Tonya McDowell, 33, an off-and-on homeless person in Bridgeport, Conn., was arrested in April by police in nearby Norwalk and charged with felony theft -- of $15,686 worth of "services" from the city. McDowell's crime was enrolling her 6-year-old son in Norwalk's Brookside Elementary School when she actually "resided" (as much as a sporadically "homeless" person can "reside") in Bridgeport. McDowell has also "resided" at times in a Norwalk shelter, but was crashing at a friend's apartment in Bridgeport when she registered her son. The head of the Norwalk Board of Education acknowledged that the usual consequence for an unqualified student is merely dismissal from school.

-- In March, jurors in New Orleans convicted Isaiah Doyle of a 2005 murder and were listening to evidence in the penalty phase of the trial when Doyle decided to take the witness stand (as defendants sometimes do in a desperate attempt to avoid the death penalty). However, Doyle said to the jurors, "If I had an AK-47, I'd kill every last one of y'all with no remorse." (The jury recommended the needle.)

-- The Montana House of Representatives passed a tough drunk-driving bill in March to combat the state's high DUI rate, but it came over the objection of Rep. Alan Hale (and later, Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy). Hale, who owns a bar in Basin, Mont., complained that tough DUI laws "are destroying small businesses" and "destroying a way of life that has been in Montana for years and years." (Until 2005, drinking while driving was common and legal outside of towns as long as the driver wasn't drunk.) Furthermore, Hale said, people need to drive home after they drink. "(T)hey are not going to hitchhike." Sen. Windy Boy said such laws put the legislature on "the path of criminalizing everyone in Montana."

-- Why Unions Are Unpopular: The police officers' union in Scranton, Pa., filed a state unfair labor practice complaint in April against Chief Dan Duffy because he arrested a man whom he caught violating a warrant and possessing marijuana. According to the union contract, only union members can "apprehend and arrest" lawbreakers, and since the chief is "management," he should have called an officer to make the arrest. The union president suggested that, with layoffs threatened, the chief doesn't need to be taking work away from officers.

-- Conventional academic wisdom is that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to homicide, but according to accused murderer Dmitry Smirnov, it deterred him from killing Ms. Jitka Vesel in Oak Brook, Ill. -- until March, that is, when Illinois' death penalty was repealed. Prosecutors said Smirnov, from Surrey, British Columbia, told them he decided to come to Illinois and kill Vesel (in cold blood, over an online relationship gone bad) only after learning through Internet research that the state no longer had capital punishment.

(1) Shelly Waddell, 36, was cited by police in February in Waterville, Maine, after "a couple of" drivers reported seeing two children riding on the roof of the van she was driving early one morning. Waddell told police she was in fact delivering newspapers to customers, but denied that the kids were on the roof. (2) At the Niceville, Fla., Christmas parade on Dec. 4, a municipal employee was arrested when he stepped up onto a city truck that was part of the parade and challenged the driver (who apparently was a colleague). The employee accused the driver of "taking (my) overtime" hours for the previous two years and ordered him out of the truck so he could "whip your ass." (The employee was charged with disorderly intoxication.)

Louis "Shovelhead" Garrett is an artist, a mannequin collector and a quilter in the eastern Missouri town of Louisiana, with a specialty in sewing quilts from women's panties, according to a report in the Hannibal Courier-Post. After showing his latest quilt at a women's luncheon in Hannibal in March, he told the newspaper of his high standards: "No polyester. I don't want those cheap, dollar-store, not-sexy, farm-girl panties. I want classy -- silk or nylon."

-- Arifinito (he goes by one name), a member of the Indonesian parliament, resigned in April after a news photographer in the gallery zoomed in on the tablet computer he was watching to capture him surfing Internet pornography sites. Arifinito's conservative Islamic Prosperous Justice Party campaigned for a tough anti-pornography bill in 2008 (which the photographer's video shows Arifinito likely violating).

-- Wheeee! (1) In March, in Pierce County, Wash., a sewer worker, 37, came loose from a safety line and slid about 3,000 feet through a 6-foot-diameter sewer pipe at the Chambers Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. He "could have drowned," according to one rescuer, but he was taken to a hospital with "minor injuries." (2) Firefighters in Gilbert, Ariz., rescued Eugene Gimzelberg, 32, in March after he had climbed down a 40-foot sewer hole -- naked. Gimzelberg said he had smoked PCP and marijuana and consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms. He was hospitalized in critical condition.

-- Jacob Barnett, 12, an Asperger's-syndrome-fueled math genius who maxed out on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and is now enrolled at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis), told an Indianapolis Star reporter in March that his next project is about proving the Big Bang theory all wrong. But if not the Big Bang, asked the reporter, how do we exist? Said Jacob, "I'm still working on it." "I have an idea, but ... I'm still working out the details." (Hint: Jacob's major point of skepticism is that the Big Bang doesn't account neatly for carbon.) Said his (biological) mother, Kristine Barnett, 36: "I flunked math. I know this did not come from me."

