The "indecent" CBS drama "Without a Trace" for which the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a $3.3 million fine of the network and affiliates was apparently complained about by only two (at most) actual viewers of the estimated 8.2 million who watched it that December 2004 night, according to FCC records that CBS cited in a June filing to the commission. Those two (and 4,209 complaints from people who apparently only heard about the show) did not start arriving at the FCC until 12 days afterward, which coincidentally was the day that a family watchdog organization began alerting its members about the show. The same CBS program had aired in 2003, with no complaints.

-- Indispensable Devices: (1) Audio software programs whose sole purpose is to re-create the hubbub and screaming of orders on an active stock-exchange floor are coveted by some traders who formerly worked such floors but now buy and sell in quiet offices. Those traders, according to a June Wall Street Journal story, say they miss the energy and wisdom they get from trading-floor chaos. (2) In May, Lester Clancy was awarded a U.S. patent for a ropeless jump rope (a handle that electronically duplicates the feel of a jump-rope handle), which he said would be practical for, among other places, mental institutions and prisons where actual rope is banned.

-- The San Diego firm Allerca Inc. announced in June that it is accepting advance orders (at $5,000 each) for hypoallergenic cats it intends to create by cross-breeding species that lack the noxious bacteria that most cats produce that are so dangerous to asthmatics and others. A competitor, New York's Transgenic Pets, is after the same result by modifying the actual gene that produces the cat saliva bacteria. (Transgenic is expecting to beat Allerca to market, at a price of around $1,000.)

-- Progress With Flavors: (1) Researchers at England's University of Birmingham announced in May that they had powered a fuel cell by giving chocolate waste to Escherichia coli bacteria, which converted the sugar into hydrogen. (The bacteria are also expected to produce precious metals from discarded automobile catalytic converters.) (2) Researcher Mayu Yamamoto of Japan's International Medical Center said her team had succeeded in extracting vanilla from ordinary cow dung, although she conceded the flavoring could only be commercially used in non-food products like shampoos.

Zimbabwe's world's-worst inflation officially reached 1,042 percent in April, with prices doubling every three or four months and unemployment rising to 70 percent. Only the unsophisticated fail to spend any money they have promptly, even though, for example, toilet paper sells for $145,000 a roll (about 69 U.S. cents). According to an April New York Times dispatch, President Robert Mugabe's remedy is simply to print trillions of dollars in new money (which he needs to keep his government workers loyal, to prop up his dictatorship).

As Congress debates whether to retain the federal estate tax, two advocacy groups released evidence in April that 18 super-rich families (including the owners of Wal-Mart, Gallo wine, Campbell's soup and the Mars candy company) spent as much as $500 million in the last 10 years through industry and trade associations to urge abolition of the tax, and if their campaign is successful, the families will have saved themselves an estimated $71 billion in taxes, a return of 142 times the investment. (Polls show that around 70 percent of Americans favor abolition, even though only one taxpayer in 400 owes any tax.)

In May, The Times of London reported on Japan's Shingo Village, which is well known to locals, and practically no one else, as the burial place of Jesus Christ. According to documents written in ancient Japanese, Jesus supposedly moved to Shingo from Jerusalem as a young man, married Miyuko, became a farmer, and died at age 106. However, that cannot be true, according to Katherine Jhawarelall, 35, a Hindu woman with a criminology degree, living in Durban, South Africa, because she is certain that she herself is Jesus Christ (after awakening one day in 2004 with a swollen arm containing a miracle-producing stigmata), according to a report in Durban's Post.

Cities feel fortunate to have even one dependable group of dedicated volunteer caretakers for a public park, but Boston's Ringer Park has two. However, they hate each other. According to an April Boston Globe story, Ringer Park Partnership Group and Friends of Ringer Park spread nasty rumors about each other, compete ruthlessly for new members, resist mediation more fiercely than some street gangs do, and, allegedly, commit park vandalism in order to embarrass the other group. The origin of the feud appears to be differences in aggressiveness and in attitudes toward dogs, and according to the Globe, peace is not in sight.

In June, another client who did her own lawyering, eccentric Susan Polk, was convicted of murdering her husband, after a long trial in Martinez, Calif., in which she spent two weeks on the witness stand as both questioner and witness (and in a judge-allowed departure, as her deep-voiced husband, as she re-created their conversations). Polk also told the jury that she is psychic, that she called the Sept. 11 attacks in advance, that her husband was an Israeli intelligence agent, that she once foiled an assassination attempt on the pope, and that Colin Powell is the Antichrist.

-- James Otis Denham, 49, was arrested in May after attempting to sell a 375-year-old etching by Rembrandt ("The Raising of Lazarus") that police later learned had been stolen. Denham was unsuccessful, largely because he said he'd take just $1,500 for it and because his sales venue was the trunk of his car, to a potential customer he had met in Torchy's Legends bar in Broken Arrow, Okla.

