Campaign Roundup: (1) In her joyful 2004 autobiography, Sandy Sullivan, 65, the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Wisconsin, recalls her friskier days as a 1960s Green Bay Packers fan, including interludes with Hall of Fame running back Paul Hornung. (2) Donovan Brown, the Democratic nominee for a Florida state House seat, resumed campaigning in October after a two-week involuntary stay at a mental health facility after his mother took him in for evaluation. (3) Palm Beach County, Fla., whose Democratic voters' confusion over the "butterfly ballot" may have cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000, will now see if its Republicans will be confused by a state law that requires them to vote for their recently resigned congressman, Mark Foley, if they want to register votes for his Republican replacement.

-- Vying to become the national sport of Venezuela is coleo, less bloody than bullfighting and "truly Venezuelan," a spokesman for the national coleo organization told The New York Times in September. Four men on horses chase a bull in a large pen, competing to see who can tip it over the most times by yanking on its tail. If the bull hasn't broken any legs when it falls, the men must get it back on its feet quickly by further twisting (or biting) the tail or by electric prod, so that the game can continue.

-- In a remote region of China, relatives shower graves with objects that supposedly make the deceased's afterlife more pleasant, and some families of dead bachelors even buy corpses of unmarried females and bury them with their sons in posthumous "weddings." Ironically, according to a September New York Times dispatch from Chenjiayuan, since men outnumber women in the region (in part due to abortions of girl fetuses), families of these dead women are able to command high "dowries."

-- More Spirits: (1) The grave of Pol Pot (one of the 20th century's most prodigious mass murderers) near Anlong Veng, Cambodia, is revered by local villagers who believe his ghost protects them and also provides winning lottery numbers, according to an August International Herald Tribune report. In fact, the government is building a casino nearby to serve those who feel lucky. (2) Of the 25,000 children homeless in the streets of Kinshasa, Kenya, more than half are believed to be there because their parents have disowned them as suspected "witches," according to an August Los Angeles Times dispatch. Said one 10-year-old: "They say I ate my father. But I didn't."

-- Dutch transportation planner Hans Monderman has been pushing his innovative plans for improving traffic, and several towns in the Netherlands and Germany have already signed on, according to an August report by the German news organization Deutsche Welle. His proposals include eliminating traffic signs and street markings, which he believes will force drivers to be careful as they hunt for their destinations, and building children's playgrounds in median strips of roads, figuring that drivers would surely slow down.

-- Injudicious: In August, Lowell, Mass., judge James McGuinness Jr. quixotically relieved Ms. Grimary DeJesus of all responsibility for failure to pay earlier court fees (which followed four arrests in eight years), provided that she recite the Pledge of Allegiance. She was only 12 words into it before she faltered, but McGuinness said, "Congratulations, ma'am, never heard it said better," and released her anyway.

-- The latest version of China's periodic Animal Olympic Games, with 300 hardly voluntary participants, was held at the Shanghai Wildlife Park in September, to the consternation of animal-rights activists around the world. London's Daily Mail reported that chimpanzees played basketball and lifted weights, a bear in a tutu navigated an obstacle course, sea lions high-jumped, and an elephant took on spectators in tug-of-war. Photographs of a kangaroo boxing a garishly-dressed man were posted on the Web sites of China Daily and CBS News.

-- At least three Christian wrestling associations are active in the southern United States, staging matches using traditional pro-wrestling gimmicks (angelic "babyfaces" vs. creepy "heels"; the "injured" star who gamely takes a mauling but wins through sheer determination). In one pointed adaptation, the bad guys strap "Wrestling for Jesus" star Chase Cliett onto a large cross in the ring and beat him bloody, but he is resurrected after a good-guys' "run-in" from the dressing room. Wrestling for Jesus and Ultimate Christian Wrestling (both based in Georgia), and Texas' Christian Wrestling Federation, set aside some time each show for their muscular roughnecks to evangelize among their rowdy fans, according to an Associated Press report.

