Just before the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, John M. Lyons Jr. filed a lawsuit in New Orleans against Mark Morice, who admits to commandeering Lyons' 18-foot pleasure boat during the chaos after Katrina hit in order to rescue more than 200 people (according to his count), including a 93-year-old dialysis patient whose wife praised Morice for a Times-Picayune story. Nonetheless, said Lyons, Morice (who voluntarily identified himself to Lyons for taking the boat) didn't have permission to use it, and since it was ultimately lost (Morice said he abandoned it for other rescuers to use), and insurance covered less than half of its replacement, Lyons says Morice should pay him $12,000.

-- (1) Salon facials available in New York City now include one (at the Nabi Med Spa) that uses stem cells from pregnant cows to rejuvenate damaged skin ($250) and another (from La Prairie) that firms the face through direct application of caviar ($270), according to a June United Press International report. (2) And the British Egg Information Service announced the imminent availability of a "smart egg" to solve the surprisingly contentious issue of when are soft-, medium- and hard-boiled eggs properly boiled. (An invisible ink on the shell turns the egg black at supposedly precisely the right moment.)

-- The Christian Retail Show in Denver in August demonstrated, said a Los Angeles Times report, nearly a parallel commercial universe, with hundreds of "Christian" versions of products and services, such as sweatbands, pajamas, dolls, health clubs, insurance agencies, tree trimmers and fragrances ("Virtuous Woman" perfume). One Retail Show visitor, though, was dismayed at the efforts to just "slap Jesus on (merchandise)." (Among the tougher sells would appear to be Book22.com, a Christian sex-toy Web site that sells condoms, vibrators and lubricants to married couples, but stocks no pornography or toys that encourage multiple-partner scenes.)

-- In August, zookeepers at Apenheul ape park in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, said they had arranged with counterparts at a park in Borneo to establish a live Internet video connection to provide companionship to their respective rare orangutans, treating the connection as sort of a visual dating site. An Apenheul spokeswoman suggested the apes might learn to push buttons to transfer food to each other, creating a mutual fondness that might lead (if transportation can be arranged) to mating.

-- Randy Bailey was on house arrest in St. Paul, Minn., with an ankle monitor that alerts police if he strays more than 150 feet (but also with a little-understood 4-minute delay before notification). Hungry on Aug. 12, Bailey thought he could race to the Burger King (nearly a mile away), yet get back in time. However, the drive-through line moved slowly, and an irate, impatient Bailey allegedly kicked in the restaurant's window before he sped away. Employees got his license-plate number and alerted police, but since Bailey had made it back home in just under four minutes, he claimed to be house-bound and never to have left. However, police soon figured it out and charged Bailey with felony destruction of property.

-- Weird disorders in the news recently included prosopagnosia, the inability of a person to remember people by their faces, even one's immediate family, and trimethylaminuria, the inability to process a chemical that, left in the body, causes a putrid odor. Researchers will soon declare that prosopagnosia (which also, obviously, inhibits sufferers' ability to enjoy movies) is less rare than previously believed, according to a June Boston Globe story. Trimethylaminuria remains basically untreatable (although bathing several times a day and ingesting chlorophyl reduce the stink, according to an August ABC News report).

-- A Connecticut company (454 Life Sciences) and Germany's Max Planck Institute have made recent breakthroughs in developing the genome of a Neanderthal man, which shows a 99 percent-plus similarity with that of humans, according to a July New York Times report. If they succeed, it might be possible to bring the species back to life by implanting the genes into a human egg (provided, of course, that some woman volunteers to bear a Neanderthal baby).

-- The Tokyo Institute of Technology said in July that it is building a database of 96 scents that will be machine-reproducible, with uses ranging from helping online shoppers smell a product before buying, to helping doctors diagnose illnesses by sniffing a patient's bile. Sensors will trigger a library of chemicals to accurately reproduce "almost any odor, from old fish to gasoline," according to one researcher, and that recipe of chemicals would remotely re-create the scent.

Joshua Shores, 34, a Subway restaurant employee in North Platte, Neb., who was allegedly caught on surveillance video pocketing the $502 he was supposed to drop into the restaurant's safe, tried to tell police and a judge in August not to worry, that he is not a thief but an undercover CIA operative and that the agency would reimburse the money. (He had lost his CIA badge, he said, which is why he was working at the Subway, waiting for the agency to send him a new one.)

-- In July, India's Medical Association began investigating three doctors who appeared on television to promote their amputation services specifically to beggars, whose income prospects grow with the more sympathy they engender. One doctor said he would remove a leg below the knee, leaving it fairly easy to fit a prosthetic, for the equivalent of about $200.

