Dakota Abbott, 16, edged Samantha Phillips, 17, to become Miss Outdoors 2008 in February in Maryland's Eastern Shore region's annual beauty-contest-and-muskrat-skinning festival. The two were the only beauty contestants (out of eight) who entered both competitions. Abbott won her skinning division, but while she sang a song for the judges, Phillips won the talent trophy by skinning a muskrat on stage. "I'll be honest," she said to a Washington Post reporter. "I can't sing. I can't dance, and I don't play any musical instruments." But she took her 4-inch blade, sticking it just above the tail, and sliced. "You want to take your knuckles and separate the meat from the hide, just like this," she told the judges, with her hand inside the muskrat (as one of the judges recoiled in shock).

-- In the 2006 take-off crash of a Comair commuter airliner at the regional airport in Lexington, Ky. (which the FAA blamed on pilot error), all 47 passengers were killed, and 21 lawsuits have been filed, with attorney William Johnson defending the only cockpit survivor (the first officer). The Lexington Herald-Leader reported in January that, in court papers filed in the lawsuits, Johnson had offered the defense that the seat-belted-in passengers should share the blame for their own deaths, in that they should have chosen other airports that might have been safer. (Shortly after the newspaper report, Johnson withdrew the defense.)

-- A prominent British novelist (former winner of the prestigious Whitbread Prize) announced in January that she had won a settlement of the equivalent of more than $200,000 from a shoe manufacturer in the town of Totnes because fumes from its factory so sapped her creativity that she was forced to write down-market thrillers instead of literary works. Joan Brady said numbness in her hands and legs, caused by pollutants, made her settle on simpler plotlines involving violence as she worked out her aggression toward the factory owners.

-- William Harvey, defending a DUI charge in court in Perth, Scotland, in February, told the judge that his high blood-alcohol reading was because he has a "balloon-like" pouch in his neck (sort of like a pelican's) that collects most of the alcohol he swallows and therefore makes it seem that he is much more inebriated than he really is. (He was convicted.)

-- Instant Karma: (1) In January, a man in Citrus Heights, Calif., had a one-car accident that left him with serious head and body injuries that were perhaps exacerbated because he was not wearing a seat belt (even though the 12-pack of beer on the seat beside him was securely buckled, and survived). (2) Daniel Thompson, 31, was so upset by the sex, profanity and violence in movies today that he opened a video store in Orem, Utah, offering major Hollywood films but with the objectionable parts manually removed. Hollywood studios got a court order shutting down the store in December because of copyright infringement, and in January, Thompson was arrested after police said he paid two 14-year-old girls for sex. [Sacramento Bee, 1-8-08]

-- Miss Fayetteville (N.C.) 2007 Jenna Walters is scheduled in court in April to answer for her November arrest in which police said she had veered recklessly through traffic in Southern Pines, N.C., in order to harass driver Angela Thomas. She pulled in front of Thomas, blocked her path, then got out, screaming and taunting the woman, but then quit and drove off, only to return moments later from the other direction, bump Thomas' car and resume screaming, then left but returned yet again, bumped Thomas' car from behind and yelled some more. In the 2006 Miss Fayetteville pageant, Walters was voted Miss Congeniality.

-- Almost half of the 47 members of the United Nations' Human Rights Council are not "free democracies" (according to Freedom House rankings), and several, such as China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia, have been widely criticized as human rights violators. Consequently, the council has failed to address any of the most prominent rights abuses around the world (including some that were called genocide) in Sudan, North Korea, Chad, Zimbabwe and Iran, among other places, but in January, the council voted its 12th "condemnation" of Israel (out of only 13 condemnations it has ever issued).

-- Lawyer Kathy Brewer Rentas, 49, was charged with assault in February after asking to shake hands with federal lawyer Jennifer Keane (who was prosecuting Rentas' husband for probation violation). The handshake began in businesslike fashion, but according to a court security guard, Rentas squeezed the hand, then yanked it up and down hard, "almost pull(ing) Keene's arm out of its socket" and nearly sending her tumbling to the ground.

-- When a 72-year-old Levis, Quebec, woman cleared her walk with a snowblower in December, sending some of the snow onto the adjacent property, the 43-year-old neighbor grabbed his blower and sent it back, and the two spent about 10 minutes blowing snow on each other before they stopped. (They "faced each other," "engines roaring," wrote the Canadian Press.) The neighbor then allegedly punched the woman (and her husband, who had come to help her) and was charged with assault.

In February, a court in Cardiff, Wales, once again released Thelma Dennis, 50, to get therapy for her addiction of making bogus emergency ("999") telephone calls, even though she has been prosecuted about 60 times in 24 years on similar charges. In an earlier case, Dennis agreed to a therapy that sent painful shocks through her body every time she dialed 999, and she remained free of problems for four years but reoffended recently by making up a bomb threat against a store.

