Ron "King Suki" King won the U.S. checkers championship in June in Medina, Ohio, claiming the $6,000 first prize by emerging from a field of 41 competitors whose intensity generally rivals that of more popular and complex games. King, the world "free style" champion, is known as the Muhammad Ali of checkers for trash-talking his opponents. Also competing was another world champion (in a form of checkers in which the first three moves are always at random), Alex "The Mad Russian" Moiseyev, who assured an Agence France-Presse reporter that, as in chess, the top players have to think 10 moves ahead.

-- The Gilgit tribe beat Chitral, 9-6, this year in the annual, bloody, take-no-prisoners, referee-less polo match on a remote, 2-mile-high field on a mountain in Pakistan, an event that, despite its viciousness, some observers credit with forestalling actual war between the tribes. According to a May dispatch in ESPN The Magazine, clubbing of opponents is rampant; horses are treated more reverently than players; and when a star player was thrown and landed on his head, motionless and thought perhaps even to be dead, fans screamed for him to be cleared from the field quickly so the match could continue. (He only had a broken neck and concussion.)

-- Unique Responses to Danger: (1) In May, just after bird flu was discovered in Ivory Coast, hundreds of young people flocked to Abidjan's night clubs to taunt the disease with a new dance imitating a chicken in the throes of death, according to a Reuters dispatch ("leaning backward, shaking (the) wrists, arms and legs ... with a loud clucking sound"). (2) As volcanologists warned of the possible eruption of Indonesia's Mount Merapi in May, nearby farmers continued to listen instead to the mountain's spirits and to continue their rituals and offerings to ward off an eruption, according to an NBC News report. In one region, to preserve the mountain's tranquility, men "gather naked in groups late at night and run in circles around their villages."

-- In May, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel ruled that Scott Panetti remains eligible for execution in Texas despite his delusional and schizoaffective disorders and the opinion of one law professor that Panetti is the "gold-plated craziest" death-row inmate he'd ever seen. Charged with murder after having been drug-addicted since childhood and in mental institutions 14 times, Panetti was nonetheless permitted by his trial judge to act as his own lawyer (and employed a "strategy" of claiming to be under the control of a "Sarge Ironhorse"), and not surprisingly, he lost the case.

-- Cleveland judge Eileen Gallagher abruptly dismissed child-rape charges against Norman Craig, 22, in June when the prosecutor was 45 minutes late for a hearing, and she further scolded the lawyer, warning him, "Don't treat me like a punk."

-- After examining 28 cases in which pro athletes received "community service" sentences for crimes, USA Today found in May that in 24 of them, the "punishment" consisted merely of ceremonial celebrity duties, even though the underlying crimes were serious (included assault, statutory rape, weapons violations and vehicular homicide). One pro basketball player, convicted of having sex with a 14-year-old girl when he was 19, served his 100 hours of community service by being a guest counselor at a youth basketball camp (and included 27 hours' travel time in the 100).

Troy and Jennifer Schally disclosed in June that their son Henry had chosen, among several possibilities as the theme for his third birthday party, PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," and the Schallys supplied a birthday cake with a photo of the show's correspondents and a periodic playing of its theme music. According to a Washington Post report, Lehrer sent along an autographed photo, signed in the name Henry calls him, "Jimmy Jimmy BoBo."

On many weekends a year in parks in the Washington-Baltimore area, 100 or more people gather in medieval costumes and wield soft weapons to wage battle in the 20-year-old Darkon Wargaming Club, according to a May report in Baltimore City Paper. Players point out that their hobby is simply of a piece with historical-battle video games and feature films, but still acknowledge the whimsy. Said a club manager (who is the wife of the player "Shalor" of the "Bloody Axe Mercenary Company"), on seeing the games for the first time: "I didn't want to get out of the car. I thought it was the dorkiest thing I'd ever seen. And 12 years later, of course, I'm running the thing." (An acclaimed documentary film on the club, "Darkon," has just been released.)

-- Oops! (1) Richard and Stephanie North were arrested in April and charged as the ones who had earlier taken a big-screen TV from an appliance store in Middletown, N.Y. Police had stopped their car on suspicion because a rear door was propped open to accommodate the huge TV set sticking out of the back seat. (2) Richard Costello, 29, was arrested in Clearwater, Fla., in May and charged with stealing motorcycle parts after police recovered photos of the parts, which they suspect were snapped by Costello. At the bottom of each photo, the photographer's bare toes are visible and display the tattoos "white" and "trash," matching Costello's own tattooed toes.

-- William Collins, 37, was arrested in Baldwin Place, N.Y., in June and charged with DUI even though his car wasn't moving. According to police, Collins was passed out drunk in the driver's seat of the locked car, in "park," with his body positioned so that the gas pedal was depressed, causing the engine to race and start to overheat. Collins was so unresponsive that only when police broke a window did he awaken and notice them.

