-- Legitimate Chinese cricket-fight promoters once again staged their national championship matches in Beijing in October despite fears from their ranks that illegal gambling was ruining their "sport" that has endured for 1,000 years, according to a New York Times dispatch. Thousands of men descend on farmers in Shandong province each summer, seeking crickets of the proper physique and character to endure rough matches inside 8-inch-wide plastic containers. Matches end when one contestant tries to flee or gets tossed around hopelessly by the other.

-- The University of Surrey (Guildford, England) announced in October that it was adding to its curriculum in service-sector management by appointing a professor of airline food. A Surrey official said the school intended to beef up its graduate and undergraduate course offerings in in-flight catering and told The Guardian newspaper that the professor would be appointed from either the field of gastronomy (how food is served) or the field of food science (concentrating, for example, on freshness).

Janet Woods, the acting principal of Strong Vincent High School in Erie, Pa., angry at reporters' questions about a rumored gun incident, allegedly displayed a middle finger and told camera operators to "Shoot this!" (August). And in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Kamol Kaewmora, 50, recipient of the gesture, was arrested and charged with shooting to death the 41-year-old German motorcyclist who had displayed it to him (August). In August, a state court in Lancaster County, Pa., and a federal court in Fayetteville, Ark., dismissed criminal charges against people who had made the gesture, and the Arkansas judge in fact ruled the defendant's right to flip the bird at a state trooper was protected by the U.S. Constitution.

-- Newcastle, England, body piercer Lorna Larson accidentally hit a vein while working on the tongue of Gemma Danielson, 18, in July and by the time Danielson got to the hospital, she had lost four pints of blood. Said Danielson, "(Doctors) said they had never seen anything like it." Larson said she was mortified: "That's the last tongue I do."

-- Joseph Pileggi, 69, filed a lawsuit in Akron, Ohio, in July seeking money damages over his 1997 marriage to Carli Buchanan, 61. He claims he intended to marry not Buchanan, but his long-time girlfriend, who is Buchanan's mother, Ducile Palermo, 83. He claimed that he did not realize until May 1999 that the "wrong" woman's name was on the license (despite Buchanan's insistence that Pileggi consummated the marriage with her on the wedding night).

-- Latest Highway Truck Spills: 26 alligator carcasses, weighing nearly 5 tons (headed for a processing plant near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., October); U.S. Army Multiple Launch rockets (from a military truck, adjacent to an elementary school near Hugo, Okla., August); and a load of completed Advanced Placement tests (being taken from a New York City testing center to Educational Testing Service in New Jersey, of which 84 were never recovered, thus hindering those students' college careers, May).

-- In August, Davidson, N.C., police officer Scott Searcy asked to search a woman's car for drugs, giving as his legally required basis ("reasonable suspicion") solely the fact that on the front seat was a copy of the weekly newspaper Creative Loafing, whose cover story on local drug enforcement was illustrated by a photo of a marijuana plant. Said Assistant Chief Butch Parker, "(Searcy) thinks he had reasonable suspicion, and we do, too." (The woman consented to the search, and nothing illegal was found.)

-- In July, Rev. Nelson W. Koscheski, a delegate from Dallas to the national Episcopal convention in Denver, was seen scattering salt under the tables of openly gay and lesbian delegates. According to some authorities, tossing the salt is a symbolic gesture to rid the premises of Satan. After some participants expressed their outrage, Rev. Koscheski resigned as a delegate.

-- Lisa Alger of Roy, Wash., had to take her claim all the way to state judge Paul Treyz in June, but she finally got a dismissal of one of the municipal citations against her for housing an unlicensed cat named "Patches." Reason: "Patches" is a stuffed animal. (The local Humane Society monitors for violations of licensing law by knocking on doors and asking kids the names of their pets, so it can check license lists. When Alger's 7-year-old son mentioned the highly regarded "Patches," and the Humane Society found no license for it, it wrote Alger up without investigating.)

Jail guards employed by the Nova Scotia government had their "privilege" of being able to eat free in the inmates' dining room taken away in July because of budget cuts and must now pay $2.50 to get their prison meal. And Brazilian multimillionaire Jair Coelho, 68, was arrested in August and locked up before trial; he had made a fortune on the country's jail contracts, supplying nearly inedible food, but the government proved that he got the contracts through bribery, and thus he must now eat his own food.

News of the Weird mentioned in 1999 that the Safety Tanteisha detective agency in Osaka, Japan, was selling about 200 aerosol spray kits a month (at $400 each) to help women find out whether their men are having affairs, by detecting the presence of fresh semen on their underwear. In July 2000, according to a Phoenix New Times report, a venerable local medical lab has introduced Forensex, which charges spouses and lovers from $350 up to test partners' underwear for semen (hers, to see if sperm is present; his, to see if he has ejaculated at inappropriate times).