(1) William Anderson, 51, was arrested in February after he attracted a lot of attention by parking a Hummer (with Michigan plates) outside the small-town county welfare office in Jonesville, Va., while he applied for benefits; a quick investigation revealed that the vehicle had been stolen. (2) Frederick Watson, 57, was arrested in February in DeLand, Fla., after he attracted attention by pushing a heavy safe in a shopping cart through the lobby of the Putnam Hotel. When questioned, Watson tried to convince police that he had "found" the safe (but actually, it had been stolen from a fourth-floor office).

Some parents, in exuberant yet inexplicable expressions of devotion to their babies' supposed happiness, stage lavish birthday parties at such young ages that the supposed beneficiaries could not possibly remember or appreciate them. For example, the party by Sheila Chapman and Ray Reed for their precious "Prince" Clayburn Reed in February in Tampa Palms, Fla., celebrating Prince's first birthday, featured 60 guests and a professional party-planner, pony rides, a magician, a pinata, centered around a rented room at the local country club. Said Chapman to a St. Petersburg Times reporter: "These are the memories I want him to have. I want him to know how important and special I think he is."

A 50-year-old Buddhist monk, who had already lost parts of three fingers in one lawnmower accident, was killed in February when another mower got away from him, and in the ensuing chase and capture of it, he somehow fell and was fatally slashed by the blade (Buckinghamshire, England). And a 36-year-old man attempted to hang himself in a closet in January, but his girlfriend discovered him in time and pulled him down, but that just angered the man, who then fought with the girlfriend. A passer-by stepped in to help the woman, and in the process applied a wrestling hold to the suicidal man's carotid artery, inadvertently killing him (San Diego, Calif.) (Irrelevant fact: The deceased's last name was Kevorkian.)

(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.)

India's middle class is humming with "brand freaks" obsessed with luxury labels like Prada and Louis Vuitton, according to a February Washington Post dispatch, even though more than half the country lives in "abject poverty" (and even though Gandhi got along fine with just a loincloth!). Said one super-consumer, "I'll spend my whole salary for a really swank brand and eat (steamed rice cakes) for the rest of the month." According to the newly launched India edition of Vogue, the country's "Me Culture" has taken over, where, on an Ahmadabad road underneath towering billboards for Tag Heuer and Mont Blanc pens, barefoot kids with begging bowls tap on car windows. Though animal rights activists estimate that the country has more uncared-for dogs on the streets than any other in the world, Gucci dog bowls are for sale in New Delhi.

-- Toronto police announced in February that they had arrested the man who had stolen a backhoe with the intention of driving it to a car wash in order to break down a wall and get at the facility's coin machine. The call to police came from a snow plow that was hot on the backhoe's heels, with the driver having diverted from his route to chase the thief.

-- Working its way through multimillion-dollar proposals for naming rights on campus buildings in exchange for donations, the University of Colorado decided in January to accept the offer of venture capitalist Brad Feld, who made a $25,000 donation to the school in exchange for having a second-floor men's room named for him in a campus technology building.

-- Generous Public Servants: (1) Two Atlanta-area schools began a pilot program in January paying students $8 an hour, plus a possible performance bonus, to study math and science harder in special study halls (as an alternative for students whose financial need forces them into after-school jobs). (2) The Times of London reported in January that the British government, in considering programs to reduce the number of overweight children, is studying one option of handing out shopping vouchers to kids who lose weight and keep it off.

-- Two ex-employees of Sioux Manufacturing Corp. revealed in a 2006 whistle-blower lawsuit that the company had been shorting the quality of the Kevlar in more than 2 million combat helmets sold to the Pentagon during 1994-2006, and in February 2008, Sioux agreed to pay $2 million to settle the dispute. The company did not contest that the Kevlar threading was lighter than the contract required, but the Pentagon said it knew of no troop injuries linked to the substandard threading. In August 2007, however, while the Pentagon was still investigating, the U.S. Air Force nonetheless contracted with Sioux to produce new Kevlar combat helmets.

-- In December, Edmonton, Alberta, tattoo artist Lane Jensen augmented the inked caricature of a buxom cowgirl on his own left calf with silicone "implants" in the skin under where the woman's breasts are. However, within two weeks, the fluid went astray and had to be drained. Jensen said some bodies just reject breast implants. "I guess my girl wasn't meant to have 3-D breasts."

-- In a Feb. 8 program, the Hamas-controlled Gaza television channel Al-Aksa introduced a third cartoon animal mascot for its campaign of resistance against Israelis, according to a February dispatch in London's Daily Mail. Following "Farfur" (a Mickey Mouse look-alike who, according to the storyline, was eventually assassinated by an Israeli soldier) and "Nahul" (a bee who was killed when he could not get medical treatment after an Israeli attack), the new character is "Assud," a Bugs Bunny look-alike who does not say, "What's up, Doc?" but rather, "I will eat Jews."

