In September, following complaints of diners, the health department in Springfield, Mo., notified restaurants that Debby Rose's "assistance monkey" could not be permitted to dine with her (in a high chair), even though Rose said she suffers from a disabling social phobia that she can accommodate only if "Richard" (a bonnet macaque monkey) is with her. Monkeys are generally permitted under the Americans with Disabilities Act if they perform certain tasks, as capuchin monkeys have been trained to fetch groceries from shelves for wheelchair-using patrons. However, animals that provide only emotional support fall into a gray area, according to a U.S. Justice Department spokesperson quoted by the Springfield News-Leader.

-- Fire crews arriving at a burning house on 99th Street in Portland, Ore., on July 26 must have suspected that something was up because nervous residents of the home were ferrying buckets of water to the fire themselves, having already implored neighbors not to call firefighters. Police later found marijuana plants growing in the basement and took three people into custody.

-- In an August segment on WWLP-TV (Springfield, Mass.), police chief Anthony Scott of Holyoke, Mass., described the extent of a recent domestic fight in which Ms. Yesenia Ortiz retaliated against alleged aggressor Victor Cruz: "She grabbed another knife and stabbed him in the winky...." (Cruz was arrested and taken to a hospital for treatment of his winky.)

-- Artists Gone Too Far: (1) An August Los Angeles exhibition by photographer Jill Greenberg featured 27 2- and 3-year-old kids crying, scenes that Greenberg provoked by offering each one a lollipop and then snatching it away. She admitted that the photos were "upsetting" but denied critics' accusations of child abuse. (2) In August, police in Mumbai, India, decided to get a professional opinion from the local JJ School of Art as to whether a downtown video and photographic exhibition was obscene and should be closed down. (The school's opinion of the show, "Tits, Clits and Elephant Dick," has not been reported.)

-- Performance artist Kira O'Reilly's August show in Penzance, England, "Inthewrongplaceness," consisted of a naked woman cradling a dead pig for four hours at a time. O'Reilly explained, on her Web site: "The work left me with an undercurrent of pigginess (and) unexpected fantasies of mergence and interspecies metamorphoses began to flicker into my consciousness." People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called the performance merely "sick."

-- One Hindu family sued another in Springfield, Mass., in July over an arranged marriage after the bride-to-be presented herself to the groom's family for the first time and was judged too ugly. Vijai V. Pandey and his wife claimed they were "extremely shocked" at the woman's "protruded bad teeth" and bad complexion, among other deficiencies. A spokesman for an American Hindu organization tried to downplay skepticism over arranged marriages, telling the Springfield Republican newspaper that he had seen "very handsome men who are happy with somewhat homely women."

-- Linda Mason filed a lawsuit in Chicago in July against a Borders bookstore, citing a defective toilet in the ladies' room that allegedly triggered near-catastrophic medical injuries. Because the broken seat "shifted to the side" when she sat down, she not only lost her balance and fell to the floor but somehow suffered "multiple spine injuries," requiring "multiple neurosurgical" operations, resulting in permanent disfigurement.

Pennsylvania inmate Donta Thomas was re-arrested in August and charged with operating a drug ring on the outside, carried out via the Fayette County prison's pay phones. According to police, Thomas routinely gave explicit instructions to his accomplices over the phone despite an automated message on each call that the conversation was being recorded. According to a spokesman for the state attorney general, Thomas, speaking, would pause so as not to have to talk over the recording, but then afterward resume planning his deals.

(1) Adam Sutton's elaborate plan to propose to Erika Brussee in July on a small chartered plane near Rome, Ga., didn't work out, as the engine stalled and the plane crashed (causing minor injuries) near their friends on the ground who were holding up signs with the actual proposal question for Brussee. (2) Mark Papkey's elaborate plan to propose to Holly Barnes in June on a hot air balloon near Boston didn't work out, as the balloon drifted into wilderness, fuel ran out, and they and the pilot were forced to spend the night in the woods before being rescued. (Both Brussee and Barnes said yes.) (And in Wichita, Kan., in September, Kandi Blakney went to the courthouse for her wedding, but when a clerk pulled up her marriage license, two outstanding arrest warrants also came up, and she was jailed, in her wedding dress.)

