New Scientist magazine reported in October that psychologists seem to be reclassifying people who are permanently uninterested in sex, from the old notion that such behavior was a disorder to the emerging position that it is merely a sexual preference of "none of the above." (Asexuals profess no sexual attraction at all, encompassing loners reluctant to associate with people and gregarious, caring people whose natural inclination is to relate to others nonsexually.) Recent research estimated that 1 percent of the population is asexual, and in previous research, 40 percent of asexuals described themselves as "extremely" or "very" happy. An asexuality support group (AVEN) touts its best-selling T-shirt, "Asexuality: It's not just for amoebas anymore."

Jackie Lee Shrader, 49, and his son, Harley Lee, 24, had a brief shootout with .22-caliber handguns, provoked when the pair confronted each other over how to cook skinless chicken for dinner (Bluewell, W.Va., September). And Niccolo Rossodivita, 62, shot Billy Cordova, 40, twice in the chest after Cordova followed him around their house prolonging their argument over Jesus Christ's correct name (Wasilla, Alaska, September). And Angela Morris, 19, was charged with assaulting her boyfriend by pouring boiling oil on him during an argument over a Bible verse the two had been reading together (Eugene, Ore., May).

(1) According to a September Washington Post dispatch from a Culpeper, Va., conference of people obsessed with spotting the alleged, 7-foot-tall Sasquatch, which is said to be roaming the woods of America, many attendees ("East Coast Bigfoot community") seem consumed by the West Coast Bigfoot community's supposed arrogance. That is, Western witnesses seem to regard Eastern witnesses as delusional, in that Sasquatch obviously lives west of the Rockies. (2) Thomas Patrick Remo, 50, was arrested in September in Dallas and charged with practicing medicine (gynecology) without a license; Remo had a stream of female customers who apparently did not think it odd that the exams were free and that he ran his office out of a self-storage locker.

-- Patricia Frankhouser filed a lawsuit in Jeannette, Pa., in November against the Norfolk Southern railway as a result of being hit by a train in January as she walked on railroad tracks. Frankhouser, who suffered various cuts and a broken finger, claimed in the lawsuit that Norfolk Southern should have posted signs alongside the tracks warning people not to walk on them, that trains might be coming.

-- In August, cardiologist Dr. Lawrence Poliner won $366 million in damages from a federal court jury in Dallas because his practice was virtually shut down through word of mouth for seven months in 1998, a verdict that (after subtracting 25 percent in attorney fees) would reward him with earnings during the shutdown of $39 million per month. The shutdown came after a hospital peer review panel had found errors in 29 of 44 patient-cases of Poliner (but he was reinstated after prominent cardiologists supported him, though the panel did not retract its initial finding).

-- Frederick Puglisi, 23, was awarded $850,000 by a jury in Ramsey, N.J., in September, for injuries, including a disfigured hand caused by frostbite, suffered when he got drunk at a party, set out on foot, and passed out in a snow bank. The jury determined that his injuries were worth $1 million in damages and that Puglisi was only 15 percent responsible. (Ramsey police and the Bergen county police bore greater fault because they had failed to respond quickly enough to a 911 call about a man passed out in a snow bank.)

-- From the July 23, 2004, Police Reports column of the New London, Wis., Press-Star: "1:15 p.m., a juvenile approached an officer at (Hortonville Police Department) complaining about having a lock stuck around his right testicle for three days and he didn't know how to get it off." (The officer found a master key.) "Having the master key in hand, the juvenile left the room for a moment and returned with the lock. The officer spoke to the juvenile about experimenting with sexuality and how he needs to be more careful in the future."

-- When the police chief in Springdale, Pa., allegedly used the N-word while detaining two black teenagers, the boys' parents charged racism, but the chief's brother, police officer Mike Naviglia, came to his rescue. Officer Naviglia suddenly grabbed one of the boys, in front of their mother, and kissed him flush on the mouth. Said Naviglia, "Does that taste like racism?" (According to the mother, Naviglia said, "I kissed him to show him that I wasn't prejudiced." The mother was undaunted and said she would proceed with her complaint.)

Australian sleep-disorder expert Dr. Peter Buchanan caused a stir in October when he told reporters that the odd behavior of "sleep sex" (leaving home at night in a deep sleep and seeking random sex with strangers) would soon be regarded as an official sleep disorder and be included in the next version of the sleep disorder manual. Said Buchanan, anticipating skepticism: "Incredulity is the first staging post for anyone involved in this (study)."

Paul Michael Callahan, 32, was arrested in Boston in August after, according to police, a short career as a bank robber, which started badly when Callahan tried to hold up the copy shop at Boston University, believing it was a bank. (The clerk asked, "Do you know you're in a copy store and all we can give you is copies?") Callahan fled but allegedly robbed a Fleet Bank branch a few minutes later (getting less than $200) and then a Citizen's Bank branch, clearing about $2,500. However, the red-dye pack from Citizen's exploded, distracting him, and then his getaway car got a flat tire, and police found him hiding in a gas station.

