Student Sarah Sevick filed a formal complaint in September with the U.S. Department of Justice, accusing Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, of violating the Americans With Disabilities Act by not letting her keep her "assistance animal," which is Lilly, her ferret. Sevick says that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, including panic attacks, and that Lilly "soothes" her, but the school said it was concerned with other students' safety. (In other ferret news, the British upscale clothing firm Burberry threatened to sue a pet-accessories shop in Dudley, England, in October, for selling outfits in the familiar Burberry "check" pattern, including a cap and cape designed for ferrets.)

-- From the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "(Carver County) Aug. 24: Hostility. A door-to-door salesman complained about the attitude of the people in the neighborhood in the 100 block of W. Shasta Circle." And from the Union Democrat (Sonora, Calif.): "(Tuolumne County, Oct. 13) 1:13 p.m., Sonora, A man came to the Sheriff's Department to 'find out how to legally kill' a person who was harassing him."

-- From the University of Utah Department of Public Safety report for October (2005-22280): "Unwanted Guest. A security officer from Primary Children's Medical Center called to report a man in that hospital who had no legitimate business there and wouldn't leave. University Police responded and were told by the man that he comes to Primary because he can find longer cigarette butts there because the doctors and nurses at Primary don't smoke their cigarettes all the way down like everyone else does. The man left when ordered to do so by the police."

-- Adam Taylor, a quite-proper executive at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, was charged with illegally (and apparently motivelessly) firing several shots from an air rifle in a city park, but swears that he has no recollection of the incident and is totally baffled by the apparently accurate witness-reports of his guilt. Said his lawyer in September, "There is absolutely no reason on Earth why a 38-year-old man with his background would suddenly take an air rifle and fire it in the park ..."

-- Tyler Ing, 20, told the London (Ontario) Free Press in October that his parents "looked at me real weird for a few minutes" but that now "they're proud. My mom shows the (Guinness Book of World Records) to all her friends." The entry that she shows is her son's honor, recently achieved, for having the world's longest nipple hair, certified at 8.89 cm (3.5 inches).

In a September rape trial in New York City, witness Roberto Suarez testified that he saw two men in the room with a waitress just before she told him that she had been raped, and then when asked by the prosecutor to identify the two men, Suarez looked past the defendants and pointed to, respectively, Juror No. 8 and Alternate Juror No. 3. The New York Daily News reported that some jurors laughed so hard that they cried.

-- (1) Transsexual convicted prostitute Monica Renee Champion, 37, was finally picked up by police in Richmond, Va., in August; there had been arrest warrants for indecent exposure against her in the city's South Side as a male and in the city's North Side as a female. (2) Tyrone D. McMillian, 33, who was arrested after a high-speed chase through three New York towns in August, told the arresting officers: "I've been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto and NASCAR on PlayStation. I thought I could get away."

-- (1) Paris Satine, 46, the madame of a legal brothel in Maroochydore, Australia (north of Brisbane), who was a nominee at an awards banquet for Excellence in Business (which was being held at a local hotel), was arrested for soliciting clients during the event. (2) London's Sunday Telegraph reported in July that, because of the shortage of military supplies caused by troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, British Army soldiers on training exercises were ordered simply to shout "bang bang" rather than fire practice rounds.

In August, convicted child murderer Mark Allen Harris was awarded $50,000 by a jury in his lawsuit against Kanawha County, W.Va., jail officials after he fell out of the back of a van transporting prisoners, breaking bones in his face and knocking out some teeth. Also in August, in Albuquerque, N.M., a filthy and disheveled John Hyde, 48, being arraigned in the murders of four people, including two policemen, complained to the judge about police behavior, "Your honor ... I have been put in a red jump suit like Elvis Presley ... My hair looks ridiculous ... I was not allowed to groom myself."

In July, police in Lawrence, Kan., gave Ezekiel Rubottom's foot back to him, convinced that, contrary to a neighbor's inquiry, it wasn't evidence of a crime. Rubottom, 21, had tried to explain that he'd had his clubbed left foot amputated and merely wanted to keep it as a memento in a bucket of formaldehyde on his front porch. A spokesman for Lawrence Memorial Hospital told the Journal-World newspaper that there have been "women that want their uterus ... people take (home) tonsils ... they take (home) appendixes." Rubottom added a porcelain horse and a can of beer to his bucket to make it what he called "a collage of myself."

In September, Anthony R. Martin, 52, of Belleville, Ill., became the latest person to call the police and complain that someone had stolen his illegal drugs. But there was more: Martin told the investigating officer that a hostile neighbor had taken his marijuana plants, but when he showed the officer the room where he usually kept them, the plants were actually still there. Martin then said whoever took them must have returned them. He was charged with growing marijuana. (He also admitted that he had been drinking that night.)