Executive chef George Llorens, 60, was arrested in Bridgeport, Conn., in July, accused of punching a colleague in the face because the appetizers she made were cold. And police in Decatur, Ala., arrested four people in August after intermittent, daylong fighting (that sent three of them to the hospital) that begin when one flicked a cigarette butt near another's property. And Jeffrey Cullen, 58, was arrested in August for firing several gunshots at Kingman, Ariz., firefighters (but missing) when they told him that they weren't permitted to rescue his cat from a tree.

While stories of dogs stepping on rifles' triggers and accidentally shooting their owners have occurred so often as to be No Longer Weird, the dog that accidentally kicks the gearshift of an idling vehicle is rarer. Nonetheless, in July in Republic, Pa., and Ogden, Utah, dogs sent trucks off on wild spins after bumping gearshifts. The Pennsylvania dog hit a pole, a fence and a house and ruptured a gas line; the Utah "driver" (a police K-9) hit a woman, seriously injuring her. (And near Elliott Lake, Ontario, in July, a bear climbed into Marty Descoteaux's idling boat and bumped the throttle, as Descoteaux bailed out. The boat spun around and hit a rock, knocking the bear back into the water.)

In Jhalabordi village in India in August, a pigeon fell into a well, and five villagers went in, in succession, to rescue first the pigeon, and then the succeeding Samaritans, but all five died. And in Surkhondaryo province in Uzbekistan in August, a father and son were digging an overflow pit for an outdoor toilet when the walls collapsed, and five neighbors in succession were lowered into the pit to attempt a rescue, but all seven people wound up dead.

Eighty such themes have occurred so frequently that they have been "retired from circulation" since News of the Weird began publishing in 1988, and many of them involve the ineptitude of criminals:

Burglars leave footprints in the snow or mud, or they suffer a leakage of loot from their heist, thus leaving trails often leading right up to perps' doorsteps. With videocams so widely used, more and more criminals are chronicling their crimes as they go, eventually making prosecutors' work easy. Even so, some robbers haven't mastered video camera technology, and when they intend to disable a surveillance camera, they smash only the lens, leaving the recording unit intact. Cop wannabes, some with uniforms, badges and flashing lights on their dashboards, get thrills by stopping and scolding drivers, until they mistakenly stop a real (off-duty) cop. All these used to be weird, but nowadays are just too common.

(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.)

It's usually in Florida where one reads of lonely widows persuaded to pay extravagant prices for dance lessons, but Mimi Monica Wong, 61, is a different kind of dancing widow, according to an August Wall Street Journal report. A Hong Kong private banker with a top-drawer client list, Wong contracted to pay US$15.4 million over eight years for cha-cha and rumba lessons from two world-class instructors so she could excel on the international championship Latin dance circuit. However, she soured on their motivational approach ("lazy cow" and "(move your) fat arse" were allegedly part of their dialogue) and sued. In September, a court ordered Wong's $8 million advance returned, and she has since signed on with another instructor whose fee is a bargain: $21,000 a month.

-- Trial judge Florentino Floro was fired by the Philippines supreme court in April, and his appeal rejected in August, after investigators found that he had claimed to rely on three mystic dwarves (Armand, Luis and Angel) for psychic powers and the ability to write while in a trance. (Floro protested media accounts of his firing to The Wall Street Journal in July, denying that dwarves helped him decide cases and writing that Armand, Luis and Angel are merely "spirit guides" and that he himself is "gifted" from God "to heal and to prophesy.")

-- "I shouldn't even be doing this," said Judge Gary F. McKinley in a Kenton, Ohio, courtroom in August. "I'm cutting you somewhat of a break," he told two star athletes of Kenton High who had just been convicted of vehicular vandalism in a prank that caused two men serious, life-long disabilities. The kids' sentence: 60 days in juvenile detention (plus community service), but only after football season. (The families of the victims were appalled, especially the family of the one who was brain-damaged.)

-- Judge Paul E. Zellerbach was admonished by California's judicial agency in August for behavior in October 2004, when he left a jury deliberating a murder charge in order to attend an Angels-Red Sox playoff game and declined to leave the game when notified that the jury had reached a verdict (forcing everyone to return the next day).