Among the recent idiosyncratic decrees by Turkmenistan's megalomaniacal president-for-life, Saparmurat Niyazov: No publicly chewing "nas" (the country's popular drug, partly tobacco, slacked lime and chicken droppings); television show hosts cannot wear makeup (because the president said he has difficulty distinguishing heavily made-up males from females); and an ice palace will be built in the heart of the country's extremely hot desert so that children can learn to ski.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) Municipal officials in Amsterdam tentatively approved a euthanasia-drug home delivery service, provided that all orders are screened by a physician before the driver is dispatched. (b) Boston police arrested a wheelchair-confined bank robber, who had become paralyzed when shot during a previous bank robbery. (c) Police in Lagos, Nigeria, organized groups of officers into street choirs to help disperse unruly mobs by singing. (d) A British Medical Association official warned that hospitals have recently become "inundated" with serious knife and broken-bottle injuries among barroom-brawling women.

Initially, Florida artist Maria Alquilar refused to correct a series of misspelled names in a $40,000 historical mural she did for the city of Livermore, Calif., claiming that "words" were not important to her art, comparing her errors to Michelangelo's "David" (imperfect in the sense that one of the testicles is lower than the other). After receiving much hate mail from Livermore taxpayers, suggesting that she must have a learning disability for not detecting "(Albert) Eistein," "(William) Shakespere," "(Paul) Gaugan," "(Vincent) Van Gough," and seven other misspellings, Alquilar agreed to fix her mural in early 2005 (but wants an additional $6,000 for her trouble).

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

Ultra-Orthodox California rabbi Nachum Shifren, 53, cuts a dashing figure on the beach at Malibu, where he is the legendary surfer "Shifty," easily spottable on 20-foot waves by his long beard, according to a September profile in the San Diego Union-Tribune. In his spare time (he says he is ready to ride 24/6, allowing for the Sabbath), he has conducted "Passover surfaris" and beach bar-mitzvahs, and his lectures on Deuteronomy include the observation that "surf punks" paddled out into the Red Sea during the Jews' exodus from Egypt. "(T)he whole religious experience," he told the reporter, "the outer body experience, is encompassed in the act of surfing."

(1) The sheriff in Tucson, Ariz., warned the public in August of a gang of women who lure horny men via newspaper ads into believing that they can buy a starring role in an adult video, citing the recent case of a man who was enticed to send $1,100 to set up a video shoot, then $7,000 more, then $8,000 more, and then another $8,000; he quit only when he learned that the women had persuaded his parents to pay $20,000 more for their son's "acting" career. (2) Lau Yat-fai, a 5-foot-9, 23-year-old basketball player in Hong Kong, paid the equivalent of about US$1,400 for electrical treatments from two "beauty centers" that had promised to make him tall. (After filing a lawsuit, he got a partial refund in October.)

A man's body was found by divers in the Pend Oreille River near Newport, Wash., on Sept. 25; sheriff's deputies estimate that he was carrying about 40 pounds of beer (a satchel full around his body, plus cans in his pocket) but said they would wait for an autopsy before commenting. And a 25-year-old driver was killed in St-Joachim, Quebec, on Sept. 24 when another car veered into his lane and hit him; police said the deceased was within his own lane but was distracted, in that he was apparently at the time engaged in sexual intercourse with a female passenger. (Having intercourse while driving, said a police spokesman, "makes driving that much more dangerous.")

-- The Muscular Dystrophy Association, a Tempe, Ariz., real estate firm, and two charity promoters were sued in September by Keith Schott, a golfer who had apparently legitimately made a fully witnessed hole-in-one during a charity round but who was allegedly turned down for the widely advertised $1 million prize when the sponsors imposed a rule that the money shots had to be videotaped. "Remarkably," said Schott's lawyer, "the defendants changed the rules on the spot."

-- North Carolina state Sen. Sam Ellis' bill to change a section of state law that actually gives an enormous right to rapists failed in committee this year, with the result that some rapists may inevitably go free. If a rape victim chooses to carry her baby, and then place it for adoption, state law requires that both parents agree to the adoption in writing, with no exception for babies conceived by rape. Thus, rapists might withhold their consent, thwarting the mother's wishes, unless she agrees not to press charges for the rape. According to a September Raleigh News and Observer story, at least three women have recently been in that situation.

-- The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Spain's El Pais newspaper, in a now-discontinued ad for a 90-day subscription, had run photos of the New York City skyline, before 9/11 and after, with the tag line, "You can do a lot in one day. Just imagine what can happen in three months."

