-- In December, according to New Scientist magazine, Swiss inventor Paolo Rais introduced his solution to the boring dinner party in which unfortunate guests, by the luck of the draw, are seated next to uninteresting people: a 12-to-24-seat dining table whose chairs keep moving so that one cannot spend more than 10 minutes trapped next to the same person. Chairs (and a wooden tray containing your food) move at 3 inches per minute. The models vary in price from about $29,000 to about $44,000.

-- Fourteen-year-old Christina Santhouse lives a normal teen-age life in Bristol, Pa., in almost every respect except for a partial paralysis of her left arm and leg, caused by the removal six years ago of half of her brain. According to an October Associated Press report, her surgery (to eliminate Rasmussen's encephalitis, which caused up to 100 brief seizures a day) has not penalized her compared to her supposedly full-brained classmates, in that she remains a straight-A student and loves 'N Sync.

-- Update: Transsexual Tammy Lynn Felbaum (formerly Tommy Wyda), 43, was found guilty in December of involuntary manslaughter and other charges in connection with the February death of her sixth husband, James Felbaum, from complications after his castration. Tammy at first said James castrated himself, then admitted she did it but at James' specific, written request. The Butler County, Pa., judge reached his verdict based on testimony from a jailer who said Tammy told her that castration was the only way she could see to rehabilitate the marriage after an alleged affair by James, and despite testimony from one of Tammy's earlier spouses, Lynn (formerly Tim) Barner, who let Tammy perform her castration because she was an expert. Said Barner, "She could castrate a dog in less than five minutes."

In September, an executive of the Bolton English soccer team ate sheep's testicles, raw squid and snails to uphold his end of the deal after his players won an impressive victory (but they would have had to eat the meal if they had lost). And South Korean archers cleaned up sewage in Seoul and stared at dead bodies in a cemetery in mental preparation for the grueling September World Outdoor championships in Beijing (which the men won, despite losing four squad members because the training was too rigorous). And in Miami in October, a dozen Burger King marketing people (among 100 in a corporate team-building exercise) were treated for serious burns after they walked on hot coals (which a trainer had assured them would not be painful if they adopted the correct attitude).

-- A November report in the Northwestern University daily newspaper described Dr. Michael Bailey's research project (which had already been vetted by the school's ethics people) to determine sexual arousal rates of females by, respectively, heterosexual erotic images and lesbian erotic images. Coeds were recruited at $75 an hour (two to three times the going rate for campus research guinea pigs) to have the "vaginal photo-plethysmograph" inserted to measure moisture and swelling. Dr. Bailey's preliminary conclusion: Women (whether straight or gay) get aroused by either straight or lesbian scenes, whereas comparable research had shown that men were aroused only by images depicting their own sexual orientation.

-- In a December report in The Times of London, University of Nebraska geologist John Shroder (an Afghanistan specialist) said the Pentagon has a Remote-Sensing Gas-Detection Device that is so finely tuned that it can distinguish ethnic groups based on faint aromas of the foods that they eat.

-- The hottest arcade game in Japan recently has been Boong-Ga Boong-Ga, in which a player virtually jabs an oversized finger up the clothed derriere of one of eight loathed targets (e.g., "ex-boyfriend," "golddigger," "con man"), with the more aggressive the jab, the more pained the expression on the target's face. Japanese consumers are said to be more comfortable with the anal theme than consumers in the United States.

-- The Braehead Shopping Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, announced in November that for the holiday buying season, it would offer the female shopper temporary boyfriends/husbands on loan so that she would have someone to browse with if her own mate tended to reject the shopping experience. Said the organizer: "The Shopping Boyfriend is the ultimate retail therapist: enthusiastic, attentive, admiring and complimentary" and will "even say her bum looks small."

-- China Youth Daily and other Chinese newspapers reported instances in November and December in which job-seekers in Shanghai and the northern city of Anshan were turned down solely because their blood type was other than the desired type O. One interviewer allegedly said that type B people "lack independent thought, discretion and ability," but a Shanghai interviewer said he rejects only types A and AB because their possessors are reserved and temperamental. An Anshan employer said he got the idea to screen by blood type by studying in Japan, where he said the practice is common.

Dwight Pichette was serving 14 life terms (concurrently) on 58 convictions for robbery and related charges, yet his lawyer and others said he is one of the most intelligent and sensitive people they've ever met, and since he has been in prison (in Victoria, British Columbia), he has published three books, with a fourth having won a pre-publication arts award. In May, he received a supervised leave to attend a philosophy discussion downtown, gave his escort the slip, and tried two more bank robberies before being reapprehended. Pichette said that he was probably subconsciously sabotaging his future because, on that supervised leave, he realized how he'd tossed away his life. And the self-sabotage worked, because he now has 16 concurrent life terms.