-- Employees who need expensive surgery under their U.S. employers' health-insurance plans may soon be asked to go overseas for the operation, in that surgeries in India, Thailand and Indonesia typically cost about 20 percent of the U.S. prices, according to an August report in the Christian Science Monitor. However, employers may share part of their savings with the worker, who might turn the trip into an exotic family vacation before or after the surgery.

Accidents by elderly drivers who police suspect momentarily confused the gas pedal for the brake (or accelerated in the wrong gear): Age 89, Dearborn, Mich. (backed into his own garage, panicked, accelerated into a neighbor's house across the street, July); age 89, New London, Conn. (plowed through a summer festival crowd, injuring 27, July); age 89, Rochester, N.Y. (plowed full-throttle through an open-air market, injuring 10, August); age 87, Orlando (slammed into eye doctor's office, July); age 86, Brookfield, Wis. (drove through front doors of a McDonald's, August); age 86, Columbus, Ohio (crashed fatally through the wall of an aquarium supply store, July); age 85, El Monte, Calif. (slammed into a Starbuck's patio, injuring 10, July); age 84, Tamarac, Fla. (backed over her landlord, then panicked and drove over him again, then panicked and backed over him again, with one of the drive-overs fatal, July).

Eighty such themes have occurred so frequently that they have been "retired from circulation" since News of the Weird began publishing in 1988, and here are more of them:

Sometimes, bank robbers are stuck for getaway vehicles and wind up on municipal buses or in taxis. And sometimes, dogs ("man's best friend") jump on rifles lying on the ground, hit the trigger and "shoot" someone. Increasingly, when an elderly person dies at home, the relatives can't bring themselves to notify anyone (and sometimes they just don't want the Social Security checks to stop). And remember the first time you got outraged that school officials actually expelled a student for a minor violation of one of those "zero tolerance" rules? All those stories used to be weird, but you won't read them here anymore.

(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.)

Seriously Bi-Cultural: Tariq Khan, 12, of New York City, bubbled with enthusiasm (to a New York Times reporter in August) about his love of the Grand Theft Auto video game and the hip-hop music of Fat Joe, T.I. and 50 Cent -- a month after becoming a prestigious hafiz by having memorized the entire Koran in Arabic (which he doesn't understand all that well). He finished the regimen in less than two years of 40-hour workweeks, and if he retains his knowledge, he and 10 people of his choosing eventually get express passage to paradise.

(1) University of Central Florida student Matthew Damsky was arrested in July and charged with starting a fire in his dormitory, just so that, he said, he could meet women during the evacuation. (2) During the Santa Ana, Calif., murder-conspiracy trial of Aryan Brotherhood prison leaders in July, the lawyer for defendant Barry "The Baron" Mills (who was convicted along with colleague Tyler "The Hulk" Bingham) made the point that the Aryan Brotherhood is more of a social club than a criminal gang and mostly enjoys just "playing cards, reading and crocheting," according to a New York Times report.

-- Longshots: (1) Los Angeles psychologist Michael Cohn filed a lawsuit in May against the Los Angeles Angels baseball team because he didn't get a red nylon bag that the team was giving to women for "Family Sunday" on Mothers' Day last year. (2) "Carlos the Jackal," who is perhaps the world's most notorious terrorist and who is serving life in prison in France, filed a lawsuit earlier this year against the head of French intelligence for illegally capturing him while he was sedated in a liposuction clinic in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1994.

-- Garrett Sapp filed a lawsuit in July seeking compensation for injuries from a 2004 auto accident in West Des Moines, Iowa, in which Christopher Garton's car, turning, hit Sapp's because Garton's attention was diverted by (according to a police report) the oral sex he was receiving from his wife.

-- James Filson was fired as a Big Ten conference football referee in 2005, following a reporter's disclosure that, after a bad accident and the installment of a prosthetic, Filson had been officiating games with one eye. Filson filed a lawsuit in July, pointing out that he had been refereeing well enough for the previous four years that no one noticed his condition, but the conference said that, now that the word is out, he would be a magnet for criticism on close calls.

-- Pedophiles Fight Back: (1) Phillip Distasio, 34, told a judge in Cleveland in August (in preparation for his September trial on 74 charges) that he's been a pedophile for 20 years, that what he does can be therapeutic for the child, and that it's part of his Arcadian Fields Ministries religion, of which he is a friar. (2) Three men in the Netherlands announced in May that they have formed the Charity, Freedom and Diversity party and will field candidates for office, advocating freedom to be naked in public and a reduction in the age of consent for sex to 12. The new party, said one, will give them "a voice." "(P)oliticians only talk about us in a negative sense."

-- (1) Amarillo, Texas, officials, welcomed home eighth-place national spelling bee finisher Caitlin Campbell in June with a billboard, but misspelled her name as "Cambell." (2) ExxonMobil, the company that announced jaw-dropping profits of $18.7 billion for the first half of 2006, said in June that it would fight the U.S. Justice Department over $92 million that the government said the company owes in the still-uncompleted 1989 Exxon Valdez oil-spill cleanup.

