Carry-on Blues: (1) Just after the Aug. 10 restrictions were imposed, British Airways refused to allow disabled New Zealand runner Kate Horan (on her way to the paralympic world championships in the Netherlands) to carry on her prosthetic leg, as she had long been allowed to do. Her checked-baggage leg was then lost in the chaos at Heathrow airport, and the prosthetic's manufacturer scrambled to make Horan a new one. (The leg was found a week later, and at press time, Horan had won at least one medal.) (2) The Transportation Security Administration's ban on carry-on liquids, gels and ointments apparently does not apply to small quantities of "personal lubricants," such as the gels popular as sex aids.

-- Leave No Animal Uneaten: Colombia's exports of "hormiga culona" ("big-butt queen ants") are down this year due to a harsh winter and aggressive lizards and birds, creating steep prices for chocolate-dipped ants in London and ant-based sauces and spreads at home, according to an August Associated Press dispatch. And a July Reuters story on the Explorers Club in New York City called it virtually the only place where gourmets can enjoy such delicacies as scorpion, cricket, tarantula and maggot, and pigeon pate, as well as odd parts of common livestock. Worms are also prized if they've been "evacuated" on oatmeal for a few days before serving.

-- Weird Chinese: (1) In rural Jiangsu province, some still believe that a well-attended funeral leads to a successful afterlife, but police have recently cracked down on the practice of hiring strippers to punch up attendance, according to an August Reuters dispatch. (2) Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia still celebrate a lunar-calendar oddity termed the "hungry ghost" month, during which the gates of hell supposedly open and create widespread fear. Many Buddhists seek to appease the ghosts (and acquire lucky lottery numbers) by offering them food and paper models of items they can use when they resume being dead.

-- Problem Solved: (1) Darrell Rodgers, 40, was treated at Bloomington (Ind.) Hospital in August after shooting himself in the left knee because he felt he had to try something to end the pain there (pain possibly from having shot himself in that knee 10 years earlier). (2) Electrician Paul Trotman, 51, was arrested in Clay County, Fla., in August after allegedly rigging an electrical device to shock a 3 1/2-year-old boy who lived with Trotman and his wife, after Trotman got fed up that the boy was constantly urinating on electrical outlets just to see sparks fly.

-- The New South Wales state government in Australia will soon propose to install voting booths in bars, according to a July Australian Associated Press dispatch. The booths would have to be located in non-serving rooms, with entrances separate from the bar, but the government said that in small towns, bars are popular community gathering points.

-- In an attempt to raise environmental awareness, two concerned citizens of Walpole, Mass., hosted a "pump-out party" in June, with wine and cheese, to encourage neighbors to keep their septic systems in good order. The hosts allowed their own tank to be publicly cleaned as a demonstration, although the drinking and eating portion of the party came to a halt at that point, according to the Daily News Transcript of suburban Boston.

-- Accommodating Your Parishioners: (1) Rabbi Yair Silverman recently declared a ring, eight miles in circumference around his Berkeley, Calif., synagogue, to be an "eruv," or "home," so that his parishioners could move about more freely on the Sabbath, when Jewish law imposes some "home"-based restrictions. (2) Some Sunni Muslims in Saudi Arabia practice the religious, and legal (though reviled), "misyar" contract, which permits a couple to be married but live separately, joining sometimes only for sex, and without financial responsibility for each other, according to a July Reuters dispatch from Riyadh.

-- (1) Sarah Yule was fired as a receptionist at St. Mary's Hospital in Troy, N.Y., earlier this year because she refused to remove her lip ring at work, which she said was integral to her religion, the Church of Body Modification. Yule insisted that her several piercings are spiritual, giving her control over her body, and she declined to accept an alternate job at St. Mary's, away from public contact. (2) Joseph Butts is in jail in Franklin County, Mo., the result of being caught with 338 pounds of marijuana in a traffic stop, but according to an August St. Louis Post-Dispatch report, he informed the arresting officer that hassling him would be a "hate crime" because he was a special courier transporting religious instruments between member monasteries of the Church of Cognizance, which uses marijuana as a sacrament.

(1) "Shooting Reported at Firing Range" (an August story on mischief at Shooter's Choice, in The State newspaper of Columbia, S.C.). (2) "Hong Kong Man Found Being Eaten Alive by Maggots" (an August story in the Sydney Morning Herald about a 67-year-old man who was discovered just in time and is recovering). (3) "Asheville Corrections Official Sent to Prison for Sex With Inmate" (an August story in the Winston-Salem Journal, which seems like welcomed punishment for the official, but actually it was a female official who had sex with a male and was shipped to a women's prison).

A recent documentary produced for Australia's Channel 4 (and described in a July story in Sydney's Daily Telegraph) caught up with a Ukrainian woman, now 23, who had been "forgot(ten)" by her mother and father and raised by dogs until discovered at age 8. Oxana Malaya (one of about 100 known feral children) has the tested mental age of 6, stilted speech and an uncoordinated gait, and still buries any gifts she receives and runs into the woods when she is upset. For the camera, Malaya showed she can still bark, run on all fours, pant with her tongue out, and dry herself off by shaking.

Kaleb E. Spangler, 21, was badly hurt by fireworks in August when, according to his girlfriend, he decided to duct-tape a large "mortar-style" explosive onto a football helmet, put it on and light it, while riding with friends in a car. According to a story in the Herald-Times of Bloomington, Ind., alcohol was involved in Spangler's decision.

News of the Weird reported in 1993 that a nude dancer in Tampa had been spared a more serious injury (according to a police officer) when a gunshot to her chest was deflected by her breast implant. In August 2006, an Agence France-Presse report from a hospital in Nahariya, Israel, credited a young woman's silicone breast implant for saving her from a more serious injury from shrapnel from a Hezbollah rocket during the recent war.

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 some of them:

Carjacking, as a crime of youth, frequently involves perps who commandeer stick-shift cars they never learned how to drive. Suspects fleeing the police near the water decide to swim for freedom, and drown. And remember, years ago, when we thought it weird that perverts would hide tiny video cameras in public restrooms? And can you remember far back enough when you thought it was weird that some women kept too many cats around? Those things, too, used to be weird, but haven't been in a while now.

(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.)

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.)