A Whiff of Injustice: William Dillon was released in November after 26 years in prison when a DNA test ruled him out as the murderer. He was the second Florida man recently freed by DNA after being positively identified at trial by a star police dog, Harass II, whose trainer Bill Preston had sworn could amazingly track scents through water and after months of site contamination. In June, the Innocence Project of Florida said as many as 60 other convicts might have been "identified" by Harass II. According to an Orlando Sentinel report, only one judge (who's now retired) thought to actually test Harass II's ability in a courtroom, and he wrote that the dog failed badly.

-- "If I had portrayed Hitler in his underpants," explained Belgian artist Jan Bucquoy at the opening of his museum in July in Brussels, "there would not have been a war." Bucquoy has displayed, in glass cases, the drawers of prominent Belgians, but also exhibits "Warhol-type" drawings of underwear-clad celebrities as he imagines them (like Margaret Thatcher). As Bucquoy told Reuters: "If you are scared of someone, just imagine them in their underpants. The hierarchy will fall." Whose knickers does the artist most covet? France's First Lady Carla Bruni's would be nice, he said, but even better, the pope's.

-- Another Belgian artist, Jacques Charlier, was rejected by the judges of the Venice Biennale gala when he submitted his poster-sized sketches of other artists' genitals idiosyncratically drawn to suggest whose belong to whom. For example, Charlier's representation of the artist Christo (famous for "wrapping" in cloth panels and ribbons such locations as New York City's Central Park) depicts genitals wrapped up to resemble a parcel. The artists are not named, and guessing their identities from the sketches is part of the show, with prizes for guests who can name 20 of the 100 pieces.

-- British Broadcasting Corp. announced in May that it would "revive an art form" by dispatching a poet to the front lines in Afghanistan to embed with UK troops. BBC selected prominent poet Simon Armitage to mark "a new era in war poetry for the 21st century."

-- Small Town Management: (1) After haggling for a while at its June 16 meeting, the county board in Lincoln, Neb., finally voted, 2-1, to reimburse Shum Darwin for his pants, which went missing at the jail after Darwin was arrested. The city's liability was clear; the debate was about whether the pants were worth $12 or $10. (2) The city council of Brooksville, Fla., by 4-1, adopted an appearance policy in June that requires all municipal employees to wear underwear while on the clock and to make sure it is not visible.

-- Small-Town Politics: In June, the city council of Indian Trail Town, N.C., voted, 4-1, to declare Mayor John Quinn's comments about the council in the town newsletter "whiny" and to ban his remarks from subsequent issues and from the town Web site. The new policy also prohibits Mayor Quinn from talking to any municipal employee unless the town manager is at his side, and requires Quinn to get express permission to enter the town hall except for places open to the general public.

-- An investigation by the U.K. TV channel More4 revealed in June that local U.K. councils spend the equivalent of $80 million a year translating their documents into dozens of languages in the cause of "fairness," even obscure languages that few residents speak, and even given evidence that, in dozens of cases, no one has ever tried to access the documents. Translations were found in Albanian, Bengali, Kurdish, Somali, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sierra Leonean Creole, Karen (eastern Burma) and Ga (Ghana), among others.

In the American version (which actually happened at least once, in Bucks County, Pa., in the 1980s), cynical cops use a photocopier "connected" by a crude wire to the suspect, and a sheet of "He's Lying" paper in the output tray, as a "lie detector" test. In July, the Tel Aviv, Israel, Police Department used a "memory machine" to change the mind of a murder suspect who swore he could not remember anything about the night of the crime. Hooked up to an electrocardiogram machine, the perp was "informed" that certain squiggles on the paper proved that he did indeed remember and must be hiding details. Andrei Polokhin, 47, then confessed and was charged with fatally stabbing his neighbor.

David Shayler, 43, used to be a British MI5 intelligence officer, but apparently went downhill after a controversy with superiors and today lives as Delores Kent, in full female dress, and believes "in (his) heart" that he is the Messiah who will save mankind from its upcoming 2012 doomsday by turning billions of people on to the virtues of hemp, which is "perfectly balanced ... full of omega-3, -6, and -9 to help muscles grow and repair." Shayler/Kent also believes that Americans staged Sept. 11 and that Jesus Christ was, like him, a transvestite.

(1) Least Competent Cops: Officers in Forrest City, Ark., arrested Lawrence Harden Jr. in June for robbing a liquor store. They cuffed him, shackled him, and head-stuffed him into their SUV, but he got out and ran away. Police dogs found Harden an hour later, and he was re-cuffed, re-shackled and re-head-stuffed into a squad car. He got out again and ran away (but was caught again and finally jailed). (2) Least Competent Priest: In a soon-to-be-released memoir, retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, Wis., claims that, at first, he had no idea that priests' sexual abuse of young boys was a crime. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Weakland writes, "We all considered sexual abuse of minors as (only) a moral evil."

