-- More Texas Justice: In March, juries in Smith County and Matagorda County sentenced Henry Wooten and Melvin Johnson III to 35 years and 60 years in prison, respectively, for possessing small amounts of drugs (but enough under Texas law to allow jurors to infer an intent to distribute). Wooten, 54, had 4.6 ounces of marijuana (same penalty as for 5 pounds), and Johnson had 1.3 grams of crack cocaine (about half the weight of a U.S. dime). (Wooten's prosecutor actually had asked the jury for a sentence of 99 years.)

-- In February, the undergraduate dean's office at Yale University disclosed that it was formally soliciting anonymous, first-person reports of student sexual experiences to publish on a school Web site, as "strategies for creatively navigating Yale's sexual culture," according to an advisor. "There is a real need for students to have space to think about what happens to them and what they want to have happen," she said. "Sex@Yale" would contain "70 to 80" specific perspectives, she said, but critics suggested the anthology might grow to resemble Penthouse magazine's often-ridiculed "Forum" section of lascivious fantasies.

-- It's Good to Be a British Welfare Mother: Under the government's Local Housing Authority, Essma Marjam, age 34, unemployed and the mother of six, is entitled to rental assistance for a five-bedroom home, and the only suitable one she could find is in an exclusive London suburb in which her neighbor is Sir Paul McCartney. Luckily, the generous allowance (equivalent of more than $9,000 a month) covers the rent on the nearly $3 million (U.S. equivalent) mansion. (Additionally, according to the Daily Mail, Marjam's non-housing government benefits total the equivalent of about $22,000 a year.)

-- Alan Rosenfeld, 64, a New York City lawyer and real estate entrepreneur, is also a full-time schoolteacher, although he has been prohibited from teaching since 2002 because of accusations of leering at female students. He is thus a "rubber room" teacher whose union contract requires full salary and benefits even though the Schools Chancellor has barred him from the classroom as a "danger" to students. The Department of Education pays him $100,000 a year plus health care (plus retirement benefits worth at least $82,000 a year). The New York Post reported that Rosenfeld reports to "the room" each day but works exclusively on his business affairs.

-- In January, Aretha Brown, 66, who has lived in the same house in Callahan, Fla., (pop. 962) for 30 years, suddenly became unable to leave her yard unless she crawled between CSX railroad cars blocking her access to the road. Tracks had always been in place, but the railway only began storing train cars on them this year. CSX told The Florida Times-Union that it would soon build Brown an access road to the street.

-- The entertainment manager at Thorpe Park in Surrey, England, announced in February a contest seeking foul-smelling urine. The park has introduced a live action horror maze based on scenes from the "Saw" movie series and decided that it was missing a "signature stench" to "really push the boundaries" of disgustingness. Manager Laura Sinclair suggested that submissions' pungency would be enhanced after consumption of such foods as garlic and asparagus and offered a prize of the equivalent of about $750 for the winning urine.

-- The Times of London reported in February that at least six local government councils have been so avid about enforcing street-parking rules that they have issued tickets to vehicles registered to their own governments. In at least two recent incidents (involving Islington and Kingston), the councils pursued collection all the way to traffic court (though only in the latter case did the adjudicator actually require the council to hand over a fine to itself).

-- Seventh-grader Rachael Greer was suspended from River Valley Middle School in Jefferson, Ind., in February, even though she apparently did exactly what her parents and the school want kids to do ("just say 'no'" to drugs). When a classmate handed her a prescription pill in gym class, she immediately handed it right back. Nonetheless, an assistant principal, after investigating the incident, suspended her for five days because she had touched the pill. (He expressed regret but said it is school policy.)