In August, a 20-year-old man who worked at a landscaping business in Phoenix proposed to his girlfriend (she accepted), took her to the worksite, turned on a woodchipper, climbed in, and tried to pull her in, too. He was killed, but she escaped. Also in August, the style and etiquette columnist for The Times of London was found dead, clad only in a shirt, beneath his fourth-floor apartment window, but colleagues said the suicide scenario was too tacky for the man. Said one friend, "(H)e'd have wanted to be really dressed appropriately." Said the coroner, "It would be likely that he would write a letter to explain, and no doubt on the Smythson's notepaper that was found in the (apartment)."

The new head of a Hudson River environmental organization, on a well-publicized maiden kayaking voyage around New York City, discovered a floating corpse. A Zambian man was granted a divorce after testimony that his wife routinely locked him in the bedroom at night to stop his philandering (Lusaka, Zambia). Police said two burglary suspects, left alone briefly in a stationhouse storage/interview room, stole some Twizzlers and the change from the office coffee fund box (Albuquerque). Police-dog trainee Ben, let out of a squad car on a rural road to relieve himself, picked up the scent of a nearby, 125-plant marijuana field (Perkins Township, Maine).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- In September, driving-school owner Bharat Patel, 49, became the 31st person convicted in a driver's-license bribery scandal at a Chicago examining station. According to testimony, Patel did not even bother to teach and spent all his time with examiners. Some of Patel's students were such bad drivers that examiners, who took $300,000 in bribes in two years, actually gave Patel his money back. Some subsequently licensed drivers did not know how to start a car or engage the transmission; others turned directly into traffic during the test; and sometimes, terrified examiners halted the test mid-trip and hitchhiked back to the station.

-- Federal wildlife officials believe that the voracious and largely indestructible Asian swamp eel has somehow made its way to within a mile of Florida's Everglades National Park and poses an imminent threat to its balance of nature, according to a September Wall Street Journal report. The 3-foot-long eel apparently eats anything in its path, has no known enemies, survives in salt- and fresh water and on land, can change genders in order to facilitate year-round breeding, lays 1,000 eggs at a time, and is so durable that one lived in a wet towel for seven months with no food or water.

Protesting taxes (Actress "Dziewanna" rode, Lady Godiva-style, through Krakow, Poland, in July). Bicycling for charity (Three men and a woman were arrested in Vernal, Utah, wearing only helmets, in July). Burglarizing a house (Dwight Mills, 38, set off by the receipt of divorce papers, took off his clothes and broke into a neighbor's house before being gunned down, Pensacola, Fla., July). Celebrating a soccer "victory" (In August, a nude fan joyously rushed onto the field and around the sidelines in the final moments of a 2-1 game, but he apparently also distracted his own Blackpool, England, team, because Torquay scored two quick goals to win, 3-2).

-- Helene Canuel filed a lawsuit in August against the Rimouski (Quebec) Minor Hockey Association, asking about $700 (U.S.) in damages, because the coach of her 14-year-old son benched him for the playoffs. Canuel said she just wanted "justice for my son," but the coach was apparently more interested in surviving the single-elimination tournament.

-- In June, a school district in Orange County, Calif., was ordered by a jury to pay $1.4 million to Taylor Steiskal, age 10, who three years ago fell off his school's monkey bars and broke his arm, which developed further complications and has required eight surgeries. Steiskal's lawyers argued that monkey bars for children should be no higher than 72 inches off the ground (thus giving a few inches' ground-clearance for a 48-inch-high boy hanging from his hands); the one Steiskal fell from was 79 inches high.

-- Anne and Lucy Abolins filed a $4 million lawsuit in May against the owners of the house they formerly rented in Edmonton, Alberta, from which their 114 cats were confiscated by health inspectors, who ruled in June 1999 that the feces-laden dwelling was uninhabitable. Contrary to neighbors' claims that the Abolinses had lowered their neighborhood's value, the sisters now say that their own lives were ruined by the health inspectors and that notoriety has made it impossible for them to find new living quarters. (In August 2000, a judge fined the sisters about $3,500 (U.S.) for housing code violations, and Lucy Abolins then called the SPCA "the Antichrist" for taking her cats away.)

-- In September, a jury in Tacoma, Wash., ordered the state Department of Corrections to pay $22 million to the family of a woman killed when a convicted felon (domestic assault) on probation ran a red light and hit the woman's car, concluding that the department somehow ought to have supervised the man better. The governor's office said it would appeal the verdict, questioning the state's ability to monitor the driving behavior of its 55,000 probationers 24 hours a day.

