Hurricane Isabel roared through Virginia Beach, Va., in September, inflicting serious property damage, despite public calls for prayer to keep it away by prominent resident Rev. Pat Robertson, whose Christian Broadcasting Network is headquartered there. (In 1998, Robertson condemned the city of Orlando, Fla., for sponsoring a Gay Days festival, and warned that the city could be torn up during the subsequent hurricane season, as God punishes those who promote homosexuality. Instead, the first hurricane of that season (Bonnie) made a direct hit on Virginia Beach.)

Alongside recent weight-loss and body-part-growth mass e-mails have been messages of Robert Todino, 22, of Woburn, Mass., who uses the spam (100 million messages so far) to locate time-travel hardware to buy because of his need to revisit his childhood, during which he believes a woman drugged him and implanted a device to give her followers the ability to monitor his every move. According to an August Wired magazine story, Todino has earnestly been seeking an "Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement" and an "AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor," among other gadgets, but that "the conspiracy" has subverted his attempts to acquire them.

The school district based in Elgin, Ill., decided in August that, although four new schools that cost $40 million were ready to be occupied, the district has no money to operate them and that they will thus stay locked up for the entire school year, at least. And a September General Accounting Office report described (based on undercover work in seven states) the customer-friendliness that motor vehicle offices display when people try to obtain driver's licenses fraudulently; clerks routinely give "applicants" back their bogus papers (instead of confiscating them) and cheerfully instruct them exactly how to "correct" the applications to assure that they'll get that license on the next attempt.

-- A July Wall Street Journal report revealed that some women's clothing stores in Tehran, Iran, do a brisk backroom business in tight, colorful, sheer, form-fitting robes that are severely frowned upon by the conservative Islamic government, which prescribes the formless hijab robe. One clerk showed one that was actually a "paper-thin beige tunic made of stretchy material with two slits on each side," "with a matching tank top." Other popular robes make strategic use of zippers for women who have to convert their flashy clothing into something conservative in a hurry.

-- In September, religious fundamentalists brawled in Brooklyn, N.Y., when the locally dominant Satmar sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews moved aggressively against slightly less-ultra-Orthodox Jews who were using a loophole to be able to push baby strollers and wheelchairs around during the Sabbath, when such activity is prohibited in public. "The (Satmars) were like animals," said a security guard who witnessed the incident. (The "eruv" loophole allows such labor inside a symbolic wall, which the more liberal ultras had constructed with sticks and string.)

-- State and local law-enforcement officials met in Salt Lake City in August to discuss the growing and seemingly intractable problem of the radical, Mormon-based polygamist community that reaches from Hildale, Utah, to Colorado City, Ariz., and which has been denounced by mainstream Mormons. Issues included not just religious freedom and forced marriage for young girls, but the $5 million annually in federal benefits that go to polygamist wives who say they are "single" mothers on their welfare applications.

-- In August, bookstores began selling Revolve, a glossy, 392-page softcover title that directs a thought-by-thought rendition of the New Testament to its target audience of teenage girls, alongside text on typical teen-magazine subject matter such as beauty, fashion secrets and dating. (For example, proper etiquette, according to Revolve founder Laurie Whaley, requires the boy to initiate a relationship: "There's no indication from Scripture that Mary Magdalene ever (called) Christ.")

-- Florida wildlife officials, suspecting that Israel A. Cervantes was illegally shooting at deer from his car in the Ocala National Forest in August, asked to inspect his home freezer for stored meat, and, professing innocence, Cervantes agreed. There was no deer meat, but apparently Cervantes forgot about the pound of marijuana in the freezer, and he was arrested.

-- William Penny was arrested in Greenwood, Ind., in August, putting a halt to his alleged identity-theft business. He was caught because, three times in a three-day period, he had aroused suspicion of several people in a neighborhood by approaching a certain ATM on foot, carrying a motorcycle helmet, donning the helmet as he neared the ATM's camera, making a withdrawal (with someone else's ID, allegedly), walking away, and then removing the helmet.