Arrested recently and charged with murder: Kenneth Wayne Keller, Denton, Texas (August); Ronald Wayne Lail, Burke County, N.C. (September); Timothy Wayne Condrey, Caroleen, N.C. (September). Sentenced for murder: Tyler Wayne Justice, Alice, Texas (September). Committed suicide while suspected of murder: Michael Wayne Baxter, Edgewater, Md. (October). And in February, convicted double-murderer Russell Wayne Wagner was found dead in his cell in Jessup, Md., of an apparent heroin overdose, but in July, at the request of a sister, he received an official military burial at Arlington National Cemetery because he had been honorably discharged after his Army service in Vietnam. (Current law blocks from national cemeteries only criminals with death sentences.)

(1) Maria Julia Mantilla, recently crowned Miss World, denied a plastic surgeon's boast that he had given her buttock implants and trimmed her ears, protesting that "I'm not the creation of a surgeon. He just did my bust and my nose." (2) Wailing loudly and apparently incredulous at being ordered to jail, a scantily dressed Natalia McLennan, 25, was taken directly to a lockup from a New York City courtroom in September, after being charged with prostitution; McLennan had recently posed for the cover of New York magazine, proclaiming herself to be the city's top-grossing "escort" and acknowledging that she provided sex for clients.

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

The Ohio High School Athletic Association apologized to football player Bobby Martin of Colonel White High in Dayton after the referees barred him from a September game because he was not wearing the required shoes and knee pads. Martin was born without legs and plays on the punt return team, moving quickly around the field with his arms. An OHSAA official said the referees were just being overly cautious, but Martin said, "That's the first time in 17 years" that someone had made him feel disabled. (At halftime, Martin briefly considered tying some shoes around his chest and attempting again to play.)

-- Inmate Scott Bolton filed a lawsuit in September against the Luzerne County, Pa., prison and a slew of corrections officials, blaming them for the severe injuries he suffered in a 2003 alleged escape attempt, claiming that tighter security would have foiled his breakout. Bolton suffered spinal cord injuries (which have permanently confined him to a wheelchair) when fellow inmate-conspirator Hugo Selenski pushed Bolton out of a window, several floors up, apparently to speed their leaping exit. Asked a corrections commissioner, incredulously, "(An inmate) is dumb enough to act as a human mattress for Hugo, and (we're) responsible?"

-- Reba Schappell, of Reading, Pa., a professional country music singer who is also a conjoined twin with sister Lori, was profiled in a September segment of the BBC radio series "Who Runs Your World." Said Reba, "When I am singing, Lori is like any other fan, except she's up on the stage with me (covered in a blanket to reduce the distraction)." Said Lori: "I do not ask for anything from Reba. I don't get in to her concerts free just because she's a conjoined twin. I have to pay, just like every other fan that comes to the concert."

-- (1) Stephen Sodones, 62, was hospitalized in critical condition in August but ultimately recovered after being bitten three times on the hand by a copperhead snake, which he was helpfully carrying to safety across Route 23 near Jefferson, N.J.; according to a neighbor interviewed by the Newark Star-Ledger, animal-lover Sodones stops traffic to let ducks cross roads and once tried to revive a bumblebee by warming it in his hands. (2) Delshawn Prejean, 35, was arrested in Jacksonville, Fla., in June after a Starbuck's waitress squealed on him for leaving a small pile of marijuana as a tip.

-- At the Weavers School in Wellingborough, England, teachers were told in August to tolerate 15- and 16-year-old students' cussing, even the "f word," at least up to five times per class. According to London's Daily Mail, the teachers were to merely keep a count of the words on the board, which the school believes shows tolerance for occasional bad language, but which more cynical teachers and parents believe will encourage the students to max out usage in each class.

(1) Ismael Velasquez, 47, was convicted of drug possession in Round Rock, Texas, in September because he failed at flushing his baggie of cocaine down the toilet of a Shell station; police attributed their evidence-recovery success to the station's new, low-flow toilet, which caused the baggie just to swirl around. (2) Among the latest citizens to (as per the First Amendment) "peaceably assemble" and "petition government for a redress of grievances" were "hundreds" of sex offenders who gathered in September in Palm Bay, Fla., to protest the town's severe restrictions on where they can live and travel.

(1) Hungry Howie's Pizza deliveryman Thomas Stefanelli, 37, was shot in the leg during a June robbery in Tampa, Fla., as he made his rounds, but he fought the robbers off and, not really aware that the pain in his leg was from a gunshot, dutifully delivered his other four pizzas before returning to the store and examining his wound. (2) In London, in July, an unnamed teenager was rescued from a construction site at 4 a.m., about 10 stories up on the arm of a crane, which she had climbed during an apparent sleepwalking episode; she had to be brought down on a hydraulic lift.