-- I See Dead People: (1) A campaign worker for unsuccessful Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate Dennis Michaud was charged in July with falsifying election records, in that he allegedly made a sworn statement that 57 voters had signed Michaud's nominating petition "in (his) presence," including two people who had long been dead. Said the worker, "I did nothing wrong." (2) The signers this summer of a nominating petition for James T. Finnell for an office in Smithtown, N.Y., were all living, but the problem there was that Finnell himself had died in 2004, and according to a July report in Newsday, no one knows who circulated the petition.

About 1,000 animals were scheduled to be dug up from Pet's Rest cemetery in Colma, Calif., after owners realized that their lease had run out (June). And the Green River Cemetery in Greenfield, Mass., began hurriedly moving and re-burying bodies, which had begun sliding down a muddy slope into the river (July). And about 100 skeletons were recently unearthed from an old graveyard beneath the St. Joseph's Church, which the Archdiocese of Boston demolished in 2004 and sold (July). And the city of London, England, began selling used burial sites (for the equivalent of about $5,600), offering to inter bodies on top of previous burials and to re-mark gravestones with new names (July).

The robber of a Bank of America branch in Tampa, Fla., in August is actually still at large, but according to witnesses, the bag of cash he took and stuffed down his pants as he fled had exploded, from the chemical dye pack inside, creating a temperature of about 425 degrees. Said a police spokesperson, "There's no way that he was not injured." (In his spirited post-ignition dash, the man jettisoned almost all the money.)

In 2001, News of the Weird mentioned William Lyttle, then age 71, of North London, England, who was notorious for obsessively digging tunnels underneath his 20-room home. That year, he had dug past the property line for the first time and created a 15-foot hole in the street. Earlier in 2006, Lyttle was temporarily evicted when his tunneling threatened the integrity of the entire street, and building inspectors feared that his accumulation of junk would cause the house itself to sink into the ground already weakened by 40 years' worth of burrowing. Engineers are considering cementing in all the tunnels.

The following people accidentally shot themselves recently: A 21-year-old man in Hoquiam, Wash., and a 20-year-old man in Chicago (fatally), both while trying "to holster" the weapon in their waistbands. And criminal suspects Fabian Patillo, 21, in a Chicago suburb (June), and a 23-year-old man in East Germantown, Pa. (July), shot themselves in the head when they too-hastily fired their guns behind them trying to shoot pursuers. (Mr. Patillo did not survive.)

Eighty such themes have occurred so frequently that they have been "retired from circulation" since News of the Weird began publishing in 1988, and here are more of them:

Sometimes, firefighters are the ones who start fires, often because of a need to prove how important they are when they put it out. And it's the law in some places that if a local election ends in a tie, it's decided by a coin flip or a cutting of cards. And most of us have heard of postal workers who fall behind in their work and stash mounds of undelivered mail. And remember when you were shocked that a high school teacher would actually have sex with a student? All those stories used to be weird, but no longer.

(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.)

Boutique wigmaker Ruth Regina of Miami is readying a line of hairpieces for "teacup" dogs and other over-pampered canines, at prices that range into the hundreds of dollars. Most promising include the "Yappy Hour" (a fluff of curls) and the "Peek a Bow Wow," which (according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in August) "fall(s) down over part of a dog's face, giving a glamorous look reminiscent of 1940s movie star Veronica Lake." (It's for dogs that feel sexy, said Regina. "There (are) some dogs that have the come-hither look.")

-- Inmate Donny Johnson, serving three life terms in solitary confinement at the Pelican Bay State Prison in California, was the beneficiary of a showing of his acclaimed paintings at a gallery in the Mexican tourist village of San Miguel de Allende, according to a July New York Times report. Because of Johnson's isolation, his only "brush" is made from strands of his own hair; his "canvases" consist of blank postcards; and his medium is colors from decomposed M&M candies. Nonetheless, at least six of the paintings, which the Times reporter called "powerful," have sold for $500 each.

-- Martin Creed, a one-time winner of Britain's prestigious Turner Prize, told the Guardian in July that his latest work, titled "Sick Film," would open in London in October and that it includes 19 scenes of people vomiting on camera. Creed spoke to the Guardian from Los Angeles, where he is working on the next, similar project, entitled "Shit Film," and has already been able to line up 15 "performers," perhaps, he said, "because LA represents the extreme edge of the world."

