The New Waterboarding: In April, the district attorney in Vilas County, Wis., announced that he was seeking volunteers for a forensic test to help his case against Douglas Plude, 42, who is scheduled to stand trial soon for the second time in the death of his wife. The volunteers must be female, about 5-feet-8 and 140 pounds, and will have to stick their heads into a toilet bowl and flush. Plude is charged with drowning his wife in a commode, but his version (which the prosecutor will try to show is improbable) is that his wife committed suicide by flushing herself.

-- Neal Horsley, running for governor of Georgia in the 2010 election on a platform encouraging the quaint Peach State legal theory of "nullification" (i.e., that the state can override the U.S. Constitution in certain instances), is principally known as a staunch foe of abortion who once posted a "hit list" of doctors. However, Horsley is also celebrated for a 2005 television interview with Fox News' Alan Colmes, in which Horsley described his childhood: "When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule." To a skeptical Colmes, Horsley added, "(Y)ou (city) people are so far removed from reality. ... Welcome to domestic life on the farm."

-- A month after her client was accused of a March attempted murder, attorney Frances Hartman spoke up for him to a reporter. "(My client) is an exemplary young man," said Hartman, describing fourth-year Camden, N.J., medical student Brett Picciotti, 26, who was charged with shoving his girlfriend off a second-story balcony, but who denied that he pushed her. "This is an aberrational charge," Hartman said. "I think there's an explanation. I'm just not prepared to give it to you right now."

-- Rammed for a Good Reason: (1) Lorena Alvarez was charged with aggravated battery in April in Lake Worth, Fla., after allegedly, angrily crashing her car into her boyfriend's pickup truck, thus endangering her two kids, ages 7 and 1, who were with her. She explained to police that her boyfriend was about to drive off drunk and hitting him was the best way to prevent danger to other motorists. (2) John Angeline was charged with fatally running over gas station attendant Haeng Soon Yang in Mossy Rock, Wash., in April after she tried to stop him from leaving without paying for $34 in fuel. Angeline, captured nearby, explained to police that he had run over the woman because she looked like she was about to "cast a spell" on him.

-- On April 8, the New Hampshire House of Representatives debated a controversial bill to outlaw discrimination against "transgenders" (those born of one sex but who identify as the other), and the legislation passed by one vote. Coincidentally, April 8 was the state's Tartan Day, and by tradition, male lawmakers of Scottish ancestry wore kilts to work. Thus, some opponents of giving greater protection to "men" who wear skirts were men who were that day wearing "skirts." (In any event, the state Senate subsequently rejected the bill.)

-- Environmental activists Raoul Surcouf and Richard Spink set sail from Bristol, England, in May on a 40-foot boat outfitted with solar panels and a wind turbine to attempt the first carbon-neutral crossing of Greenland's polar ice cap (a journey being monitored eagerly online in Bristol by 25,000 schoolchildren). However, 400 miles off the coast of Ireland, hurricane-force winds destroyed the boat, and the crew was lucky to be rescued by a nearby ship, which was a tanker carrying 680,000 barrels of crude oil.

-- Almost No Longer Weird: (1) In Los Angeles on March 29, hit-and-run drivers killed two pedestrians: an 18-year-old female college student and, hours later, a 55-year-old Guatemalan-American construction worker. As is not unusual, according to the Los Angeles Times, the LAPD went into massive "overdrive" to find the woman's killer but handed the other homicide off to "a lone detective with little more to go on than hope." (2) On April 25, in Washington, D.C., the murder of a black teenager was reported in two sentences of that day's Washington Post while nearly 10 times the space was devoted to the colonoscopy of a panda at the city's National Zoo.

In April, accounting clerk James Kauchis made a formal complaint to the personnel office of the county Department of Social Services in Binghamton, N.Y., demanding that he be compensated for a recent interrupted lunch hour. Kauchis had missed lunch when DSS offices were locked down as police secured the neighborhood surrounding the site of the April 3 massacre in which a gunman killed 13 people and then himself. Although DSS had pizza and beverages brought in during the siege, Kauchis felt that wasn't as good as a regular lunch hour.