-- Not Cut Out for a Life of Crime: (1) Paul Wendell Gunn was arrested in May, sitting on a sofa in the reception area at the First State Bank in Round Rock, Texas, minutes after he had allegedly robbed it. According to Austin's American-Statesman, Gunn, for reasons he has not yet disclosed, chose to remain in the bank and read magazines until police arrived. (2) In Kumagaya, Japan, in May, a 58-year-old unemployed man commenced a robbery of the Saitama Resona Bank, but then asked a teller for suggestions on bank-robbing. When the teller angrily ordered the man out, he left, but in his haste, cut himself on the leg with his knife.

The 13-year-old blond, blue-eyed, twin white-supremacist singers, Lynx and Lamb Gaede ("Prussian Blue," mentioned here in December), might lower their profile temporarily while their divorced parents fight over custody in Fresno, Calif. Though mom April Gaede is still a white supremacist ("I'm a racist ... Everybody's a racist"), dad Kris Lingelser said he has renounced his separatist ways and would like to soften the girls' views, too, but so far, he has only limited visitation rights to April's home in Montana.

It Worked Out, After All: In May, a 30-year-old man from Waterfoot, England, attempted suicide by tying a rope around his neck and the other end to a telephone pole, and then drove off in his car. However, the rope quickly broke, dooming the suicide. The impact, however, jarred the driver, causing him to lose control and crash into a tree, fatally. And in June, a man attempted suicide in Huntington Beach, Calif., by hanging himself off the side of the Adams Avenue Bridge, but he accidentally came loose, fell to the dry riverbed below, and was killed.

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

Britain's Prince Philip has for at least 30 years accommodated a tribe of 400 "cargo cult" people on the South Sea island of Tanna, who revere him as the human face of an ancestral spirit, according to June revelations by London's Daily Mail. Both sides have been discreet, but the prince has acquiesced by sending the tribe signed photographs, including one in which he is holding the traditional war club (even though a totally authentic pose would require that the prince hold it while naked). Cargo cults are so named because, lore has it, an ancient god forecast that one day, wealth would fall from the sky, and then, during World War II, it did, in the form of parachuted-in supplies for American troops who used the islands as staging areas.

-- An Iowa tribunal turned down Chris T. Coppinger's demand for unemployment benefits in May, following his firing from a charitable fund-raising company in Davenport for various alleged indiscretions. Among the company's charges was that Coppinger had had sex on top of his desk with a co-worker, but Coppinger argued that that should not be a terminating offense, since many other company employees had had sex on his desk, too.

-- Never Give Up: Ronald Blankenship, a shoe repairman in Birmingham, Ala., finished second in June's Democratic primary for sheriff and was placed in a run-off, when the Birmingham News discovered details of an apparently shady past: faking his death in connection with an insurance policy, assault and passing bad checks. Blankenship's defense, a week later: It must be another Ronald Blankenship (even though "both" men have the same middle name and birth date and coincidentally are married to women with the same first, middle and maiden names).

-- Honesty Is the Best Policy? (1) Jonifer Jackson, 20, was arrested in Clarksville, Tenn., in April and charged with reckless endangerment for firing a 9 mm pistol while street-preaching (because, he told police, it was the only way he could get people to listen to him). (2) Phillip Daniels, 42, was arrested in Dallas in April, as the one who had set off five explosives in the previous two weeks (which he told Dallas' KXAS-TV were done just because he likes the sounds). (3) Yasuhisa Matsushita, 25, was arrested in Iwata, Japan, in March as the man who stole a high school girl's swimsuit, put it on, and pranced around in it while relieving himself because, he told police, "(I)t felt so good."

In the course of an April ruling that the New York City school system had gone too far by firing Toquir Choudhri for poor work habits, administrative law judge John Spooner declared that city workers have a "right" to surf the Internet for personal use while at work. Choudhri was expecting reinstatement, but two weeks later Chancellor Joel Klein fired him anyway, citing poor work habits beyond his Web-surfing. (Choudhri was unavailable for comment, in that he was suspected of being on leave in a country on whose tourist Web sites he had been lingering.)

-- In May, in the midst of the Ford Motor Co.'s "Red, White & Bold," buy-American ad campaign touting its classic Mustangs, the research firm CSM Worldwide (using statistics from the U.S. Department of Transportation) revealed that 35 percent of the 2006 Mustang's content came from overseas, and in fact, that five Honda models and seven Toyota models contained more U.S. content than the Mustang, including Toyota's Sienna minivan, which was 90 percent U.S.

