Among the reality-TV series being batted around in London, according to recent reports in the Daily Telegraph and The Independent, is "Make Me a Mum," in which a woman reduces a field of men to the two whom she believes will make her the genetically best offspring. At that point, producers will inseminate the woman with sperm from both men and, using intravaginal micro technology, will attempt to record a "race" to see which sperm gets to the egg first. Said Remy Blumenfeld, the creative director for the Brighter Pictures production house, "(This show is) much more about the rule of science than the rules of attraction."

-- British surfboard designer Jools Matthews, working with Intel Corp., built an Internet-ready surfboard with an 80-gigabyte, wireless laptop, powered by solar panels and housing a video camera, for exhibition in June in Devon, England. The waterproofed circuitry adds about 5 pounds to the 9-foot-long board and is carefully placed so as to retain surfers' balance points.

-- A commander at a military conscription unit in Finland told reporters in August that some men recently have been discharged shortly after enlisting because they had become "addicted" to the Internet and longed for their computers. Said the official, Jyrki Kivela: "For people who play (Internet) games all night and don't have any friends, don't have any hobbies, to come into the army is a very big shock." (All males are scheduled for at least six months in the military, but about 20 percent get specially exempted.)

-- McDonald's franchisees in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Brainerd, Minn., and Norwood, Mass., recently began outsourcing their drive-thru order-taking to a call center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Thus, a Big Mac order shouted into a microphone in Missouri gets typed into a computer in Colorado (and a digital photograph of the customer's car is taken in order to reduce errors) and then clicked back to the originating restaurant's kitchen, which has the order ready in less time (30 seconds less, on average, with fewer errors) than the average McDonald's takes.

-- An econometric study of "happiness" by professors David Blanchflower (Dartmouth College) and Andrew Oswald (Warwick University, England), announced in July, found that a successful marriage brings such a level of joy that those without it would need an additional $100,000 to compensate. They conclude: Money can buy happiness (but each unit of it is very expensive); increasing the frequency of sex from monthly to at least weekly brings the same happiness as a $50,000 raise; and those who must buy their sex are the least happy of all.

-- A U.S. Army laboratory in Natick, Mass., has developed a lightweight, dried-food meal that can be safely hydrated by adding virtually any kind of liquid, from dirty swampwater to a soldier's own urine, according to a July report in New Scientist. A membrane with ultra-tiny gaps allows only water molecules to pass, filtering out "99.9" percent of any bacteria and most chemicals. (While urine will theoretically work in a pinch, the developers discourage its use since urea is not blocked and will build up in the kidneys over time.)

-- Least Competent Animals: Police in Yuba City, Calif., responded to a motorist's call and freed a chicken that had flown into a car and become tangled in its windshield wipers (August). And a black bear drowned in the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania after he resisted several attempts by Samaritans to remove the plastic jar that had become stuck on his head after he had raided a camper's food supply (July). And organizers of a 93-mile homing pigeon race, between the Swedish cities of Ljungby and Malmo, let 2,000 go on a perfectly clear day, but only 500 found their way home (July).

The Gentle Wind Project of Kittery, Maine, was recently in the news for filing a federal lawsuit against a couple who had allegedly slandered the group with claims of mind control and child neglect, among other charges. According to a Gentle Wind spokesperson, each human lives inside an energy field 8 to 10 feet high, 4 to 6 feet wide, which sometimes gets damaged and must be repaired. Its "healing instruments" are just the tools to do that, bringing good health, based on "20 years" of research. For example, its "Puck Puck" (which resembles several tuning forks) is said to bring relief from high blood pressure, arthritis, migraines, ulcers and chronic fatigue to those who merely hold them, and it has even been known to help people "forgive." On the other hand, wrote the spokesperson, "We're not New Age wackos."

A New Hampshire judge was suspended, and the state's attorney general resigned, both over allegations of sexual misconduct stemming from their after-hours behavior (in separate incidents) at the same conference, which had been called in May as a workshop on preventing sexual and domestic abuse. Five women complained of being groped by Judge Franklin C. Jones, 55, and one woman complained that Attorney General Peter Heed had touched her inappropriately on the dance floor. (The local prosecutor later said there was not enough evidence to file a criminal charge against Heed.)

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) A high school principal in Boston was admonished by the school board for trying to shut down football practice as violating the school's new "zero tolerance" rule for violence. (b) Hong Kong's mainstream press reported that a lonely widower in Beijing was found to have, as "pets," 200,000 cockroaches in his home. (c) A 17-year-old boy in New Haven, Conn., arranged for a friend to shoot him in the leg, later explaining that he didn't want to be sent to Iraq and thus was scheming to avoid the "draft." (d) A 47-year-old woman in Lumberton, N.C., was charged with animal cruelty for giving pap smears to her Boston terrier. (Answer at end of column.)

