-- In Halberstadt, Germany, in September, an organist kicked off a performance of the late, radical composer John Cage's "Organ 2/ASLSP" (an acronym somehow derived from "as slow as possible"), which was written for 20 minutes, but thanks to technology and imagination, will be performed over a period lasting 639 years. The first six months will be devoted to creating an organ's first note. The purpose of the performance is to contrast the piece with the frenzied pace of modern society.

-- Georgia state Rep. Dorothy Pelote of Savannah, addressing her chamber during opening prayer ceremony on the day after Labor Day, informed colleagues that she has psychic powers and in fact managed to catch a glimpse of Chandra Levy's dead body in a ditch (but did not get a chance to speak with her). House Speaker Tom Murphy diplomatically told reporters, after being asked for a comment, that he really did not hear too well what Rep. Pelote had said (even though he was standing well within earshot).

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (47) A husband's enthusiastically taking his wife back into the marriage even though she just tried to murder him, as David Martin did in June after his wife, Tammie, emptied a gun into him and his father (Moulton, Ala.) (works also for wives taking husbands back). And (48) forcing young miscreants to listen to less popular kinds of music as punishment for playing their rap or rock music too loud in public, as Cambridge, Ohio, Judge John Nicholson sentenced Alan Law to do in August (i.e., listen to polka).

Latest Cutting-Edge Products: Fox News reported in July that business was good for Hidden Vestments (Santa Monica, Calif.), a lingerie shop with silk female-type undies specially tailored for cross-dressing men's bodies (e.g., lace-edged vest-and-boxer set, $136). And, according to a June Denver Post story, Buck Weimer (Pueblo, Colo.) sold his entire first run of airtight briefs called Under-Ease, which contains a charcoal filter lining that effectively, he says, prevents flatulence from escaping into the air. And the Potty Putter (mentioned in Newsweek in May) is a toy fabric golf green, complete with hole, flag, ball and putter, that men can put on the floor and play with while sitting on a toilet.

-- In July, Richard Davis, 53, settled his lawsuit with a London doctor and a pharmaceutical company over his claim that a prescription drug made him so sexually wild that it led to his bankruptcy and a criminal fraud conviction. He said he was a virgin until he started binging on the apparently magical bromocriptine, which caused him to act like a "cross between a deranged sex maniac and a highly overexcited teen-ager."

-- Among the potential 21st-century foods being developed for military use (according to research led by Purdue University professor Michael Ladisch, released in June) is a chocolate bar with special nutrients to change body temperature, which could not only make soldiers warmer in cold climates but could also thus render soldiers "invisible" to an enemy's thermal-imaging equipment.

-- Police in Northumbria, England, agreed in April to pay Detective Brian Baker the equivalent of "several" thousand dollars (he was asking for about $25,000) to compensate him for the snoring habit he picked up, allegedly from too many years in the evidence room inhaling dust from seized marijuana plants. His maladies, including a whistling in his nose, were said to have caused Baker marital disharmony.

-- Tim Nelson, a La-Z-Boy recliner tester profiled in a May Associated Press report, said the job of sitting down, kicking his feet up, and rocking back and forth in the company's chairs all day is much harder than it looks: "It's not like they give us popcorn and a TV set to watch"; "(u)p and down all day (can) be a workout." Actually, said colleagues, the job is one of the hardest at the Dayton, Tenn., plant because testers must certify the comfort and balance of up to 130 recliners a day (with 10 to 15 pieces not making the grade).

William Lyttle, 71, of North London has been a compulsive digger for years, said neighbors, according to an August report in The Guardian. To satisfy unarticulated inner needs, Lyttle has dug extensively all over his multi-acre property, once going about 50 feet straight down before getting bored and cementing up the hole. However, in his latest adventure, which authorities said is probably the first time his digging has gone past his property line, his excavation caused the street in front of his home to collapse. Lyttle lives in a 20-room home that would be worth about $1.5 million if it were in good repair.

-- The Philippine toxic garbage pile that collapsed in July 2000, killing more than 200 professional scavengers, is still active in the Patayas neighborhood of Manila, and more dangerous than ever, according to a July 2001 Associated Press dispatch. The government offered to relocate the scavengers, but most stayed because of the pay (about $3 (U.S.) a day). As the AP writer set the scene: "Hundreds of self-described scavengers, many with skin rashes and teeth nearly as black as the toxic mud that caked their feet, followed in a swirl of flies, mangy dogs, diesel exhaust and flying cockroaches." "The children who splash and play in the fetid runoff spread skin fungi, tuberculosis, hook worms, and stomach viruses at an alarming rate." A recent, tough clean-air act, banning incineration, has increased the dump's volume.

