Laney Wallace, 16, won the beauty contest at the 53rd Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas and the next day fulfilled the first duty of her reign: to behead and skin a western diamondback.
“You have to make sure you don’t pop the bladder,” the 2011 Miss Snake Charmer said shortly after taking a few swipes with a machete.
“That would be a huge mess.”
Three years ago, News of the Weird informed readers of the annual beauty-contest/muskrat-skinning festival in Maryland’s Eastern Shore region, in which the “beauty” part and the “skinning” part are separate — but in which that year, two teenage girls entered both, with Dakota Abbott edging out Samantha Phillips for the crown.
They owe us
elebenty-gazillion
dollars
Record companies have enjoyed recent successes in court by suing individuals who have shared music by trading files through specialized websites that avoid paying copyright licensing fees, including Lime Wire, which shut down last year.
Thirteen record companies won a summary judgment last year, and, applying a formula they believe was set out in federal law, the companies demanded that Lime Wire pay damages of up to $75 trillion — an amount more than five times the entire national debt.
In March, a federal judge said the companies should modify the formula and lower their expectations.
Cue the
Twilight Zone
music, please 
The author of most of the text of The New York Times obituary on Elizabeth Taylor, published on March 23, was Times reporter Mel Gussow, who passed away almost six years before Taylor.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa Fla. 33679 or go to www.newsoftheweird.com.)