More Unprofitable Counterfeiting: Japanese police have made no arrests in connection with a flurry of 400 counterfeit 1,000-yen notes that keep turning up in vending machines in Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo; in each one, a real 1,000-yen note is cannibalized to supply a key part of the bogus note. Similarly, in Calgary, Alberta, in July, Jason James Cremer was fined about Cdn$800 for passing a set of counterfeit $20 bills that he made by removing the optical security devices from real $20 bills and inserting them onto his bogus ones (and discarding the remnants of the real bills, believing them then worthless, which police said was not true).

More Clumsy Gunmen: Drew Patterson, 27, getting his .22-caliber pistol ready after news got out of an escaped fugitive in the area, stuck the gun into the waistband of his trousers and accidentally shot himself in the buttocks (Bristow, Okla., August). And David Walker, 28, carrying his shotgun back into a pub to settle an argument over whose turn it was to buy, accidentally shot himself in the scrotum and then in July was sentenced to five years in prison for illegal possession of the shotgun (The Crescent, Dinnington, England).

In August in a camping area of Baker Lake, Wash., Fish and Wildlife agents found a black bear passed out amidst three dozen empty (clawed- and bitten-open) cans of locally brewed Rainier Beer. "And (the bear) definitely had a preference," said an officer, noting that only one can of Busch beer had been drunk, though many unopened ones were nearby.

Answer to Almost All True: (b), (c) and (d) are true.

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

Among the ice cream flavors offered recently at Ice Cream City in Namco Nanja Town in Tokyo's Toshima-ku (and posted on the Web site of the English-language Mainichi Daily News) are these: spinach, garlic, tomato, seaweed, oyster, red wine, goat, chicken, lettuce and potato, wheat, shark fin, and something called "raw horse flesh." Each flavor's package is shown, mouth-wateringly photographed.

In July, police were summoned to an upscale office building in west St. Louis on a report of a man roaming the halls with a gun, and on arrival, officers found some workers hiding under desks and in closets and others having fled the building. Police concluded that two lawyers, Gary Burger and Mark Cantor, were once again playing their game in the hallways, stalking each other with BB guns and occasionally firing. (Most workers did not know that the men were playing, but one did because she had been shot in the finger and shoulder after walking into a previous battle.) Police said they intend to file charges of waving a dangerous weapon, and one officer said the men would be tried as adults.

Ice cream truck driver Markus Miller, 29, was arrested in Enid, Okla., in August after he ended an altercation with an 18-year-old customer by allegedly pulling out his handgun and firing two shots at the woman's feet (one shot of which ricocheted and hit her collarbone). And in July, police in Grahamstown, South Africa, were hunting a soccer referee after the man ended a confrontation with a coach (after the referee had yellow-carded his player) by pulling out a gun and shooting the coach dead.

In June, the director of Thailand's corrections system wanted a way to shift inmates' interest away from betting on the Euro 2004 soccer tournament to actually playing soccer and so had the bright idea to schedule them a match against outsiders, ostensibly to build up their self-esteem, but the outsiders happened to be trained soccer-playing elephants from Ayuthaya Elephant Palace. Self-esteem might have taken a hit, since the inmates could manage only a 5-5 tie. (The elephants apparently were allowed to move the ball with their trunks.)

-- As many as 400 Cambodian pilgrims a day are flocking to the northern village of Phum Trapeang Chum to be licked by a mystical cow that was born in a sacred commune, according to a July Agence France-Presse report. Word got out after the wife of the cow's owner said she was cured of a chronic illness, and other success stories followed, and now the owner is charging the equivalent of about 13 U.S. cents for four licks. But, warned the owner, "the cow won't lick people who won't put in their money."

-- Two reporters from South Africa's largest online news operation, News24, profiled Miyi Shongi, 58, in August, in her quest to avoid a "curse" of stones landing on her. She was forced to leave her home village of Lombani after her home was pounded inexplicably with stones (evidently witnessed by a police officer) and forced again to leave relatives' home in nearby Nhombelani after another rock storm hit her. A spiritualist she consulted concluded that the problem was a spell cast by a Zimbabwean trader to whom she owned money.

-- The University of Colorado received much negative publicity in the last year about allegations that its football coach and some players had sexually assaulted or harassed female students, and it fell upon the school's president, Elizabeth Hoffman, to try to minimize the damage, and she apparently took that task seriously at a deposition in a federal sexual harassment lawsuit. According to a leaked copy of the deposition, reported in June by KUSA-TV (Denver), Hoffman denied that what some call "the C-word" (a vulgar reference to women) is necessarily "filthy and vile." "It is all in the context," she strained to explain. Asked for an example of a "polite" context, Hoffman said, "I've actually heard (the word) used as a term of endearment."