-- A recent epiphany caused millionaire Austrian businessman Karl Rabeder, 47, to be depressed about his wealth, and by February, he was in the process of giving away an estate worth the equivalent of about $5 million. Two luxury properties are for sale, with proceeds going to charities he established in Central and South America, and he plans to move into a small hut in Innsbruck. "Money is counterproductive," he told a reporter. "I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish or need." (According to London's Daily Telegraph, Rabeder's wife was with him at the time of the epiphany, but the story curiously is silent about her view of his decision.)

-- Embarrassing: (1) In March, on duty on opening day of the jail at the new Adair County judicial center in Columbia, Ky., sheriff's deputy Charles Wright accidentally locked himself in a cell and was fired after he tried to shoot open the lock. (2) A Collier County, Fla., sheriff's deputy suffered a broken ankle when he and a colleague accidentally locked wheels while patrolling in Naples on their Segways.

-- It wasn't pretty, but sheriff's deputies in Montcalm County, Mich., got their man on March 3. Mark McCuaig, in court on an earlier charge, became unruly and escaped from two different sets of officers (despite a Tasering). Another court officer tried to stop him outside, but McCuaig got loose (despite being maced). He locked himself inside a van, but officers surrounded it, broke a window, and Tasered him again, yet couldn't stop McCuaig from driving off. After a high-speed chase, state troopers disabled his tires with "stop sticks" but couldn't apprehend him before he reached his home, where he barricaded himself. Officers surrounded the house, and four of them (plus a police dog) entered, but McCuaig escaped and got into another vehicle. Finally, after another chase, he was forced off the road, Tasered a third time, and subdued.

-- Robert "Prince Mongo" Hodges had been disturbing people, and sometimes running for office, for 10 years before he came to News of the Weird's attention in September 1992 by attracting nearly 3,000 votes in a campaign for mayor of Memphis. Since then, the perpetual performance artist (always "333" years old, always from the planet "Zambodia") has been annoying his neighbors in Memphis, and in Fort Lauderdale and Volusia County, Fla., usually as revenge for their complaints about his quixotic property maintenance. Last year, he built a deck on his Volusia home, without a permit, and neighbors complained, thus provoking Hodges recently to dump a mountain of sand in his front yard and to install clotheslines covered with women's panties. Currently, he faces various county code violations.

-- Once oddities but now increasingly common are reports of prisoners storing larger and larger inventories of valuables in their rectums. However, one accounting from a jail in Amarillo, Texas, might still be a record. A man was arrested in November 2000 with $12,300 inside (eighty $100 bills, two $50s, and money orders worth $4,200). The cash record before that was believed to be a Florida State Prison inmate who had only $2,000 (although he also had room for six handcuff keys and an assortment of razor and hacksaw blades in a pouch).

It's a simple recipe, said A-List New York City chef Daniel Angerer: a cheese derived from the breast milk of his wife, who is nursing the couple's 3-month-old daughter. As a chef, he said, "you look out for something new and what you can do with it," and what Angerer could do is make about two quarts of "flavor(ful)" cheese out of two gallons of mother's milk. "(T)astes just like really sweet cow's milk." He posted the recipe, "My Spouse's Mommy Milk Cheese," on his blog and invited readers' participation: "Our baby has plenty (of) back-up mother's milk in the freezer, so whoever wants to try it is welcome to try it as long as supply lasts (please consider cheese aging time)."

-- Florida's Agriculture Department, acting on a tip, confiscated Giant African Snails believed to have been smuggled into the country by Charles Stewart of Hialeah, Fla., for use in the religion Ifa Orisha, which encourages followers to drink the snails' mucus for its supposed healing powers. Actually, said the department (joined in the investigation by two federal agencies), bacteria in the mucus causes frequent violent vomiting, among other symptoms. At press time, Stewart had not been charged with a crime.

-- A growing drug problem facing Shanghai, China, is stepped-up use of methamphetamine, cocaine and other drugs at all-night parties, but not the "rave" parties favored by young fast-lane types in the U.S. These Shanghai druggies, according to a February dispatch in London's Guardian, are often middle-aged and retired people, who use the drugs to give them strength for all-night games of Mah Jongg played at out-of-the-way parlors around the city.

