While March Madness dominates intercollegiate athletics, another group of collegians works out amidst coaches' whistles, endures bloody, 12-hour practices, and cheers on teammates preparing for the national championship in meat-judging, in which about 40 colleges compete, according to a March Wall Street Journal report. Coaches at powerhouses like Colorado State and South Dakota State say skills such as evaluating T-bone cutting and spotting whether a pig has too much back fat come with determination and concentration (and, of course, practice, as one coach said it all comes down to time spent in the meat locker, at 38 degrees (Fahrenheit)). (And pro scouts are watching from the stands, representatives of U.S. meat companies, seeking talent.)

(1) Italy's highest appeals court ruled in March that it is not illegal for a woman to lie in a police investigation if the reason is to cover up her adulterous affair. Court of Cassation judges said that her honor is more important than providing intimate information about her lover. (2) The North Carolina Court of Appeals voted 2-1 in February to approve a worker compensation claim for only one of a woman's breast-implant replacements, ruling that the other implant ruptured (in a job-related accident) only because it had been improperly installed. (The dissenting judge said, even so, the compensation fund should pay for the second replacement, too, because to achieve their purpose, both breasts must be aligned properly on the chest.)

-- When Johnny Diablo's year-old vegan restaurant failed to catch on in Portland, Ore., last year, he converted the space into Casa Diablo's Gentlemen's Club, which is what he believes is the world's only vegan strip club. He has no rule against meat-eating dancers, he told Willamette Week newspaper in February, but won't permit leather, fur, silk or wool outfits on stage (no "murder victims" in the club, he said).

-- Cosmetics from the American company Blue Q, under the "Lookin' Good for Jesus" brand urging users to "Get Tight with Christ," were pulled from stores in Singapore in February due to complaints, but Blue Q said it's not abandoning that line of hand and body creams, lip balm, breath spray and bubble bath. (Of course, Blue Q also markets similar cosmetics under such brands as "Dirty Girl," "Cute as Hell," "Total Bitch" and "Virgin/Slut," as well as a car air-freshener by its brand "Cat Butt.")

-- A team of researchers from the University of Calgary and the Tokyo Institute of Technology proudly announced in February that they had successfully stored "nothing" inside a puff of gas and then had managed to retrieve that same "nothing." That "nothing" is called a "squeezed vacuum," and the physicists tell us that a light wave can be manipulated so that its phases are of uncertain amplitude, then the light itself removed so that only the "uncertainty" property of the wave remains.

-- In February, the South Korean cell phone company KTF announced a new voice-analysis program for its customers to enable them to evaluate their sincerity when calling a lover. The caller can point the phone's camera at himself and see a meter on the screen measuring his own passion, then receive a text message afterward noting voice expressions by the person receiving the call (surprise, honesty, etc.).

-- To feed the fast-growing women's hair-extension business, brokers in India scour the countryside for Hindu temples that encourage female worshippers to shear themselves as good-luck offerings to the temples' gods, according to a February dispatch in Germany's Der Spiegel. Historically, the hair was used to make mattresses, but because the celebrity-driven extension business is so large, salons around the world pay from $125 to $250 per pound for strands of never-chemically-treated hair of desirable hues. Shaving is a Hindu tradition, and one donor told Spiegel she had long prayed for her husband to stop drinking and that when that "miracle" happened, she felt compelled to offer her hair.

-- In the worst slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti (where 80 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day), rice now sells for 30 cents a cup (double the price of a year ago), according to a January Associated Press dispatch, leaving the poorest of the poor to subsist mainly on "cookies" made with dirt. Choice clay from the central plateau is at least a source of calcium and can be baked with salt and vegetable shortening. However, recently in the La Saline slum, the reporter noted, the price of dirt, too, has risen about 40 percent.

At a February casting call in Pittsburgh for the movie "Shelter" (to star Julianne Moore), producers announced they were seeking extras to play West Virginia mountain people from the hollers (Pittsburgh is about 40 miles from the state line), specifically an albino woman, extraordinarily tall or short people, those with unusual body shapes and faces (especially eyes), and "a 9- to-12-year-old Caucasian girl with an other-worldly look. 'Regular-looking' children should not attend."

Takahiro Fujinuma, 37, was arrested and charged with making at least 2,600 calls (perhaps more than 10,000) to directory assistance ("I would go into ecstasy when a lady (operator) scolded me," he told a reporter) (Tokyo; January). Ms. Lee Amor, 23, pleaded guilty to calling or texting her jilting ex-boyfriend more than 10,000 times over a 65-day period (South Devon, England; February). John Triplette was arrested, suspected as the one who made more than 27,000 calls to "911" since May 2007 (consisting mostly of mumbling and making bodily noises) (Hayward, Calif.; February). Paul Kavanagh, 40, was sentenced to 30 months in jail for making about 15,000 calls in 12 years to women asking them about their underwear (West London, England; November).

Not Ready for Prime Time: Robber Adam Grennan, 39, did not make it out of the Mt. Washington Bank in Dorchester, Mass., in December. So intent was he in not appearing nervous that he waited patiently in line, eyes straight ahead, until the time came to hand the teller his holdup note. He did not notice that a uniformed Boston police officer, working security, had slipped quietly behind him in line, and he arrested Grennan immediately as Grennan was quietly demanding large bills and "no funny money."

Padre Pio, who died in 1968 and was sponsored for sainthood by Pope John Paul II, has been a controversial figure, as News of the Weird reported in 1999. He was wildly loved by his parishioners, yet viewed skeptically by some Vatican officials who found his claim of hands bleeding from crucifixion holes (similar to those of Jesus), and of having been eye-gouged in a wrestling match with the devil, to be difficult to authenticate. On orders from Pope Benedict XVI, Padre Pio's body was exhumed in March, to be placed on public display for several months at the Vatican, even though problematic for two reasons. The top part of his skull is exposed, presenting an unsettling image, but more important, there obviously are no crucifixion holes or scars on his hands or feet.

Latest Electro-Sensual Accidents: Toby Taylor, 37, of York County, Pa., was charged with involuntary manslaughter in January after his wife died of a heart attack in an accident during sex, and police found the woman's body (according to the York Daily Record) with "alligator clips on the end of a stripped electric cord ... attached to her breasts," with an on-off switch. About two weeks earlier, 100 miles away in New Berlinville, Pa., a 23-year-old construction worker was electrocuted when he placed electric clips to his chest piercings (despite colleagues' warnings).

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.)