-- Catholic priest Zivko Kustic told a newspaper in Zagreb, Croatia, in July that his church would lobby the Croatian Parliament for an exemption to a tough drunk-driving law being debated, on the ground that priests have to drink wine in as many as three masses a day and sometimes in three different villages and often cannot meet the safe blood-alcohol level of under 0.05.

In August, the North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners revoked the license of John Hall of Cornelius, N.C., based on a finding that he for some reason had been injecting his semen into the mouths of several patients during office visits. He had tearfully denied the charges, but his semen was found on syringes turned in by two of Hall's assistants, and patients testified to an "awful"-tasting substance he had squirted into their mouths (and one testified to his seriously improper sexual manner in treating her). Hall told the examiners that the reason he had semen in the office was for a sperm-count test concerning his use of the hair-loss drug Propecia, but then could not explain why other people's DNA (perhaps from their saliva) was also found in the syringes.

Two men were arrested in Dearborn, Mich., in July and charged with robbing a Bank One branch, done in by a glitch in their getaway plan. They had hopped on mountain bikes to make their exit (which bank robbers have used with success from time to time), but they were apparently unfamiliar with the concept of a gearshift, and both men rode away in first gear (or perhaps second), so slowly that one witness followed them easily on foot, and a bank guard got close enough to shoot one of them in the arm. They were quickly arrested.

News of the Weird has reported several times in the last 12 years on Kopi Luwak, the ultra-expensive coffee derived from beans that have been eaten and excreted by civet cats in Indonesia. In July Massimo Marcone of the University of Guelph (Canada) published his examination (in the journal Food Research International) of how taste is affected by the beans' journey through the civet. First, the civet instinctively chooses only the ripest beans. Then, digestive biochemicals penetrate the outer layer of the bean as it passes through the GI tract. Internal fermentation by digestive enzymes adds a unique flavor ("earthy, musty, smooth and rich with jungle and chocolate undertones"). Also, proteins are leached out during digestion, thus removing a source of coffee's bitterness. (On the other hand, Kopi Luwak doesn't particularly distinguish itself from other coffee in human blind taste tests.)

Landscape contractor Blair Davis, who lives in a Houston suburb and whose own yard's flora includes the Texas Star hibiscus, was the object of a SWAT-type raid by the Harris County Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force in July. A neighbor had reported Davis as having drugs, in that the Texas Star hibiscus somewhat vaguely resembles the marijuana plant, and the prestigious Task Force didn't know any better. Davis said that an agent also asked him warily what he planned to do with the watermelons and cantaloupes that were growing in his back yard.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) A state Sierra Club official, hiking with friends, was struck and killed by lightning. (b) A family in India was reported to have 175 members, who eat meals in shifts of 25 to 30 and require about 1,500 weekly servings of fresh-baked bread. (c) Federal and state officials managed to shut down a smuggling tunnel running from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to Laredo, Texas, on the ground that it violated U.S. mine safety standards. (d) Among the recent priorities of Netherlands' Labour Party is legislating a ban on the forcible licking of people's toes. (Answer: The third choice is made up.)

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

CEO Andrew Wiederhorn began his 18-month federal prison sentence in August, but unlike other convicted CEOs, he'll continue to draw his $1.6 million a year salary while doing hard time. He pleaded guilty to two felonies (including filing a false tax return) while previously the CEO of Wilshire Financial Services Group in Oregon, but his current company, Fog Cutter Capital Group, apparently believes Wiederhorn is a real hot shot worth holding onto. Fog Cutter said it might even give Wiederhorn a bonus, in order to help him pay the restitution he is required to make under his plea agreement.

A 911 operator in Anne Arundel County, Md., apparently fell asleep in the middle of a call about a possible home break-in in progress on July 29, according to the official tape recording, which was reported by WBAL-TV (Baltimore). And in Alexandria, Va., the week after that, police found all three staff members asleep at the Sunrise Senior Living facility on Duke Street. (They had slept through the buzzing call button, several telephone calls, and a police siren. The supervisor had to be nudged awake despite the burglar alarm blaring just 10 feet away. One patient had fallen out of bed and couldn't get up, and another called 911 to summon the police when no one was there to help with his catheter.)

Some people out for morning rush hour on Aug. 5 in the Dorchester section of Boston were treated to a demolition derby on New England Avenue, after Yvesnane Gethers, 27, in a white limousine, chased her husband, Wayne Gethers, in another white limo, at speeds up to 50 mph and rammed him at least five times, causing extensive damage to both cars. The couple just happen to own white limos as their vehicles of choice, and Mrs. Gethers happened to discover her husband in his, having an early morning drink with a female friend.