(1) "Man With Ear Ache Gets Vasectomy" (an August Reuters dispatch from Rio de Janeiro about a patient who answered the wrong doctor's call at a clinic and endured the procedure because he thought the ear inflammation had deep roots). (2) "Groups Fight Over Fate of Feral Chihuahuas" (an August Reuters report on 170 wild Chihuahuas taken from a breeder in Acton, Calif., and ultimately given to one animal rescue outfit rather than another). (3) "Woman With No Baby Given Caesarean" (a September Melbourne (Australia) Herald Sun report on an overweight woman who went into cardiac arrest at a hospital after telling doctors she was pregnant, motivating them to try to deliver the baby in case they couldn't save her). (She survived; the baby never existed.)

The Danish beer company Carlsberg announced it was relocating a plant from Stockholm, Sweden, to Gothenburg because there was too much uranium in the spring it uses near Stockholm. And the interior minister of the Netherlands, citing public concern, proposed to ban police officers from coffee shops that also legally sell marijuana. And authorities in Putnam County, W.Va., announced that someone had broken into a sheriff's deputy's home while he was away on vacation and set up a methamphetamine lab.

Furious at a rush-hour accident that blocked traffic in the Boston suburb of Weymouth, motorist (and software engineer) Anna Gitlin, 25, went ballistic at a police officer and then allegedly bumped him with her car, screaming, "I don't care who (expletive deleted by the Boston Globe) died. I'm more important" (June). And Joseph DiGirolamo, 43, distraught over domestic problems, allegedly barricaded himself inside an ex-girlfriend's home in Boston and hurled household items (TV set, room air conditioner, broomstick, a pot of boiling water) at police officers, threatening to kill them, before he was subdued (May).

A 20-year-old man was killed in Denver during afternoon rush hour on Sept. 1 when he jumped from a car going about 40 mph; according to friends, he had been planning a nonfatal jump for a while because he wanted to endure some trauma in order to muster the courage to get a tattoo. And a 15-year-old boy in Maryland Heights, Mo., who had been demonstrating his pain tolerance by clobbering himself on the head with his skateboard, invited a pal to take a shot, too; the first blow knocked him out, and he died four days later.

A 47-year-old man was arrested for allegedly trying to steal a woman's backpack, his 177th arrest (Boulder, Colo.). A 36-year-old man was captured by a SWAT team after holding off police for 10 hours in a hotel room, in an incident begun when he threatened to kill hotel workers because there was no ice (Houston). And absolutely no one voted in a school board election in Mississippi County, Ark., on Sept. 16, not even Carl Miner, who was the only person on the ballot.

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

A man, so far unidentified, created a frenzy in London in September when he began offering a free call-in service in which he (dressed in a full "superhero" costume of colorful tights, cape and mask), armed with a metal-cutting circular saw, would dispatch himself to help motorists whose cars had been immobilized by unpopular, police-installed wheel clamps (called in many American cities the "Denver boot"). "Angle Grinder Man," with a Web site and hotline number, said he had freed 12 cars so far and doesn't mind breaking the law because it's a "public service." "And I like wearing the costume."

Matthew Long was acquitted of assaulting his girlfriend, Vicki Smith, in Cincinnati in September. Smith (250 pounds) had accused Long (116 pounds, one leg) of choking her with their dog's leash (although before the leash could be introduced as evidence, the dog reportedly ate it). Long testified that what really happened was that he grabbed Smith in a desperate attempt to prevent her from walking out, clinging to her as she dragged him through the house. ("Love does that," Long added.) When Smith admitted that she could throw Long around "like a rag doll," the judge found him not guilty. Both Smith and Long are married to other people.