-- Overreaching: (1) In April, Texas state Rep. John Davis of Houston proposed a tax break -- aimed at buyers of yachts valued at more than a quarter-million dollars. Davis promised more yacht sales and, through a ripple effect, more jobs if Texas capped the sales tax on yachts at the amount due on a $250,000 vessel -- a break of almost $16,000 on a $500,000 boat. (2) Adam Yarbrough, 22, ticketed by a female police officer in Indianapolis in March after he was observed swerving in and out of traffic on an Interstate highway, allegedly compounded the problem first by offering the cop "five dollars" to "get rid of this ticket" and then by "(H)ow about I give you a kiss?" Felony bribery charges were filed. (Bonus fact: Yarbrough was riding a moped.)

Marissa Mark, 28, was indicted in March in Allentown, Pa., for hiring a hit man in 2006 via the then-active website HitManForHire.com, agreeing to pay $37,000 to have a California woman killed (though prosecutors have not revealed the motive). Mark allegedly made traceable payments through the PayPal service (which in recent years has righteously refused to process transactions involving online gambling or the WikiLeaks document dumps, but which in 2006 did in fact handle payments for HitManForHire.com). The hit man site was run by an Egyptian immigrant, who told the Las Vegas Sun in 2008 that he would never contract for murder but sought to make money by double-crossing clients and alerting (for a fee) the intended victims.

The local board of health closed down the Wing Wah Chinese restaurant in South Dennis, Mass., briefly in August (1992) for various violations. The most serious, said officials, was the restaurant's practice of draining water from cabbage by putting it in cloth laundry bags, placing the bags between two pieces of plywood in the parking lot, and driving over them with a van. Said Health Director Ted Dumas, "I've seen everything now."

-- Marla Gilson, 59, was fired in April after her employer callously rejected her offer to work from home in Chevy Chase, Md., at reduced salary, while she recovers from chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant for her leukemia. Gilson's job was chief executive of the Association of Jewish Aging Services of North America, which serves 112 facilities that help frail and elderly Jews during their final years. Gilson's termination also made her health care much more expensive and potentially made her uninsurable in the future if her treatment is successful. (Nonetheless, the board of directors thanked her for her service and wished her a "speedy recovery.")

-- Thomas Cavender, 60, of Bessemer City, N.C., pleaded unsuccessfully with a judge in March to remove him from the National Sex Offender Registry, to which he had been assigned as part of his sentence in 2000 for molesting a third-grade girl. Cavender told the judge that he had become a preacher and evangelist and that it "hurts my ministry when you're in the pulpit, and someone goes to the computer, and there you are."

-- In April, two police constables in North London, England, threatened Louise Willows with arrest for criminal damage and forced her to clean her artwork from a city sidewalk. Willows had cleared off 25 deposits of droppings that dog-walkers had failed to remove and in their place drawn pink cupcakes in chalk (with a nearby message, "Dog owners, Please clear up your dog's mess. Children walk here").

-- The notorious U.S. military contractor KBR, prominent for having earned several billion dollars from no-bid contracts during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and which has been accused of numerous employee sexual harassment cover-ups (including nine pending lawsuits filed by female employees), has apparently been voted by readers of Woman Engineer magazine as one of the top 50 places for women to work. (KBR and other companies on the list made announcements in April, but at press time, Woman Engineer's issue containing the list had not been published.)

-- Nursery school teacher Elizabeth Davies, 48, was fired in February from Hafod Primary School in Swansea, Wales, after accusations that she had sprayed pine-scented room-freshener on kids who passed gas and on Bangladeshis who had come to class reeking of curry and onions. Of the latter, she reportedly said, "There is a waft coming in from paradise."

Recently, public school students were expelled in Spotsylvania, Va. (possession of homemade tubing for launching plastic "spitballs" in lunchroom horseplay) (December); arrested in Hammonton, N.J. (a 7-year-old, for bringing to class a Nerf-type "gun" that fired soft balls) (January); and arrested in Arvada, Colo. (for drawing violent stick figures, which was recommended by his therapist as a way to tamp down harmful thoughts) (February). Meanwhile, in March, at the other end of "zero tolerance," a judge allowed Ryan Ricco, 18, to play for his school in a big basketball tournament despite being on modified house arrest after being charged with threatening to blow up two other high schools in the Chicago suburbs.