-- New York filmmaker Andy Deemer, impressed by reports that 40 to 45 new religions emerge every year in America, offered a $5,000 fee earlier this year for a wannabe messiah to start one and let Deemer chronicle the formation step-by-step, from creation of the philosophy to the soliciting of disciples. Of 300 applicants, Deemer chose 35-year-old musician Joshua Boden, based on Boden's God-optional, feel-good narrative that he called "the Church of Now," based a bit on Buddhism and Taoism (according to an August New York Times profile). Among the prophets that Deemer passed by was Damian Phoenix, whose religion centers around an insect-like creature, "Arkon," and a world of alien parasites that negatively influence people (that is, until Phoenix heals them).

In September, police in the Georgia towns of Perry and Americus were investigating incidents probably involving the same unnamed man, who provided an additional dimension to the typical foot-fetishist: religion. An 80-year-old Wal-Mart shopper in Perry reported that the man was sitting on the floor of an aisle and asked her for help with his "religious" ritual. The lady accommodated him by stepping on his hands and then spitting on him, but when he began to lick her feet, she called for help.

(1) Least Competent Anti-Abortion Activist: David Robert McMenemy, 45, was arrested in Davenport, Iowa, in September after he drove his car into a women's clinic and then set it on fire to protest abortions. He was then informed that it is just a medical clinic, providing neither abortions nor abortion referrals. (2) Least Competent Drug Agents: Just after federal and local narcotics agents cut down and bundled for destruction massive quantities of marijuana plants at a site in California's Marin County in September, officials reported that, despite security, 1,200 of the plants had been stolen before they could be taken away.

The Latest News From Places That Lack Sunshine: According to a September Reuters report, four gang-member inmates at the maximum-security Zacatecoluca lockup in El Salvador were caught with "cell phones, a phone charger and spare chips" in their rectums, "far enough (in) to reach their intestines," according to prison official Ramon Arevalo. And in September, arrestee Melissa Roberge, 25, allegedly set fire to the mattress and blanket in her jail cell in Conway, N.H. She had earlier been frisked, but after the fire, a full-body search revealed a cigarette lighter in an unspecified "body cavity."

LaToya Joplin was arrested in July in Ypsilanti Township, Mich., and charged with killing her daughter, Kayla, 3, despite her statements to a sheriff's detective (read in court in an August hearing) that she, and not Kayla, was the real victim. The detective said Joplin told him "she was the one who was abused when she disciplined Kayla, because she would strike her to the point that her hand was throbbing." She was forced to keep hitting her, she said, because Kayla never said "ouch."

(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.)

Most of the year, civil aviation engineer Joseph Ngoupou and his wife (a budget officer at the World Bank) live the life of a suburban Washington, D.C., couple taking up golf on weekends. But two or three times a year, Ngoupou travels to Cameroon, where he is, by heredity, a village chief, responsible for resolving disputes among his 3,500 subjects. According to a September Wall Street Journal dispatch, his impoverished village has no electrical service or running water and lies five miles of barely passable road from the nearest town, and the isolated villagers are eager to cede Ngoupou authority as the ultimate wise man, to decide, for instance, the fair price of a bride's dowry or the proper restitution for the theft of plums.

-- Sometime next year, if all goes well, Brett Holm of Chaska, Minn., will begin selling his Season Shot, an improvement over current shotgun shells because its pellets dissolve on contact in the game meat and, more important, automatically flavor it for cooking. Holm told the Chanhassen (Minn.) Villager newspaper in August that he will initially offer lemon pepper, mesquite, Mexican, and Creole flavors, but, he said, chemists are at work right now to expand the selection.

-- In Dafen, a suburb of Shenzhen, China, more than half of the world's cheap oil paintings, including knock-offs of masterpieces, are hand-produced by laborers at up to 30 per day, earning them the equivalent of $125 to $400 a month. Germany's Der Spiegel reported from Dafen in August that a "reasonably skillful copy of Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' sells for (about $50). Buy 100, and the price goes down to (about $33 each)." One painter remarked that when a large order arrives (for instance, from Wal-Mart), he may have to paint the same thing 1,000 times, earning perhaps the equivalent of 40 cents each.