Perverts Giving 110 Percent Effort: (1) Allan Mailloux, 45, was arrested for flashing motorists as he walked among rush-hour traffic in Madison, Wis., in January, on a day when the high temperature was minus-2 (F). (2) Police in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, investigated reports in February from "several" people that a man was driving up alongside motorists on Highway 78, and if the motorist was a lone female, he would speed on ahead, pull over to the shoulder, get out, and flash the motorist as she drove by.

Questionable Judgments: (1) In April in Arnold, Mo., police arrested a suspected shoplifter trying to leave a Schnucks store with unpaid-for merchandise. She aroused suspicion from security personnel only because she was attempting to exit through an automatic "enter" door and was slow to figure out the problem and loud in expressing her frustration. (2) Nathaniel Johnson, 19, was arrested in March in Tampa on burglary charges when police produced solid evidence of his presence in a neighborhood that had reported several break-ins. Johnson was revealed to be at each crime scene because he was traced by the ankle monitor he was wearing from a previous court appearance.

Public urination continues to be dangerous, as News of the Weird has reported periodically. In April, a 23-year-old man tumbled off a bridge over the Minnesota River in Bloomington, Minn., just before 5 a.m. while attempting to urinate. He fell 30 feet but survived. And in March, tugboat captain Kevin McGonigle fell off his boat into the Campbell River near Victoria, British Columbia, while attempting to urinate. He was rescued after 70 minutes, clad only in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and could not have survived much longer in the frigid waters.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Codey Wayne Miller, Johnson City, Tenn. (May). Darcy Wayne Banaszek, Skamania County, Wash. (May). Dale Wayne Baylis, Denver (May). Benjamin Wayne Shorter, Catonsville, Md. (April). Timothy Wayne Fletcher, Welaka, Fla. (April). Paul Wayne Stark, Pueblo, Colo. (March). Abrey Wayne Fortner, Blountsville, Tenn. (January). On trial for murder at press time: Geoffrey Wayne Freeman, Brisbane, Australia. Arrested in Nevada, at press time fighting extradition to Roseberg, Ore., to face a murder charge: Dale Wayne Hill (April). Committed suicide after (according to police) murdering his wife: Terry Wayne Scott, Dade City, Fla. (May).

On the day before Good Friday in 1998, reported the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Ernesto A. Moshe Montgomery consecrated the Shrine of the Weeping Shirley MacLaine at the Beta Israel Temple in Los Angeles. Inspired by an image he said he had while riding in the actress's private jet, Montgomery said a subsequent, large photograph of him with MacLaine was "observed shedding tears," which had inspired congregants' prayers and testimony of miraculous healings.

Convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, now serving a life sentence in the Florence, Colo., "Supermax" prison, filed a 39-page federal lawsuit in March alleging unconstitutional "cruel and unusual punishment" because the refined-food, low-fiber meals give him "chronic constipation (and) bleeding hemorrhoids." He demanded fresh raw vegetables and other high-fiber foods, necessary to "keep one's body (i.e., God's holy temple) in good health." Nichols was joined in the lawsuit by fellow Supermax resident Eric Rudolph (the convicted abortion-clinic and Atlanta Olympics bomber), who claimed "gas and stomach cramps" and observed that "our bodies" are "sacred and should be treated as such."

-- Recently the Washington Supreme Court ruled that Seattle had for two years improperly charged water customers for servicing hydrants when the city should have covered the service from general tax funds, and it ordered customer refunds averaging $45. However, Seattle then discovered it had insufficient general funds to pay for hydrant service and thus imposed a water surcharge of $59 per customer, according to a February KOMO-TV report. The most likely reason the surcharge was higher is that the city had to pay $4.2 million to the attorneys who filed the account-shuffling lawsuit.