News of the Weird's favorite animal was called "heroic" by Argentine researchers in a July issue of the journal Paleontology. Had it not been for high-performance South American scarab dung beetles, they wrote, gargantuan prehistoric mammals would have choked vast areas of the continent knee-deep in manure. The researchers found that, by burying tennis-ball-sized "food supplies" for their young, the beetles also improved surface sanitation by leaving less dung available for "disease-carrying flies."

For years, News of the Weird has touted the magnificently dysfunctional municipal government of Washington, D.C., as the "District of Calamity," but improvements have been made, and the nation's capital has been overtaken by the disaster that is Detroit. (1) A Detroit News investigation revealed in June that the police department has routinely downgraded obvious "murder" cases, to make the city seem less unsafe. (2) A Detroit Public Schools auditor reported in June that the system has been issuing regular paychecks to 257 nonexistent employees. (3) City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, the wife of a U.S. congressman, pleaded guilty in June to accepting a cash bribe for a council vote. (4) A May Detroit Free Press survey revealed that the population of three large Detroit jails has mysteriously declined, which it suggested was because police have simply stopped investigating certain crimes.

In early 1995, Chesapeake, Va., inmate Robert Lee Brock filed a $5 million lawsuit against Robert Lee Brock -- accusing himself of violating his own religious beliefs and his own civil rights by getting himself drunk enough to engage in the various crimes that put him behind bars. He wrote: "I want to pay myself five million dollars (for being made to suffer from this breach of rights) but ask the state to pay it in my behalf since I can't work and am a ward of the state." (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.)

Apparently believing that religious competition in the Middle East is not exciting enough already, the television station Kanal T in Istanbul, Turkey, is preparing a reality game show for September release in which 10 certified atheists try to resist conversion by a priest, a rabbi, a Muslim imam and a Buddhist monk. The exact rules have not been disclosed, but the "winning" convert will receive an expense-paid trip to the holy land of the most persuasive religion (the Vatican, Jerusalem, Mecca or Tibet). According to a July Reuters report, Turkey's Islamic Religious Affairs Directorate, not surprisingly, had vowed never to co-operate.

-- By early July, Jonathan Baltesz and his wife and kids were desperate to find their 10-year-old black Labrador mix, Simon, who had run away. They had one more plan, however. The family members urinated into containers and sprinkled the contents at various locales around their town (Bristol, England), laid out so that Simon could follow a trail home. (Results were unavailable at press time.)

-- The British charter airline Thomas Cook announced at the gate in the resort island of Mallorca in June that, regardless of seat assignments on a departing flight, passengers should sit toward the rear of the aircraft in order to balance the load (since it was already front-heavy with cargo and therefore harder on the pilot). Not surprisingly, 71 apprehensive passengers refused to board. (Also, some incoming passengers on that same aircraft, which experienced a similar balance problem, had dramatically dropped to their knees in the terminal, kissing the ground, calling the flight their worst ever.)

The New Age movement might be growing too inclusive, according to a July report in the St. Paul Pioneer Press (published in a city where the concept of "New Age" is already highly nuanced). "(P)agans feel jilted," wrote the reporter. "Chiropractors want out (of consideration)," "channelers wonder if they belong," and "organic farmers don't want to be near pet psychics." Said one St. Paul merchant, "I have customers who completely believe in fairies and will laugh at you if you believe in Bigfoot." But, said one New Age magazine editor, the movement should "encompass anything on a spiritual path -- Bigfoot, Jesus, Buddha. Even worshipping a frog is sort of OK."

-- Some parents of students at the Al-Islah Muslim girls' school in Blackburn, England, discovered that a staff secretary, Shifa Patel, 28, had a Facebook page, featuring innocuous photos of herself but dressed in other than her full-body robe and headscarf, which are her everyday school attire. The photos also reveal that she has close-cropped hair. One assumption led to another, and soon Patel was accused of being a man who dresses as a woman in order to mingle with females. Patel went to the trouble of getting a doctor's certificate of her gender, but the parents refused to accept it, and in June, Patel (and the school's headmistress) resigned in despair.

-- A young copperhead snake trespassed into a building near Poolesville, Md., in June and delivered several venomous nips to the hand of Sam Pettengill. Often snakes do not survive such encounters because the victim's first impulse is to kill the attacker. Fortunately for this snake, it had wandered into a Buddhist temple, and Pettengill had an obligation, according to a Washington Post report. Before he set out for the hospital for treatment (which turned out to be four antivenin cycles), Pettengill took the snake in his throbbing, increasingly pain-wracked hand, circled a prayer room three times to bless it, and released it back into the woods.