-- (1) Researchers from the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center announced in May that they had grown a fully functional, artificial penis from a rabbit (using his own genes), which they hoped would lead to future development of a human penis, for men with birth defects, body trauma or cancer. (2) Ambreed New Zealand introduced in June a go-cart-like machine for ranchers to gather sperm from bulls. A driver maneuvers the vehicle, designed to resemble a cow, so that the bull can mount it. The driver waits patiently until the bull is done and then drives away with the sperm so that manual extraction is no longer required.

-- (1) Pastor John Sabbath of the Christ Christian Center, angry at the denial of funding by the Ontario (Calif.) City Council, announced at a June meeting that he was placing a curse on City Manager Greg Devereaux and his family. (2) And in June, the Motion Picture Association of America, for the first time ever, announced that it was rating a film PG (Parental Guidance) not for any sex, violence or bad language, but just because it is too openly religious (the film "Facing the Giants," starring Georgia preacher Alex Kendrick).

-- Religious Entrepreneurship: (1) Many British churches have recently installed the new Hymnal Plus, a karaoke machine to help congregations recite verses and sing hymns (including risky tunes, such as a disco version of "Amazing Grace"). (2) A violent video game based on the evangelical "Left Behind" novels, "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," was introduced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles in May, and features the Tribulation Force bloodily battling the army of the Antichrist. Reviews have been severely mixed (either a positive step to spiritualize the video games culture, or grotesque violence seemingly sanctioned under the cover of the Bible).

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

The "indecent" CBS drama "Without a Trace" for which the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a $3.3 million fine of the network and affiliates was apparently complained about by only two (at most) actual viewers of the estimated 8.2 million who watched it that December 2004 night, according to FCC records that CBS cited in a June filing to the commission. Those two (and 4,209 complaints from people who apparently only heard about the show) did not start arriving at the FCC until 12 days afterward, which coincidentally was the day that a family watchdog organization began alerting its members about the show. The same CBS program had aired in 2003, with no complaints.

-- Indispensable Devices: (1) Audio software programs whose sole purpose is to re-create the hubbub and screaming of orders on an active stock-exchange floor are coveted by some traders who formerly worked such floors but now buy and sell in quiet offices. Those traders, according to a June Wall Street Journal story, say they miss the energy and wisdom they get from trading-floor chaos. (2) In May, Lester Clancy was awarded a U.S. patent for a ropeless jump rope (a handle that electronically duplicates the feel of a jump-rope handle), which he said would be practical for, among other places, mental institutions and prisons where actual rope is banned.

-- The San Diego firm Allerca Inc. announced in June that it is accepting advance orders (at $5,000 each) for hypoallergenic cats it intends to create by cross-breeding species that lack the noxious bacteria that most cats produce that are so dangerous to asthmatics and others. A competitor, New York's Transgenic Pets, is after the same result by modifying the actual gene that produces the cat saliva bacteria. (Transgenic is expecting to beat Allerca to market, at a price of around $1,000.)

-- Progress With Flavors: (1) Researchers at England's University of Birmingham announced in May that they had powered a fuel cell by giving chocolate waste to Escherichia coli bacteria, which converted the sugar into hydrogen. (The bacteria are also expected to produce precious metals from discarded automobile catalytic converters.) (2) Researcher Mayu Yamamoto of Japan's International Medical Center said her team had succeeded in extracting vanilla from ordinary cow dung, although she conceded the flavoring could only be commercially used in non-food products like shampoos.

Zimbabwe's world's-worst inflation officially reached 1,042 percent in April, with prices doubling every three or four months and unemployment rising to 70 percent. Only the unsophisticated fail to spend any money they have promptly, even though, for example, toilet paper sells for $145,000 a roll (about 69 U.S. cents). According to an April New York Times dispatch, President Robert Mugabe's remedy is simply to print trillions of dollars in new money (which he needs to keep his government workers loyal, to prop up his dictatorship).

As Congress debates whether to retain the federal estate tax, two advocacy groups released evidence in April that 18 super-rich families (including the owners of Wal-Mart, Gallo wine, Campbell's soup and the Mars candy company) spent as much as $500 million in the last 10 years through industry and trade associations to urge abolition of the tax, and if their campaign is successful, the families will have saved themselves an estimated $71 billion in taxes, a return of 142 times the investment. (Polls show that around 70 percent of Americans favor abolition, even though only one taxpayer in 400 owes any tax.)

