People Who Don't Keep Up With the News
The Transportation Security Administration revealed in March that, in the last 12 months, airline passengers at U.S. airports had been found by screeners to have tried to board with 4.8 million prohibited items, including 1.4 million knives, 1,100 guns, 125,000 incendiary items and 40,000 box-cutters. And in February, a 45-year-old Japanese tourist attempted to board a flight at Miami International Airport carrying a canister of gasoline, two boxes of matches and a barbecue grill, and he was taken into custody when he refused to give them up. [CNN-AP, 3-10-03]

University of Manitoba professor Rod Yellon's appeal of his 1998 traffic ticket for running a stop sign (reported in News of the Weird last year) was rejected in February, and it appears he will now have to pay the fine, equal to about US$35. Yellon's strategy alternated between complaining of being oppressed and boycotting court proceedings, and in fact he was convicted in absentia. He refuses to pay the ticket because he thinks the word "stop" on a stop sign is too vague and that the government should set precisely calibrated standards of what it means to "stop." [Winnipeg Free Press, 2-26-03]

Police in Warren, Ohio, arrested Roger A. Hunt, 41, on New Year's Day and charged him with kidnapping his girlfriend, despite his story that the couple were just blissfully headed out to dinner in his truck. Police said their suspicions were aroused when they noticed that the woman was barefoot and Hunt tried to explain that by saying, "She's from Virginia. She doesn't wear shoes (when she goes out to dinner)." [Tribune-Chronicle (Warren), 1-3-03]

Top Pentagon and CIA officials met with the author of "The Bible Code," who said Osama bin Laden's whereabouts can be detected by connecting letters from ancient Hebrew (February). And eight hours before the U.S.'s "Orange" alert on Feb. 7, four heavily armed Cuban military men wandered through downtown Key West, Fla., unknown to anyone in Washington. (Turned out they had arrived by boat to defect and were looking for someone to surrender to.) And Jake Greenwald announced he would offer "terror tours" in Israel for $5,000 each to visitors wanting helicopter and simulated-games tours of West Bank bomb and battle sites (but has suspended the venture because of the war in Iraq) (March). [Wall Street Journal, 2-28-03]

Belgian actor Benjamin Verdonck lived nearly naked in a cage with a pig in Ghent for three days in November hoping the pig would "teach" him why there is such strife in the world (results not reported). And James Albert Ernest Togo, 20, of Brisbane, arrested for mooning a policeman, claimed in December that Australia's Constitution gave him the right to stick out his bare buttocks in political protest, which he said was part of his Aboriginal tradition. And in October, in the midst of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals anti-milk demonstration at an Aberdeen, Scotland, high school, about 100 milk-loving students spent 10 minutes angrily drenching PETA's cow-costumed spokesman with milk. [Reuters, 11-15-02]

Also, in the Last Month ...
A 43-year-old woman, wanting some fruit, was arrested at around 5 a.m., angrily throwing bricks through the front window of a grocery store just because it wasn't open yet (Hot Springs, Ark.). Hillside Cemetery received a bill in the mail from the phone company addressed to one of its "residents" (buried, 1997) for a call he supposedly made early this year (Auburn, Mass.). A first-grader became the latest kid suspended from school for having a nonweapon "weapon" (a plastic school cafeteria knife), but his parents threatened criminal charges against the school (for arming 6-year-olds with weapons) if the suspension stood. [Boston Globe-AP, 3-13-03]