-- In July, according to a Canadian Press report, a Wal-Mart in St.-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, received a bomb threat and immediately dispatched about 40 employees on duty to look through the store to find the explosive. (Customers were allowed to leave, though, and ultimately, it was a false alarm.)

-- Can't Possibly Be True: (1) School bus driver Delores Davis faced termination in Coushatta, La., in August after she decided to arrange seating on her bus, with whites up front and all nine black kids into the back two rows. (2) In a suburb of Nashville, Tenn., in July, reserve Army Capt. John Parker was let go as a criminal-justice teacher at Wilson Central High School because he had volunteered for a second tour of duty in Afghanistan. School officials offered him his job back after the first tour, but after the second, they terminated his course, suggesting that he was insufficiently committed to teaching.

-- Tammie Lee Doss, 43, and two friends were charged with unlawful imprisonment in September in Athens, Ala., when Doss held her brother Randy at gunpoint and prayed for him. According to police, Tammie had confronted Randy, even firing a shot near his head to keep his attention, and urged him to redress his childhood mistreatment of her.

-- A puppy with six legs and two penises was reported outside the Kwang Sung Temple in Malaysia in June, according to that country's Star newspaper. And a kitten was born with two faces in July in Grove City, Ohio, and another with just one eye and no nose was born in Syracuse, N.Y., in April. And the World Aquarium in St. Louis, Mo., ran an exhibit in August featuring 10 two-headed snakes and turtles. And a 24-year-old businessman, in a hospital in New Delhi, India, in August, was reported to have two functioning penises.

-- Sanju Bhagat was admitted to a hospital in Nagpur, India, in August, where doctors expected to find a very large abdominal cyst, but instead, said surgeon Ajay Mehta, "To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside." Bhagat was a victim of fetus in fetu, in which his birth twin had migrated to the inside of his body and continued to leech off of him. Mehta extracted feet, hands, hair and jaw.

Hapless: (1) The guy in the Ronald Reagan mask who robbed a Bank of America in San Diego in August got away, but all his money was dye-stained, in a caper that went wrong from the start. According to police, the mask covered his eyes; he wore a cape that tangled with his gun, causing him to drop it; his getaway car got blocked in by a delivery truck; he rammed the truck to get away, provoking an argument with the driver; the dye pack exploded; and the mask and gun got left behind. (2) Twice in a week in August, gangs (or maybe the same gang) of bank robbers in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia, tried to haul away an ATM. In the first, they mistakenly yanked loose a check-depositing machine instead of the ATM, and in the second, their excavator's digging arm got stuck in the bank's ceiling.

In September, police in New Zealand dropped the dangerous-driving charge against the armless driver reported in News of the Weird in April, satisfied that he steers well enough with his left foot (though his speeding ticket remained). In August, though, the St. Petersburg Times profiled Michael Wiley, 39, of Port Richey, Fla., an enthusiastic driver despite having lost both arms and half a leg in a childhood accident. Wrote the Times, "He guides the key into the ignition with his mouth. Turns it with his toes. Shifts with his knee. Bites the headlight switch. Jams his stump of a left arm into the steering wheel and whips it around." On the minus side, his license was revoked long ago, and reckless driving charges flourish, including the latest, one day after the Times story ran. (And in September, he was charged with domestic assault, with his head.)

Reuters reported in August that a man was killed in his workshop on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro when he tried to open a rocket-propelled grenade (probably to recover scrap metal) with a sledgehammer. And two days before that, in the Indiana town of Brazil (near Terre Haute), a 31-year-old man was accidentally killed in the explosion of the pipe bomb he was carrying (probably to be used to help him catch fish in Birch Creek).

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: A jar with a loved one's ashes is sometimes inadvertently given away or sold, as at a yard sale. Or a spouse agrees to reconcile even though he or she was recently the victim of attempted murder by the other. Every couple of years, reports surface from Africa about rumors of people able to make penises disappear. Increasingly now, judges punish young noisemakers by forcing them to listen to demographically unappealing music (classical or polka or Barry Manilow). Those things were once upon a time 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.)

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.)