Religiously strict Saudi Arabia can't have traditional Western-style beauty contests, but there was a pageant in April in remote Guwei'iya, about 75 miles from Riyadh: a beauty contest for camels. More than 250 owners brought more than 1,500 camels to be judged by such standards, said one organizer (according to a Reuters dispatch), as "the nose should be long and droop down" and "the ears should stand back, and the neck should be long" and "the hump should be high, but slightly to the back." Prizes included more than 70 SUVs.

-- Among the long-term disabilities that have been drawing compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs (at a time when the returning wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan are meeting bureaucratic delays in getting their own disabilities properly compensated): 124,000 veterans receiving monthly checks because of hemorrhoids (according to a March Scripps Howard News Service report) and "thousands" of veterans since 1972 having received regular monthly checks to cover venereal diseases that they contracted on their own time while on active duty, including those treated for depression at having caught the disease (according to an investigation by the same reporter, published in May).

-- Fifty-six New York City principals and assistant principals and more than 500 schoolteachers have records so dismal that no school will take them on its rolls, leaving the school system the choice of either commencing long, expensive termination procedures for each or (as the schools chancellor has chosen to do) placing them into lower-status and make-work jobs (at their previously high rate of pay), according to a March report in the New York Daily News.

-- Close Enough for Government Work: (1) U.S. Department of Agriculture officials admitted in March that since the early 1970s, 250 of the nation's 6,000 meat-processing plants, which are all required by law to be inspected daily, have been inspected as rarely as biweekly (probably because they were too far away for an inspector to get to), according to a March Reuters report. (2) KUSA-TV reported in March that a Transportation Security Administration undercover team was able to sneak simulated liquid explosives past screeners at Denver International Airport about 90 percent of the time during a three-day test in February, in nearly every case because, though machines detected the explosives, the undercover agents talked the screeners out of personally searching them.

-- The University of Minnesota campus newspaper reported in February that some students are combining trips to the blood bank to make donations with quick trips to local bars for a drink or two, because they report a quicker and more powerful "high" immediately after blood loss. Said one, "As soon as the needle's out of my arm, I'm out the door (headed for a bar). The rest of the night's a good one."

-- Reuters reported in January that an increasingly popular beauty treatment of women in Singapore is having their eyebrows plucked and hair drawn back artistically by injected ink (similar to tattoos) in a process known as eyebrow embroidery, which the Straits Times newspaper estimated was an industry worth the equivalent of over $3 million.

-- Cops Getting No Respect: (1) Taryn McCarthy, 21, in the course of a contentious January arrest for DUI in Portsmouth, N.H., was further charged with five counts of simple assault, including four separate incidents of grabbing a state trooper's genitals. (2) Felicha Marin, 18, was charged with shoplifting shoes from a store in Richmond, England, in March, and (according to a report in the Edgware & Mill Hill Times) in the skirmish surrounding her arrest, she was charged with assault for "spray(ing) an officer with milk from her right breast."

-- Honesty Is (Sometimes) the Best Policy: Connecticut state trooper candidate Jon Van Allen decided that he would have a better chance to be hired if he were totally truthful on his application and in person and decided to tell his interviewer something no one else knew: that he had on two occasions fondled an adolescent girl as she slept and that he had been duly ashamed. Van Allen was immediately rejected for the job and arrested in April based on the admission, even though the girl said when questioned that she had no recollection of any of it.

New York Mets baseball fan Frank Martinez, 40, was ejected and then arrested at Shea Stadium in April after he allegedly shone a high-beam flashlight into the eyes of Atlanta Braves player Edgar Renteria during a game. A former neighbor, interviewed by the New York Post, said Martinez was once evicted from his apartment because he would commandeer the hallway after a Mets victory, and into the middle of the night, screaming "M! E! T! S!" as he paraded from one end to the other.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Eric Cunningham, 18, was arrested and charged with robbing a Hess gas station at gunpoint in Orlando in April, done in by his forgetting to take his gun case with him as he fled; inside was the receipt for his gun, made out to "Eric Cunningham." (2) Jazrahel King, 29, was arrested in Norwalk, Conn., in April when he tried to use, as a trade-in for a larger vehicle, the very Jeep that he had allegedly stolen from that very Wholesalers of America dealership several weeks earlier (and which still showed the temporary plate Wholesalers had put on it).

Last year, a BBC News correspondent in Sudan reported that village elders in the Upper Nile state had punished Charles Tombe, who had been caught being amorous with a goat, by requiring him to pay a dowry to the goat's owner, to endure a "wedding" to the goat, and to treat the goat as his "wife" to embarrass him. The dispatch ran worldwide and was the most popular story on the BBC News' Web site for 2006. BBC News reported in May 2007 that the goat, "Rose," which had given birth to one kid in the interim (clearly, not fathered by Tombe), had recently passed away after choking on a plastic bag.

(1) The Des Moines, Iowa, woman who was the victim in December of an Iowa Methodist Medical Center policy on disposal of amputated body parts (the woman wanted to take her toe with her): Gladys Goose. (2) The 41-year-old woman charged with assault in February, in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., after she allegedly grabbed a high-heeled shoe and smacked her boyfriend in the head several times: Kari Barefoot. (3) The name dog breeders apparently give to the increasingly common crossbreed of a shih tzu with a bulldog (according to a March story in London's Guardian): bullshih.

At a special session of Arizona's Court of Appeals in April, judges heard arguments on whether a bag of methamphetamine had been legally seized by police, who had a search warrant but not the authority to inspect body "cavities." The bag had been partially protruding from a certain cavity, and an officer pulled it out. The defense lawyer argued that the only legal precedent involved items hidden between posterior "cheeks" (i.e., where contraband would not be so secured), and thus that pulling it out was an invasion of privacy. However, the prosecutor, claiming that the bag was in plain sight and would have fallen out eventually, asked rhetorically, "Where does the butt end and the anus begin? ... The buttocks is just the bell end of the trumpet, and I don't think you (judges), for constitutional reasons, want to go there."

(And for the accomplished and joyous cynic, try News of the Weird Daily/Pro Edition, at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com.)

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.)