-- After three years of providing worker-training grants to a San Francisco-area multimedia coalition that includes a maker of sexualized torture videos, the California Employment Training Panel cut off funding in April, claiming that it had not realized the nature of what an outfit called "Kink.com" does. The coalition protested the panel's decision, pointing out that Kink is a law-abiding, tax-paying entity that employs 100 local people and keeps California adult video "competitive in the international marketplace" by training employees in video editing, Photoshop and other multimedia skills. A typical Kink.com production may feature paid, consenting women bound, gagged and supposedly electrically shocked.

-- In April at a gallery in London, Mexican artist Raul Ortega Ayala's exhibit opened with the customary hors d'oeuvres for visitors. However, since Ayala's work specializes in the roles that food play in our lives, he served cheese made from human breast milk, to "explor(e) our first encounter with food emphasizing its territoriality and boundaries." He said his next piece would go the other way, with 10 menus showing what "presidents, public figures, mass murderers and cave men" ate just before dying.

-- A pedestrian bridge over Interstate 80 in Berkeley, Calif., opened late last year, decorated with $196,000 in public art by sculptor Scott Donahue. At each end of the bridge are 28-foot structures to honor the "history" and "daily life" of Berkeley, notably its tradition of citizen protests, but smaller sculpted medallions feature street scenes such as dogs romping playfully in city parks. However, as initially noted by a Fox News reporter in February, one of the medallions shows a dog defecating and another displays two dogs mating. Said a local art program official, "I think they're just, you know, natural science ... what dogs really do."

-- New York artist Ariana Page Russell has a dermatological disorder that makes her skin puff up immediately at the slightest scratch (which renders her, she says, the "human Etch A Sketch"). She now scratches herself in deliberate patterns, to create artistic designs, which she photographs and offers for sale. Russell says she must work quickly, for her skin usually returns to normal after about an hour.

East St. Louis, Ill., policeman Kristopher Weston apprehended a murder suspect about 20 minutes after the crime in April, which was such a nice piece of police work that the mayor called Weston before the city council to commend him. Five minutes after Weston left the room, the council got down to regular business, the first order of which was to approve a list of police and firefighter layoffs due to budget shortfalls, and on the list because of low seniority was Officer Kristopher Weston.

(1) In March, a judge in Jefferson County, Texas, probated the 90-day DUI sentence for Jeffrey Latham, 37, on condition that he not drink alcohol, and he ordered Latham to report to the probation office. Two hours later, Latham showed up as scheduled, drunk, and was promptly shuttled back to court. (2) A man and woman in their early 30s were arrested in April after they stripped naked and began having sex in front of tourists on the lawn at Britain's Windsor Castle. The queen was in residence, but her living quarters are at the opposite end of the castle, and she missed the spectacle.

Shreepriya Gopalan filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Diego in April against Microsoft, Google, Apple, Saks Fifth Avenue, McDonalds, Starbucks, Subway, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Chase Bank, Verizon, AT&T and 47 other U.S. corporations, claiming that he actually owns the companies based on the Chinese divination system I Ching, which he said he invented when he was "15 or 16" years old. "These companies were I Chinged in through a metaphysical layer created and owned by me," he wrote, but he added that, "unfortunately," he lacks paperwork to document his claims and asks the court's help.

Questionable Judgments: (1) Remo Spencer, who works at the Wal-Mart in Great Falls, Mont., was arrested in April and charged with stealing eight laptop computers and seven iPods from the store's inventory. He aroused suspicion when he offered those items for sale on Wal-Mart's employee bulletin board. (2) A 22-year-old man was hospitalized in Wilmington, N.C., in December after stiffing a taxicab driver. The man had bolted from the cab without paying, but the driver simply drove after the fleeing thief and rammed him.

