-- On the heels of a journal report on increased use since 1999 of posthumous sperm extraction (so the family line can be continued even after the father passes away) came a June report than an Israeli researcher had grown maturing ovarian tissue in the lab after extracting it from aborted fetuses. If Dr. Tal Biron-Shenton's work eventually makes way for fully developed eggs, it would mean that a baby could be born even though her mother never was.

-- In June, Reuters profiled Jerri Lyons, 55, of Sebastopol, Calif., who conducts seminars on the legalities and etiquette of do-it-yourself funerals, which are supposedly becoming more popular as alternatives to $5,000 funeral home services. According to one Lyons client, personally bathing and dressing a deceased friend made the loss easier to accept. Tip: Ice must be applied after about 24 hours (packages of frozen vegetables OK). A funeral-industry analyst said Lyons was not a threat; of more concern to the industry these days was, as Reuters put it, "a soft mortality rate due in part to a weak flu season."

(1) "Man Gets Life Sentence for Spitting" (a Tulsa World report on the sentence of domestic abuser John Marquez, 36, who got one year for the assault and life for spitting on the arresting officer, Sapulpa, Okla., May). (2) "Male Infertility Can Be Passed on to Children" (a Reuters story on Cornell professor Gianpiero Palermo's work, which reports that sperm from a low-sperm-count man can be injected into an egg to create an embryo, but that the embryo will still possess the genetic defect that led to the father's low sperm count, July).

-- According to a wrongful firing lawsuit filed in June by a former media relations assistant for the Sacramento Kings pro basketball team, star player Doug Christie is not permitted to speak to any female other than his wife, for any reason. The assistant said she was fired because she innocently passed along a telephone message to Christie in the course of her work, but that when Mrs. Christie found out, she pressured the organization to fire her and reaffirm the Christie family policy.

-- Child Care by Ultimatum: Norcross, Ga., police arrested parents Khalidan Tunkara, 28, and Olin Washington, 32, after one of whom, following a squabble in a parking lot, left their 9-month-old girl on the ground and drove away, intending to pressure the other parent to take the kid, but that parent then drove off, too (April). The same thing happened with parents Jennifer Jones, 21, and the father of her 3-week-old girl, in front of a beauty salon in Elgin, Ill., where police found the baby in the street (February). The same thing happened with parents Christy Leann Radacy, 23, and the father of her 2-year-old twin daughters in Lake Worth, Texas, where police found the girls lying on busy state road 199 (May).

-- Earlier this year in Mobile, Ala., Daina Sancho, 42, and Irwin Vincent ("I.V.") O'Rourke III, 14, were married after a several-months' courtship. Said the boy's approving father (of Sancho's infatuation), "If you've met the man of your dreams, why wait?" The couple live in Gonzales, La., but I.V. could not marry there until he turns 16; Alabama permits 14-year-olds to marry if they have their parents' permission.

-- On May 25 in the town of Baqubah, Iraq, Ms. Iman Salih Mutlak, 22, was gunned down by U.S. soldiers, who said she relentlessly charged at them, despite orders to halt, intending to explode the 10 grenades she was carrying. While some Iraqis treated her as a courageous martyr, her family in Zaqaniyah, Iraq, was disgusted with her, not because they are pro-American, but because she shamed them by leaving home without permission. Said her father, to an Associated Press reporter in May, "Had she returned home, I would have killed her myself and drunk her blood."

-- The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said that the June test launch of an SM-3 rocket in Hawaii, which failed to hit the incoming missile it was programmed to shoot down, was not a failure but actually a success. Said MDA spokesman Chris Taylor, "(I)ntercept was not the primary objective," but rather, the gathering of "great engineering data" was. (A recent General Accounting Office report criticized the MDA for using "immature technology.")

-- Where the Fault Lies: Gilbert D. Walker, 43, arrested (and then released) in Panama City, Fla., after crazily breaking into a neighbor's house and chasing her with a dagger, said the problem was that he had drunk too much jasmine tea (July). And heroin-cocaine addict Amanda C. Hagan, 29, brought to a Norristown, Pa., hospital after an overdose, said it was the hospital's fault that she shot up again in her bed because it let in the visitor who resupplied her (June). And fired Rochester, N.Y., police officer Clint Jackson, 24, convicted of fondling eight women during traffic stops, said he was contemplating a lawsuit against the police department for inadequate training (July).