The Cambodian government is planning a tourist attraction (museum, theater complex, food service) at the site of the cremated ashes of Pol Pot, the dictator who directed the "killing fields" murders of 2 million people. And several established, online gambling parlors ran full betting boards in August on this year's Little League World Series, according to Editor & Publisher magazine. And Derrick and Patricia Cogan of Devon, England, still managed to enjoy a scheduled September holiday in their mobile home, despite the fact that just days before, it sustained about US$3,400 in damage after being hit by a flying cow that fell off of a 30-foot cliff.

-- Easy Collars: Pamela J. Reardon was arrested in Monroe, Ohio, in August and charged with buying groceries using a stolen check; she was easy to track down because she had tried to save even more on her purchase by using her own Marsh Supermarket discount card. And Mr. Lem Lom was arrested in Janesville, Wis., in August after he had allegedly stolen an electronic gadget from the front yard of a home; it turns out that the device was the base station for the pre-trial-release ankle monitor worn by the home's resident, and removal of the base station automatically signals the police, who can track its whereabouts easily.

-- Lyle Hartford Van Dyke Jr. was convicted in July in Portland, Ore., of trying to pass US$3 million in bogus currency that featured a photo of the Queen of England. And in September, Michael Christopher Harris, 24, was arrested after he tried to pass a $200 bill with a photo of George W. Bush at a Blue Flame convenience store in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., but then police found out that before that, he had actually gotten a cashier at a Food Lion in town to accept one, and give him back change.

-- In August, scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, traveling by boat on a research mission to attach satellite-tracking devices to whales to study their habitats, managed to capture what they believe is a historical first photo: the water pattern that results from the bubble when a huge whale releases flatulence. Said researcher Nick Gales, "We got away from the bow of the ship very quickly. (I)t does stink."

-- Scientists working out of the Lawn Hill (Queensland) National Park in Australia announced in June that they had found a male Lavarack's turtle, which was thought to be extinct but has apparently survived relatively unchanged for thousands of years. The turtle's primary distinction is that its sex organs and its breathing apparatus are located in the anus.

-- Awesome: In August, surgeons in Beijing successfully removed a year-old baby's third leg, which was growing in her back and was actually her undeveloped twin's leg. And in June, a 26-year-old woman gave birth to a baby girl with one body and two heads at the Abu al-Reesh hospital in Cairo, Egypt. And in Rensselaer County, N.Y., two unrelated groups of girls out hiking discovered a turtle with two heads (Poestenkill, N.Y., May) and a frog with no eyes (Raymertown, N.Y., July).

-- The New York Post reported in August that some corporate meeting planners in New York and Los Angeles are scheduling upscale gourmet buffets in which the food (sushi is the favorite) is served on the body of a young nude or semi-nude woman who lies on the buffet table for up to three hours. Raw Catering (New York) and Global Cuisine (both cities) charge up to $700 per guest.

-- An August New York Daily News report on Manhattan's housing scarcity revealed these recent offerings: a 250-square-foot condo near Gramercy Park, $167,500; a 240-square-foot walkup on West 10th Street, $179,500; and a 160-square-foot co-op in the West Village for $135,000 (quickly taken). Said one agent, "It's owning a piece of Manhattan."

-- In July, retired developer Bill Martin, 65, announced that he has agreed to buy a dilapidated park near Hudson, Fla., and convert it from its former use as a racially segregated nudist camp into a nonsegregated, Christian-themed nudist resort. Said Martin, "Body shame is an indicator of our alienation from God, self and others. It is a bondage from hell and, according to the Bible, a direct result of Satan's deception."

At press time, Chicago police detective Janice R. Govern was scheduled for a dismissal hearing based on a 2001 incident in which, allegedly, she nonchalantly continued to shop in a Dominick's store even after a customer told her that the bank branch inside the store was being held up. According to a witness, she told the fellow customer to call 911 but that she resumed shopping and in fact was waiting in a checkout line when uniformed officers arrived at the store.

