Barney Vincelette, who says his autism renders loud noises sickening to him, has been feuding for several years with neighbors in Houston, Del., over their rock music. At first, he invented his own sound-jammer, according to an April profile in the Wilmington News Journal, but a judge curtailed its use. Subsequently, he recorded super-annoying sounds of his own (including a foghorn) and had them written out as music ("Sonata for Calliope of Truck Horns About to Be Transcribed for Locomotive Horns Opus No. 1"), at which point the judge decided that permitting the neighbors' Bon Jovi but not Vincelette's sonata amounted to selective law enforcement, and the feuders settled their differences. (Vincelette, by the way, lives in a house shaped like a flying saucer.)

-- The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which operates mass transit just south of San Francisco, and whose employees stage about three dozen office parties a year, issued 33 pages of specifications in January to invite local companies to bid on a contract to supply sheet cakes. The winning bidder must be versatile enough to offer cakes in 11 specified flavors, 16 fillings, five icings and six toppings (but must also carry $3 million in liability insurance!).

-- Peru's Emilio Cordova, 15, won the South American chess championship in January, but rather than wind up a chess-obsessed nerd, he flew from the tournament site in Argentina to Sao Paulo, Brazil, and moved in with a 29-year-old stripper. After Emilio's two months in the fast lane, his father, with government help, went to Sao Paulo and snatched him back.

(1) After a street assault in January, a 22-year-old New Zealander was rushed to Wellington Hospital to have surgeons remove his car key, which was embedded behind his right ear. (2) After a vicious attempted carjacking in March, an 18-year-old Australian was sent to Fremantle Hospital in Perth, where surgeons removed a screwdriver embedded in his face.

-- (1) Mexico City taxi driver Manuel Quiroz was seeking a sponsor earlier this year for his pursuit of the world raw-chili-pepper-eating contest. Supposedly, he can guzzle dozens of them at one sitting and even harmlessly squeeze their juice into his eyes. (2) In February, Dublin, Ireland, software engineer Michael Killian demonstrated his sideways-traveling bicycle, in which a rider sits and pedals facing perpendicular to front and back, with each hand controlling a wheel, e.g., squeezing the right handlebar and pedaling moves the bike rightward.

-- In March three homeless men were awarded $10,000 each in a settlement with the city of Las Vegas because they were arrested in November for violating a since-repealed ordinance. The men had been cited for "illegally" sleeping within 500 feet of public urine or feces (a restriction the city thought would drive the homeless to isolated parts of town to relieve themselves and/or to sleep.) (In December, New York City panhandler Eddie Wise won $100,000 from the city when a judge ruled he had been illegally arrested 27 times under a law that had been ruled unconstitutional in 1992.)

-- In breathtaking attention to detail reminiscent of the movie "The Great Escape," some inmates at Michigan's Kinross Correctional Facility chipped through 8 inches of concrete, then continued tunneling until they had cleared the facility's two external walls by an extra 25 feet, but then a guard spotted an irregularity near a cell wall and discovered the operation. When stopped in March, the inmates were only 6 feet away (straight up) from freedom. (As in the movie, their greatest accomplishment was figuring out how to dispose of all that dug-out dirt without being noticed.)

-- To get her reluctant terrier "Missy" to eat dog food, Elaine Larabie decided to be a role model and eat some herself, after which, Missy indeed began nibbling at it. The next day, both Larabie and Missy were in Ottawa, Ontario, hospitals, vomiting and foaming at the mouth. The incident occurred in March, during the first days of the alert over rat-poison-laced pet food, and doctors suspected that as the culprit, but no definitive conclusion was reported in the press, and both Larabie and Missy recovered.

Stewart Laidlaw, 35, was banished from Thirsty Kirsty's pub in Dunfermline, Scotland, in March, following numerous complaints about his excessive flatulence. (A shocked Laidlaw said no one had complained before, but conceded that was probably because cigarette smoke had been masking the odor until Scotland's recent smoking ban.) And in December, an American Airlines flight made an emergency stop in Nashville, Tenn., when passengers reported the smell of burning matches in the cabin. A female passenger was found to have been lighting them at her seat in an effort to vanquish her flatulence odors.

In February in Bethlehem, Pa., middle school principal John Acerra was arrested and charged with selling crystal meth from his office (but not to students) (and when arrested in his office, after hours, he was reportedly nude). And in April, in Lorain, Ohio, principal Robert Holloway resigned after apparently too eagerly delivering on a wager. He had bet with some boys on a student-staff volleyball game and lost, and then paid off as agreed by kissing the boys' feet (but he was too much into it, the boys thought).

