Lead Stories

 * Michael Anthony Horne filed a lawsuit against the City of San
Antonio, Tex., in May for a wrongful arrest last year that cost him
the ashes of his grandmother.  He had pulled off the road to nap,
which looked suspicious to a passing patrolman, who searched
Horne's car and found the ashes, which he submitted to a field test,
which turned up positive for methamphetamines.  Horne was in jail
for 30 days until he made bail, and the case has cost him his job, his
car, his apartment, and his military reserve status.  Two subsequent
tests of the ashes were negative for drugs, but the tests consumed
almost all of the ashes.

 * In May, the Food and Drug Administration voted 5-4 to continue
approval of the human skin replacement patches made by
Organogenesis Inc. of Canton, Mass.   The company's technique is
to cultivate and harvest the fastest-growing source of raw material:
circumcision residue.  One snipped foreskin can eventually produce
200,000 three-inch disks of fake skin.  The Economist magazine
called this use of foreskin "the most profitable . . . since David
presented Saul with a sackload" to gain the throne of Israel.

 * Cradle of Democracy:  In May, actor and proud philanderer Jose
Estrada was elected president in one of the Philippines's quietest
elections ever, in that only 45 people were killed in campaign-
related incidents.  Former first lady Imelda Marcos dropped out of
the race in April, but got back in, she said, to prevent the suicides
of several of her supporters.  Among the presidential losers was
Mario Lagazpi, who stayed in character as God, claiming he had
taken a leave of absence from Heaven to help the country.

Opera Conductor Imitates Chevy Chase

*In June, James Conlon, the music director of the Paris Opera,
accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with his baton while he was
in Ohio rehearsing Stravinsky's "Nightingale" for the Cincinnati
May Festival.  He returned to work two hours later.

Dangerous Workplaces:  the Restaurant

*In May, soup cook Jose Grimal, 46, of the San Francisco Hilton
Hotel, was charged with biting off the end of a supervisor's finger
during a fight over access to a storeroom.  And Durham, N.C.,
waiter Joseph Drummond, 27, was charged with assault in April for
allegedly stabbing a fellow waiter who had taken a hot potato off
one of Drummond's trays instead of waiting until a chef gave him
his own potato.  And restaurant cook Harold Jack Sutton, 70, was
finally arrested in Knoxville, Tenn., in April after eluding police for
22 years on a Delaware murder charge for allegedly killing a fellow
cook in a pre-dawn carving knife duel in the parking lot.

U. S. Congressmen Are Better at This

*In March, British Columbia legislator Paul Reitsma was caught
lying by a handwriting expert, who said, contrary to Reitsma's
denials, that Reitsma was the author of a letter to the editor of the
Parksville Morning Sun praising Reitsma's performance.  The next
day, Reitsma admitted he wrote it but that he was only dictating for
another person.  When confronted by charges that he had written
nine similar letters, he said, "To the best of my knowledge," he
hadn't written any others.  The next day, he admitted to writing all
nine amidst charges that he had written several dozen more.

At Least He's Not Making Regulations

*Recently, Washington, D.C., TV station WJLA aired a story on
Government Printing Office bureaucrat J. Emory Crandall's
complaint that his bosses had refused to give him more than three
days' work in the last eight years, despite a $90,000 salary.  The
station videotaped Crandall at work reading, napping, and playing
computer games.  In May, U. S. Rep. Scott Klug of Wisconsin,
who was a reporter at the station before being elected to Congress,
demanded a GPO explanation.

Questionable Judgments

*In April, Darren Kennedy, 30, pleaded no contest in Denver to
several misdemeanors for streaking across Coors Field during a
Colorado Rockies baseball game.  Kennedy told the judge he
thought it would be a good way to meet women.

* In December, Rev. Joyce Mines of St. Stephen's Pentecostal
church in York, Va., distributed leaflets in a townhouse community,
intending to save souls and increase her church's membership but
instead drew criticism.  She said the fliers were aimed at girls and
young women but asked readers, "Did your grandma have ways
like a whore?"  "Did your mother have ways like a whore?"  "Do
you have ways like a whore?"  "Are you now raising a whore?"
Mines said no offense was intended.

* Still more people who would be free today if they had kept lower
profiles:  If you're smoking marijuana and have arrest warrants
outstanding, you shouldn't just say "Come in" when someone
knocks on the door (2 men, Lanagan, Mo., March; at the door was
a former police officer then door-to-door campaigning for mayor).
If you're carrying heroin and marijuana, you shouldn't cause a
disturbance by constantly spitting on the front window of a bar
(Ruben F. Adams, 20, Montpelier, Vt., May).  If you're on alcohol-
clean probation for DUI that caused a death, you shouldn't pop into
a local bar and shout, "I'm here to get drunk," because the
prosecutor who convicted you might be at the next booth (Jennifer
Hardin, Raleigh, N.C., March).

* People who recently (according to arrest records) thought it
unnecessary to remove the child pornography from the hard drive
before taking their computers in for repair:  David Asimov, 46, son
of writer Isaac Asimov, Santa Rosa, Calif., March; former radio
deejay Richard Kull, 31, Leighton, Pa., February; and flamboyant
British rock star Gary Glitter, 54, London, March.

* Earlier this year, Wichita Falls, Tex., Baptist minister Robert
Jeffress wrote a $54 check to the city library to purchase all the
copies of the book Heather Has Two Mommies and another
children's book on living with homosexual parents, with the goal of
retiring them from circulation.  However, subsequent publicity
caused so many library patrons to request the book that, according
to the library's standard guidelines, it will have to order several
new copies to satisfy demand.

Least Competent Criminals

* Police in Saratoga Springs, N. Y., arrested Tracey L. Wilcox, 18,
in May and charged him with possession of a counterfeit $50 bill.
According to police, the cashier tried to talk Wilcox out of trying to pass it,
but Wilcox insisted he take it, despite the fact that the bill bore a picture of Andrew Jackson
(the $20-bill man) instead of Ulysses S. Grant.

Recurring Themes

* News of the Weird has frequently reported on unusual DUI cases.
Among the latest:  Justin Carbaugh, 27, was jailed in April for
riding his tractor mower drunk down Route 116 near York, Pa.
Robert Rowland, 42, was charged with DUI on horseback on state
road 280 in Calloway County, Ky., in January.  Ricky Hall, 35, was
charged with drunk-driving two camels in January in Oodnadatta, Australia.

Thinning the Herd

* In March in Fullerton, Calif., a man in his early 20s accidentally
shot himself to death in the course of pistol-whipping the manager
of a computer store he was robbing.  And in Tahlequah, Okla., in
June, a 32-year-old man apparently lost his balance and fell to his
death from a 64-foot water tower on which he had just finished
painting the graffiti "No Fear."