-- Modernization Kept at Bay: (1) Despite Fiji's strides into the 21st century, the island nation's court system remains relatively primitive, according to a January report from Agence France-Presse. Transcriptions of court proceedings are still made by ordinary reporters, writing out the dialogue by hand and thus calling on judges, lawyers and witnesses to periodically slow down or repeat themselves when they speak. (2) Papua New Guinea retains many of its historical tribal conflicts, and one flared up in January, according to a dispatch by an Australian Broadcasting Corp. reporter. Two people were killed in skirmishes that were provoked in a quite contemporary way -- when a member of one tribe sent a member of another a pornographic text message.

-- Japan's Mantokuji temple in Gumma province was historically the place where women went to cleanse themselves in divorce, aided by the temple's iconic toilets, into which the bad spirits from the failed liaisons could be shed and flushed forever. The toilets have been modernized, according to a February Reuters dispatch, and today the temple is used by the faithful to rid themselves of all types of problems. (The upgrades also permitted a solution to a longstanding annoyance at the temple, of visitors mistaking the iconic toilets for regular commodes.)

-- American Taliban: (1) Michael Colquitt, 32, got a judicial order of protection in January against his father, Baptist preacher Joe Colquitt, in Alcoa, Tenn. According to Michael, Pastor Joe had threatened him at gunpoint about his poor church-attendance record. (2) Kevin Johnson, 59, was arrested in Madison, Wis., in February and charged with using a stun gun repeatedly on a local dance instructor, whom Johnson believed was a "sinner" (also a "fornicator" and a "peeking Tom") who "defiles married women" by teaching them dances involving bodies touching.

-- Jeff and Marci Beagley were sentenced to 16 months in prison in March after a jury in Oregon City, Ore., found them guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of their teenage son, whose congenital urinary tract blockage was treated only with oils and prayer prescribed by the Beagleys' Followers of Christ Church. Doctors said the boy could have been saved with medical treatment right up until the day he died. (The Beagleys' infant granddaughter died in 2008 under similar circumstances, but no criminal conviction resulted.)

-- A 7-year-old girl died in February in Oroville, Calif., and her 11- year-old sister was hospitalized needing critical care, after being "lovingly" beaten by their adoptive parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, who are followers of religion-based corporal punishment. The Schatzes, as recommended by a fundamentalist Web site, had whipped the girls with quarter-inch-wide plumbers' rubber tubing, to supposedly make the children "happier" and "more obedient to God." Criminal charges against the couple were pending at press time.

In December, in St. Tammany Parish, La., and in February, near Miami Township, Ohio, men driving young female family members around decided it would be cool to feign crimes as they drove. Tim Williams, 45, was arrested in Louisiana after the sight of his duct-taped 12-year-old daughter provoked at least three motorists to call 911. The Ohio man, detained by police after several 911 calls, admitted that he had thought it would be "funny" if his granddaughter held a BB gun to his head as he drove around Dayton Mall.

(1) Toni Tramel, 31, angry at being jailed in Owensboro, Ky., for public intoxication in March, had "assaulting a police officer" added to the charges when, changing into a jail uniform, she allegedly pointed her lactating breast at a female officer and squirted her in the face. (2) Deanne Elsholz, 44, was charged with domestic battery in Wesley Chapel, Fla., in February after hitting her husband, David, in the face with a glass. David, intoxicated, had enraged Deanne by apparently completely missing the toilet bowl as he stood to urinate. (Deanne then angrily charged after him but lost her footing on the slippery floor.)

When the FBI finally concluded that the late-2001 anthrax scare was the work of government scientist Bruce Ivins (who committed suicide in 2008), the bureau released its investigative files, revealing personal activities that (according to Ivins' own description) "a middle-age man should not do." For example, Ivins admitted to being a cross-dresser, and agents discovered pornographic fetish magazines on "blindfolding or bondage" themes and "15 pairs of stained women's panties." Ivins also admitted a decades-long obsession with the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma and told agents how he broke into two chapters' houses to steal books on KKG "rituals."