Tools of the Trade: (1) Michael Derenberger, 40, was charged with illegal voyeurism in Hernando, Fla., in March after being caught sticking a long pole with a hook on it through a girl's bedroom window, to pull down her comforter as she slept. (2) A 48-year-old man in Stockton, England, was found dead in January, naked, inside a large plastic bag attached to a vacuum cleaner, with police concluding at an April inquest that he got his sexual kicks through asphyxiation by having the vacuum suck all the air out of the bag.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Aaron Hudgins, 26, and Ruan Rucker, 24, were reported missing and presumed lost inside a coal mine in Kanawha County, W.Va., in April, and after a search-and-rescue operation, they were pulled out 24 hours later. They had no time to be grateful, though, for they were immediately arrested because the sheriff said they had gone into the mine only to try to find copper to steal. (2) Two men walked into a postal annex in Portland, Ore., in April, with one wielding a folding pocket knife, and announced a robbery. However, seconds later, the employees began laughing as the man with the knife couldn't get the blade out with his thumbnail, and the pair fled.

Beijing continues its intensive citywide upgrade campaign to impress visitors when the Olympic Games open in August 2008. In February, the city designated the 11th of each month as "voluntary wait in line" day to begin training Chinese to queue up for services in an orderly fashion rather than by their customary chaotic swarming. In April, retired restaurateur Guo Zhangi began a program offering people money (the equivalent of 25 cents each) to bring in dead flies. Also in April, guidelines were issued for taxi drivers, calling for a two-day suspension for cabbies who spit or smoke, have bad breath or dress garishly. (Taxi drivers in Shanghai have been issued special sacks to spit in, housed on the dashboard, to break their custom of spitting out the window.)

(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.)

Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre most recently made News of the Weird in 2004 because of continued petty territorial fighting among the six Christian denominations that share management of the church, which is home to some of Christianity's holiest sites, including that of Christ's resurrection. As Easter approached this year, three of the groups that control one 10-stall restroom could not agree how to divide responsibility for repairing it, leading to a pervasive stench in the building. Furthermore, the path of the outflow sewage pipe (which needed enlarging) passes under property of a fourth denomination, which has resisted helping unless it is granted control of one of the 10 stalls.

-- Britain's General Dental Council found dentist Alan Hutchinson guilty in April of several hygiene violations, including frequent hand-washing lapses, failure to sterilize instruments that he had taken off treatment trays to clean his own ears and fingernails with, and, more than once, urinating in his surgery sink. The council said it needed another hearing to decide whether Hutchinson's habits impaired his treatment of patients.

-- Following a three-year investigation by federal and local authorities in Orange County, Calif., the owners of at least 10 massage parlors were arrested in March and accused of running prostitution establishments. Among the investigators' findings was that, to reduce the cost of supplying condoms, the salons urged customers to use plastic food wrap, which management bought in large quantities. Said District Attorney Tom Rackauckas, "I really don't think about (plastic food wrap) in the same way anymore."

-- Our litigious, anger-fueled, dispute-intensive society took a break in a Folcroft, Pa., courtroom in March, as landlord Genevieve Zumuda, 77, was suing tenant La Tina Osborne, 32. In the middle of Osborne's defense, Zumuda started shaking and suddenly stopped breathing, but Osborne interrupted her argument and gave Zumuda CPR until paramedics arrived. "When people are down," Osborne said, "if you can help them, you help them."

-- (1) New performance-appraisal rules by India's Ministry of Personnel, for the country's senior-level bureaucrats, included a request that females disclose the dates of their last menstrual period, according to an April Reuters dispatch (but within days of the rules' release, the ministry rescinded that provision). (2) In April, near New Orleans, motorcyclist Charles Warren, minding his own business in the left lane of Interstate 12, was hit by a bathtub (which had fallen from a pickup truck in the right lane) and was hospitalized with severe injuries.

-- Tentatively scheduled for July (nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina forced the chaotic evacuation of New Orleans) is the resolution of two dog-ownership cases, in which a judge in Pinellas County, Fla., will decide, after months of relentless haggling, whether the Louisiana owners, Steven and Dorreen Couture, "abandoned" their dogs as they complied with evacuation orders, or merely left them temporarily at a shelter, which wrongly offered them for adoption. Two Florida women claimed the dogs separately, and have fought doggedly to retain them. (One is an assistant district attorney in Tampa who has been represented in part by one of the city's highest-priced lawyers.)

-- The Scandia Family Fun Center, which operates a super thrill ride (168 feet high, spinning at 60 miles an hour, pulling 3.5 g's) called the Screamer, in Sacramento, Calif., decided in March that because of neighborhood residents' noise complaints, riders would be prohibited from screaming (and subject to ejection from the park).

