In the midst of violence and despair in Baghdad, at least two institutions are working smoothly, according to September stories in, respectively, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. "Iraq Star," an "American Idol"-type reality TV show, attracted 10,000 contestants for 45 slots in filming at the downtown Baghdad Hotel, and will be shown locally and around the Arab world. Other reality-style shows are in the works. Second, the almost 3,500 Baghdad traffic officers still command high respect despite the city's other problems. Said an engineer, "The traffic law is the only thing nowadays that functions correctly." In fact, the Web site of the Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani contains a query whether it is permissible, even when a driver has the street all to himself, to violate traffic laws; the ayatollah's answer is no.

-- The 30-year-old traditional festival of eel-"bowling" in the fishing village of Lyme Regis, England, was canceled in July after complaints from an animal rights activist that it was disrespectful to eels. In the ritual, teams of anglers stand on platforms and swing a giant (but dead) conger eel, attached to the ceiling, to see who will be the last person standing. Said a spokesman for the charitable event, which raises money for lifeboat crews, "But it's a dead conger, for Pete's sake. I shouldn't think the conger could care one way or another."

-- Leon Howard Matter was arrested in Sandusky, Ohio, in August for sending a letter containing "anthrax" (though it turned out to be harmless powder) to the local FBI office. He told agents the reason he did it was because he was facing earlier child pornography charges and didn't want to go to prison for that because he'd get beaten up. Threatening the FBI, he reasoned, has a better cachet.

-- Lame: After police found 638 marijuana plants in a Hastings, England, warehouse rented by David Churchward in September, he said he was forced to grow the plants (which would make more than 280,000 marijuana cigarettes) to help his wife, because she has difficulty sleeping. And Reuters reported in September that a farm woman in Lobez, Poland, who had been charged with growing marijuana, said she was forced to because her cow had been acting "skittish and unruly" until she put cannabis in the feed.

-- At the York Crown Court in England in September, Antonia Pearson-Gaballonie, 36, was convicted of having enslaved a 26-year-old housekeeper from 1997 to 2005 despite her defense that the woman had actually been earning the equivalent of about $55 a week during that time and that all she had to have done was ask for it, but she never did.

-- At the Wimbledon Magistrates' Court in England in July, Andrew Curzon was charged with wrongfully attempting to cash a neighbor's pension-adjustment check, in the equivalent of about $220,000. The explanation by Curzon (who is a law student) is that he has "dyspraxia," which renders him unable "to engage in logical thinking."

-- U.S. Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio agreed to plead guilty in September to corruption charges stemming from investigations of the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and even though Ney faces as much as 27 months in prison, he will still be eligible for a congressional pension (based on 12 years' service) when he gets out. Earlier this year, Congress passed a corruption-reform bill, which Ney enthusiastically supported, which would have caused a congressman in Ney's position to forfeit his pension, but the bill has been stalled in a House-Senate conference and was not enacted before Ney's plea was accepted.

-- More Ironies: (1) WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported in August that the pregnancy rate among girls at Timken High School in Canton, Ohio, was 13 percent, despite the fact that the school's athletic teams are known as the Trojans. (2) Police Chief Michael Chitwood of Daytona Beach, Fla., reported that his house was burglarized in August during the time he was speaking to a Neighborhood Watch group on crime prevention. (3) In August, Kosco, a police dog assigned to the Watertown, N.Y., force, was the first cop on the scene to bring down Mark A. Adams, 22, who had eluded officers for seven hours after violating probation for cruelty to his pet dog.

In Tacoma, Wash., in September, a smirking Ulysses Hardy III, 24, pleaded guilty to three aggravated murders, laughed at the victims' families in court, and told them to "get over it" and that "(p)ain is part of life." Hardy said there are two kinds of people, "us and them, predators and prey," and that he's "damn sure not prey." "(I) did what I did. And that's not going to change." A week earlier in Norristown, Pa., Janeske Vargas, 35, was sentenced to life in prison for setting a friend on fire with vodka and nail polish remover, but said she had nothing to say in court to her friend's family. "No, why should I? ... They'll get over it."

In an August rafting tournament on the Vuoksa River near St. Petersburg, Russia, which used only inflatable dolls of the kind typically sold in adult boutiques, Igor Osipov, 40, was disqualified upon finishing the race when (according to a report by Moscow News) observers "saw signs of recent sexual activity on (Osipov)'s doll."

(1) Bryan Sanderson was arrested minutes after allegedly committing his second bank robbery of the day in York County, Va., in September. Sanderson's main misjudgment, according to police, was making his getaway both times in his company home-inspection van with "Sanderson Services" on the side. (2) More Anthrax Stupidity: New Yorkers Donald Ray Bilby, 30, in July, and Abdullah Date, 18, in August, were, respectively, convicted and arrested for sending anthrax threats to authorities in envelopes that each contained their correct return addresses. (Date allegedly also included a taunting note reading, "Catch me if you can.")

Urinating continues to be a dangerous activity (even fatal, over the years, among several men who had stopped on the side of the road at night to answer nature's call and fallen down slopes to their deaths, as News of the Weird has reported). In July, an Australian man, looking for a place to relieve himself near the Commercial Drive SkyTrain station in East Vancouver, British Columbia, fell about 100 feet into a ravine, but tree branches broke his fall, and he survived. And Jerry Mersereau, 23, after camping in the Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon, filed a lawsuit against the federal government in August for injuries he suffered after wandering off a cliff at night while searching for a place to relieve himself.

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 is a final selection from the list:

Increasingly, parents are leaving their infants in hot cars while they're out shopping or drinking. Toddlers not even big enough to see over the steering wheel grab car keys and drive off a surprising distance without doing too much damage. Prosecutors and drunk-driving counselors are increasingly, themselves, found behind the wheel, inebriated. Elderly motorists from time to time make a wrong turn and don't think to stop and ask directions until they're hundreds of miles from home. All used to be novel at one point, but today are No Longer Weird.

Thanks This Week to Jan Wolitzky, Tom Barker, David Gregory, John Thomasson, Shirley Peters, Edward Rossi, Earle Norris, Steve Dunn, Michael Curtright, Skip Munger, Essie Beck, and Mike Derrickson, and to the News of the Weird Editorial Advisors.

(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.)

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.)