(1) Pastor Marshall Wedderburn was given a "conditional" sentence and probation by a court in Kitchener, Ontario, in June after he admitted that he had whipped his 11-year-old daughter in church with a microphone cord because she appeared not to be paying attention to his sermon. (2) Elaine Walker became the latest parent to decide to relocate without letting her child know about it. She moved out of their home in Redmire, England, in July, leaving the equivalent of about $40 to her 15-year-old daughter, along with a note announcing that she and an older daughter had moved to Turkey (where she had recently met a man).

(1) Toru Nagasawa, 29, a construction worker in Kawasaki, Japan, was arrested in July after allegedly forcing a man to give up his contact lenses; at his home, police later recovered 124 pairs of eyeglasses and 30 pairs of contacts, stored in plastic bags. (2) Stephen Schroeder, 60, was arrested in Wilmington, N.C., in August, as the man who has been stealing teenage boys' clothes for 25 years, with an inventory of 137 pairs of shoes and enough other items to fill a van and a truck. According to police, Schroeder said he had a need to "hold" and "possess" the clothes.

Kim Bedwell, 52, and Gladys Bedwell, 50, were arrested for alleged marijuana manufacturing in Clarkston, Wash., in September, discovered when police happened to chase a black bear through their neighborhood and into the Bedwells' back yard. Apparently, frightened that the commotion was a drug raid, Kim tried to toss a marijuana plant over a high fence, but it landed on one of the officers. And in San Jacinto, Texas, in May, William Bluder, 21, was arrested for armed robbery but attempted to escape by diving head-first through some bushes outside a convenience store. However, unknown to Bluder, the bushes obscured a brick wall, which he hit with full force.

-- Royalty by Opportunistic Encounter: After a lifelong search, Marty Johnson, a Minnesota mortgage broker, finally located and visited his birth father this year, according to an ABC News report. Dad is John Ogike, who was an exchange student from Nigeria when he had a brief affair with Marty's mother, who gave Marty up for adoption, but today John Ogike is chief of the Aboh village in Nigeria, and Marty will be accepted as the new chief upon his dad's death (but Marty is unsure whether to accept).

-- Human Rights in Action: The Sri Lankan Daily News reported in September that the government's cabinet has decided to lower the age of consent for sex from 16 to 13 because, according to Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, too many men were being arrested under the old law. Also in September, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered the government to ban the traditional practice of confining women to cow sheds during their menstrual periods.

A 49-year-old woman and her 30-year-old daughter were accidentally run over and killed in August in Indianapolis as they scuffled with each other just after midnight and rolled into the street, in front of an oncoming car. And a 38-year-old man whose family owns the Catacombs Extreme Scream Halloween attraction in Kansas City, Mo., was killed while working on the exhibit when the horror house's elevator malfunctioned.

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

Brett Backwell, Australian rules football player for Gleneig, a suburb of Adelaide, whose broken finger has hampered his playing for three years, decided in September to forgo bone fusion in favor of just having half the finger amputated. "(I)f that's going to help me to succeed at this level (of pro football), then it's something you've just got to do." (In 1985, San Francisco 49ers all-pro defensive back Ronnie Lott chose to have the tip of one finger amputated because surgery, and the rehabilitation necessary to repair the finger, would have caused him to miss one game.)

-- The Moscow Cats Theater still plays to packed houses in Russia, as described in News of the Weird in March 1998, but founder Yuri Kuklachev brought 26 of his improbably trained housecats to New York City's TriBeCa Performing Arts Center this fall to play weekends through October. Among the tricks: front paw stands; "tightrope" walking on a pole; and traversing the pole from underneath by grasping it with four legs (but one cat does it using only two legs). Kuklachev says each show is different because "(s)ometimes a cat doesn't want (to perform) one trick, so he does another."

-- Megalomaniac Roundup: (1) Turkmenistan's supreme leader Saparmurat Niyazov, chronicled here in 2002 (when he whimsically changed the names of the seven days of the week and the 12 months of the year) and 2004 (for insisting that all licensed drivers pass a "morality" test), said in September 2005 that his country would build a huge, natural-habitat zoo for a large array of species, including penguins, in a desert-like area of the country. (2) And North Korea's Kim Jong-il was touted by a spokesman in August 2005 as one who never forgets a phone number or even a single line of computer code. (Among his previously publicized skills in News of the Weird reports dating back to 1994 are writing operas, flying jets, producing movies and shooting 11 holes-in-one on the first round of golf he ever played.)

-- The Anchorage, Alaska, zoo has now completed the elephant treadmill it promised last year for its venerable "Maggie," age 23, and will unveil it in November, even though in the intervening year, she has lost about 1,000 of her then-9,000 pounds, through exercise and dieting. The treadmill is merely a humongous version of a treadmill for humans.