-- The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, released in February, revealed that 12th graders' reading ability is at an all-time low, yet their grades for English class are at an all-time high (averaging 2.82 on a 4.0 scale, up from 2.52 15 years ago). Also, Washington state legislators, faced with 10th graders' declining achievement test scores in math and science, are poised to just eliminate the tests altogether (while retaining those for reading and writing, which do not show declines), according to a March Seattle Times report. (Some math and science would still be tested, but only right after math and science classes, when memories are fresher and, presumably, scores would be higher.)

(1) In Bridgeport, Conn., in March, Fermin Rodriguez, 21, was charged with assault for stabbing his wife several times (after an argument over her alleged infidelity); police said that following his attack, he apparently handed his knife to the couple's 2-year-old son and said, "Now, you stab Mommy." (2) According to the manager of BJ's Pawn Shop in Gretna, La., a customer came in with his diaper-clad boy of about age 2 in April and handed the kid an AK-47 from the store's shelf, instructed him how to hold it in order to "mow (people) down, kill everybody," and told him that "Daddy's going to buy you this chopper." The manager, incredulous, said he took the gun back and shooed the pair out.

Officials in Apex, N.C., finally confiscated the 80 sheep that David Watts had long been keeping in his home as pets (he slept upstairs, they downstairs), with the final straw coming when some of the sheep wandered into the local cemetery and munched on fresh floral arrangements. The town had apparently tolerated Watts's eccentricity for years because of his pleasantness. Said a next-door neighbor, "(Officials) felt like he was (merely) living an alternative lifestyle."

(1) South Carolina Highway Patrol officers arrested Howard Fisher, 54, in March and seized 43 pounds of marijuana from his car, after he for some reason was unable to avoid crashing into one of their cruisers, with which they had blocked two lanes of Interstate 95 while investigating accidents. (2) Three men, allegedly carrying $4,000 worth of drugs, were arrested at a toll station on the Triborough Bridge in New York City in March because, between them, they lacked $4.50 to pay the toll. (They had asked an officer if they could mail it in, but a check of the driver's license revealed it had expired, after eight suspensions.)

In March, the owner of Di's Diner in Bulls Gap, Tenn., reported that a "blond, heavy-framed female" tried to take out a catfish dinner without paying for it and that when confronted, the woman got angry and threw money at the cash register. When the owner followed her into the parking lot, the woman threw the dinner, hitting employee Tina Henry. And in April, David Moser, 28, complained that his Bulls Gap home had been burglarized and that missing were handcuffs, six packs of cigarettes, a set of $1,200 car wheels and 300 tongue rings.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Gary Wayne Ray Jr. (Oklahoma City, February); Larry Wayne Brigman (St. Paul, Minn., charged in February for a 1989 murder, but already in prison for a different murder); Lewis Wayne Fielder Jr. (Laurens, S.C., February); Robert Wayne Wyant (Charlottesville, Va., February). Confessed to murder: Timothy Wayne Shepherd (Houston, March). Sentenced for murder: Jimmy Wayne Bass (Mobile, Ala., February, life in prison for DUI homicide). Re-captured after a brief escape: convicted murderer Michael Wayne Brunner (La Grange, Ky., March).

(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.)

To fund a new Iraqi economy and government after the March 2003 invasion, the U.S. Federal Reserve shipped 484 pallets of shrink-wrapped U.S. currency, weighing 363 tons, totaling more than $4 billion, and, according to a House of Representatives committee staff report in February, most of the cash was either haphazardly disbursed or distributed to proper channels but with little follow-up tracking. By March 2007, The Times of London found bank records revealing, for instance, that two unremarkable Baghdad small-business men (appointed to the defense ministry) eventually deposited over $1 billion in private accounts in Jordan, and that U.S. efforts to buy state-of-the-art equipment for the Iraqi army were seriously undermined because middlemen purchased only cheap, obsolete Polish munitions and pocketed the savings.

-- On Jan. 31, several hundred Japanese husbands recognized the second annual Beloved Wives Day to upgrade Japanese men's notorious, deeply ingrained indifference to their spouses. Among the husbands' vows: be home from work by the unusually early hour of 8 p.m.; actually look into the missus's eyes and say "thank you"; and try to remember to call her by her name (instead of, as many apparently do in substitution, grunting at her). (Divorce in Japan remains relatively rare, but marital estrangement has been rapidly increasing in recent years.)

-- Several matrilineal cultures exist in the world, but on Orango Island, off the African coast of tiny Guinea-Bissau, women's power to choose marriage partners is nearly absolute, according to a February Associated Press dispatch. By custom, the woman selects a man, then prepares a special dish of fish marinated in palm oil, after which any reluctance on his part is regarded as dishonoring his family. Before the couple can cohabit, though, a family home must be built from driftwood and mud bricks, and fortunately for the man, that, too, is her job. Islanders told the reporter that men are becoming more assertive, but that change has brought with it the unheard-of phenomenon of divorce.