(1) In April, Robert Hohenberger, 64, was arrested in Clayton County, Ga., for shooting a neighbor's dog with a BB gun after complaining that he was tired of the Chihuahua "pooping" in his yard. The neighbor, Leticia Mendoza, told police that her dog was innocent, in that Casey had actually relieved himself inside right before she let him out. (2) Jonathan Avery, 31, was arrested in Benson, N.C., in February for hitting his son, 6, on the head with a spoon, drawing blood with a cut that became infected. Hospital personnel treating the kid called police, as Avery had apparently attempted to suture the wound with fishing line.

-- Fine Point of Iowa Law: Thanks to a loophole recently sanctioned by the Iowa Court of Appeals, Matt Danielson and his wife, Jamie, now own their home in Ankeny, Iowa, outright (value: $278,000) after making just one monthly mortgage payment. Iowa law regards a home mortgage by a married couple as automatically void if only one spouse has signed it, and a thusly voided mortgage is treated as fully satisfied. (The purpose was to prevent one estranged spouse from exploiting the other, but the voiding is automatic regardless of the circumstances.) Legislators are currently trying to change the law to leave the discretion of voiding up to judges.

-- Explicable Only as Metaphor: On April 13, a customer who had been watching videos in a booth at the Golden Gate Adult Superstore in downtown San Francisco (and whose name was not released) ran from the store into the street engulfed in flames. No explanation for the fire was given, but the man was taken to St. Francis Memorial Hospital suffering from third-degree, life-threatening burns.

Not Ready for Prime Time: Harold Luken, 45, was arrested on April 8 in New York City near a Bank of America after his attempt to rob it failed badly. According to police, Luken walked in at 1:50 p.m. and announced that he had a gun and intended to rob the place -- but then merely got in a line and said he would wait for a teller. When he finally got to the window (with police apparently on their way), Luken restated his intention and, as if narrating, announced the handing over of the robbery note. When the teller refused to respond, Luken asked to check the balance in his own account, but the teller again declined, provoking Luken to walk away and shout, "OK, I will go to Citibank (and) rob them instead!" He was arrested minutes later.

(1) "(G)o ahead and shoot me," said Rodney Gilbert, 57, who was embroiled in a domestic tiff with his girlfriend Kimberly Gustafson in Ocala, Fla., in February. According to police, Gustafson, after cocking the gun in a room with several witnesses, then turned to walk away without firing until Gilbert trailed after her, shouting his final words several more times. (2) "You're going to shoot? Right here," said now-deceased Roberto Corona, pointing to his chest. Corona was refusing to reveal the whereabouts of his sister to her husband, David Sanchez-Dominguez, who had asked Corona several times before pointing his handgun at him.

A Tulsa, Okla., physician, writing in a 1992 issue of the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, reported on a 32-year-old woman whose neighbors had just had a large satellite dish installed in their yard. The woman became convinced that she was being wooed by Donald Duck and that the dish had been placed there to facilitate his communicating with her. She spent lots of time "hovering" around the dish and eventually undressed and climbed into it, where she said later that she had consummated marriage to Mr. Duck.

Equal justice under the law might just depend simply on whether a judge's stomach is growling when he pronounces sentence, according to a study of 1,000 parole decisions during 50 courtroom days observed by students from Columbia University and Israel's Ben Gurion University for an April journal article. The students found that, day after day, judges were increasingly stingy with parole as a morning or afternoon session wore on, but that dramatic spikes in generosity took effect immediately following lunch or a snack break. The lead researcher, Columbia professor Jonathan Levav, expressed satisfaction with the scholarship but disappointment "as a citizen" with the findings.

-- "Man's best friend" sometimes isn't, as when a playful dog hops onto a gun on the ground, causing it to fire a round. John Daniels, 28, took a bullet in the knee from his dog, for example, in Raleigh, N.C., in January. Dogs betray in other ways, too. Motorist Joel Dobrin, 32, was pulled over in a traffic stop in February in Moro, Ore., and rushed to hide his alleged drug stash, which was in a sock. However, his dog intercepted the sock for an impromptu game of dog-tug-of-war in the car. Dobrin won but lost his grip, and the sock flew out the driver's window, right in front of the officer. Dobrin was cited, and later indicted, for drug possession.

-- At least three jihadist groups in recent years have published full-color Arabic magazines lauding the Islamist struggle, with articles and essays to recruit fighters and offer personal advice for women on the importance of raising proper families and catering to mujahedeens' needs. The latest, Al-Shamikha ("The Majestic Woman"), which surfaced in March, featured interviews with martyrs' wives and advised women to stay indoors, both for modesty and a "clear complexion" (advice that earned the magazine its nickname "Jihad Cosmo").

-- Prevailing medical authority 20 years ago warned that few humans could survive blood-alcohol readings above .40 (percent), but in recent years, drivers have rather easily survived higher numbers (curiously, many from Wisconsin, such as the man in February in Madison, Wis., with a .559). (In 2007, an Oregon driver was found unconscious, but survived, with a .72 reading.) The plethora of high numbers might indicate mistaken medical teaching, or nonstandard machine measurements -- or an evolutionary hardiness in American drinkers.