-- Los Angeles has become the U.S. epicenter for surgery for women seeking to "firm up" their genitals, with Dr. David Matlock the leading practitioner of "vaginal rejuvenation," according to a dispatch in Toronto's Globe and Mail in August. Much of the impetus comes from patients' (or their husbands' or boyfriends') desire for vulvas as trim and youthful as those of actresses in porno movies. News of the Weird first covered the phenomenon in December 1988 when a Dayton, Ohio, gynecologist was accused of surgically tightening a woman's vagina without her consent (at the behest of her husband during surgery for another condition). The doctor, James C. Burt, who wrote an early book on the subject, "The Surgery of Love," eventually lost his license and a $5 million malpractice verdict.

-- Florida artist Maria Alquilar returned to Livermore, Calif., in August to fix the large mosaic she created at the city library a year ago when the city paid her $40,000 but failed to spellcheck her names "(Albert) Eistein," "(William) Shakespere," "(Paul) Gaugan," "(Vincent) Van Gough" and seven others. She had initially refused to make the corrections, dismissing the errors as merely "words" and angry at being ridiculed, but she relented after the city offered her $6,000 more.

-- With increased job anxiety in China's market economy, more Chinese men and women are opting for painful body-lengthening procedures to get taller. A June 2005 report on China Radio International updated the 2002 News of the Weird story, in which "hundreds" were enduring the months-long "Ilizarov procedure" (forced breaking of bones in the leg, then manually adjusting leg braces four times a day that pull the bones slightly apart, then waiting as they grow back and fuse together). As a 33-year-old, 5-foot-tall woman (aiming for 5-4) said in 2002: "I'll have a better job, a better boyfriend, and eventually a better husband. It's a long-term investment."

-- News of the Weird has reported several times on psychotherapists who help patients "recover" "repressed" memories. According to the therapists, suddenly "remembering" a really astonishing event means that the event must have actually happened, but increasingly, patients realize that they were merely persuaded by aggressive psychotherapy (such as the Chicago-area woman who in February 2004 was awarded $7.5 million from two doctors who had, over a 12-year period, facilitated her false "memory" that she had bred children for a satanic cult). In August 2005, a leading skeptic of such therapists, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, reported (in a National Academy of Sciences publication) how her research team had planted "memories" in her subjects' minds, actually convincing strawberry ice cream lovers, falsely, that they had forgotten that they used to hate the stuff.

-- Kaziah Hancock and Cindy Stewart are back in court in Salt Lake City after the Utah Court of Appeals granted them a new trial in July to try once again to get money from a breakaway Mormon sect headed by Jim Harmston. Hancock and Stewart had won $300,000 in 2002 after Harmston took their land in exchange for giving them a place to live and promising them a face-to-face meeting with Jesus Christ. (Harmston's defense was that God had told him to break that promise.)

-- Legislation advancing $453 million for the Alaskan "bridges to nowhere" described in a News of the Weird story in April 2004 (which would connect Ketchikan, pop. 7,800, with the town's airport, replacing a five-minute ferry boat ride with a bridge almost as big as the Golden Gate, and a two-mile-long span connecting Anchorage with a sparsely populated port) was finally passed by Congress in August 2005, as part of the 6,300 "earmark" pet projects of legislators, totaling $24 billion. The projects are back in the news as Congress considers cutting some in order to fund reconstruction on the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina.

-- Former Cornelius, N.C., dentist John Hall pleaded guilty in July (an "Alford plea," acknowledging only the sufficiency of the evidence against him) to seven counts of misdemeanor assault on female patients, specifically, squirting semen into their mouths from a syringe. The state Board of Dental Examiners had revoked his license in 2004 after finding two syringes of semen in his office with patients' DNA (from saliva) on them. Hall's sentence was five years' probation, and his lawyer said he thought Hall would move to Jacksonville, Fla., and go into the flooring and tile business.

-- Robert Norton starred in News of the Weird several times since 1988, owing to his habit of (and more than 20 arrests for) annoying his Pekin, Ill., neighbors by doing yardwork naked. (When, in 1999, a judge finally told him that he would go to jail if he did it again, Norton said, "I can't (promise) anything.") He passed away in July 2005, at age 82, and despite his wishes, family members made sure that he was wearing clothes when he was buried.

-- It was reported here only a month ago as one of the "most frightening stories of the week," but as it turns out, the story had already been topped. In July, 644 people had gotten together in Kimberly, British Columbia, and simultaneously played accordions for half an hour. Thanks to a proud News of the Weird reader, it can now be reported, shudderingly, that the next month at a St. John's, Newfoundland, folk arts festival, the record was broken, by 989 accordionists.

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