-- According to an Associated Press report in August, quoting lawyers close to the case, the Catholic Diocese of Nashville, Tenn., planned to use the defense of "comparative fault" in two lawsuits filed by boys who claimed to have been sexually molested by former priest Edward McKeown. Such a defense would allow the church to reduce its damages by showing that other people had knowledge of McKeown's continued abuse and did not warn authorities of it. Among those other people the church regards as culpable are the 21 other victims who were abused but remained silent.

-- Paralyzed inmate Torrence Johnson filed a lawsuit in July against the Spartanburg (S.C.) County Jail because guards failed to stop him in 1998 when he was whimsically doing backflips off a desk in his cell, the last one of which resulted in a fall and his subsequent paralysis. Johnson claims guards should have been watching him carefully because he had been diagnosed as depressed, although they said he appeared to be vigorous until he landed on his neck.

Mark Sims, 24, filed a lawsuit in August against Ottawa (Ontario) Civil Hospital, alleging that a misdiagnosis (of cancer) caused a doctor to remove one of his testicles, which at that time was the size of a "baseball." Sims now says it was obvious that the swollen testicle was not cancerous but merely the result of an office-party jaunt to a strip club, a visit during which Sims ultimately found himself onstage with a dancer, who "suddenly, without warning" whacked his scrotum. Sims says that if the doctor had waited until his testicle shrank to its normal size, he would still have both testicles.

Last year, News of the Weird reported that a Bombay, India, collection agency had hired six eunuchs to hang around the homes and offices of obstinate debtors to embarrass them into paying up. According to a July 2000 report in London's The Guardian, the Tsaisheng credit agency in Taiwan has begun hiring AIDS patients at about $100 (U.S.) a day for the same purpose. According to the agency owner, many people in Taiwan still believe that AIDS is transmitted through mere social contact.

Sherman Lee Parks, 50, escaped from the Dallas County Jail in Fordyce, Ark., in August, oblivious of the fact that a judge had just ordered his release because he had been locked up too long; he was rearrested the next day, charged with escaping, and jailed. And in September, according to police in Shawnee, Kan., a 19-year-old clerk at a Texaco Starmart reported he had been robbed, but actually he had just looted his own cash register, and to conceal the crime, he had put tape over the store's surveillance cameras. However, he had used transparent tape; said a police lieutenant, "(I)t looks a little fuzzy, but I don't see any robbery in there."

Water and health officials were mystified at the continued appearance of half-inch-long red worms in the tap of a Deltona, Fla., woman but after tests, declared the water safe. A mayoral candidate in Vlore, Albania, promised that, if elected, he would re-open the city's long-shuttered brothels. Officials in Cairo, Egypt, began implementing a 20-year program to relocate 21 cemeteries (with 109,000 graves) to the suburbs. When an arrested stripper on pre-trial release argued that wearing an ankle monitor on stage would hamper her act, the judge relented and dropped that condition (Cleveland).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- A New York appeals court ruled in July that a 53-year-old, serial-plastic-surgery patient, who became dissatisfied with her tucked-and-tightened body after 12 operations over a seven-year-period, could sue her doctor for malpractice, despite her consent to all surgeries, because she might suffer from the disorder that causes a person to think his body is ugly. (Doctors contacted by the New York Observer wondered which, if any, of their patients are totally free of the disorder.) The complaining patient has had work done on her nose, eyelids, chin, eyebrows, flanks, thighs, knees, breasts and tummy.

-- Central Illinois farmer Dan Aeschleman recently converted his land to a more lucrative use: attracting foxes and then selling their urine in pump-spray containers ($11.95 for 16 oz.) to landowners to keep nuisance animals away with the "presence" of a predator. According to a September report in The Pantagraph newspaper of Bloomington, Ill., Aeschleman says the tricky part -- getting the non-domestic foxes to urinate in an orderly fashion and then collecting it all (10,000 gallons a year) -- is a "trade secret."

According to Martinsville, Ind., prosecutors, Judy Kirby, 31, mother of 10, intentionally killed four of them in March after she drove into oncoming traffic for more than two miles and struck a minivan (also killing three of its occupants); her doctors say they will testify at her upcoming trial that she suffered from postpartum depression and should not be punished. And Jeane Newmaker, 46, was charged in Golden, Colo., in September with child abuse for going along with a "therapy" in which four practitioners squashed her 10-year-old adopted daughter to death; the "therapists" were "rebirthing" the child (supposedly to compensate for an abusive biological mother) by getting her to simulate escaping the womb, but they accidentally suffocated her despite her more than 50 pleas for help over a 70-minute session.