-- World's Toughest Job: Farah Ahmed Omar was appointed recently as chief of Somalia's navy, which ordinarily would be on the front lines against the throng of pirates operating off the country's coast. Omar's job is difficult, though, because the Somalian navy has not a single boat nor a single sailor, and Omar himself has not been to sea in 23 years. However, he told a reporter he was optimistic that the piracy could be stopped.

-- An 18-year-old, severely mentally challenged, Paris, Texas, man was sentenced in February to 100 years in prison for a single act of what might amount to the childhood sex game of "doctor" with a 6-year-old neighbor. The man has an IQ of 47, and no coercion or violence was involved, but the jury was not given the option to send the man to a care facility in lieu of prison. In fact, his original lawyer failed even to argue his client's incompetency as a defense because, he said, he thought the man obviously would get probation. In a final touch, Lamar County judge Eric Clifford, able to punish the man on just one count with four other counts running concurrently, instead chose to stack the five counts to total 100 years, and in April, after listening to a parade of witnesses beg him to reconsider the sentence, he refused.

-- It's the Shoes: Palm Beach County, Fla., defense lawyer Michael Robb resisted a courtroom motion in June to force him to discard his well-worn Cole Haan loafers and go buy a new pair. The plaintiff's lawyer Bill Bone had complained that jurors would see the holes in the bottoms of Robb's shoes and be unfairly sympathetic to Robb's clients as humble and frugal and therefore more deserving to win. The motion was denied. According to a Palm Beach Post story, Robb said later that he has a renewed enthusiasm for the shoes.

(1) Todd Hall, 36, was sentenced to a year in prison after his conviction in Bentonville, Ark., in June for habitually biting the toes of his son, which Hall said he did up to age 6 as routine discipline. (He had earlier been on probation for the disciplinary biting of his 10-month-old daughter.) (2) In June in Muncie, Ind., in his second such conviction in seven months, Robert Stahl, 64, was found guilty of resolving disputes with men in their 50s by reaching into their mouths and yanking out their dentures.

(1) A Polynesian man in his 20s was being sought as the robber of the Black Diamond Equipment store in Salt Lake City in June. He made off with some gear from the ski and climbing accessory store, but had originally demanded jewelry, as he apparently thought he was knocking off a "diamond" store. (2) Motorist Zackary Johnson was arrested in Athens, Ga., in June after pulling over a passing police car to inquire whether he had any warrants outstanding against him. No, answered the officer after a computer check, but he noted that Johnson's driver's license is under suspension, and he was arrested.

Rarely has a city experienced a "better" year of weird news than Akron, Ohio, in 2000. A father was indicted for constantly roughing up his gifted teenage daughters to encourage even higher achievement (including threatening to kill one for misspelling "cappelletti" in the National Spelling Bee). A man was found living with his father's corpse for 11 years, discovered only when his mother died, and he failed to bury her, also. A 69-year-old man sued a woman for tricking him into marrying her when he had intended to marry her mother. A woman defended a charge of sexually molesting her 7-year-old son, by claiming that the family dog had raped him. A 10-year-old boy, trying to avoid leaf-raking chores by hiding underneath them, was hospitalized when his mother accidentally drove over the leaves. A high school coach got caught cheating when he sneaked in to run the second leg of his school's 4x100 relay at a track meet.

Unconventional Medicine: British construction worker Martin Jones, 42, who lost one eye and was blinded in the other in a 1997 explosion, regained his sight this year as a result of surgery in which part of his tooth was implanted in the eye. Dr. Christopher Liu of the Sussex Eye Clinic used a piece of tooth because a "living" "anchor" was necessary to hold a patch of Jones' skin underneath his eyelid, to generate blood supply while a new lens formed. When the lens was healthy enough, Dr. Liu made a hole in the cornea for light to pass, and Jones feasted his eye on his wife, whom he had married four years ago, sight unseen.

-- Until Mayor Sharon McShurley changed the protocol this year, fire stations in Muncie, Ind., had been delivering reports to department headquarters downtown by dropping them off in fire engines. McShurley ordered the department to learn how to send reports by e-mail.

-- In June, the New York Police Department spent $99,000 on a typewriter repair contract, which will take on increasing importance since last year NYPD bought thousands of new typewriters, manual and electric, costing the city almost $1 million. The NYPD still is not even close to computerizing some of its daily-use forms, such as property and evidence reports.

-- Hundreds of Los Angeles' down-and-out live not just underneath local freeways but inside their concrete structures, according to a June Los Angeles Times report. The largest "home" is a double-gymnasium-sized cavern under the Interstate 10 freeway in the suburb of Baldwin Park. That space is nearly inaccessible, requiring squeezing through a rusty grating, traversing a narrow ledge, and descending a ladder to reach "a vast, vault-like netherworld, strewn with garbage and syringes," with toys and rattles and a cat carcass visible on an upper platform marginally harder for rats to reach. Authorities shy away from the area, out of fear, but every few years, state officials try to seal the entrance (which the homeless quickly unseal as soon as the officials leave).

-- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was livid in June when he learned that inmate Tuvia Stern, housed in the city's notorious lockup The Tombs, had arranged a privately catered, 50-guest bar mitzvah for his son inside the facility's gym, officiated by a prominent rabbi and assisted by five jail guards. The caterers were even allowed to bring in knives for food preparation and dining. It was not surprising that it was Stern who pulled it off, because at the time he was awaiting sentencing for running two slick business scams.

According to the Pentagon, there are only 566 surviving U.S. prisoners of war from the Vietnam era and 21 from the first Gulf War, but the Veterans Administration has been paying POW-labeled disability benefits to 966 and 286 people, respectively, according to an April Associated Press investigation. The AP found that, even though the Pentagon POW list is posted online, the VA does not routinely check it when a veteran applies for POW status. (POW claimants go to the front of the VA disability-application line and receive various other privileges.)

(1) Thomas Stites, 25, was charged with first-degree sexual assault of a child in Manitowoc, Wis., in June, thus becoming the fourth Stites brother to face sex charges recently. (In addition, brother Michael Stites' wife and their son have also been charged with sexual assault.) (2) Mykal Carberry, 13, was arrested in Hyannis, Mass., in March and charged with arranging for the murder of his 16-year-old half-brother, Jordan, so that, according to police, he could take Jordan's place atop the family's prosperous Cape Cod cocaine distribution ring. (The boss's job was open following the boys' father's recent imprisonment.)

(1) Researchers in Japan and Spain found recently that Argentine ants, normally highly aggressive and territorial, are actually one huge global colony with three expanding centers: a 3,700-mile-long stretch in Europe, a 560-mile strip in California, and a swath of Japan's west coast. Researchers hypothesized the kinship because, when members from those groups were thrown together, they became docile. (2) A June article in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases reported the worldwide reach of incidents of tapeworms that grow inside humans to nearly 40 feet in length. The most serious carrier, according to a Scientific American summary, is salmon sashimi. (Anthony Franz's 2008 lawsuit against a Chicago sushi restaurant, for a 9-foot-long tapeworm, is still pending.)

Former elementary school principal John Stelmack, 62, was sentenced in July in Bartow, Fla., to five years in prison for a collection of child pornography, even though no child was directly involved. Without the aid of computer software, but rather, using scissors and paste, Stelmack had meticulously placed photos of the faces of young girls over the faces of adult women in sexual poses.

Questionable Judgments: (1) Christopher Lister, 21, pleaded guilty to a home burglary in June in Leeds (England) Crown Court. He and two pals had attempted to steal a plasma TV in broad daylight last year, but witnesses easily identified Lister. He is 7 feet tall and lives only a few doors down from the crime scene. (2) Markeith Webb, who was wanted by police for a bank robbery in Easton, Pa., in June, left a string of indignant phone messages at a police station, angry that cops had released his photograph to the media. Just for that, he said, he would make sure they never caught him. He was captured six days later.

News of the Weird reported in 2003 on San Francisco artist Jonathon Keats' project to sell "futures contracts" on his brain cells (provided science discovers how to keep them alive after he dies), with $10 buying a million of Keats' radically imaginative neurons. In a new recent project, which critiques today's hyperactive media, Keats has published a story in print that will take almost 1,000 years to read beginning to end. Actually, it is only nine words long (published in the interactive multimedia print magazine Opium) and, according to the instructions, the ink will reveal itself, ever so slowly, as it is exposed to air and light, taking about one century per word.

(1) A British prison research organization revealed in July that, over the last 10 years, the country's notoriously generous inmate furlough program has seen almost 1,000 of its prisoners escape, including 19 convicted murderers. (The government said the rate of "non-return" is less than it used to be.) (2) The East Anglian Daily Times reported in July that its Freedom of Information Act request for the names of recent escapees from the Hollesley Bay prison had only been partially fulfilled by the government. A list of the crimes represented by the 39 escapees was handed over, but not their names, because prison officials said that would violate the escapees' right of privacy.

Michael Warner, 58, passed away in May 2004 of acute alcohol poisoning (with a 0.47 blood-alcohol level) in Lake Jackson, Texas, from ingesting three liters of sherry wine, which entered his body by enema. His widow, Tammy, told authorities that he had been addicted to taking them since childhood and even had favorite recipes, such as enemas by coffee, by Castile soap, by Ivory soap. Said Tammy, "I'm sure that's the way he wanted to go out because he loved his enemas." Tammy was originally charged with negligent homicide for helping prepare Michael's fatal wine dose, but the prosecutor dropped the charge.