-- Laurie David is the social-activist wife of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" TV star Larry David, well known for speaking out on, and rallying other activists on, environmental issues, such as the need for energy conservation. According to a report in the September Atlantic Monthly, David shuns commercial airliners to get to her speeches (even though the increase in fuel usage to carry a person of her size would be negligible), preferring to make special trips each time by private jet, which a New Republic columnist calculated uses as much fuel in one cross-country round-trip as a Hummer uses in a year.

-- In September, a Roanoke (Va.) Times story documented the righteous complaint of Melissa Williamson, 35, that street construction noise outside her home in southeast Roanoke, especially by jackhammers, would have a harmful effect on her unborn child, then two months from term. The published Times story ignited a firestorm of reader mail because it was accompanied by a candid photo of Williamson in her front yard, looking annoyed at the construction mess, but puffing away on a cigarette.

David Roy Truscott, 35, pleaded guilty in Cornwall, England, in September to three arsons and a burglary of a farmhouse near Redruth, but the burglary was less significant than what he did when he got onto the property. Police said Truscott had submerged himself in a manure pit in order to masturbate. (Also, containers of liquid sludge were found at his home.) At the crime scene, two items of Truscott's were picked up, but of questionable usefulness given the severity of his alleged behavior: tissues and rubber gloves.

Police in Edwardsville, Ill., charged David Wroten, 20, with fraud in September after, they say, he took out membership in an online dating service by paying with a check drawn on the county jail, where he had been held earlier this year for theft. Wroten, like all inmates, had been issued a check for the cash he had on him when he was booked, and he allegedly copied the check form. Police were confident Wroten was their man because, naturally, he had posted a photograph of himself on the dating service site.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) The government of Vietnam is said to be moving to lethal injection for capital punishment because its firing squads, populated with volunteers, too often nervously miss. (b) An airplane hangar in a Los Angeles suburb was found filled with bags of empty soda cans, to a height of 10 feet, with police believing a gang has been stealing cans from homeless people. (c) A California county is systematically ticketing drivers who appear to be high only on kava herbal tea. (d) A Missouri man fled a court hearing on an animal abuse charge but was captured a few minutes later hiding in a doghouse.

In September, Floyd Edwards, 78, set out to drive his friend Ruth Stancil, 62, and Edwards' son Clifford from their home near Erwin, Tenn., to nearby North Carolina towns for shopping, as they routinely do once a month. The round trip is usually about 100 miles, but once again, a senior driver became confused, lost track of time and distance, and was fearful of stopping. By the time the three returned, 60 hours later, they had traveled 1,600 miles, as far as an Atlanta suburb, where Edwards accidentally fell at a gas station and hit his head, necessitating a call to police, who were able to help the group turn around.

In September, according to a report in Tehran's daily Mardomsalari newspaper, a local court ordered a husband to stop beating his wife. However, the Iranian woman, identified only as Maryam J, said she would have accepted an order that just limited the beatings to once a week. "Beating is part of his nature," she said, "and he cannot stop it." The disconsolate husband said, "If I do not beat her, she will not be scared enough to obey me."

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

Most of the Japanese World War II suicide-mission dive-bombers ("kamikazes") were successful, but a few failed pilots are still alive (their missions aborted because of weather or equipment failure), according to a Los Angeles Times dispatch in September. These days, they resent being compared to extremist-Islamic suicide bombers, who, the kamikazes say, act out of hatred rather than love of country and who do not always aim at military-only targets. On the other hand, one of the survivors said that many kamikaze "volunteers" were, contrary to legend, reluctant to die but caught up in patriotic fervor.

(1) Joseph Manuel Augusto, 37, and Andres S. Diaz, 52, chased each other around a Burger King in Stratford, Conn., in July after Augusto had become enraged that Diaz had occupied the men's room too long; Augusto was flailing at Diaz with a small pocket knife, and Diaz at Augusto with a straw dispenser. (2) Attorneys for the city of Monte Sereno, Calif. (pop. 3,400), said in October they would proceed with the civil and criminal cases against defiant residents Joe and Darla Padgett over the Padgetts' 2-feet-too-high fence (and illegal chopping down of a tree), which has so far cost the modestly budgeted city $170,000 to prosecute, with no end in sight.

David Toumey, who is the county coroner in Bloomington, Ind., was hospitalized after accidentally shooting himself in the leg in September while demonstrating gun safety at a recreational facility. And a 61-year-old man accidentally, fatally shot himself in September in Rose Bud, Ark., as a result of showing off with his pistol before church. (He had removed the clip, held the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger, thinking it would not fire, but some will fire a bullet thus left in the chamber.)