-- Snowmobilers fall through thin ice every season because the ice's thickness is difficult to estimate, especially at night. Less understandable is that every season, when other snowmobilers come to rescue the downed snowmobiler, they drive their vehicles as close as they can to the spot of the fall -- which, of course, is right at the lip of thin-ice-break, thus virtually assuring that their vehicle, too, will fall in, such as the four people who fell through the ice in a pond near Holyrood, Newfoundland, in February.

-- Young girls "grow up" prematurely, often aided by hungry retailers such as the U.S.'s Abercrombie & Fitch and the British clothiers Primark and Matalan, each of which this spring began offering lines of padded bras for girls as young as 7 (8 at Abercrombie & Fitch for the "Ashley Push-Up Triangle"), with Matalan offering one in size "28aa." Child advocates were predictably disgusted, with one Los Angeles psychologist opining that permissive mothers were trying to compensate through their daughters for their own lack of sexual appeal.

-- In 2002 News of the Weird mentioned a theme park near Mexico City in which potential emigrants to the U.S. could test their survival skills in an obstacle course mimicking the rigors one would endure sneaking across the border. Recently, Owlchemy Labs, a Massachusetts technology company, announced plans to release an iPhone/iPad app, "Smuggle Truck," a video game in which players compete to drive a pickup truck full of illegals over rocky terrain from Mexico into the U.S. without too many passengers bouncing out (and with in-game "additions" consisting of pregnant women giving birth enroute). Special "green cards" are awarded to winners. (Update: At presstime, Apple rejected the app, and Owlchemy said it would alter the game to one of animals escaping from a forest.)

-- Chutzpah! Thieves usually pick out easy jobs, but occasionally they go bold -- for example, breaking into the prison at New Plymouth, New Zealand's North Island, in March (carrying off a large TV set) or breaking into a police station in Uddingston, Scotland, in April (carrying off uniforms and radios).

-- Local councils that govern life in the United Kingdom seem overly frightened of liability lawsuits -- even from criminals who might get hurt while committing crimes. London's Daily Telegraph and the Surrey Mirror reported in February that police in the counties of Kent and Surrey had been advising homeowners and merchants to avoid using wire mesh on windows because burglars could seriously gouge themselves while climbing through. Also, electrical engineer David Bishop said police seemed especially concerned that burglars could be electrocuted if they broke into his workshop and thus advised him to post a warning sign outside that could be seen in the dark.

-- Carelessness sometimes begets tragedy, as when motorists survive terrible accidents but then, while awaiting help, they are hit and killed by emergency vehicles. In December, near Ocala, Fla., a 39-year-old driver survived a rollover but was accidentally run over and killed by a responding Marion County sheriff's deputy, and in April in Baldwin Park, Calif., an arriving ambulance fatally struck a 22-year-old accident victim who was, until that moment, not seriously hurt.

-- In 2007, Australian Wayne Scullino, then 30, quit his job in Sydney and somehow convinced his wife they should sell their house and move to Wisconsin for the sole purpose of rooting for the Green Bay Packers, about which he had enjoyed an inexplicable fascination since age 15. Said Scullino, "At some point, you've got to ... start living the life you want to." After one season, the Scullinos returned home, but in February 2011, he was of course back in the U.S., on hand in Dallas for the Packers' victory in Super Bowl XLV. Scullino says his Australian friends are still bewildered. "I try to talk to them about it," he said, "but they just don't get it."

-- In January 2010, shortly after News of the Weird's report, the U.K. government admitted that the British-made "magic wand" bomb-detector its own Department of Trade and Industry was promoting for export to police in Mexico and the Philippines was useless (no better than a Ouija board). Earlier, several British firms had sold thousands to Iraqi police at dollar equivalents of $16,000 to $60,000 (from a manufacturing cost of about $20 each). Furthermore, according to City of London police, "hundreds" of Iraqis had died in Baghdad after suicide bombers were mistakenly allowed into secure areas after being "cleared" by the wands. In January 2011, BBC News reported that a new British company, Unival, featuring a respected retired Army colonel as spokesman, had resumed selling the wands, to Bulgarian police.

-- Sigurdur Hjartarson's life's work is his Phallological Museum in the fishing town of Husavik, Iceland. As the world's only all-penis attraction, it draws tourists by the thousands, eager to see the 276-specimen collection of desiccated or stuffed organs from a wide range of animals. However, only in April (15 years after it opened) did the museum acquire a human penis, donated by the late Pall Arason, an acquaintance who, said Hjartarson, "liked to be in the limelight ... to be provocative." To an Associated Press reporter inquiring of the "size" of Arason's donation, Hjartarson said only, "You will just have to come and see it."