An 18-year-old man, rowdily hanging out of the passenger-side car window, fatally struck his head when the driver came too close to a trash can (Lebanon, Ore., August). A 38-year-old man fell 15 floors to his death after he accepted a dare from a buddy and attempted unsuccessfully to hang from an apartment balcony (Vancouver, British Columbia, July). A 39-year-old man was killed when his speeding car struck a parked semitrailer truck at about 9 a.m., with another motorist telling police the man appeared to be reading a newspaper moments before the crash (Pleasant Prairie, Wis., June).

A 31-year-old man barely survived a deadly bacterial infection of the heart valve, facilitated by his numerous body piercings that he acquired in order to look like his idol, basketball player Dennis Rodman (Chicago). Responding to several noise complaints, a city's environmental officer publicly urged citizens to be quieter at night while making love (Stockport, England). In its latest advertising campaign, the University of Bonn (Germany) profiled famous alumnus Joseph Goebbels ("philosophy student," "propaganda minister") but without mentioning his role as an architect of the Holocaust. A 39-year-old woman, who had just killed one son, was thwarted in killing another because the bullet lodged in the Holy Bible he was carrying (North Fort Myers, Fla.).

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

-- Prosecutors and six Tampa-area juries have found Oscar Ray Bolin to be a vicious murderer, but in August, the state Supreme Court ruled, for the sixth time, that he's entitled to a new trial, that damaging testimony from his ex-wife ought not to have been used against him. The court said Bolin had not waived his privilege not to have his wife's words used against him (even though he wrote police a six-page letter reading in part, "If there's anything that you really want to know about, then you'll haft (sic) to ask Cheryl Jo (the ex-wife), because she knew just about everything that I was ever a part of (and) she knew about all 3 of these homicide (sic) which I'm charged with"). (The wife died before the trials, but her videotaped interview was played in court.)

-- Several insurance companies in France have begun offering policies to compensate parents of kids who get bullied in the schoolyard, according to an August Associated Press report. No company yet covers stolen lunch money, but eyeglasses that get slapped off a kid's face and trendy designer clothes that inspire muggings are covered.

Recent Scams: Two inmates at Cook County (Ill.) jail managed to swindle as many as 12 people ($9,000 from one woman) by calling them at random, collect (even though a message broke in automatically every 60 seconds identifying the call as coming from jail), and promising to cleanse the callees' nonexistent criminal records for a fee. (The men were indicted in July.) And a former Atlantic City, N.J., man sued boardwalk fortune-teller Sole Mio Balaam Nicola after he had given her $200,000 over a 13-year period, closed his real-estate business, left his wife and moved from the area, all in order to comply with various curse-avoidance behaviors she sold him. (The lawsuit was settled in May).

-- In June in Seattle, federal judge Marsha J. Pechman reinstated sexual-assault convict William Bergen Greene's main defense (which had been rejected by a Washington state judge): that he did not attack his female mental health counselor in 1994 but rather one of his other personalities (a 4-year-old boy, "Tyrone") did. Judge Pechman said the trial judge was insufficiently respectful of the science of multiple-personality disorders, and she was persuaded to that opinion by Greene, himself, who argued his own appeal.

-- High Court Judge Griffith Williams ruled in July that Christina Coles, 21, of Kent, England, was entitled to compensation (amount to be determined) to help raise her daughter Rebecca, now 3, to be paid by the driver of a car that hit Coles' car in 1995. Coles apparently demonstrated that Rebecca would never have been born except that the collision caused Coles a memory loss, which contributed to why Coles forgot to take her birth-control pills. Furthermore, Judge Williams issued the ruling even though he found that Coles was 75 percent at fault for the original collision.

-- In June, a jury in Broward County, Fla., found that a 28-year-old man who was speeding and whose blood-alcohol reading was twice the presumed-impaired limit was nonetheless only 10 percent responsible for the single-car accident that killed him. The man's car ran off an access ramp on Florida's Turnpike and smashed into a metal pole because, the jury determined, the 10-inch drop-off on the left lane caused the car to swerve (which was 45 percent each the fault of the state and the construction company). (The amount of damages due his family were to be determined later.)

