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The new logo of the Las Vegas Stars' minor league baseball team is shown Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2000 in Las Vegas. Las Vegas' minor league baseball team has revealed its new name: the 51s, as in the Area 51 nuclear test site where science fiction fans believe the government studies extraterrestrial life."
Thanks to Andy K.

The stories below are quoted from the NEWS OF THE WEIRD archives

Parents just don't understand
Thomas Lavery, 56, was indicted in Akron, Ohio, in August on nine counts of roughing up two of his high-achieving, home-schooled daughters when they performed worse in their endeavors than he expected. According to the indictment, when one daughter came in second in the National Spelling Bee, botching "cappelletti," Lavery threatened to kill her and had to be physically restrained. The girl told the Akron Beacon Journal that Lavery would punch them in the head for their failures and that screaming and profanity were common. Lavery complained to the Associated Press that he was "easier on (his kids) than my father was (on me)."

Only in Floriduh...
In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in February, accused murderer Donald Leroy Evans, 38, filed a pre-trial motion asking permission to wear a Ku Klux Klan robe in the courtroom and to be referred to in legal documents by "the honorable and respected name of Hi Hitler." According to courthouse employees interviewed by the Associated Press, Evans thought Adolf Hitler's followers were saying "Hi Hitler" rather than "Heil, Hitler."

The Florida Court of Appeals in September turned down lawyer Philip G. Butler's challenge to his bribery conviction. Butler had represented himself at trial and lost, and then claimed on appeal that the reason he lost was that he had failed to inform himself adequately that acting as his own lawyer was foolish.

A 64-year-old Dade City, Fla., man accused by authorities in March of fathering at least one, and perhaps all nine, of his 44-year-old sister's children recently had his trial postponed until early 1996. The man, identified only as William, warned authorities that prosecuting him will doom society because he needs six more months to finish up his work on "the prism" (a wooden table with a hole in the middle in which William stands), which he promised would enable him to harness all the world's energy to control the weather, end the fighting in Bosnia, and make the state's child welfare office obsolete. Said William, the prism is "the only way humanity will get out of limbo."

'Johnny Hildo' strikes again...
James Dogg, 42, was charged with assault in Mandan, N.D., in May for beating up his girlfriend's mother, 86-year-old Regina Lafromboise, who had been joking about Dogg's name and making barking sounds.

Yay!
In December in Troy, N.Y., Todd W. Bariteau Sr., 32, pleaded guilty to robbing, for the second time, a store called Deja Vu. In the second robbery, he broke through the same window, and stole some of the same kinds of merchandise that he had stolen in the earlier theft.

Bismarck, N.D., police reported in October that a man recently telephoned two fast food restaurants posing as a police officer and instructed the manager to strip-search employees for contraband. The caller's persuasiveness caused an adult male to strip for a female manager and an adult female to strip for a male manager.