-- Arrest Sheet: (1) A 17-year-old man was arrested in January and charged with burglary in Tempe, Ariz., based on a victim's description, which included the observation that the man was wearing "monkey-printed pajamas" during the crime. (2) William Torres, 21, was arrested in Allentown, Pa., and charged in connection with two homicides; he was taken into custody after a Friday afternoon traffic stop in January, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, pajama bottoms and fuzzy slippers with a lion's face.

-- Petty Criminals: A 43-year-old alleged shoplifter was arrested in Newburgh, N.Y., in January with 42 items under his clothes as he left a store, but the items' total value was only $132.07. And in December, Wesley Gregory, 52, who works on parking meters for the city of Greensboro, N.C., was arrested and charged with embezzling nickels, dimes and quarters for five years, with his "haul" averaging about $10 a week.

James Bowring, 45, told a court in Tauranga, New Zealand, in February that he wants to reconcile with his son, Jacob, 18, despite James' recent conviction for trying to run Jacob over in his car at 50 mph (after making a U-turn and jumping a curb to get at him). James admitted he was upset at Jacob for calling him a "pedophile," following James' having wooed and won over Jacob's 18-year-old girlfriend and gotten her pregnant. (James admitted that just before making that U-turn, he had dropped off a 14-year-old girl he was giving a ride to.) Subsequently, a judge sentenced James to five months' home detention in the bus he lives in with the pregnant girlfriend.

Should've Left Well Enough Alone: (1) Eric Livers, 20, a wanted man in Cheyenne, Wyo., fled apparently scot-free to Portsmouth, N.H., but could not resist calling his former Wyoming employer to ask that his final paycheck be mailed to his New Hampshire address. The employer called authorities, and Portsmouth police picked up Livers in February. (2) Jeremy Hart, 24, was arrested in Topsham, Maine, in December after allegedly burglarizing a home while the residents were asleep. As Hart was leaving, according to police, he hit a snowbank in the driveway, causing the car to stall, and Hart to become so cold that he sheepishly walked back, rang the victims' doorbell, and asked if he could come in and get warm. (The residents, aware that Hart had just been in their house, had already called police.)

Many inmates file lawsuits over the allegedly poor quality of prison food, but noteworthy was the one recently filed by Missouri inmate Norman Lee Toler (serving 10 years for statutory rape), demanding kosher food as required by his devout Judaism, even though, in a previous prison stint, he was a notorious Adolf Hitler sympathizer with Nazi tattoos who amassed white supremacist photos and literature. Said a spokesman for the state attorney general, "We have serious factual doubts about ... his sincerity."

More people who accidentally shot themselves recently: A man, 20, showing off to friends after miscounting bullets, fatally shot himself in the head (Dallas, January). A man who said he didn't feel safe walking his dog unless he had his gun with him, wounded himself on a walk (Palm Bay, Fla., February). A convenience-store robber, 25, shot himself in the genitals when stuffing the gun into his waistband (Kokomo, Ind., January). A man, 26, checking on a disturbance near his apartment, shot himself in the buttocks (Scottsdale, Ariz., December). An insurance company employee, 47, who brings a gun every day to hang in his cubicle, shot himself in both legs while handling it (Lake Worth, Texas, October). A man, 26, shot himself in the head while loading his gun at a firing range (Riverside, Calif., November).

(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.)

In February, a Mississippi judge released two convicted rapists of children, who had each been in prison for more than 12 years, based on DNA. The men had been convicted primarily by the "bite mark" analysis of since-discredited dentist Dr. Michael West, who used iridescent lights and yellow goggles to demonstrate that scratches on the victims were bites by the two men. Subsequent independent analysis identified the scratches as scratches, perhaps even made by West himself, according to a director of the Innocence Project. West is a favorite colleague of medical examiner Steven Hayne, who seems always to find evidence of guilt of anyone charged by district attorney Forrest Allgood, according to a Reason magazine investigation. West's bite "technology," in particular, has been widely ridiculed by forensic professionals.

-- A 25-year-old woman was arrested for assault in Bremerton, Wash., in December after fighting with her boyfriend in the shower over whether the man's dog could join them. The woman objected and said the arrangement would be a deal-breaker for their relationship, to which the boyfriend replied that he hoped his next girlfriend would appreciate the dog more. At that, according to police, she punched him several times in the face, and in their struggle, he dislocated his shoulder.