-- Actor Bethany Halliday filed a lawsuit in May against the British opera company D'Oyly Carte because it allegedly pulled back an offer it had made to her earlier to play a blushing teen-age virgin in "The Pirates of Penzance." D'Oyly Carte said that whatever interest it had in Halliday at one time no longer existed when she showed up pregnant and would be three months from delivery when the show opened. (The character she was to play is so sheltered that she screams in fright every time she sees a man.)

-- The Arizona Fish and Game Commission told new resident Wallace Burford in June that they were declining his formal request to compensate him $328.21 because one of the state's 250,000 wild coyotes had eaten his cat. Burford's suggestion was also rejected: that the commission feed wild coyotes so they aren't so hungry for cats all the time.

Stephen T. Harris, 39, was arrested in July and charged with public indecency for apparently deliberately (according to the surveillance camera at Lowes Home Improvement in Plainville, Conn.) unzipping his pants and slightly wetting the back of the pants leg of a man who was shopping at the store. After doing it once and not being noticed by the man, Harris apparently returned and did it twice more. No motive was given in the police report, nor was there evidence the men knew each other.

Trevor Blair Roszell, 35, pleaded guilty in Edmonton, Alberta, in August to impersonating a police officer. The person he had tried to impress with several items of police paraphernalia was, it turned out, herself an undercover officer who was at the time portraying a prostitute. Furthermore, "Officer" Roszell then tried to convince the woman to give him a freebie since he, too, was on the job.

Earlier this year, News of the Weird reported the astounding "fact" that, according to federal lawsuits filed in San Francisco, at least three business executives (of the 88 victims) in the Alaska Air 261 crash in January 2000 had secret mistresses in rural Mexico or Guatemala, with whom they had fathered children (and whose "great aunts" or other distant relatives had filed wrongful-death lawsuits against Alaska Air). However, in court-ordered mediation in July, Miami lawyers Edgar Miller and David Russell were ordered to pay $225,000 to the estate of one of the executives because a judge found the San Francisco claims to be bogus. Miller and Russell claim they were duped by the "relatives," but the mediating judge said they played a larger role.

The Athens, Greece, daily newspaper Adesmeytos, noting that so many people had left town for a national holiday, reported to readers that there was absolutely no news worthy of putting on the front page of its Aug. 13 edition. High school physics teacher Jim Schmitt is undergoing rabies vaccination after a bat flew into his mouth briefly during an early-morning run on Aug. 23 (Eau Claire, Wis.). A California prisoner on a highway work detail was using a Port-a-Potty (on wheels) when a truck driver inadvertently drove off with it to another site and had pulled it along for a while at 40 mph before anyone heard the inmate's screams (Morro Bay, Calif.). "Folk artist" Stephen Huneck opened a dog-themed church ("all creeds, all breeds, no dogma") to honor canines' spiritual and utilitarian service to humanity (St. Johnsbury, Vt.).

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

-- Life Imitates the Three Stooges: According to a complaint filed with police, at a Lincoln, R.I., School Committee meeting in August concerning the hiring of two assistant principals, member Lucille J. Mandeville, 45, grabbed the nose of colleague Patricia A. Iannelli, 51, and "proceeded to twist" it, saying, "What's the matter? Did you get your little nose twisted out of joint?" Observers said the rancor between the two had been building for a while.

-- The British magazine New Scientist reported in August that researchers at Japan's Central Research Institute of Electrical Power Industry were actively studying whether compact nuclear reactors (of the size of a broom closet and to be housed in a building's basement) could be used to provide electricity for population-intensive downtown-Tokyo blocks of office and apartment buildings. The Rapid-L reactor was originally designed to produce electricity for moon stations.

Mark Harter got only probation for killing a 31-year-old man who had come onto his property, got into an argument, and demanded that Harter either put his gun down or shoot him (Mt. Vernon, Mo., March). The Supreme Court of Canada ordered a new murder trial for Rejean Parent in May because the trial court had been too lenient with him; he had shot his estranged wife during an argument about their divorce terms, immediately after she said, "I told you I would take you to the cleaners" (Quebec City). Casimiro Ovalle, 59, survived a gunshot administered by his wife during a quarrel; he had handed her a rifle and dared her to shoot him (Brownsville, Texas, May).

-- The Northampton (England) Borough Council recently ordered Ruby Barber to remove the 2-year-old barbed-wire fence around her home because it might possibly injure someone who "foolishly" tried to climb it to come onto her property. Just before she put it up, she had been burglarized three times; since then, none.

-- In July, Colorado House Bill 01-1221 became law, banning aluminum underpants. Its purpose is to discourage shoplifters' using them to get past electronic detectors, but the law does provide an exception that allows people to wear them if they can prove it's for a "personal" reason.