In May, The Times of London reported on Japan's Shingo Village, which is well known to locals, and practically no one else, as the burial place of Jesus Christ. According to documents written in ancient Japanese, Jesus supposedly moved to Shingo from Jerusalem as a young man, married Miyuko, became a farmer, and died at age 106. However, that cannot be true, according to Katherine Jhawarelall, 35, a Hindu woman with a criminology degree, living in Durban, South Africa, because she is certain that she herself is Jesus Christ (after awakening one day in 2004 with a swollen arm containing a miracle-producing stigmata), according to a report in Durban's Post.

Cities feel fortunate to have even one dependable group of dedicated volunteer caretakers for a public park, but Boston's Ringer Park has two. However, they hate each other. According to an April Boston Globe story, Ringer Park Partnership Group and Friends of Ringer Park spread nasty rumors about each other, compete ruthlessly for new members, resist mediation more fiercely than some street gangs do, and, allegedly, commit park vandalism in order to embarrass the other group. The origin of the feud appears to be differences in aggressiveness and in attitudes toward dogs, and according to the Globe, peace is not in sight.

In June, another client who did her own lawyering, eccentric Susan Polk, was convicted of murdering her husband, after a long trial in Martinez, Calif., in which she spent two weeks on the witness stand as both questioner and witness (and in a judge-allowed departure, as her deep-voiced husband, as she re-created their conversations). Polk also told the jury that she is psychic, that she called the Sept. 11 attacks in advance, that her husband was an Israeli intelligence agent, that she once foiled an assassination attempt on the pope, and that Colin Powell is the Antichrist.

-- James Otis Denham, 49, was arrested in May after attempting to sell a 375-year-old etching by Rembrandt ("The Raising of Lazarus") that police later learned had been stolen. Denham was unsuccessful, largely because he said he'd take just $1,500 for it and because his sales venue was the trunk of his car, to a potential customer he had met in Torchy's Legends bar in Broken Arrow, Okla.

-- Not Cut Out for a Life of Crime: (1) Paul Wendell Gunn was arrested in May, sitting on a sofa in the reception area at the First State Bank in Round Rock, Texas, minutes after he had allegedly robbed it. According to Austin's American-Statesman, Gunn, for reasons he has not yet disclosed, chose to remain in the bank and read magazines until police arrived. (2) In Kumagaya, Japan, in May, a 58-year-old unemployed man commenced a robbery of the Saitama Resona Bank, but then asked a teller for suggestions on bank-robbing. When the teller angrily ordered the man out, he left, but in his haste, cut himself on the leg with his knife.

The 13-year-old blond, blue-eyed, twin white-supremacist singers, Lynx and Lamb Gaede ("Prussian Blue," mentioned here in December), might lower their profile temporarily while their divorced parents fight over custody in Fresno, Calif. Though mom April Gaede is still a white supremacist ("I'm a racist ... Everybody's a racist"), dad Kris Lingelser said he has renounced his separatist ways and would like to soften the girls' views, too, but so far, he has only limited visitation rights to April's home in Montana.

It Worked Out, After All: In May, a 30-year-old man from Waterfoot, England, attempted suicide by tying a rope around his neck and the other end to a telephone pole, and then drove off in his car. However, the rope quickly broke, dooming the suicide. The impact, however, jarred the driver, causing him to lose control and crash into a tree, fatally. And in June, a man attempted suicide in Huntington Beach, Calif., by hanging himself off the side of the Adams Avenue Bridge, but he accidentally came loose, fell to the dry riverbed below, and was killed.

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

Britain's Prince Philip has for at least 30 years accommodated a tribe of 400 "cargo cult" people on the South Sea island of Tanna, who revere him as the human face of an ancestral spirit, according to June revelations by London's Daily Mail. Both sides have been discreet, but the prince has acquiesced by sending the tribe signed photographs, including one in which he is holding the traditional war club (even though a totally authentic pose would require that the prince hold it while naked). Cargo cults are so named because, lore has it, an ancient god forecast that one day, wealth would fall from the sky, and then, during World War II, it did, in the form of parachuted-in supplies for American troops who used the islands as staging areas.

-- An Iowa tribunal turned down Chris T. Coppinger's demand for unemployment benefits in May, following his firing from a charitable fund-raising company in Davenport for various alleged indiscretions. Among the company's charges was that Coppinger had had sex on top of his desk with a co-worker, but Coppinger argued that that should not be a terminating offense, since many other company employees had had sex on his desk, too.

-- Never Give Up: Ronald Blankenship, a shoe repairman in Birmingham, Ala., finished second in June's Democratic primary for sheriff and was placed in a run-off, when the Birmingham News discovered details of an apparently shady past: faking his death in connection with an insurance policy, assault and passing bad checks. Blankenship's defense, a week later: It must be another Ronald Blankenship (even though "both" men have the same middle name and birth date and coincidentally are married to women with the same first, middle and maiden names).