At least nine child-care centers in Melbourne, Australia, have banned all stories about crime-fighting superheroes, lest it encourage aggressiveness (August). A primary school in Birmingham, England, banned parents from its annual sports day so that the kids who did not win contests and races would not feel so bad (May). The British Health and Safety Executive decided that a European Union standard for multi-story buildings should also apply to mountain climbers, thus requiring ice and snow warnings posted on mountainsides and the use of an additional safety rope for all climbers (August). An Irish government minister encouraged churches to investigate whether burning incense during services might violate the law on secondary smoke (August).

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg (whose net worth is estimated at nearly $5 billion) was rejected for a Sears credit card as he shopped in Queens (and after the error was rectified, his approved card arrived with a $4,000 spending limit). President Lucio Gutierrez of Ecuador commenced a campaign to rid the nation of its notorious indifference to punctuality, starting with an interview over Teleamazonas TV, but he showed up late. A 42-year-old salesman for Tires Plus in Athens, Ga., was charged with offering a female customer four tires for sex.

Thanks this week to Thomas Shultz, Kathleen Tibbetts, Bill Daniels, Matthew Rushing, Michael Memmo, Nick White, Tim Farley, Michael Hughes, David Swanson, David Savage, Chris Suver, Dawn Albrecht, Daniel Withrow, Jan Wolitzky, Craig Oakley, Gary Abbott, Jamie Anderson, and Emerson Dameron, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

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

Between June and August, high school dropout Jonathan Harris, 34, acted as his own lawyer in three Philadelphia felony cases and won them all, including a murder trial that could have sent him to death row. At press time, he had scheduled two more for himself, on a 2001 gun charge and at a new trial on several lesser charges related to the murder (although he had taunted a prosecutor in court about taking him on again). The prosecutor blamed the murder verdict on unreliable and no-show witnesses.

Zachary G. Holloway, 20, and a pal were arrested in Springfield, Ill., in September and charged with breaking into one car (and stealing, among other things, a motorcycle helmet) and attempting to break into another. To try to get into the second car, Holloway put on the helmet, stood back from the car, and charged into it, head-butting a window, unsuccessfully, twice. The two were arrested shortly afterward.

Ms. Jamila Glauber filed a lawsuit against the transit system in Juneau, Alaska, because a driver's attempt to enforce the well-known no-eating rule on a bus (it was a Snickers bar) caused her, she says, at least $50,000 worth of emotional distress (July). And Kenneth Williams, in jail near San Diego, awaiting trial for raping an underage girl, filed a lawsuit against the facility because of the mental stress and anguish and weight-loss caused by finding a fly in his mashed potatoes (June). And the post office in Fulton, Mo., removed a tape dispenser that had long been available for customers to seal packages, because a customer had hurt himself using it and had filed a claim against the Postal Service (June).

A 46-year-old woman was hospitalized in critical condition when she dropped a coin while at a drive-thru window at a McDonald's, then opened her minivan door to retrieve it, taking her foot off the brake, allowing the van to inch forward, trapping her head in the open door, which lodged against a post (Burke, Va., August). And the CEO of Diebold Inc., a leading manufacturer of voting machines that register votes through the company's unique technology, committed to support President Bush's re-election and wrote a fund-raising letter for Ohio Republicans (August).

-- The police department in Madera, Calif., and its officer Marcy Noriega filed a lawsuit in July against the manufacturer of Taser guns (nonlethal guns that fire incapacitating electrical charges), claiming it was the company's fault that Noriega, reaching for her Taser, inadvertently drew her real gun and fatally shot a man resisting arrest. According to Noriega, the Taser looks so much like a real gun that she couldn't help it, and Taser International Inc., should have provided better warnings and training.