-- A highlight of the East Finley Summer Festival in Claysville, Pa., in July was the return of the popular "chicken-flying contest" after a 10-year hiatus. As explained by the Observer-Reporter newspaper of Washington, Pa., chickens are placed in ordinary mailboxes, which are then abruptly opened with a toilet plunger, which somehow sends them flying hundreds of feet, with the longest flight winning first prize. During chicken-flying's hiatus, said Festival sponsors, cow-patty bingo was featured but was not nearly as exciting.

-- The Al Salam Mosque Foundation filed a $6.2 million federal lawsuit in August against Palos Heights, Ill., which had reneged on a promise to pay the Muslim group $200,000 to change its mind about buying a local building and converting it to a place of worship. The city council had made the cash offer, reportedly, because some council members preferred not to have such a prominent Muslim presence in the town. Then, when the Foundation accepted the cash offer, the Palos Heights mayor vetoed it, complaining that the offer was an "insult" to the Muslims.

-- Relieving the Doctor Shortage: According to an April Los Angeles Times report, imposter "Dr." Adam Litwin roamed UCLA Medical Center with impunity for six months last year, chatting it up with "colleagues" and keeping himself busy, being discovered only when a pharmacist reported an irregularity with a prescription. And "physician's assistant" imposter Gary Lee Stearley received excellent reviews from several doctors at Mercy Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pa., in June before being detected; he had previously "worked" hospitals in Seattle, Richmond and Washington, D.C.

-- No Substitute for a Loyal Dog: Sevier County (Tenn.) sheriff's dog Kysor was praised in a July Knoxville News-Sentinel report as so faithful that he withstood a stab wound to the head from a fleeing suspect, hard enough that the blade broke off, in order to maintain his grip. However, after the man plunged the knife in, he tried to sic his own dog on the weakened Kysor, but, according to a deputy, "He whistled for him, but his dog wouldn't come."

-- Forget About Asking Him to Consider a Trigger Lock for His Gun: In June, a federal grand jury in Springfield, Mo., indicted Todd Morman Murray, 27, on charges that he stole 45 pounds of explosives from a chemical plant and "hid" them in his children's playhouse.

A young man suffered a broken arm when he was walking so close to railroad tracks that a passing train violently knocked his surfboard out of his hands (San Clemente, Calif., June). And a 25-year-old woman lost the toes on her right foot when she crawled under a slow-moving train as a shortcut to the correct platform (Mount Prospect, Ill., July). And an inebriated man's life was saved by his wife, who pulled him just in time from the path of a speeding train after he had lingered on the tracks to make an obscene gesture at the conductor (Trevor, Wis., June).

According to news reports in July and August, Mack W. Metcalf, 42, of Florence, Ky., has led a dismal life that included frequent drinking binges, some DUI and other traffic charges, drug selling, eviction for failure to pay rent, and a debt of $31,000 in back child support. However, in July, he won a $34 million lump-sum jackpot in the Kentucky Lottery. (His haplessness continues: Shortly after he was paid, he handed a woman $500,000 as a gift, but later realized he was drunk and has now sued to get the money back.)

The Classic Middle Name (all-new): Arrested for killing his roommate (San Diego, Calif., August): Aryan Wayne Duntley. Arrested for killing a young neighbor girl (Oilton, Okla., August): Robert Wayne Rotramel. Sentenced for murdering and beheading a 20-year-old woman (Orange, Texas, July): Christopher Wayne Gregory. Application for DNA testing rejected in a murder case against him (Illinois, August): Randall Wayne Stevens. Convicted in the murders of five people at a car wash (Irving, Texas, September): Robert Wayne Harris.

Killed over Access to Mating: Edward William Heckman, 58, was charged in July near Jonesboro, Ga., with killing his wife after she refused to have sex with him. Baby sitter Robert Cooper, 22, was convicted in June in Calgary, Alberta, of killing two young boys because they hindered his attempted seduction of their mother. A man in his 20s allegedly killed 11 people with an Uzi at a Bogota, Colombia, nightclub in June after rejection by a woman.

An off-duty police officer reporting for an MRI while armed had the superpowerful magnet suck his gun away and slam it against the machine, causing one round to fire into a wall (Rochester, N.Y.). Singapore's leading newspaper published a how-to guide to having sex in cars, in support of the government's campaign to raise the birth rate. The mayor of a French resort town, which has no cemetery vacancies and a restrictive land-use law, prohibited dying except by people with burial space (Le Levandou). The Supreme Court of New Hampshire ruled that a candidate for office had the right to parade on the street dressed as a penis, because he was commenting on the political system.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)