(1) Victor Harris was pouring an additive into his SUV's fuel tank in March in Saginaw, Mich., when he got his index finger stuck. These situations are often inexplicably difficult, and it took firefighters four hours to remove a section of the tank and transport Harris to a doctor, who pried his finger loose and stitched it up. (2) Another careless pistol-whipping took place in April in Upper Darby, Pa., when, according to police, Jamiyl Muhammad, 17, was beating up on a street punk, and the gun accidentally fired, shooting Muhammad's 19-year-old brother in the arm.

Elderly drivers' recent lapses of concentration, confusing the brake pedal with the gas (or "drive" with "reverse"): An 89-year-old man accidentally crashed into his wife in a parking lot in Greenville, S.C. (April). An 88-year-old man accidentally drove through the front window of a restaurant in Redondo Beach, Calif., injuring five (March). An 85-year-old woman, on her way to take her driver's test, accidentally crashed into the building that houses the licensing office in Schram City, Ill. (February). An 82-year-old woman accidentally drove into the Indulgence Salon in Prescott Valley, Ariz., while trying to park (May). A man in his 80s, arriving at a Subaru dealer in Town of McCandless, Pa., for service, accidentally crashed into the showroom (April). An 80-year-old woman, backing out of a parking space, accidentally sped out, instead, hitting six cars and ramming a building, in Indianapolis (February).

According to a January 1999 Boston Globe feature, Mr. Wai Y. Tye, 82, a chemist who retired a while back after 32 years' service with Raytheon Corp., has lived continuously, without complaint, in the same 200-square-foot room in the downtown Boston YMCA for the last 50 years. "When you're busy working and playing tennis," he told a reporter, "when you come home, you don't have much time to take care of an apartment." The bathroom, as in 1949, is still down the hall to the left, and Tye said he does not mind the exposed pipes, the linoleum floor or having food preparation limited to a hotplate.

"Consensual Living" parenting, which was developed in 2006 and now has many hundreds of followers, supposes that every family member's needs are equally valid and respectworthy. Even pre-adolescents are assumed able to understand their own needs and respect those of others. When little Kiernen, 3, of Langley, British Columbia, hits another child, his mom told Toronto's Globe & Mail in March, she does not invoke authority but instead asks about his feelings and whether he'd like to express himself differently. If Kahlan, 18 months old, of Nanaimo, British Columbia, is grumpy at a time when her mother has made plans, Mom says she is obligated to consider other plans. And when Savannah, 6, insisted on wearing her Halloween cat costume every single day for several months, her mom in Burlington, Ontario, just shrugged, since she recalled how contentious the morning dressing rituals were, pre-Consensual Living.

Safety First in Britain: (1) Recently, 118 local government councils conducted formal tests on their cemeteries' gravestones to see how susceptible they are to toppling over and hurting people, according to an April Daily Telegraph report. (2) In April, a circus clown performing in Liverpool was ordered not to wear his classic oversized shoes because he could trip and injure someone. (3) BBC producers, wielding a "telephone-book-size" set of safety precautions while making a recent adventure documentary, ordered Sir Robin Knox-Johnston (the first person to sail single-handedly and nonstop around the world) not to light a portable stove unless a "safety advisor" supervised.

For 15 years, police in southern Germany have been futilely tracking a female "serial killer" whose DNA (but little other matching physical evidence) was found at 40 crime scenes, including six murders. Only in 2007 did they begin to consider alternative theories, and in March 2009, a state justice minister announced that the case had been solved: The DNA matched up in the tests because the cotton swabs used to collect it had been contaminated at the factory (but authorities still have not determined which female factory worker inadvertently supplied the DNA).

-- Be Wary of Discount Funeral Services: (1) A 2004 burial in Allendale, S.C., is just now being investigated after relatives learned that the deceased, a 6-foot-7 man, was somehow laid to rest in a 6-foot-long coffin that was part of his prepaid plan. (2) Authorities in Houston are investigating a funeral home that handles burial of paupers on contract from the county after, somehow, a 91-year-old male (who was supposed to be preserved for viewing) was cremated instead of the female who was scheduled.