-- Fund manager Scott R. Sacane of Norwalk, Conn., defending himself in July against charges that he ignored Securities and Exchange Commission rules requiring investors to give notice when they buy large percentages of a publicly traded stock, said the mistakes were not his fault. In a filing with the commission, he said he had no idea that he had acquired 33 percent of one company (far exceeding the reporting threshold) and 78.5 percent of another, blaming the problem on a software failure over a three-week period.

-- In August, Tom Jennings filed an appeal to his earlier dismissal as public affairs manager for Mobile (Ala.) Area Water and Sewer System, which was caused by his having had pornography on his office computer. In the appeal, Jennings blamed most of the downloading on other people, but took responsibility for a file labeled "buttshot" (an image of his own buttocks), claiming that it was photographed accidentally when he was changing clothes and that the only reason he loaded it onto his computer was "because I wanted to talk to some of my friends about deleting it."

-- There was a conflict reported in August in an aggravated assault in Skowhegan, Maine, as to who had stabbed Paul Vienaire, according to police. Jean Lampron, 46, was charged with the stabbing, but she said Vienaire's ex-wife did it. Vienaire, however, said that the ex-wife "ordered" the stabbing but that Lampron actually carried it out. Police attributed both explanations to alcohol, since Vienaire's ex-wife died long before the incident occurred.

According to a June police report in the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, W.Va., a 19-year-old man drove from Greenwich, N.Y., to Huntington to meet for the first time a 17-year-old girl he had been "chatting" with over the Internet, to persuade her to return to New York with him. Her mother refused to let her go. The man walked away, "intentionally banged his head on the door frame of his car and fell to the ground, unconscious." He was taken to Cabell Huntington Hospital.

Egyptian law scholar Nabel Hilmi told a weekly newspaper in Cairo in August that he and other Switzerland-based expatriates are preparing a lawsuit against "all the Jews in the world" for the "trillions of tons" of gold and jewelry that Jews swiped during their exodus from Egypt in the time of the Pharoahs. Also in August, a 14th-generation descendant of Montezuma asked the Mexican government to reinstate the long-dormant pensions the king of Spain agreed in 1550 to pay the descendants for the appropriation of Aztecs' land.

Police in Avon Park, Fla., charged April Marie Brown, 28, with criminal mischief after she allegedly, at the direction of her son, 12, drove him and a pal around town on a Saturday night as the kids vandalized 11 stop signs, doing more than $1,000 damage. And in September, according to Wichita Falls, Texas, police, Joann Rubio, 31, drove her pickup truck alongside a truck driven by a 19-year-old man, so that her 16-year-old son in the passenger seat could shoot the man; he was hit once, and mother and son were later arrested.

Arizona law treats selling, downloading, trading or buying child pornography as the equivalent of actually molesting a child, with a penalty of 10 to 24 years per count, with multiple counts to run consecutively, and two high school teachers (convicted of photos-only, no child interaction) are now serving 200 and 408 years (the latter for having 17 photos) in prison, respectively. Critics point out, according to a May report in The Arizona Republic, that there are cold-blooded murderers serving less time in the state, and that a life sentence without possibility of parole could be obtained by as few as 12 computer-mouse clicks at a pornography Web site.

Latest Street Price for a Child: $250 (Judith Ann Garland, 20, was convicted in Baltimore in September of offering a 2-year-old boy because she needed $250 for bail on drug charges.). Latest Cat to Inherit an Estate: Tinker, a black stray taken in by Margaret Layne, who died in May at age 89 in London, England (inherited a house worth about US$600,000 and a trust fund worth about US$175,000).

Police decided not to charge Lula Brown for 911 abuse even though she had called the emergency number just to report that a McDonald's tried to charge her for extra barbecue sauce (Avon, Ohio). A fisherman had to be rushed to a hospital by helicopter after the bull shark he had just caught and was posing for photos with bit his arm (Freeport, Texas). With United Nations funding, the pygmy musical group Ndima released a 10-track CD of songs backed by music made by animal horns, rawhide drums and bamboo pipes (Republic of the Congo).

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