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.

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.