In 2005, News of the Weird reported the bustling sales for artist Erin Crowe's series of oil paintings of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was then riding high, with Greenspan-worshipping money managers quickly buying up her inventory for thousands of dollars each. A Wall Street Journal reporter tracked down Crowe and some of her customers in February 2010 and found, obviously, subdued demand (with some customers having hidden or discarded their Greenspans). Crowe said that one of her Greenspan customers had recently asked her to paint a Ben Bernanke for him, but for about half the fee that he had earlier paid for a Greenspan.

In January 1996, The Wall Street Journal reported on a growing fetish surrounding the act of smoking. Examples: (1) An erotic smoking video from an Oklahoma City firm, CoherentLight: "The scene opens with a young blonde (Paula), dressed in a shimmering strapless gown and a veiled black hat, lighting her cigarette from a nearby candle," the Journal wrote. "She takes numerous long drags." (2) A smokers' newsletter, with film reviews: Of the above video, it wrote, "(Paula) is a fabulous smoker." Another review, of the Hollywood movie "Mad Love": "Drew Barrymore smokes throughout; there are many deep inhales, although the exhales aren't great."

War Is Hell: The day before British army chef Liam Francis, 26, arrived at his forward operating base in Afghanistan, the Taliban shot down the helicopter ferrying in food rations, and Francis realized he had to make do with supplies on hand. In his pantry were only seasonings, plus hundreds of tins of Spam. For six weeks, until resupply, Francis prepared "sweet and sour Spam," "Spam fritters," "Spam carbonara," "Spam stroganoff" and "stir-fried Spam." He told the Daily Telegraph that he was proud of his work but admitted that "morale improved" when fresh food arrived.

(1) In November, Jim Bartek, 49, of Maple Heights, Ohio, announced he was ending his streak of 524 consecutive days in which he listened to the album "Nostradamus" by the heavy-metal group Judas Priest. (2) In February, Hilary Taylor, 63, of Great Yarmouth, England, revealed that she had been bequeathed her uncle Ken Strickland's collection of 3,000 watering cans. Strickland, who also kept meticulous records of the holdings, died in January.

-- Details about Britain's biggest marijuana-importing operation emerged in March following the conviction of its three managers in Southwark Crown Court. The enterprise earned the equivalent of as much as $300 million at such a rapid clip that the partners apparently were unable to use much of it, despite buying real estate, jewelry and expensive cars. An inspector said Scotland Yard found "moldy" cash "rotting away," hidden under floorboards. "(I)t was no good to anybody."

-- Recession's Over: Among the items on display in February at the Verona Luxury Fair in Verona, Italy: a hand-crafted billiards table covered in gold sheets; an armchair topped with the skin of 20 crocodiles; a 24-carat gold racing bike; a boat with a Ferrari engine; a golden coffin (with cell phone); and a diamond-studded wedding gown in pink chinchilla fur.

-- Pigs Livin' Large: (1) Among the items that celebrity farmer Cathy Gieseker bought with proceeds from the $12 million Ponzi scheme she, in February, was sentenced for perpetrating (prosecutors called her the "Midwest Madoff") was a $900 tanning bed for her "show" pigs. (2) Farmer Chang Chung-tou, of Yunlin County, Taiwan, drew praise from environmentalists in December for having "toilet"-trained almost all of his 20,000 pigs to use his 600 specially rigged plots that collect and separate urine and feces. Chang's farm conserves water and facilitates recycling.