-- More Ironies: (1) The May 10 tornado that hit Highland County, Ohio, touched down in the town of Hillsboro, along Wizard of Oz Drive. (2) In April, The Washington Post, covering outdoor press conferences by Capitol Hill legislators to decry the then-recent bump in gasoline prices, reported that the vehicle of choice for most of them returning to offices only a few blocks away was a gas-guzzling SUV, and in fact that several senators hopped into idling SUVs even to travel across the street from the Capitol to their offices.

(1) The Chicago Sun-Times reported in May that at least six homeless substance addicts had claimed that someone had paid them $5 each to vote for certain candidates in a recent Chicago school board election (but that a schools spokesman, after consulting the rules, said vote-buying in Chicago school board elections might not even be illegal). (2) London's Guardian reported in April that access to British dentists is becoming so difficult that in a recent week, 6,000 do-it-yourself crown-and-cap replacement kits had been sold to consumers.

In May, a judge in Reno, Nev., sentenced Raymond Russell George, 58, to five consecutive life sentences for molesting three young girls over a two-year period, but George said he welcomes the prison time because it will give him a chance to use his comprehensive knowledge of the Bible to help inmates find Jesus. George is notorious also for his dreadful inattention to hygiene, which he said is necessary to keep fellow prisoners (his potential congregants) from getting too close to him. (Otherwise, he said, they "flick boogers at me and fart in my face.")

Flunking Finance 101: John Faux, 41, was arrested in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in April and charged with robbing a Key Bank branch of about $2,000; Faux had complained to the teller that he had clearly demanded not $2,000, but "$100 million," and the two were still arguing when the police arrived. And Tekle Zigetta, 45, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles in March to trying to smuggle $250 billion into the country (which Customs agents discovered, in the form of 250 bills of the denomination of $1 billion, bearing a picture of President Grover Cleveland).

-- Veteran New England mobster Anthony St. Laurent, 64, was arrested again in April, in Providence, R.I., on loan-sharking charges. As with previous arrests, St. Laurent tried to convince the judge not to jail him because his colorectal condition required him to take 40 enemas a day, but the condition has apparently worsened, in that he now claims to need "to have his stool removed, biweekly," according to his lawyer. (Note: "Biweekly," meaning "every two weeks," is often used incorrectly to mean twice a week.)

-- Four weeks ago, News of the Weird reported that a "side business" of British farmer David Lucas was building gallows for export to Zimbabwe and other countries that still execute by hanging. After the story was widely reported in the British press, a man who identified himself as Lucas' sometime-business-partner told reporters that Lucas had been joking, that he had built only one gallows and was not actually in the business. At press time, it is unknown whether Lucas, or his partner, was telling the truth.

(1) Recent incidents in which people were run over fatally by their own cars: a 62-year-old woman backing out of a parking space at a Wal-Mart in Kahului, Hawaii, in May (she had apparently opened the door to look behind her and fell out), and a 76-year-old woman visiting her husband's grave at Maple Grove Cemetery in New York City in April (details not reported). (2) A 67-year-old woman was killed in Houston in May when her car went out of control, swerved across a road, and slammed into the lead car of a funeral procession about to depart Guadalupe Funeral Home for the cemetery. The woman's family later announced that they would just leave the body at Guadalupe for funeral arrangements.

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

A 5-year-old boy in Broward County, Fla., preparing to enter kindergarten, is believed by gender-identity experts to be the youngest kid in the country whose family supports his decision to live completely as the other sex (according to a May profile in New Times Broward-Palm Beach). The parents doubt that the unnamed now-girl (dubbed "Nicole Anderson" in the article) is "just going through a phase," because of "her" early, constant, and insistent female preferences and comments, e.g., "I want the fairy princess to come and make my penis into a vagina."

-- In May, Nevada officials said they were hopeful of persuading the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to allow the family of a soldier who was killed in Afghanistan, and who is buried in a federal cemetery, to have a Wiccan symbol on his headstone. The department has approved headstone symbols for more than 30 religions, as well as one for atheists, but so far not for Wicca.

-- Much Ado About Little: (1) The student lockers at Kealing Middle School in Austin, Texas, haven't been used in 10 years (for disciplinary reasons) and probably won't be again, but they will still be "refurbished" (and some new ones added) at a $60,000 expense to taxpayers, according to school renovation plans in a recently passed local budget. (2) Included in a local task force's proposal this year for building a $381 million riverfront arena in Louisville, Ky., was $63 million to move a Louisville Gas and Electric substation about 30 yards, across the street from its present location.

-- In May, independent arson experts reported that the 2004 Texas execution of Tyrone Willingham was based on evidence that has now been scientifically disproved (and which had probably been repudiated earlier in 2004, when another Texas arson convict had had his death sentence overturned). According to a Chicago Tribune story, the fire marshals whose testimony cinched Willingham's sentence relied on out-of-date, discredited tests, leaving no reliable evidence for the jury that the fire that killed Willingham's three kids was deliberately set. According to the report (commissioned by the Innocence Project), no formal training (only training "on the job") is required of Texas fire marshals.