In June in the state penitentiary near Indiana, Pa., Raymond Davenport, 19, doing time for aggravated assault, told fellow inmates that he did not believe them when they told him that another inmate had recently gotten his hand stuck in a prison toilet. It was impossible, he said, and Watch this! -- he would show them. A short while later, guards had to call in civilian firefighters with an air chisel to free Davenport's arm.

Tyrone Henry, 30, appeared here in 2000 when arrested in Tucson, Ariz., for running a scheme in which female college students were paid $10 to "test" facial cream but which cream turned out to be Henry's sperm. He was convicted of fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison, but is still (according to a June 2003 Tucson Weekly story) aggressively proclaiming that he violated no law. Argues Henry: The women were adults; there was no sexual contact; they were paid; Henry did not "expose" himself because the girls were blindfolded. Henry said he was just pursuing "the American dream" with his Web site selling men photos of women's sperm-adorned faces.

-- In May at the 24 Hour Fitness Center in Englewood, Colo., a 55-year-old client died of a heart attack during a workout, but before the body could be properly removed, several club members continued their workouts less than 6 feet away. And Ukrainian scientists told the Agence France-Presse news service in April that worms that survived the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl (where radioactivity is still 100 times higher than normal) are more reproductively active than they were before the disaster.

-- Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (63) Genetic modification experiments using DNA from jellyfish to create some organism or other that lights up, such as an aquarium-pet zebrafish that glows yellow and green, created in Taiwan by the Taikong Corporation (June). (64) And the man with a police obsession who dresses as a cop and makes free-lance traffic stops with emergency flashers on his car, only to discover that the person he stopped is a real police officer, as happened when Clifford Holloway, 30, stopped off-duty officer Matthew Bandler in Kansas City, Mo. (June).

-- Becky Nyang, 26, was hospitalized while on holiday after being struck by lightning, attracted to her face by her tongue stud, leaving her with severe blisters about the mouth, face and feet (Corfu island, Greece). Mongolian sumo champion Asashoryu was disqualified during the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament when he inexplicably pulled a World Wrestling Entertainment move and took down his opponent by yanking his hair (Nagoya, Japan). And a 4-year-old girl was hit by a computer that came flying out of a 12th floor apartment window, flung by a father angry that his 12-year-old daughter wouldn't stay off the Internet (Seoul).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- British shock artist Damien Hirst, chronicled several times in News of the Weird (e.g., skinned dead cattle in copulating positions), told The Guardian newspaper in June that he had discovered a new refinement after giving up drinking. Said Hirst: "I can drink, I can take drugs, and I can produce art. But the art starts looking stupid." Once, he said, he wanted to cover a pig in vibrators to look like a hedgehog and call it Pork-u-Pine. His new installation, set for London in the fall, features Jesus and the apostles as 13 Ping-Pong balls bobbing on fountains of red wine, and another piece on the disciples features several pickled bull's heads.

-- On June 28, as Orange County (Calif.) sheriff's deputy Owen Hall was standing beside a car he had stopped, he was shot in the leg with an arrow. After Hall pulled the arrow out and reported to a hospital, deputies combed the neighborhood and finally located archer Tri Thanh Lam, who had apparently been practicing in his back yard when an arrow got away from him. Lam was arrested, but he went free two days later when authorities realized that he had committed no crime, since the state's negligent-shooting law applies only to guns.

-- Business is apparently good for "pet psychics" and "communicators" who not only claim to understand animals' emotions in human terms but work with a client base that has included spiders, an iguana, a snake, a skunk, a hawk, a camel and cockroaches, and can do most of their work remotely by having the pet stand close to the telephone (at about $25 for 15 minutes). The Animal Planet channel has a weekly program, "Pet Psychic," and newspapers recently profiled practitioners in Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. (Revelations: Spiders mostly express interest in not being killed, and one French poodle's issue was supposedly the dog's having imaged everything in French instead of English.)