-- Texas has created "tax districts" in nonresidential but business-rich areas, thus allowing developers to move a single "voter" into the district, approve some public-works projects, and move out. In a June series, The Dallas Morning News reported that businesses in a nonresidential tax district in Denton, Texas, needed a voter and that Dell Computer, located in the district, promised a laptop computer to anyone who would relocate and become the voter. Jerry Drake, an assistant city attorney in Denton, accepted the offer, moved into a trailer in the tiny district to establish residency, voted on the pro-development agenda (which carried, 1-0), and then moved back to his home in town. Drake insisted that he accepted the computer only for enduring the inconvenience of relocation and not as a bribe on how to vote.

-- Government Policy on Copulation: In July, Kenya's president Daniel arap Moi urged his countrymen (because of the ravages of AIDS) to refrain from sex altogether for the next two years. However, the government of population-dwindling Singapore has instituted subsidies, paid vacations, and education opportunities in order to increase procreation (with Singapore's establishmentarian Straits Times newspaper publishing a "Make-Out Guide" on how to have semi-public sex and what supplies were needed, e.g., lubricants, music, towelettes). And Malaysian Senator Jamilah Ibrahim (a woman) introduced legislation in August to limit nighttime work by women so they will be available for conjugal duty.

-- Antonio (no middle name) Vargas of Windsor, Calif., told the San Francisco Examiner in August that he's optimistic the San Bernardino County (Calif.) District Attorney's office has finally gotten straight after more than 20 years that he is not one of the eight Antonio Vargases they want for such things as missing child-support payments. Vargas said he has received various summonses and orders over the years aimed at other Antonio Vargases but that even as he gets things straight with one prosecutor, another mistakes him all over again, and the office only recently revamped its tracking system.

Michael Dean Messer of Waynesville, N.C., was bitten in August by his pet 4-foot-long timber rattlesnake, which he had taken outside "for some exercise" after coaxing it to swallow a hen's egg because he was so "worried about him (not) eating (lately)." Said Messer, "(M)y dog got him upset." And two days later, in Fayette County, Va., Alfred "Pooch" Preast was hospitalized after taking a bite on the hand from a timber rattler, but Preast was bitten in the middle of worshiping at the Pentecostal House of Prayer. (Preast's uncle was a snake-handling legend in the area, and his brother said Pooch was showing off for his new girlfriend, who herself had been raised in a snake-handling family but had dropped out years ago.)

-- The acrobatic New York City crook called Spiderman, Omar Waftalim Triplett, 23, was convicted in June of several muggings, but his behavior in front of the jury might have sealed the verdict. He shouted to the jury during opening arguments that he was really Mike Tyson and said, "I'll eat your children." Then, he announced he was partial to the name "Ali Hitler." Then, he testified that he couldn't have committed one of the crimes because he was spending the night with a "good friend" (whose name and address had slipped his mind). Then, he quickly retestified that he perhaps did have an altercation with police on the night in question, with them "trying to shoot me" but that he escaped; after all, he asked, "Is it illegal to run? Is it wrong to disguise myself?"

Arrested and charged with murder: Kevin Wayne Coffey (Port Arthur, Texas, July); Terry Wayne Freeman (Peoria, Ill., August); Michael Wayne Farmer (arrested in Wamego, Kan., and charged with a Baltimore murder, August); Dallas Wayne Shults (Sevier County, Tenn., August); Donald Wayne Darling II (Florence, Ala., July). Being sought as a murder suspect: Lewis Wayne Seay (Moreland, Ga., August). Committed suicide while on the lam as a murder suspect: David Wayne Outlaw Sr. (Dallas, August). Executed for murder: Jerald Wayne Harjo (Macalester, Okla., July).

A 28-year-old woman was arrested and accused of stealing software and videotapes from a neighbor by patiently, over a two-week period, carving a 16-inch hole in their apartments' common wall and squeezing through (Yorii, Japan). Several cow carcasses were exposed by residents digging in yards in their brand-new subdivision's homes, which used to be a dairy farm (Ontario, Calif.). Lawyer Christina Gulotta was fined $13,000 and suffered a mistrial ruling in a medical malpractice case because she refused to stop dramatically frowning at nearly every adverse ruling by the judge (Suffolk County, N.Y.). Police in Calgary, Alberta, asked the public not to bring suspected bombs down to the station after one such helpful citizen did, which sent officers scurrying and resulted in a blast that put holes in the wall of the station.

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