-- Honesty Is the Best Policy? (1) Jonifer Jackson, 20, was arrested in Clarksville, Tenn., in April and charged with reckless endangerment for firing a 9 mm pistol while street-preaching (because, he told police, it was the only way he could get people to listen to him). (2) Phillip Daniels, 42, was arrested in Dallas in April, as the one who had set off five explosives in the previous two weeks (which he told Dallas' KXAS-TV were done just because he likes the sounds). (3) Yasuhisa Matsushita, 25, was arrested in Iwata, Japan, in March as the man who stole a high school girl's swimsuit, put it on, and pranced around in it while relieving himself because, he told police, "(I)t felt so good."

In the course of an April ruling that the New York City school system had gone too far by firing Toquir Choudhri for poor work habits, administrative law judge John Spooner declared that city workers have a "right" to surf the Internet for personal use while at work. Choudhri was expecting reinstatement, but two weeks later Chancellor Joel Klein fired him anyway, citing poor work habits beyond his Web-surfing. (Choudhri was unavailable for comment, in that he was suspected of being on leave in a country on whose tourist Web sites he had been lingering.)

-- In May, in the midst of the Ford Motor Co.'s "Red, White & Bold," buy-American ad campaign touting its classic Mustangs, the research firm CSM Worldwide (using statistics from the U.S. Department of Transportation) revealed that 35 percent of the 2006 Mustang's content came from overseas, and in fact, that five Honda models and seven Toyota models contained more U.S. content than the Mustang, including Toyota's Sienna minivan, which was 90 percent U.S.

-- More Ironies: (1) The May 10 tornado that hit Highland County, Ohio, touched down in the town of Hillsboro, along Wizard of Oz Drive. (2) In April, The Washington Post, covering outdoor press conferences by Capitol Hill legislators to decry the then-recent bump in gasoline prices, reported that the vehicle of choice for most of them returning to offices only a few blocks away was a gas-guzzling SUV, and in fact that several senators hopped into idling SUVs even to travel across the street from the Capitol to their offices.

(1) The Chicago Sun-Times reported in May that at least six homeless substance addicts had claimed that someone had paid them $5 each to vote for certain candidates in a recent Chicago school board election (but that a schools spokesman, after consulting the rules, said vote-buying in Chicago school board elections might not even be illegal). (2) London's Guardian reported in April that access to British dentists is becoming so difficult that in a recent week, 6,000 do-it-yourself crown-and-cap replacement kits had been sold to consumers.

In May, a judge in Reno, Nev., sentenced Raymond Russell George, 58, to five consecutive life sentences for molesting three young girls over a two-year period, but George said he welcomes the prison time because it will give him a chance to use his comprehensive knowledge of the Bible to help inmates find Jesus. George is notorious also for his dreadful inattention to hygiene, which he said is necessary to keep fellow prisoners (his potential congregants) from getting too close to him. (Otherwise, he said, they "flick boogers at me and fart in my face.")

Flunking Finance 101: John Faux, 41, was arrested in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in April and charged with robbing a Key Bank branch of about $2,000; Faux had complained to the teller that he had clearly demanded not $2,000, but "$100 million," and the two were still arguing when the police arrived. And Tekle Zigetta, 45, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles in March to trying to smuggle $250 billion into the country (which Customs agents discovered, in the form of 250 bills of the denomination of $1 billion, bearing a picture of President Grover Cleveland).

-- Veteran New England mobster Anthony St. Laurent, 64, was arrested again in April, in Providence, R.I., on loan-sharking charges. As with previous arrests, St. Laurent tried to convince the judge not to jail him because his colorectal condition required him to take 40 enemas a day, but the condition has apparently worsened, in that he now claims to need "to have his stool removed, biweekly," according to his lawyer. (Note: "Biweekly," meaning "every two weeks," is often used incorrectly to mean twice a week.)

-- Four weeks ago, News of the Weird reported that a "side business" of British farmer David Lucas was building gallows for export to Zimbabwe and other countries that still execute by hanging. After the story was widely reported in the British press, a man who identified himself as Lucas' sometime-business-partner told reporters that Lucas had been joking, that he had built only one gallows and was not actually in the business. At press time, it is unknown whether Lucas, or his partner, was telling the truth.

(1) Recent incidents in which people were run over fatally by their own cars: a 62-year-old woman backing out of a parking space at a Wal-Mart in Kahului, Hawaii, in May (she had apparently opened the door to look behind her and fell out), and a 76-year-old woman visiting her husband's grave at Maple Grove Cemetery in New York City in April (details not reported). (2) A 67-year-old woman was killed in Houston in May when her car went out of control, swerved across a road, and slammed into the lead car of a funeral procession about to depart Guadalupe Funeral Home for the cemetery. The woman's family later announced that they would just leave the body at Guadalupe for funeral arrangements.

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)