-- God's Been Busy: Christian Broadcasting Network reported in June that it was no coincidence that the Bush administration's April and May announcements to support a separate Palestinian state were followed by "the worst months of tornadoes in American history" (375 twisters in eight days) and other meteorological disasters; God is punishing the United States, CBN said, for supporting the biblically unthinkable division of Israel. And in May in Brunswick, Ga., after Mary Burgess inherited a cockapoo dog named Cindy and $10,000 to care for her, she told a probate court that God had recently told her she would actually need "$50,000" for Cindy; Burgess had figured expenses (e.g., $225 a month for haircuts) as even more, but said she'd accept the Lord's number.

-- According to a New York Times report, a 1985 New York law, passed to make sure medical-malpractice victims are adequately compensated from the date of their injury, requires judges to add mandatory interest payments to all awards, while other New York laws require the jury also to impose interest payments over the same period; that meant that in a 1990 case against New York-Presbyterian Hospital, finally approved by the state's highest court in April 2003, the jury's $40 million, interest-included judgment was automatically increased to $140 million.

-- D'Oh: When a pair of bald eagles at Kentucky's game farm in Frankfort produced an extremely rare (for in-captivity eagles) egg in April, officials destroyed it because to allow it to hatch would have violated their federal permit; a federal official said the Kentucky officials should have just shipped it to them. And in May, Laurie Hanniford, of Carlisle, Pa., was fined $352 for failure to file a state tax return in 2000, when she was 14, on total earnings of $316, for which no tax was due, anyway.

-- California's Got Issues: According to an April New York Times report, California has spent $13 million in education money since 2001 defending its deteriorating school facilities against a class-action lawsuit; the state argues that it is providing as best it can on a shrinking budget (which of course has shrunk by $13 million just on this lawsuit). And a California Senate committee revealed in May that misconduct investigations of prison employees proceed so slowly that an accused worker could be on paid leave for more than two years before ultimately being fired when the charges prove true.

Democracy in Action

-- Among the memorable recent local government meetings: In Shutesbury, Mass., seating at the town meeting was divided into those wearing perfume or aftershave, those who never do, and those who never do but forgot and wore some that day (May). In Chelmsford, Mass., the town council was split on whether to open the meeting with a Pledge of Allegiance and spent nearly an hour debating such issues as whether the meeting might already be "open" and thus could not "open" with the Pledge (April). And in Hutto, Texas, the council debated whether the mayor could use an economic development grant to buy a huge steel and fiberglass hippopotamus as a town business mascot (June).

-- The Speaker of the New Zealand House ruled in May that, though laptop computers are forbidden in the chamber, one member could bring in his carburetor and work on it, as long he didn't make noise. And the Green Party in Granada, Spain, for the country's May elections, offered a comprehensive platform that included issuing "sex vouchers" to give adults under age 25 local hotel-room discounts to encourage couples' intimacy (and safe sex and contraception) because most people that age still live with their parents.

In Easton, Pa., in June, Richard James Clader, 38, was sentenced to at least seven months in prison for a series of episodes on state roads 22 and 33 in which eventually 27 people contacted authorities to report that a motorist (identified as Clader) had driven nude, with the horn blasting, while vigorously masturbating. Clader told the judge that he believes his behavior stemmed from feeling neglected as a child and later by his wife, but said he is making substantial progress.

In Racine, Wis., in January, city and state officials knocked on Angie Anderson's door to inform her that they were about to capture a sickly owl in a tree in her yard, but she explained that the reason it appeared immobile was that it was a fake owl, purchased two years earlier from Wal-Mart for $14.99. And a consciousness-raising stunt by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals hit a snag in March at the Palm Springs Middle School in Hialeah, Fla., when PETA was informed that its sign in Spanish on its life-size cow prop, reading "Echar la Leche" (translation of their slogan, "Dump Dairy") was also slang for "ejaculate."

In 1996, U.S. Republican political strategist Roger Stone was forced to leave Bob Dole's presidential campaign when a magazine revealed that Stone and his wife had placed ads, with kinky photos of themselves, in swingers' magazines. In June 2003, British Conservative Party think tank executive Dougie Smith was revealed to be the founder and coordinator of the 5-year-old Fever Parties, which are upscale orgies held periodically in fashionable townhouses and country mansions, costing couples the equivalent of US$125 to attend. (However, Smith appears to be secure in his job.)