-- London's Daily Telegraph reported in August on the veiled but apparently active market of British collectors who buy and sell fetuses and stillborn babies, with one seller saying he has heard of prices over 5,000 pounds (US$9,100). The major suppliers, apparently, are labs and medical schools, which dispose of their "curiosities," usually deformed fetuses such as babies with two heads. Said one dealer, of the seriousness of the collectors, "(It) is a very small market, but a very keen market."

-- On July 12, federal, state and county officials, responding to a call about an eye-popping scene at a sandbar just off Whale Harbor in the Florida Keys town of Islamorada, discovered a young woman apparently blissfully dangling by the shoulders from meat hooks that were hanging from a makeshift bamboo tripod and stuck in her skin. A Coast Guard officer took pictures and asked if anyone was doing anything he or she didn't want to do, but the heavily tattooed, pierced people at the scene assured him they were just having fun in the sun. A sheriff's spokesman said he couldn't think of any laws that were broken but that he would look into it.

Cape Town (South Africa)'s Old Town House museum has scheduled an exhibit for September featuring familiar 17th-century Dutch Master paintings, but with all of them turned to face the wall, which curator Andrew Lamprecht said will be a "conceptual art intervention" that turns the pieces "into something new and unexpected" which will "force gallery goers to reconsider their preconceptions about the art." "These are fascinating things to see from behind," he said.

-- An AFSCME union local filed a grievance against East Haven, Conn., mayor Joe Maturo recently for violating the city's labor contract by personally doing the civic task of reaching down into a storm drain and repositioning the drain cover, which Maturo noticed had become dislodged. According to the union, if a cover comes loose, the city is required to call out exactly four union employees, three of whom would get time and a half and be guaranteed four hours' work. Said union president John Longley, "It's not about the money; it's about our work." (Maturo, a licensed electrician, was a longtime union member himself.)

-- Canadian officials now require immigrants seeking work as strippers to submit nude performance photos of themselves, lest non-pros falsely claim to be strippers in order to get Canadian work permits, according to a July Toronto Sun report. Said an immigration lawyer, "They can't (even) be partially nude (in the photo)." Canadian club owners are so needy of strippers that they typically pay about Cdn$5,000 (US$3,700) a week for headliners.

-- U.S. military personnel and their immediate families can routinely receive elective plastic surgery at government expense, including liposuction and facelifts and even breast implants for women (if the woman supplies the implants), according to a July report in The New Yorker. The writer found that, though the military did not offer the benefits in writing, word gets around, and the benefit helps in recruiting as well as in keeping the military's reconstructive-surgery doctors sharp.

Merle Hatch, 42, was arrested shortly after he allegedly robbed a Compass Bank in Denver, even though he was dressed (in running shorts and shoes) entirely differently than when he pulled off the job. Hatch's plan was to leave the bank, then strip off his pants and appear to be a jogger out for a morning run, carrying the money. However, for some reason, he did the clothing change in front of the bank building in full view of the employees, who reported his new outfit. According to a police spokesman, Hatch expressed surprise when he was caught so quickly.

Games Floridians Play: Shannon Kramer, 35, was hospitalized with serious burns after (according to police) trying to toss a lighted firework at his girlfriend from his car during an argument; however, he overestimated the burn time, and it went off in his hands (Jacksonville, Fla., March). And Aravis Walker, 23, was killed when his car exploded during a session in which he would light fireworks and toss them out the window at passersby; one of the fireworks didn't clear the window but ricocheted to the back seat, where it ignited the rest of Walker's fireworks.

In July, a transit system police officer in Washington, D.C., arrested, handcuffed and searched Stephanie Willett, 45, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist, detaining her at a police station for about three hours because she was finishing up the chewing of her PayDay candy bar inside a Metrorail station, in violation of the no-eating rule. Transit officials pointed out that Willett had been warned by the officer a minute before not to enter the station while eating the candy bar, but she thought if it was completely in her mouth as she walked in, she was safe.

Three of these four things really happened just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story?

(a) The New Zealand government issued a 100-page occupational health and safety guide for prostitutes.

(b) An appeals court in Michigan ruled that a man suffering chronic depression can, under the Americans With Disabilities Act, carry a loaded pistol in public because holding it in his hands helps him therapeutically, according to doctors.

(c) Turkmenistan ruled that drivers cannot get licenses unless they pass tests on the moral values described in President Saparmurat Niyazov's writings.

(d) The owner of a gym in downtown Baghdad held a bodybuilding competition on July 30 in honor of the birthday of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

(Answer: The three foreign stories are true.)

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