-- Female Muslim medical students at several hospitals in Britain are objecting to a campaign that demands more rigorous hand-washing (to stop the spread of dangerous bacteria), complaining that being forced to bare their forearms above the wrist is immodesty prohibited by their religion. Doctors cited in a February Daily Telegraph story said washing up to the elbow is crucial for safety. Some women at Birmingham University said they would change careers rather than comply.

-- In January, the state medical board in Sydney, Australia, admonished psychiatrist Yolande Lucire for testifying in a court case about her belief that Ritalin and similar drugs had produced residual organic hallucinosis in children that might explain their violence later in life. The board said it disagreed with her and ordered Lucire to make an appointment with a senior psychiatrist for therapy, to help her deal with her problem of making unconventional diagnoses.

-- In early January, when a national deep freeze extended even to the Florida Keys, iguanas fell into their natural hibernation-like torpor, and some compassionate Floridians, unaccustomed to seeing iguanas that appeared nearly dead, took them indoors to warm them up, which is a mistake. The owner of the veterinary clinic in Marathon said one "sweet lady" called him about the five-footer she had dragged inside. "When it woke up," said the vet, "she couldn't understand why it seemed to be coming after her." "When they warm up, they go back to being a wild animal."

-- Construction worker Brian Persaud's malpractice lawsuit is scheduled for trial in March against the New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital based on a 2003 incident in which he was taken there (after being clobbered on the head by a plank at work) and given a rectal exam. Persaud was alert when informed of the imminent exam, but then went nuts, resisting the doctor and was sedated so that the test could be performed. The doctor defended the exam, citing the need to check for spinal cord injury.

-- Since at least the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there," said one researcher quoted in a February dispatch in London's The Independent. An oceanographer predicted that the Patch would double in size in just the next decade. A 2006 United Nations office estimated that every square mile of ocean contains, on average, 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

(1) Luis Jimenez, 24, was arrested in Austin, Texas, in January and charged with having child pornography that police say he left behind when he moved. The subsequent tenant has a cat, which, in the process of exploring the new digs, got caught in a gap between a pantry and a ceiling where the DVDs had been hidden. (2) Police testifying in the murder trial of David Henton, 72, in Swansea, Wales, in January said they made recordings (in his home, with hidden microphones) of Henton confessing to killing his long-time domestic partner. Since Henton lives alone, the wordy confessions were apparently to his cats, to whom he spoke frequently about a range of matters.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (87) The person arrested for drunk-driving who decides to contest the charge but is drunk again when arriving in court, as was Joseph Longfellow, 35, who blew a .32 blood-alcohol reading (four times the state driving limit). (88) People who live in airports, like Iranian Merhan Nasseri, who lived at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport for 18 years because of passport problems and who inspired the Tom Hanks film "The Terminal" (and among others, Anthony Delaney, who was arrested at London's Gatwick airport in February after nearly four years' residence).

-- A 16-year-old boy was arrested in Toronto in February after he emerged from a CIBC bank with about $150,000 (Cdn) stuffed in a sack. Despite numerous Hollywood movies emphasizing the need for speed in a bank robbery, the kid had dawdled inside for more than 45 minutes after the silent alarm had been pressed, collecting cash not only from the vault and tellers, but from customers, and by the time he walked out, the bank was surrounded by cops.

-- Pat Dykstra, 51, of Fox Lake, Wis., was persuaded by bar patrons, including her boyfriend, that she was too drunk to drive and so took responsibility by calling 911 from her truck to ask that the sheriff send someone to follow her home, according to a January Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story. (Dykstra then ended the call by telling the dispatcher how dangerous it is to drive while on the phone.) When deputies caught up to Dykstra, she registered a .14 blood-alcohol reading, well over the maximum permitted.

In February, televangelist Jim Bakker (who lost his Praise The Lord ministry in the 1980s in fraud convictions that led to a five-year prison stint) began broadcasting from Morningside, his new religious development in southern Missouri that bears a strong resemblance to PTL's Heritage USA project. According to a February report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "hundreds" of Heritage contributors ponied up this time, too, and despite the fact that each lost 99 percent of the value of their $1,000 investments, some even signed over their $6.54 restitution checks (following the fraud settlement) to Bakker's new venture. The newspaper, observing Bakker's debut from the new studio, noted that the first appeal for donations did not come until 41 minutes into the show.

In a spectacular one-car wipe-out along an airstrip near Ocala, Fla., on Jan. 26, five young men were killed when their supercharged BMW M5 left the road at at least 120 mph, sailed 200 feet, and smashed into a tree. In the days after, visitors to an Internet forum of M5 drivers recalled a question posed on a message board on Jan. 25 from an 18-year-old seeking advice about handling the car when shifting gears at super-fast speeds. He signed on only as "Josh," which is the first name of the 18-year-old driver killed on the airstrip.

(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.)