A 36-year-old woman drowned in a fast-moving river after jumping in to rescue her golden retriever, which paddled ashore with relative ease while rescue efforts for the woman were under way (Kyoto, Japan, June). A 26-year-old man was killed after he asked his uncle to stab him in the chest to see if a bulletproof vest would protect him (Lakewood, Colo., June). A veteran skydiver accidentally crashed into a veteran hangglider at about 4,000 feet, killing both men (Brackley, England, June).

A 67-year-old woman, outraged that Guinness recognized only an 831-gallstone-removal surgery as the world's record, said she would submit her 3,110 stones (from a 1981 surgery), which fortunately she has saved (Neustrelitz, Germany). In land-scarce Japan, the Tokyo city government started selling small cemetery plots for the first time since 1960, at prices ranging from US$30,000 to US$86,000. And career criminal Gary Cowan, whose latest sentence was up, confessed to three more crimes with the hope he would be allowed to stay in prison to finish a restaurant management course (Cambridge, England).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- Motorist Catherine Donkers got a ticket in Portage County, Ohio, on May 8 for not having her baby strapped in, mainly because she was breastfeeding it while she drove. Rather than pay the $100 fine, Donkers' husband, Brad Barnhill, demanded a trial with himself as the defendant, in that his First Christian Fellowship for Eternal Sovereignty teaches that the husband must take responsibility for all of his wife's public actions. (That religion's principal focus, according to founder Christopher Hansen, is keeping "God-given rights" free of "encroachment of the Beast," which is defined as the government.) Barnhill said that at his next court appearance, he will make a citizen's arrest of the prosecutor.

-- Increasingly, chickens are being kept as pets in suburban homes, according to an Associated Press writer in June (though reporting with scant evidence). A Bala Cynwyd, Pa., family has nine chickens, which are "aesthetically pleasing," said the owner, even "cool." A Cedar Hill, Mo., woman recalled the 38 chickens she has had over the years and said "the best part" was "knowing them as individuals." Another Bala Cynwyd woman said her chickens are faithful in the way they follow her around the yard and are "very sweet. They give back."

(1) Life Imitates the Three Stooges: Providence, R.I., high school teacher Michael Dame was charged with assault in June when, being taunted by a truant student who had stuck his head in Dame's classroom, Dame slammed the door, catching the student's head inside. (2) Life Imitates the Movie "Carrie": Dorothy VerValen filed a lawsuit against the city of Sultan, Wash., for a broken ankle suffered when she stepped onto her father's gravesite at the town cemetery to clear away moss, and the plot caved in beneath her. (In June, the judge ruled it wasn't the city's fault.)

In June, the St. Paul Pioneer Press profiled counselors Lynn Baskfield and Ann Romberg, who use the technique of "equine-assisted coaching" to help clients like Mari Harris, who wants to boost her singing career. In a typical session at a Stillwater, Minn., farm, Harris would ride and walk a horse until struck with some dramatic insight on how to achieve show-business success. Said Romberg, "It's much less difficult to accept feedback from a horse than a human." Another client said that when his usually passive horse suddenly sped up in a frenzy, "It got me thinking." "I (had) let (my) business lead me," he realized, apparently for the first time, and thus started drawing a better balance between work and family.

-- Tacky People's Rights: Among the more effortless budget cuts this year proposed by California (which is facing a near-catastrophic financial crisis) was $400,000 by ending the free stocking of trout in 10 Los Angeles County lakes, but local fishermen went nuts and got the county Board of Supervisors to denounce the cut. And when Boston Mayor Thomas Menino ended a longtime giveaway program this year, of free golf privileges for 15 local ministers, several black minister-golfers were incensed, like Rev. James Allen, who said, "I don't want to make it a racial thing, but it seemed like that's what it was."

-- New Frontiers in PC: Sal Santana II, 12, was suspended for three days from an El Paso, Texas, middle school for sexual harassment after sticking his tongue out at a girl who said she wouldn't be his girlfriend. And the Leander, Texas, school board voted in June to prohibit students from "teasing." And Britain's National Society for Epilepsy said in April it had received several inquiries from teachers in training who had been instructed to avoid the term "brainstorming," as offensive to epileptics (substitute: "thought shower") (but the society said brainstorming was OK).