-- New Scientist magazine reported in May that the Pentagon's cutting-edge research agency, DARPA, was considering a human-launching device that works like a cannon, to blast special-forces troops (and maybe firefighters and police officers) at just the right trajectory so that they land on hard-to-reach locations, such as rooftops.

-- Last year, in order to soften the transition from an agrarian economy, the rural village of Renhe, China, offered to give farmers apartments in town -- one-bedroom flats for single people and two-bedroom units for married couples. But in a fit of greed, hundreds of couples promptly divorced for no other reason than to qualify for two apartments so that they could rent one out. When officials learned of the scams, they modified the rules, according to a May dispatch in the Los Angeles Times, and turmoil resulted, as newly divorced couples failed to reconcile, leaving children in broken homes while husbands ran off with younger women.

(1) The principal of Liberty Elementary School in Colleyville, Texas, authorized an enlarged photo of a nickel on this year's yearbook cover, but with "In God We Trust" deleted so as not to cause offense -- but then handed out stickers with those four words so that students could place them on the cover photo if they wished. (2) A British government agency recently decided to spend the equivalent of $33 million over 10 years to encourage women and minorities to become fishermen (or fisherwomen) because too many anglers are white, male and middle-aged; a Welsh pilot project, for example, teaches Muslim women and children to fish for trout.

Ernest G. Johnson, 42, was arrested in Shreveport, La., in May after he, posing as an insurance company employee, roamed the corridors at LSU Hospital seeking to photograph women wearing casts. Said a police detective, "It's like all he wants is to be in the presence of a woman with a cast on and have her attention." And in April in Wausau, Wis., Thomas Vogedes, 58, was sentenced to six months' probation for incidents in which he hung dozens of bras and panties (new and used) from car mirrors and videotaped them.

No "Oversies": Sarah Zabolotny, 29, who was in the courthouse in Buckhannon, W.Va., in March to deal with a speeding ticket, was later charged with petty larceny after she was seen on surveillance video folding up an 8-foot rug in the building and walking out the door. When a court clerk tracked her down, Zabolotny asked if she could just give it back and forget the whole thing, but the clerk said no. And in Williston, N.D., in March, Ryan Wright, 20, was arrested for bank robbery, even though he insisted that all he did was walk in to the bank wearing a ski mask and demand money, before saying, "Just kidding" and leaving.

-- Less than three months after one wife-as-sex-slave contract surfaced (in Iowa, for which husband Travis Frey in June was sentenced to 10 years in prison), Hudson, Wis., husband Kevin Anderson was accused of making his own sex-slave contract with his estranged wife, Kimberly O'Brien, which O'Brien filed as evidence in March in her pending divorce. The contract required O'Brien to call Anderson "Master Jon," to achieve orgasm "ONLY" (emphasis in the original) by permission, and to allow her orgasms to be "controlled for proper training (and) teaching ... good habits (and) providing motivation (and) physical or sexual energy."

-- Playing Hardball: The newspaper Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv) reported in March that the Moqassed Hospital in East Jerusalem was under investigation for detaining a newborn baby for two months because its parents did not pay the bill. (The mother had given birth to premature triplets; the hospital allegedly let her take two home but kept the third.) And London's Daily Telegraph reported in April the hard luck story of unemployed Darren Wheeler, 30, who had six of his teeth extracted at the Birkdale Clinic in Whiston, England, but before dentures could be fitted, the clinic converted from public health to private practice and said dentures would now cost Wheeler the equivalent of almost $5,000.

(1) Robert E. Mays, 64, an associate dean at the University of Southern Illinois, agreed to plead guilty in June to biting a man on the leg when he had stopped to help Mays after a March traffic accident. (2) Louisville, Ky., middle school teacher Caroline Kolb was fired in March after a January incident in which she bit a 14-year-old student on the back as punishment. (3) Janet W. Strong, 53, was charged by police in April with biting a toddler at her Loving Touch Child Care center in Milton, Fla. (4) An assistant to boxer Mike Tyson revealed in March that he had settled his lawsuit stemming from a May 2003 incident in which he had accused Tyson, who was angry about a road-rage incident, of punching him and then biting him on the leg.

In April, Elgin, Ill., police said they gave confidential informant Robert Bridges, 29, $300 to buy 7 grams of cocaine and sent him into a drug house for a sting, but later they got tired of waiting for him to leave, and they stormed the house. Inside, they found Bridges, intoxicated, with no money and only 2.8 grams of cocaine left.

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