-- Toning up one's body is apparently a need that unites diverse soldiers in America's so-called culture war. In July, USA Today profiled the Lord's Gym in the West Palm Beach suburb of Greenacres, catering to devout Christians (sales pitch: "Your body is a temple for Christ"), where mothers say they can bring their teenage daughters without men ogling them. But in April, Reuters profiled a "Slavercise" class in New York City, where dominatrix "Mistress Victoria" led her clients through punishing fitness and weight-loss routines while wielding an intimidating riding crop.

-- You Break It, You Bought It: Australia's High Court ruled 4-3 in July that because Dr. Stephen Cattanach's sterilization surgery on Ms. Kerry Melchior had failed, it was Cattanach's (and the Queensland Health Department's) responsibility to pay the cost of raising the Melchiors' unwanted child until age 18. The decision stunned the medical profession and insurers in Australia, especially because Cattanach had relied on Melchior's inaccurate statement that her right fallopian tube had been removed at age 15 (and so performed surgery only on the left tube).

-- The Salon Mexico restaurant in New York City introduced a $45 burrito in July, with a filling of filet mignon and truffles. And the founder of Paul Mitchell salon products recently launched John Paul Pets (shampoos for dogs), joining Estee Lauder's Origins line in the so-far-uncrowded upscale pet hair-care field. And a June runway show at Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo featured eight dogs modeling fashions such as a yellow dog raincoat (US$72) and a wedding dress and matching hat for dogs.

-- At a New York legislative committee hearing in May, a Manhattan building owner revealed that he had hired as a lobbyist former U.S. Sen. Alfonse d'Amato to make a single telephone call to the chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority regarding a real-estate issue that eventually was decided in the owner's favor and for which he paid d'Amato $500,000.

Until May, Darlene Heatherington, 40, was a well-regarded, high-achieving city councilwoman in Lethbridge, Alberta, but then she traveled to Great Falls, Mont., on city business, during which trip an incident occurred. In several shifting public statements since then, Heatherington said she was drugged, kidnapped to Las Vegas and raped. However, police in Las Vegas, Great Falls and Lethbridge have contradicted her accounts, and (in Great Falls and Lethbridge) have charged her with filing false reports. Still, she has stuck to her story (baffling most people in Lethbridge) and denies any emotional problems ("I'm a long way from nuts," she said). (A National Post columnist wrote in June that, most likely, she had a consensual tryst and was then tormented by her own super-straight image.)

Brian Kline, 10, playing with his father's old handcuffs (Dad used to be a security agent) on Father's Day, lovingly cuffed himself to dad William Kline Jr., 33, but the key was lost, and William called police (in Des Moines, Iowa) to get the cuffs off. As is routine, police ran Kline through their database, found two arrest warrants outstanding, and re-cuffed Kline for real. And in Tulsa, Okla., in July, suspected shoplifter Jacob Wise, 18, had cleverly removed security tags from clothes he was allegedly walking out of a store with, but the alarm went off anyway because he had merely put the removed tags in his pocket.

In July, at an isolated hospital in Peru's Andes mountains, Dr. Cesar Venero realized that patient Centeno Quispe could not be airlifted to a full-service hospital in time to save his life from a brain injury incurred during a street fight. Luckily, the hardware store in the town of Andahuaylas was open, and with a drill and pliers, Venero (who earns the equivalent of about US$5,000 a year) saved Quispe's life by making the necessary holes in the skull to remove the clots that were putting pressure on the brain.

-- According to Norway's Newspaper VG (which is currently running a series on odd summer jobs), teenager Svein Tore Hauge's job may take the prize: Armed with a shovel and a container, he works at Saerheim Plant Research, following cattle around and catching their excreta before it can hit the ground. Because the work-product is used for scientific study, it must be "pristine," free of grass, dirt, foreign bacteria, etc. Sometimes, it's easy, he said, but, "Sometimes it just sprays in all directions."

-- A labor tribunal in Denmark concluded in May that the rule about not drinking alcoholic beverages on the job, issued by management of MJ Mason Co. (Broenderslev, Denmark), was illegal and could not be enforced. The Mason owner had issued a no-drinking rule, but since he did not follow the procedure in the union contract, it was declared void, at least as to employees' break times.

-- In the latest news from Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center, a researcher said in June that his study had found that men's underarm odor has a stress-reducing effect on women. The week before that, The Wall Street Journal, profiling the Gillette Co.'s research lab, reported that lab director Ahmet Baydar is working not just on ordinary antibacterial-plus-fragrance products but on a substance that actually blocks odor receptors in other people's noses. (Gillette's tests use a synthetic malodor compound so strong that more than a few molecules can make a room uninhabitable, and involve five odor judges who sniff actual armpits and rate them 1 to 10, with 10 meaning "your head snaps back.")

-- The 50th Vienna Biennale opened in Austria in June with its usual array of avant-garde art, including another chapter in Canadian videomaker Jana Sterbak's series on reactions to pain. This time, she strapped a camera to a Jack Russell terrier, Stanley. Among his experiences was an innocent but intrusive exploration of a porcupine, which eventually provoked a quill attack, at which point the video goes haywire as Stanley jumps and writhes in pain. (Stanley appeared with Sterbak at the exhibit and, by his demeanor, apparently has no hard feelings.)

-- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit recently ruled that just because convicted marijuana dealer Frederick R. James had sent the judge invoices for $500,000 each time the judge uttered his name during the trial (which his threats to do were reported in News of the Weird in 2002), that was not proof that James was legally insane. The court thus rejected James's appeal of his 22-year sentence, which makes it further unlikely James will ever collect on the $151 million he says District Judge Michael R. Reagan owes him for the "copyright" violations.

Syracuse, N.Y., dungeonmaster John Jamelske, 68, sentenced to 18 years to life in July for holding a series of girls and women as sex slaves underneath his house (though all were eventually released), told the judge that he thought of the slaves as his "buddies," that he would get together with them in the "party room," and that he did not "kidnap" them because no ransom was requested. And in Doylestown Borough, Pa., in May, ex-pediatrician Alva Hartwright, sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison for sexually abusing homeless teenage boys in his care, continued in May to insist that the many enemas he gave them were "medically necessary" and that the reason he had a huge cache of child pornography was because he found the pictures "aesthetically pleasing," in the same way as his other photos of landscapes and wildlife.

A man allegedly seeking a street-corner prostitute was arrested and, per local law, had his vehicle confiscated, even though his vehicle that night was a municipal transit bus, which he was returning after a shift (Cicero, Ill.). A 45-year-old man fleeing police in a high-speed chase between Oak Ridge, Texas, and Lebanon, Okla., kept calling 911 on his cell phone, asking the operators to tell police to stop chasing him. The Cranbrook (British Columbia) Daily Townsman profiled Irene Weller's cat, Patches, which nurses not only her kittens but also two mice that Weller had recently ejected from the home.

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

-- 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.)