-- Lobbying Pays: University of Kansas researchers, reporting in April, disclosed that a single tax provision in a 2004 law (allowing U.S. multinational corporations to avoid federal tax on foreign profits) gained a typical company $220 for every $1 the company had spent lobbying Congress to enact that provision. Among the big winners was the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, which disclosed spending $8.5 million to lobby for the law and gaining a tax break of more than $2 billion. (The lobbying emphasized that the lower tax would enable the companies to create more jobs, but the Congressional Research Service found that most of the tax savings went to pay dividends or buy back company stock.)

-- In a study of the last six years' admissions at hospital emergency rooms in the Austin, Texas, area (reported in April), 900 people were identified as using ERs six or more times in the previous three months, and nine specific patients had made a total of 2,678 visits in the six-year period.

-- Mixed Signs From the Middle East: (1) In March, at a soccer match in Hilla, Iraq, between two local teams, as a player with the ball approached the goal to attempt a tying kick late in the game, an overenthusiastic spectator drew his gun and shot him dead. (2) In more hopeful news, authorities in Ramallah said that the March 24 bank robbery by armed gunmen who snatched the equivalent of $30,000 was pulled off by five Palestinians and an Israeli Jew, working together.

(1) A 44-year-old intoxicated man was arrested in Ann Arbor, Mich., in March, blocking traffic by approaching an officer and requesting a big hug (and then cursing the officer when he declined). (2) A 22-year-old tipsy soccer fan celebrating on a chartered bus after a match in West Bromwich, England, in January, was run over by a motorist after he fell out the back door of the bus, believing it led to the restroom.

Not "Consensual Living": (1) An Oregon, Wis., man was arrested in February after his 9-year-old son wrote a school essay about the time his dad shot him in the buttocks with a BB gun because he was blocking his view of the TV set. (2) A 58-year-old man was arrested in Baltimore in February for allegedly stabbing his 19-year-old son after an argument over the son's refusal to remove his hat during church service.

-- Timothy Grim, 39, was arrested in Shreveport, La., in April after swiping several garments from the rehearsal room of the Shreveport Opera and dashing off. The conductor and three performers took chase and cornered Grim several blocks away, still in possession of one part of a diva's outfit, which he immediately offered to sell back to the opera, and by the time police arrived, Grim had cut his asking price to $1.

-- Not Ready for Prime Time: A 16-year-old boy was arrested in Centerville, Utah, in April as he roamed a neighborhood at night trying to break into several cars. The last one he tried was the private vehicle of a sheriff's deputy, who was still in it, in uniform and finishing a phone call after coming off his shift. After arresting the kid, the deputy reported that the boy had been so stunned when he saw the deputy inside the car that he immediately soiled his pants. Said the deputy, "You could smell him."

In April, the City Council of Vero Beach, Fla., grappling with the question of how much skin can legally be exposed in public, adopted the definitions that at least two other Florida jurisdictions use (and which were reported in News of the Weird). "Buttocks," for example, is "the area of the rear of the body which lies between two imaginary lines running parallel to the ground when a person is standing, the first or top such line drawn at the top of the nates (i.e., the prominence of the muscles running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the second or bottom line drawn at the lowest visible (sic) of this cleavage or the lowest point of the curvature of the fleshy protuberance, whichever is lower."

The New York Times reported in February 2004 on a Washington, D.C., man whose love of music led him, in the 1960s, to meticulously hand-make and hand-paint facsimile record album covers of his fantasized music, complete with imagined lyric sheets and liner notes (with some "albums" even shrink-wrapped in plastic), and, even more incredibly, to hand-make cardboard facsimiles of actual grooved discs to put inside them. "Mingering Mike," whom a reporter and two hobbyists tracked down (but who declined to be identified in print) also made real music, on tapes, using his and friends' voices to simulate instruments. His 38 imagined "albums" were discovered at a flea market after Mike defaulted on storage-locker fees.