-- Animals With Issues: (1) Ashley Saks' 2-year-old basset hound Roxy was resting comfortably in Jacksonville, Fla., in November following a vet's removal, one by one, of the 130 nails she had compulsively swallowed. (2) The polar bear Aisaqvaq produced two cubs in December at Quebec's Zoo Sauvage de Saint-Felicien. Aisaqvaq had given birth to another the previous December, but had eaten it. (3) In November, maritime rescuers were called to ocean waters off the coast of Darwin, Australia, to rescue an adult cow that was dog-paddling around and, according to a seaman, "not in a good mood."

-- Natural Selection: (1) Female cane toads are choosy at mating, according to a recent article in Biology Letters. A desirable male is permitted to hop onto the female's back and start the process, but the female is also able to inflate sacs in her body to bloat herself so large that males slide off before completing insemination. (Also, to test the strength of the male's grip, the researchers encouraged necrophilia: The scientists doused dead female toads with pheromones to measure males' horniness.) (2) Female short-nosed fruit bats in China's Guangdong Province show their preference for certain males by fellating them, according to an October journal article. Researchers observed that licked males were able to copulate longer, thus improving the likelihood of insemination. (The scientists also confirmed that bats mate while upside down.)

Later this year, manufacturer Organovo, of San Diego, will begin shipping its $200,000 ink-jet-type printers that create living organs for patients needing transplants. The 3-D "bioprinter" works by spraying extracted microscopic cells on top of each other, in pass after pass. On the bioprinter's equivalent of a sheet of paper, and under laboratory conditions, the cells fuse together and grow for weeks until an organ substantial enough for research use is created (and ultimately, substantial enough for human transplants). The bioprinter is faster than growing such organs from scratch, which scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine have been doing for several years.

If you're wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun and walk into a store to rob it, but there are no employees there to rob, and you abort, is that an "attempted robbery"? Sanjuan Reyes, 22, and two teenagers were arrested in Joliet, Ill., in January and charged with attempting to rob the Supermercado Viva Mexico. Two acted as lookouts while the youngest, wearing a ski mask and wielding an air pistol, entered the store. Apparently, the only employees on duty were in the back room. The boy waited for a minute or so, then bailed out, and the three fled empty-handed. Joliet's deputy police chief said a crime was committed.

In March, sheriff's deputies in Kissimmee, Fla., detained a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who was working undercover but who had aroused suspicions of residents of a neighborhood. After investigating, the deputies discovered that in order to guard his identity as an ICE agent, the man was posing as an FBI agent. [Orlando Sentinel, 3-4-10]

(1) Jonathon Smith, 27, was arrested in March in Fairbanks, Alaska, shortly after his release on bail on charges that he tried to buy three trucks from local dealers using forged checks. His latest arrest came at Seekins Ford, where, according to police, he was trying to buy yet another pickup truck with a forged check. (2) Falmouth, Mass., police hired John Yarrington as a confidential informant on Feb. 16, setting him up with $100 in marked bills to make a cocaine buy from dealer Cory Noonan, which Yarrington completed. He left the scene, but less than 10 minutes later, before Noonan could be arrested, Yarrington returned and, according to police, attempted to buy more cocaine on his own.

(1) A 36-year-old man drowned in Denville, N.J., in January during a friendly swimming competition with a pal, as they raced underneath a 30-yard long ice patch on partially frozen Indian Lake. (2) New York City police believe that drug-gang hit man Hector Quinones, 44, shot three men to death in a high-rise apartment in December, but allowed a woman in the apartment to escape when he tripped on his own baggy pants while chasing her. As police arrived, Quinones climbed out onto the fire escape but accidentally fell off and broke his neck.

Two-time convicted bank robber Mark Turner filed a lawsuit against Canada's National Parole Board in 2001 because the board had released him early from prison in 1987 from a previous sentence. The board should have kept him inside until that sentence ran out in 1994, he said, and it was thus the board's fault that while on parole, Turner had robbed another bank and had again been locked up. By 1994, he said, he would have been more mature and would not have re-offended, and for the parole board's error, it should pay him the U.S. equivalent of almost $1 million.