-- Budget-Busting: (1) While New York state grapples with a serious budget shortfall, the speaker of the state assembly works at a law firm that trolls for "victims" of injuries at state parks, with a suggestive Internet-page list of accidents that might lead to lawsuits against the state. (In August, after the New York Post exposed the page, the law firm withdrew it.) (2) In July, just after New Jersey's governor and legislature resolved a government-closing stalemate over spending in that heavily taxed state, the government announced it would reinstate its discontinued policy of paying for "erectile dysfunction" drugs for Medicaid recipients.

-- Beijing News reported in July that the city intends to assign tracking numbers to every single cabbage, carrot and pea pod in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, to identify their origins to improve food safety. Five thousand tons of vegetables may be eaten during the Olympics, and Chinese farming has been criticized by Greenpeace for using banned pesticides and other soil pollutants.

-- From an Atlanta police report, summarized in a July issue of the weekly Creative Loafing: A man working on a house on Smith Street was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital with serious injuries to his posterior. He happened to be bending over next to a wall that, unknown to him, a worker on the other side was drilling into, and the drill bit entered his "anal cavity."

-- Least Competent Cops: Four New York City police were called to an apartment house in July in the Bronx concerning a landlord-tenant dispute, but were distracted by a teenager in the hallway smoking marijuana and started to chase him, when a pit bull attacked the officers. The toll, 26 bullets later: one dead dog, one bitten officer, three other officers wounded by each other's gunshots.

(1) Undercover investigators for the Government Accountability Office reported in July that they were able to purchase, on the open market from Pentagon contractors, surplus body armor, mounts for shoulder-fired missiles, and missile radar test devices. (Nearly 2,700 "sensitive" military items had been bought by 79 other buyers.) (2) An FBI computer consultant, who said he was frustrated by bureaucratic delays in obtaining legitimate access to certain bureau files, was able to hack into the files surreptitiously via the FBI director's secret password, which the consultant figured out using software found on the Internet. (3) Indiana state homeland security officials told Vermillion County officials in July to stop using the special emergency-only highway message boards to advertise their charity fish fries and spaghetti dinners.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: John Wayne Lewis, 59 (McAlester, Okla., June); Kenneth Wayne Beck, 34 (Warren County, Mo., June); Timothy Wayne Coalson, 44 (Senoia, Ga., July); Charles Wayne Thomas Jr., 22 (Dallas, July); Ira Wayne Cloniger (Washington, Va., July); John Wayne Thomson, 46 (arrested in Victorville, Calif., on a Washington warrant, August). Pleaded guilty to murder: Michael Wayne Nelson, 23 (Palatka, Fla., August). Executed for murder: Darrell Wayne "Gator" Ferguson, 28 (Dayton, Ohio, August). Committed suicide after escaping from a halfway house: convicted murderer David Wayne Nelson, 42 (Anchorage, Alaska, June).

Huang Chunyi, 94, of Taiwan, told a reporter from China Daily in May that the secret to his longevity is that he likes to look at photographs of pretty women every day, and he showed off his collection of 100,000 that he has amassed from newspapers and magazines over the last 20 years. His favorites are Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz and Chinese model Chiling Lin. "I hope these scrapbooks will become family heirlooms," he said, "so that my grandchildren can get a look at them."

Least Competent Bail Bondsman: That would be the unidentified bondsman who bailed out identity-thief suspect Thomas Samuel in Santa Cruz, Calif., last year on Samuel's bogus check for $9,800 (after rejecting as bogus an earlier Samuel check for $3,200). Least Competent Lawyer: Ms. Knovack Jones pleaded guilty in Miami in July to ripping off a client for $300,000, though admitting that she lost most of that money in a Nigerian e-mail scam. (Said Jones, "He had a contract with the government (for) $38.6 million, and he needed my (help).")

(1) Eduardo Gonzalez, 18, was arrested and charged as the one who shot an Orlando, Fla., man to death in March for spilling beer on him in a bar. In August, the price of life went down even further when, according to police, Gonzalez put out hit contracts on five witnesses to the original shooting, which would have brought the total to six dead over one spilled beer, except (as is often the case) the "hit man" was an undercover cop. (2) A 34-year-old man was killed in Hollywood, Fla., in June after refusing to pay $80 for a $78 towing bill (he demanded $2 change, which the driver did not have), then jumping on the truck to challenge the driver and eventually falling underneath it to his death.

Eighty such themes have occurred so frequently that they have been "retired from circulation" since News of the Weird began publishing in 1988, and for the next few months, they'll be reviewed here.

Too many pranksters nowadays kidnap school or business mascots (like inflatable Ronald McDonalds) and vandalize them or hold them for ransom. Some libraries do have policies to have patrons arrested for long-overdue library books. The incidence of fires increases as smokers hooked up to an oxygen supply simply must feed their habit. And gasoline thieves who work at night need to check the tank somehow to see how full it is, and all they brought with them are matches or a lighter. These stories used to be weird, but let's face it: no longer.

(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.)