year-old woman in Parkersburg, W.Va., accidentally set fire to her long hair, and she later died at the West Penn Burn Center in Pittsburgh, Pa. Also in February, Dennis Crouch, 53, who had earlier chased his wife with a knife during an argument in Daytona Beach, Fla., resisted police when they arrived, provoking one officer to fire her Taser, which struck a cigarette lighter in Crouch's shirt pocket, setting fire to his upper body. (His burns weren't serious.)

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

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on a high-tech device with seemingly a multitude of uses in lessening our crushing overload of banality: a boredom detector. A talker, via a wearable camera and software that measures facial expressions and movements, could know whether he has lost touch with a listener (via signals from eyebrows, lips, nose, etc.). The device was designed for the autistic (who are typically oblivious of other people's reactions), but would be useful to anyone underskilled at being interesting. So far, the software is said to be accurate 64 percent of the time, according to a March report in New Scientist.

-- Bold Marketing: (1) Among men's colognes recently launched: the Elizabeth Arden-NASCAR "Daytona 500" fragrance and the Ecuadorean Football Federation's set of three soccer-motif scents, ranging from a "sporting" aroma to "an intense smell ideal for after work." (2) Butte, Mont., has long been unhappy with the presence of the Berkeley Pit, a huge, putrid, toxic lake filled by runoff from arsenic, copper, cadmium, cobalt, iron and zinc mines. Last year, however, the town began to figure out that tourists would actually pay to see the 500-acre, 900-foot-deep, foul, wretched mess. Attendance was so good that the admission price was recently increased.

-- Specialty Products: The apparently successful Iraq Insurance Co. (a state-owned firm with 50 salespeople nationwide) is thought to be the only company in the world to offer "off-the-shelf" terrorism life insurance (paying a bodyguard's beneficiary, for example, the equivalent of about $3,500, which is a policeman's yearly salary, for a $90 premium, according to a New York Times dispatch). As of mid-March, no policyholder had been killed. (2) Among the "brand" names used by marijuana traffickers to sell dope-laced candy, according to federal agents who made arrests in March in Oakland, Calif., are Buddafingers, Pot Tarts, Double Puff Oreo, Puff-a-Mint Pattie and Toka-Cola.

-- Volleyball is quite popular among female devout Muslim refugees in Kenya, according to a March New York Times dispatch, even though the women's bulky hijabs frequently shift around, hindering the "digs" and "spikes." The Nike company recently came to the rescue by designing (and then donating) sleek hijabs that cover the skin and hair appropriately, but also permit much freer movement on the court. Nike is silent on its marketing plans, but worldwide, the number of Muslim girls and women of prime sports-playing age is huge.

-- In work by various labs in the United States, the Netherlands and Australia (reported by Toronto's Globe and Mail in March), meat was grown in test tubes, and such dishes may yet be a staple in progressive kitchens. "Before bed, throw starter cells and a package of growth medium into the (coffee maker-sized) meat maker and wake up to harvest-fresh sausage for breakfast," wrote the Globe and Mail. Engineered meat would taste like beef or pork, but could be created to be as healthful as salmon. One private group told researchers it was interested in growing human meat, but funding for any of the work will be difficult, said a Medical University of South Carolina scientist.

-- A family has been found in Kurdish Turkey whose members walk on all fours, use the palms of their hands for balance, and stand upright only with difficulty, according to researchers who filmed the family for a March British television show. According to Professor Nicholas Humphrey of the London School of Economics, scientists' best guess for the family's condition is that their inbreeding caused the reprise of genetic traits long thought to have been evolutionarily passed over.

In February, two girls (aged 12 and 13) ran away from home in Cleveland, headed by bus for Minneapolis, along with Bambi, one girl's family dog (represented to the driver as a "guide dog"). However, the girls overfed Bambi on junk food, and the dog became so flatulent as to cause a commotion on the bus, which eventually drew police officers, who then discovered the girls were runaways.

In February, the Missourian newspaper reported that Columbia resident Adam Ballard, 22, now in his second year in the Army, is overeating and under-exercising so as to gain weight rapidly and exceed the Army's body-fat requirement, which will force his discharge rather than his deployment to the Middle East war zone. According to The Columbian, 3,285 soldiers were discharged for excess body fat in 2004 (although not all were war-zone shirkers). Ballard said he had no qualms because recruiters had originally assured him a desk job.

-- Inexplicable: Phillip Williams, 47, for some reason approached two uniformed police officers in Tampa, Fla., in March to ask their opinions of whether the substance he had just purchased for the crack pipe he was holding was indeed cocaine. After examining the pipe, the officers suspended their then-current investigation of a burglary and put the cuffs on Williams. The month before, in Orlando, Michael Garibay, 34, approached a sheriff's deputy in a marked patrol car and asked him if he was "straight," which, as Garibay proceeded to explain to the befuddled officer, meant, "Do you want to buy cocaine?" After Garibay pulled out a baggie of white rocks, he was arrested.

-- Recurring Themes: In March, Gary Brunner became the latest person to go to a police station and ask naively if there were any warrants on him, only to find the answer to be yes and that he was under arrest (for drug possession, Carmel, N.Y.). And Bryan Palmer, 21, and Peggy Casey, 31, were interviewed by police investigating a burglary in South Windsor, Conn., in March, but were released. Detectives changed their minds, though, and were futilely searching for them when the pair showed up at the police station to innocently ask how the investigation was going.

(1) In February in Pattaya, Thailand, the woman who was the former Guinness Book recordholder for living in a cage with scorpions was married to the man who holds the equivalent record for time spent with centipedes, with consummation immediately afterward in a coffin. (Kanchana Ketkaew had stayed 32 days with 3,400 scorpions and Bunthawee Siengwong 28 days with 1,000 centipedes.) (2) After Ms. Sohela Ansari told friends in their village in West Bengal state in India that her husband had mumbled "talaq, talaq, talaq" in his sleep, word got to local Muslim authorities, who declared the couple divorced. (A Muslim husband may obtain a divorce merely by the utterance, and the West Bengal clerics ruled that he need not be awake at the time.)

In March, Deputy Fire Chief Leroy Johnson, 52, of Mesa, Ariz., announced his retirement after becoming possibly the highest-status person in the country in recent years to be allegedly witnessed having sex with a barnyard animal (a lamb). Another possible record-setter was Kimberly Du, 36, who was charged in February in Des Moines, Iowa, with faking her December death to avoid prosecution on several traffic tickets, which might be the pettiest criminal charge anyone has ever tried to avoid by faking death.

People who recently had their sleep disrupted by out-of-control vehicular traffic crashing into their homes and right over their beds: Maryella Wallace, Davenport, Iowa, June 2005 (no serious injuries). A couple in Altamonte Springs, Fla., December (driver in a stolen car; no serious injuries). Juan Diaz, Fairdale, Ky., March (no serious injuries). A couple in the Houston suburb of Missouri City, Texas, March (two fatalities).

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