Unlikely Model for al-Qaida: Twenty-one people who claim now that they speak for Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult (which killed 12 people and injured 5,000 in a 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack) said they have become a benign religious organization and changed their name to Aleph, and in November they started a computer business with the goal of earning enough money to compensate the cult's victims. So far, they have raised about $2.5 million. The most famous member, Shoko Asahara, remains in custody and on trial (trials are not constitutionally guaranteed "speedy" in Japan) for murder.

A 38-year-old, alcohol-fueled man, taking up the challenge of a 50-year-old man that if the younger man could outswim him in San Francisco Bay, he'd give the younger man his car, drowned (Berkeley, July). A 45-year-old surfer from Denver, attempting to capitalize on the 10-foot waves of Hurricane Juliette at the southern tip of Baja California, drowned (Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; July). A 48-year-old man was killed while attempting to pass a car he had been expressing his displeasure with for traveling too slow; as he swerved his pickup truck right to gently nudge the car, he lost control and smashed into a light pole (Laval, Quebec; November).

According to a lawsuit, a Wal-Mart manager, informed that an employee had allegedly fondled a 10-year-old girl in the store, offered the girl's mother a $25 gift certificate to forget the whole thing (Columbia, S.C.). A 49-year-old man was arrested for DUI with a record-challenging blood-alcohol reading of .532 (Lorain, Ohio). Arizona Cardinals' placekicker Bill Gramatica made his 16th field goal of the year (in 20 tries), against the Giants, leaped into the air in celebration, and ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament as he landed, ending his season and jeopardizing his career. Towing company employee Joseph Thomas Johnson, 33, was arrested for joyriding in rap singer Missy Elliott's 2001 Lamborghini (price: $330,000), during which he hit a stop sign and crashed, inflicting $160,000 damage.

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

-- In December, transgender aspirant Jamie Cooper, 16, of Birmingham, England, told reporters that he planned to store some of his sperm before he changes sexes so that, with the use of a surrogate womb, he can eventually be both the father and the mother of a child (which, if it happens, would be a world's first). Cooper is now living openly as a girl, has begun anti-testosterone injections, and, under National Health Service rules, will be eligible for surgery in five years. Various church spokespeople were horrified when told of Cooper's plans.

-- In December, a Nevada association of private security guards who work at the federal government's super-secret "Area 51" at Groom Lake, 90 miles from Las Vegas, went on strike for higher wages and benefits. In fact, the association president told reporters he could not even divulge the location of his workplace but that the questioner should "use your imagination." When at work, the guards report to the airport in Las Vegas and are flown in nondescript planes to the site, which they are trained to refer to as "nowhere" and "out of town." The guards are called "camo dudes" locally because they wear camouflaged uniforms on patrol.

-- Recidivist voyeur Daniel W. Searfoss, 43, was charged in November with using a tiny lens in his shoe, attached to a video camera he carried in a bag, to photograph underneath women's skirts at a flea market in Brandon, Fla. He had just finished probation for a similar incident at a Wal-Mart last year, and after detectives scanned 45 videotapes from Searfoss' home, they charged him with another November incident at a Plant City church (perhaps the one in which he performed community service on the Wal-Mart charge). At a December court hearing, the prosecutor told the judge that Searfoss had also tried to point his shoe under the dresses of several women in the county probation office.

A barber from Scotland was flown at government expense to the Netherlands just to cut the hair of accused Pan Am Flight 103 bomber (and Scottish prisoner) Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in July because security policy prevents local civilians from doing it. And police in New Bedford, Mass., admitted in November that they had hurt their case by discarding a partial bomb allegedly made by the high school students recently charged with conspiring to blow up their school, because they wrongly thought that policy was to use as evidence only active bombs. And in September, two Pennsylvania state troopers got in trouble for receiving complete, $60 prostitution services while working undercover, even though policy prevents such sex acts "except in a lifesaving situation or where officers' lives are at stake," according to a state police official.

-- At his October murder trial in Hackensack, N.J., Agustin Garcia, 49, did not dispute that he shot his former girlfriend to death on her wedding day, but he said the jury ought to sympathize with him, in that he could not help himself: On the day that he learned of her wedding, it had been only three days since he had last had sex with her himself. A psychiatrist testified that this was "acute adjustment disorder," but that apparently did not faze the jury, which sentenced Garcia to 30 years in prison.

-- Rangers at the Great Smoky Mountain National Park just across the North Carolina line in Tennessee canceled a massive search they had scheduled on Oct. 19 when the missing man (Chien Nguyen, 47, a school custodian from Smithfield, N.C.) turned up in a homeless shelter in Knoxville. Nguyen said he had gone to the park, and then to the shelter, because he needed to get away from women, believing that his status as a Buddhist monk was being jeopardized by too much intergender contact. (Indeed, the Knoxville shelter was men-only.)