-- Spain has long been criticized for its traditions of animal abuse, such as bullfighting and, until recently, one village's festive custom of tossing a live goat from a church tower. German animal welfare activists complained in March about another Spanish "sport": the flinging of live quail into the air (from a catapult) so that hunters can shoot them. (Germany also has its ugliness, according to a March Der Spiegel report, with certain villages' customs of clubbing a hung-up goose and poking a cat with a broomstick through a hole in a crate.)

-- Among the world's emerging messiahs is lapsed-Catholic Jose de Jesus Miranda, 60, of Houston (who has ministries in as many as 30 countries), whose message includes drinking ("Jesus (Christ) drank wine because he didn't have Dewar's (scotch)"), smoking, rejection of the concepts of sin and hell, and condemnation of Catholicism and the pope (according to a March report from ABC News). Though El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras recently banned him, he is said to have tens of thousands of followers, many of whom joyfully have themselves tattooed with "666" to honor Miranda's self-description as an antichrist.

-- A professional burglar was arrested in the village of Klevan, Ukraine, in February (according to a report from the German news agency DPA) after he broke into a church to steal gold fixtures, fell asleep, got locked in the weekends-only facility for five days, and survived on the only liquid available: sacramental wine.

-- A senior Italian member of the Catholic organization Opus Dei, Ms. Paola Binetti, told a television interviewer in March that she often wraps a spiked chain around her upper thigh for two hours a day as punishment for her sins. Said a prominent Catholic writer (interviewed in London's Daily Telegraph), "The world is full of people who, thanks to God, freely choose their own type of suffering." Wrote the Opus Dei founder: "Blessed be pain. Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain ... glorified be pain!"

Preserve That Porn: (1) It looked like just another case of a man's hoarding junk in his apartment and providing a home for several hundred animals (in this case, pigeons and mice), but health officials in Toronto learned in a March raid that the resident was lucid enough to protect, from animal feces, his extensive collection of pornography by carefully wrapping the items in plastic. (2) Reclusive high-tech engineer Michael Palmer, 53, was arrested in Los Gatos, Calif., in April and accused of hiding a massive cache of child porn in 15 ammunition canisters he had buried in seven Saddam-like spider holes on his property, near his ramshackle cabin.

Safety First! (1) Britain's Health and Safety agency headquarters reportedly posted signs in various locations in the building warning workers not to attempt to move chairs and tables by themselves, but to call for porters (for which 48 hours' notice was required). (In April, London's Daily Mail reported, not surprisingly, that the agency's workplace injury record was very low.) (2) The head teacher at Bramhall High School in Stockport, England, decreed recently that students, who wear neckties to class, must use clip-ons and not knotted ties, in part because of the risk of choking.

In March, police in Trenton, N.J., arrested four men in separate incidents and learned that they fancy themselves as "diplomats" from the Abannaki Indigenous Nation and claim immunity from the laws of the "so-called planet Earth" (and, by the way, of Mars and Venus, as well). One allegedly possessed an unidentified "controlled substance," and the others were driving cars with made-up "diplomat" tags. The four showed no ostensible ties to the Abenaki Indigenous Nation, a tribe that first appeared in North America in the 17th century and which is still present in the northeastern U.S.

Anthony Perone, 20, pleaded guilty in March in Connecticut in connection with two stalking letters he admitted mailing to a woman he had fallen for in the third grade but who apparently had spurned him. The rambling, incoherent letters explicitly threatened death, and Perone had intended to send them anonymously, in that he wrote no return address on the envelopes. However, he lived with his mother and had given each envelope to her to mail, and, unknown to him, she had thoughtfully added his name and address before posting them.

A Web site based in Seattle shamelessly encourages pedophiles to look all they want at kids (and gives tips for where the sightseeing is best), as long as they don't touch, and police admitted to Fox News in March that so far, that's not illegal. Said founder Jack McClellan, 45 (whose preference is for girls ages 3 to 11): "I really think this pedophilia hysteria is overblown." "There's a kind of code of ethics that these pedophiles have developed." "(Many people) have the attraction, but they're not going to do anything physical because of the laws." (After the Fox report, the Internet service provider closed the Web site.)

(1) In March, a British Airways economy-class passenger on a flight from Delhi, India, died onboard, and the corpse was moved to the less-congested first-class section, to the chagrin of Paul Trinder, who had paid the equivalent of about $6,000 for his nearby seat. When he complained, he said he was told just to "get over it" and that no refund would be offered. (2) In March, officials at the Gaza-Egypt border noticed that a Palestinian woman entering Gaza had a particularly lumpy upper body and searched her to reveal, strapped to her chest, three small crocodiles, which she had intended to sell to a zoo.

(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.)