-- Just Can't Stop Myself: Investigatory work by a scorned woman turned up more than 50 others who were victims of the same man, 29-year veteran U.S. Army Col. Kassem Saleh (most recently stationed in Afghanistan), who struck up e-mail romances with the women and wrote "the most intoxicating love letters" one woman had ever read while assuring her (while also assuring others) that they would soon marry. The 5-foot-10 Saleh created at least one skeptical woman, though: Saleh had claimed to be 6-foot-5, but when a first-meeting date with the woman neared, he wrote that he had shrunk about 5 inches due to repeated parachute jumps. Saleh issued a public apology to the women after The New York Times outed him.

-- In 1998, Barbara Downey killed her 7-year-old daughter with two execution-style shots to the back of the head, and she was committed to a state mental hospital; in March 2003, doctors concluded that she is no longer mentally ill, and she was released. And Johnnie Eugene Maxwell, 56, accused of killing his father in 2001, was freed in June after a judge in Hillsborough, N.C., concluded that a stroke had left Maxwell cognitively unable to defend himself at trial (in that he can only speak three words: yes, no and a certain cussword); Maxwell could not be sent to a mental hospital, either, because he is not currently insane or a threat to himself or others.

-- Anthony Perks, an endocrinologist and professor of gynecology at the University of British Columbia, reporting in the July issue of Discover magazine, set out his unique theory of the symbolic meaning of the prehistoric Stonehenge monument in England: The paired, capped stones (one smooth, one rough) represent the female's smooth skin as against the male's rough skin, and the smooth stones match the locations of the vulva's labia minora and labia majora, with an altar stone in the position of the clitoris. "Stonehenge," he said, "could represent the opening by which the earth mother gave birth to the plants and animals on which ancient people so depended."

America's most underrated highway safety problem appears to be senior drivers who mistakenly step on the accelerator instead of the brake: Henry Clax, 78, Jersey City, N.J. (hit three lampposts and then 13 people coming out of a Jehovah's Witnesses assembly, April); Marcella Stahly, 63, Albuquerque (tore through the front wall of a fruit market, March); Ms. Nahid Nainzadeh, 64, New Fairfield, Conn. (plowed halfway into a bank, April); Leonard Borok, 81, Coral Springs, Fla. (crashed through the front window of a post office, May); Waunona Reed, 85, Crescent City, Ore. (struck 26 people leaving an Assembly of God church, January).

-- A suspected burglar in Albany, Ore., apparently escaped in June after failing in his quest to break into a warehouse, but he left behind his bolt cutters, some burned clothing and part of his scalp. Police said the man had attempted to cut through a 480-volt line and probably had "severe" burns.

-- The burglar who is captured because his tracks lead away from a crime scene in the mud or snow is a story category previously identified as No Longer Weird. However, in May, Albert Jackson Dowdy, 22, in Grants Pass, Ore., took incompetence to a new level. According to police, he tried to smash a glass door with a paint can, but the can broke open. Dowdy eventually got into the home, said police (total take: a can of tuna fish and a box of oatmeal), but on his way out stepped in the spilled paint and created tracks to a nearby motel, where police eventually arrested him.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress released in June revealed that Washington, D.C., students score the lowest in the country in reading, even though the system spends more money per pupil than 49 states do, and even though teacher salaries are among the highest in the nation. And Washington, D.C.'s, Options Public Charter School replaced its principal, Clarence Edward Dixon, in May after learning that he is a felon with a long arrest record and in fact had been reporting to work daily wearing an ankle monitor as a condition of probation for credit-card fraud.

A couple said the reason why their 18-month-old son survived a five-story fall out of an unscreened window, with only a broken leg, was because he landed on his loaded diaper (Ottawa, Ontario). A Roman Catholic priest blessed his town's beauty pageant, a preliminary to Miss Italy, saying, "Beauty is never embarrassing, for it is a gift from the Lord" (Civita Castellana, Italy). Taxpayers in Manchester, England, learned they were paying for an Urdu-speaking translator because a newly elected city councilman from a Pakistani neighborhood barely speaks English.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)