-- Edinburgh, Scotland, postal worker Graham Fletcher, 25, was sentenced in October to only community service, on a plea-bargained charge of hoarding two items he should have delivered (reduced from the original 696 items). He said things started to go bad when he decided to surprise his wife while she was attending a ladies-night-out but found her engaged in a sex act outside a bar, up against a Ford van. Stunned, Fletcher said he wandered around in a daze, sank into depression, and eventually started hoarding mail as a "cry for help."

-- Howard Strumph filed a lawsuit in September against the Voorhes, Pa., Police Department, claiming that they were responsible for his wife's death in 1999 because they failed to enter the family home quickly enough to save her. The reason the police were reluctant to enter was because Strumph had just shot Mrs. Strumph, along with a handyman the couple employed, and police thought they might be in a standoff with a homicidal man. (Strumph later showed he intended only to shoot the handyman, whom he saw attacking his wife, but he was unsteady when he fired from his wheelchair and accidentally hit his wife.)

-- Kane Rundle, 22, filed a lawsuit for $1 million (Aus.) against the New South Wales State Rail company in Australia, based on his severe injuries from a 1994 incident. Rundle is brain-damaged because he hit his head while leaning out of a moving train, spraying graffiti. Rundle's lawyers believe the company knew that some passengers were spraying graffiti out of train windows and thus should have done more to prevent them from doing it.

In November, Philadelphia City Councilman Angel Ortiz was revealed to have been driving for the last 25 years without a license, including the last 17 years when he has been a municipal employee or council member. Said Ortiz, "I kept trying to make time to get a new license, and it seemed that something pressing always took precedence." A few days later, Ortiz was discovered also to have 53 outstanding parking tickets (face value, about $3,000), and as is often the case with public officials' misconduct, Ortiz made the story more interesting by denying that he knew about any of the tickets.

-- Expensive single acts of sexual intercourse occasionally hit the newspapers when celebrities are involved (such as tennis star Boris Becker's recent out-of-court settlement paying a reported $2.5 million in child support for the product of a brief interlude with a model in a restaurant closet). In November, a court in Birmingham, England, ordered plumber John Walker, 25, to pay what amounts to nearly $100,000 for an episode in which a much older woman seduced him when he was 15. Though he never saw her again, she remembered him and now claims she needs help raising their child. After a positive DNA match, Walker must pay until the kid turns 19 (or later, if the kid stays in school).

-- News of the Weird reported in 2001 that Kepler College in Seattle had won state higher-education certification for a curriculum in astrology and that the U.S. Department of Education had decided that vocational astrology students could qualify for federal loans and grants. Recently, India's higher-education curriculum planners decided that colleges in that country could offer courses in astrology at the graduate, post-graduate and research levels, and about 25 programs have been established. Critics say the policy is an ill-conceived plan by Hindu nationalists to extend their influence, but a New Delhi astrologer applauded the move, pointing out that astrology "seek(s) wisdom which no other science provides."

Firefighters in Argo, Ala., found a well-preserved (but dead) 6-foot-long brown shark lying on the side of Micklewright Road just off U.S. 11 and disposed of it after no one called to claim it. A 53-year-old man was hospitalized after two of the four homemade bombs he was carrying around in case he got mugged exploded (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.). A fired postal worker pleaded guilty to splattering former colleagues with a mixture of worms and porcupine feces in a vengeful return visit to the workplace (Grand Rapids, Mich.). A large woman was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after the 49-year-old man she was sitting on (attempting to persuade him to pay for the sex act he had allegedly purchased from her) died (Peoria, Ill.).

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

-- Two professors recently quit West Virginia University in protest of its new-agey Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health, an anxiety-reduction study organization named after a welder whose epiphany "catapulted him from a routine life of stress and insecurity into a state of deep peace, hopefulness, security and clarity." According to one professor in attendance at a recent Banks conference in Seattle, a Banks speaker presented photographs of "ice crystals formed in the presence of positive thoughts and (ice crystals) formed in the presence of negative thoughts," and then noted that the negative-thought ones "weren't as pretty," and then remarked, "I'm not a scientist myself, but this looks like evidence to me."

-- Rev. Jamyi Witch, a Wiccan, was appointed in December as one of the two official chaplains at the Waupun (maximum security) Correctional Institution, Waupun, Wis. She won the job over nine rivals despite the fact that only 30 of the 1,200 inmates are of Wiccan denomination and despite the fact that Wicca does not preach fear of eternal damnation, which many regard as a crucial message for that population.