Police in Sandown, N.H., charged Suzanne Viviani, 47, with threatening her daughter (age 22) with a knife held to her head because the daughter had snatched cocaine out of Suzanne's bra during a confrontation in August. (The two women reconciled and were booked into the same jail cell.) And in October, 40 miles away in Belmont, N.H., police charged Jacqueline Weiner, 36, with assault after her husband, Steven, held Jacqueline's 10-year-old son down while she stabbed him repeatedly in the arm with a kitchen knife because the boy and his brother had destroyed Jacqueline's favorite toy animal.

-- The Arabian Peninsula Women's Information Bureau (which is said to be an al-Qaida affiliate) announced in September that it had published the first issue of an Internet magazine, Al-Khansaa, designed to help women sort out their simultaneous obligations to their family and to the holy jihad. Among the inspirational guidelines: "The blood of our husbands and the body parts of our children are the sacrifice by means of which we draw closer to Allah," and "(The wife and mother) is the soldier who bears (her husband's) pack and weapon on his back in preparation for the military offensive." The first issue admonished the wife-mother to be in "top condition," to "not overindulge in eating and drinking," and to have a vast knowledge of jihad.

-- Even though wild monkeys rampage through towns in India, destroying property, eating villagers' food and physically attacking people, they are considered holy to Hindus and are pretty much left alone. However, according to a September dispatch in London's The Independent, as attacks have grown in number and severity recently, police have been finding dozens of monkey carcasses with slashed throats. Police believe that the bodies were the result of contract killings, ordered in the belief that paying someone else to harm monkeys was not quite the sacrilege of doing it directly.

-- In October, the school board in Puyallup, Wash., canceled Halloween activities because of complaints from local Wiccans that the pointy-nose, broomstick-riding "witch" icon of the holiday was offensive to their religion, which refers to its priestesses as witches. (In several other cities, in response to complaints from Christians, officials moved trick-or-treating day to Oct. 30 because Oct. 31 fell on a Sunday, which might be inappropriate to celebrate what to some is "The Devil's Night.")

-- In September, the Oakland (Calif.) police suspended their successful traffic safety program of random drunk-driving checkpoints because they had received too many complaints from illegal aliens, who were being arrested not because they were driving drunk but because, as illegals, they lack driver's licenses.

-- People Who Shouldn't Have Access to Matches: David Mason, on a Braathens airline flight home to England from Norway in February, set fire to some pornographic magazines he had brought aboard, saying he had been offended by the pictures; he was convicted in August of endangering a flight (although cabin attendants had quickly extinguished the fire). And in Pine Bluff, Ark., in September, Leroy Brown, 19, set fire to a pair of his wife's pants (because those were what she was wearing when she had a tryst with another man), but was not able to put the fire out before it destroyed the couple's home.

Kenji Hishida, 39, was arrested in September in Kobe, Japan, and charged with stealing several pairs of uniform trousers from a West Japan Railway office. He was later revealed by authorities to have been stealing clothes from that and other public transportation offices for 15 years and to have more than 10,000 uniforms. And Joseph Rizza, 56, was charged recently with two counts of vandalism to neighbors' property in Brighton, Mass.; according to a psychiatric evaluation submitted to his judge, Rizza believes he has "a responsibility to keep trees from producing pine cones."

Gary Arthur Medrow, 60, first made News of the Weird in our inaugural year, 1988, but his criminal record (mostly for impersonating police officers) goes back at least 10 years before that. Medrow's preferred scene is to call someone (usually a woman) on the telephone, pretend to be a police officer on an investigation, and ask her to try to lift up another person in the room and carry him or her into another room. He was charged again in New Berlin, Wis., in September.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) Two men removed the ATM from a Milwaukee gas station, chained it to their bumper, and drove away, dragging it through the streets, as if no one might notice. (b) A lawyer cost the European Commission the equivalent of $1.2 million when a document was not "delivered" on time because the lawyer had mistakenly faxed the blank sides of each page. (c) University of Nebraska researchers, on a grant from Monsanto Corp., began a six-week study, living in an unsanitary, 40-pet home to test an odor-displacement spray. (d) A local woman was ticketed (and later fined the equivalent of $200) at Rome's Trevi Fountain as she was explaining its history to her out-of-town guests but did not have a tour guide's license.

In October, Crystal, Minn., police Sgt. Robin Erkenbrack, summoned to the local VFW hall by a report of a medical emergency, arrived to find an Elvis impersonator, who worked a show at the hall that night, ostensibly in the middle of a seizure, just as another impersonator (portraying the late comedian John Belushi) jumped into a car that did not belong to him and sped off. As Elvis' "seizures" stopped, and frightened onlookers gathered, Elvis suddenly leaped to his feet and broke into "Viva Las Vegas!" while Erkenbrack chased "Belushi" to a nearby airfield, where he stopped him. Said Erkenbrack later, "Every time you think you've seen it all, there's something else."

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