Pleasures of the Educated Class: In July, Reuters profiled British mathematician (doctoral degree) Rosi Sexton, 26, on her avocation of "cage fighting" (using martial arts and near-mayhem tactics to beat opponents into submission), which she compares to chess; another cage fighter (a college professor), said the sport "requires good problem-solving skills and a good understanding of anatomy and body mechanics." Also in July, Doug Lenhart, who holds a doctorate in business administration, pleaded guilty in Pittsburgh to several charges for botching a castration, which he had performed on a consenting male-to-female transsexual.

(1) A 27-year-old man, arrested in July after allegedly trying to rob a Bank of America in Enid, Okla., told police he merely intended to help repay the national debt. (2) Thomas Pinckney, 18, charged with trespass in Tomah, Wis., in June after a woman awoke at night to find him holding her arm, told police that he had found the woman's keys in her apartment door and was just trying to return them. (3) Mr. Thubten Dargyel, 53, who was arrested for sexual assault on a mentally disabled woman in Madison, Wis., in June, explained the presence of his semen by claiming that he ejaculates when he sneezes and that, in fact, he was surprised only that his semen doesn't show up on many other patients, too.

Koko, the famous gorilla that was taught about a thousand words in American Sign Language, had recently been telling her handlers at her apartment at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, Calif., that her mouth hurt. It was only a toothache, but treatment would require her to be anesthetized, and the foundation decided to take advantage and give her a complete physical, with specialists volunteering to work on a "star." (Said Dr. David Liang of Stanford's medical school, "Koko is less demanding" than other celebrities.) Afterward, according to an Associated Press reporter, Koko met with her doctors and motioned one woman to come closer. The woman, awed by this brilliant animal, playfully handed Koko her business card, which Koko promptly ate.

In June, Nebraska's Health and Human Services agency revoked the license of mental health therapist Robert Powers based on an incident in which he, after receiving a memo denying him his own key to the office supply cabinet, pulled out a .22-caliber handgun and fired several shots at the document. And Clay Sullivan faced municipal charges in July resulting from his behavior as a parade marshal (on horseback) during the Cheyenne (Wyo.) Frontier Days; protesting the needless towing of a car along the parade route, Sullivan lassoed the tow truck driver and yanked him away from the car.

-- Writing in the journal Pediatrics (August 2004), Israeli physicians cautioned against a traditional form of circumcision in which blood is cleaned from the wound not by a suction device but by the circumciser's taking wine into his mouth and then sucking the blood from the wound. Researchers, led by Dr. Benjamin Gesundheit of Ben-Gurion University, found eight cases of infants having developed herpes from circumcisers' mouths.

-- In a federal court in Austin, Texas, in June, accused bank robber Adam Martin, 38, acting dramatically as his own lawyer, inexplicably called his brother Michael as a character witness even though he knew that Michael had already pleaded guilty to being Adam's partner on four robberies. Adam asked if Michael had ever committed any crimes. Predictably (that is, to everyone except Adam), Michael responded, "Yeah. You were with me on four different bank robberies, Adam. You know that."

-- In June, Norway's Labor Inspection Authority rejected the official registration papers filed by the Skjargard School, a private Christian fundamentalist institution that nonetheless receives much federal assistance. The authority said it needed to see a better organization chart in order to track lines of responsibility, because the chart Skjargard submitted merely listed as its CEO Jesus Christ.

-- Separation of Church and Bedroom: A 43-year-old Catholic priest and a 26-year-old nun were sentenced to six-month suspended sentences in July after they were caught by police having sex in the back seat of a Toyota Corolla at the Lilongwe International Airport in Malawi. And in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria, in August, police raided the headquarters of an Islamic breakaway sect, the Yan-Gwagwarmaya, whose conventions are at odds with the mainstream in several ways, most notably its devotion to wife-swapping.

The legendarily devoted anthropologist John Peabody Harrington passed away in 1961 and left six tons of disorganized belongings in various warehouses, attics, basements, and even chicken coops. Most of the items were quixotic, inexplicable junk. However, according to a July 2004 Los Angeles Times report, there are also 1 million pages of valuable notes in nearly indecipherable code, which will require 20 years to organize and are strewn amongst, apparently, everything Harrington ever possessed, including dirty laundry, half-eaten food, and "a box of birds stored for 30 years without the benefit of taxidermy." According to anthropologists, Harrington's records are absolutely crucial because in some cases his work forms the only written evidence of certain Native American languages.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (Answer below.) (a) Identical male twins were revealed to be the registered owners of a Russian Web site devoted to nude photos of female Siamese twins. (b) A male nurse who had just pleaded guilty to lewd conduct with a handicapped boy was merely transferred by his employer (a California government agency) away from children, to work in its animal-care facility. (c) A distributor in Florida moved more than 10,000 units of a plastic toy premium (inside bags of candy) that depicts planes flying into the World Trade Center. (d) An Oregon couple pleaded guilty to several instances of punishing their two kids' bad behavior by allowing their pit-bull dog to attack them.

-- Two 16-year-old boys were hospitalized after trying to extract gunpowder (for July 4 fireworks) from shotgun shells by using a sledgehammer (Houston). A 19-year-old man used an explosive to blast a fire hydrant cap into the air on July 4 to see how far up it would go, but was hospitalized when the cap landed on his head (Chicago). A 17-year-old boy was killed when he peered down a mortar tube at the wrong time during a July 4 fireworks demonstration (Webster, Wis.).

The unnamed young man who won the latest "Jackass" contest, sponsored by Chicho's Restaurant in Virginia Beach, Va., in August, first came to the attention of police when he was spotted wandering around at 1 a.m. bleeding from an amateur Mohawk haircut. Also, his chest, stomach, buttocks and legs were heavily industrial-strength stapled, and he had slice marks on his side and a broken collarbone (from a back flip off the bar). He had also swallowed and vomited a live goldfish and broken a beer bottle over his head, but all in all, he said, he was proud. (The restaurant manager was fired.)

John Hutcherson, 21, was arrested in Marietta, Ga., in August for vehicular homicide and DUI after he drove 12 miles home and went to bed, allegedly oblivious of the dead body of his good friend that was hanging out his passenger-side window. According to police, the 23-year-old pal had been decapitated by a telephone pole guide wire when he stuck his head out the window after Hutcherson veered off the road. A neighbor alerted police the next morning when he saw the body still draped on the door of Hutcherson's truck.

(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 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.)