According to the attorney for several Benicia (Calif.) High School students suspended for toilet-papering the school in November, principal Robert Palous, in meting out the punishment, described the kids' actions as the school's own World Trade Center attack. And in an October Associated Press story about turning the Miami house in which Elian Gonzalez lived into a shrine, one visitor said, "To us, (the day that Elian was taken away) was almost equivalent to the Twin Towers day." And in November, outgoing Frederick, Md., Mayor Jim Grimes, who for months had been trying to prevent the local newspaper from getting an arrested prostitute's files publicly disclosed (allegedly to protect some friends), reacted to a judge's finally releasing them by saying: "I absolutely feel that the same thing that happened at the World Trade Center has hit me. I was terrorized (by The Frederick News-Post)."

-- The city council of Edmonds, Wash., voted recently to toss out a 60-year-old, cheap-looking totem pole that had been donated to the city, but before it got to a landfill, demolition company employee Sydney Locke plucked it out of a trash bin and took it home. City officials for some reason resented Locke's action, and have filed a lawsuit against Locke to regain legal ownership of the totem pole, though not because they have found a use for it but rather to make sure it gets to and stays in the landfill.

-- According to a November Los Angeles Times report, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has issued 5 million "smart cards" to permanent residents since 1998 (containing all the unique personal information now being discussed to improve security against terrorism) but has not yet acquired any machines that can read the cards. Among other INS problems: INS's fingerprint system has been, and is still, unconnected to the FBI's fingerprint system; and its electronic database to track foreign students, created following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, now covers students in only 21 colleges.

-- To resolve a problem unknown in American governments, state authorities in Queensland, Australia, decided in October that local bureaucrats were taking too much time to process applications to open legal brothels and thus decided to adopt a fast-track program to jump-start the industry. The state government announced it would appoint an independent official to get more brothels up and operating, thus stymieing town officials who are opposed to having them in their neighborhoods.

-- In August, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection pleaded guilty to two felony counts, acknowledging that the agency itself had polluted the city's water (and that of Westchester County) with mercury and the suspected carcinogen PCB that leaked for years through its water-circulation equipment. According to testimony in federal court, the agency had known of several dozen leaks since 1988 but disregarded them. In one incident, six pounds of mercury was left in the system three years after the agency promised to clean it up, and the deputy director's excuse was that the area involved "is dark and is difficult to see."

-- A September Associated Press review of Department of Agriculture records revealed that more than 60 percent of federal farm subsidies given out last year went to just 10 percent of farmers, almost all of them well-to-do in the first place. Among the recipients were farms owned by David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson and basketball star Scottie Pippin. Asked one farmer, "Why are we giving millions of dollars to millionaires?"

In Singapore in September, Shahul Hameed Kuthubudeen, 17, had agreed to a favorable sentence on his conviction for obsessive hand-kissing of girls: He had been enrolled by his family into a religious school in India to break him of his habit, which in the latest case involved seven counts of extending his hand to girls, receiving her hand innocently in his, and then kissing the back of her hand repeatedly while refusing to let her go. Two weeks after the schooling was arranged but before he had left town, Kuthubudeen was arrested again for a similar attack on a 16-year-old girl in an elevator.

In November, the decayed body of a man who apparently died three years ago at age 46 was found in his apartment in Warminster, Pa. While this genre of news stories occurs often enough to be regarded as No Longer Weird, this story is different because of the number of people who had an opportunity during those three years to discover the body but did not. The regular postal carrier; the postal service supervisor; at least one neighbor; village officials who towed the man's car for expired registration; the condominium association president; the police (who received many calls from various people suggesting that something was amiss in the apartment); the condo association management company agent; and a sheriff's deputy (delivering a foreclosure notice, which he merely tacked up on the door) all failed to inquire seriously about the whereabouts of the resident or about the odor emanating from the apartment.

Fulton County (Ga.) police said the only reason Derrick Van, 36, got caught at all was because he dropped some coins in the course of a November home burglary. When he reached to pick them up, he locked eyes with the homeowner, who was hiding under a bed. Though the homeowner was originally hoping that Van would just leave, when their eyes met, he felt threatened and fired his .357 Magnum, wounding Van badly and sending him to the hospital.

A court in Sweden ordered a certified sperm donor to assume parental rights just because the lesbian couple he assisted have split up and the child needs support (about $265 a month more) (Orebro, Sweden). Yet another Swedish court, hearing a case of four teen-agers who threw a cake at King Carl Gustaf, found them guilty of high treason (but ordered only a fine, of about $370 each) (Stockholm). Police chased down and arrested a 42-year-old man suspected of shoplifting six packages of corn removers from a Wal-Mart, an easy collar because his corns slowed down his getaway (San Diego). Florida judge Joyce Julian, 44, was arrested at 2 a.m. at a resort's conference center after she, intoxicated and nude from the waist down, verbally challenged security officers and then fled (Amelia Island, 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/.)