-- Another painter, California graffiti artist Paco Rosic, set out to facilitate what he called his life's ambition in January when he and his family bought an abandoned warehouse in Waterloo, Iowa, so that he could re-create with spray paint a near replica (in half-size) of Michelangelo's fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The Los Angeles Times reported in September that he has used 2,000 cans so far and eventually will cover about 2,500 square feet of newly installed curved ceiling in the warehouse.

-- In September, police in Madison, Wis., said Milo G. Chamberlain's blood-alcohol content was .425, which experts said normally is attainable only by those either dead or in a coma, but he was picked up, quite conscious, allegedly causing a disturbance at a Marathon gas station, where he reportedly got into a fight with a gas pump before being restrained by passersby. Police said Chamberlain responded to each of their questions only by rattling off strings of numbers of no particular pattern.

-- Surgeons have reattached many penises (in the cases of accidents, self-mutilations or angry wives' vengeance), but the first successful transplant of the organ, to the point in which blood and urine flow were regenerated, was performed this summer in a 15-hour procedure at Guangzhou General Hospital in China. Although the patient was left functional, he and his wife, two weeks later, citing "psychological" reasons, ordered the new organ removed. (A formal report is to appear this month in the journal European Urology.)

(1) In a September raid, sheriff's deputies in Vista, Calif., seized jars of urine from the home of a suspected methamphetamine user. Deputies said the user appeared to be saving his own urine in order to extract, and reuse, the meth he had already used. A Drug Enforcement Administration agent said he was unsure whether the practice was widespread. (2) A September episode of the periodic NBC "Dateline" stings of online child sex predators, in Long Beach, Calif., turned up 38 arrestees, including one who is apparently beyond embarrassment, since he had already been busted once by "Dateline."

Alfred Thomas Steven, 69, was arrested in the La Purisma Mission park in Lompoc, Calif., in September, and cited for trespassing and animal cruelty for attempting to satisfy himself sexually with a horse. According to police, Steven apparently had anointed himself with olive oil and coated his nude body in feed grain or oats, and then lay down so that the horse would nibble and lick him. Deputies said he told them that it was a longtime fantasy.

(1) Richard Brooks, 50, was injured in a September incident in Concord, Calif., in which he became enraged at a group of bikers and drove toward them in his car, waving a pool cue with his left arm. It wasn't the bikers who injured him, though. Brooks got out, still in a rage, walked around behind his car, and was backed into because he had left the car in reverse gear. The collision knocked him into traffic, but some of the bikers pulled him to safety. (2) Brian Hoyt, 46, was arrested in Framingham, Mass., in August after he, riding his bike the wrong way on a busy street, headed straight for a police cruiser, forcing the driver to swerve. Said police Lt. Paul Shastany, later, Hoyt appeared to be "playing a game of chicken with the officers."

(1) A superior court judge in Reading, Pa., overruled a county court judge in August and declared that Miller Genuine Draft is, indeed, an actual beer. (The county judge had said that the prosecutor had failed to show that MGD was on the state beer list, but the superior court judge said there was other evidence that MGD is beer.) (2) In Carlisle, Pa., Derek Randall Pittman, with a .237 blood-alcohol reading, was ticketed for drunk driving, even though he said that all he did was hold the steering wheel momentarily while his friend in the driver's seat took a bite from his sandwich. However, that was enough to be "operating" the car, said a judge at a hearing in August.

In 2001, a veteran middle school science teacher in New Bedford, Mass., used the same needle to prick the fingers of two dozen seventh-graders to make blood slides for class. (The teacher retired before school officials learned of the gross breach of blood-safety procedures, and subsequent tests revealed no problems.) In September 2006, a first-year teacher at Salina South High School in Salina, Kan., used the same lancet on more than 20 students in her anatomy and physiology classes, thus violating not only blood-safety rules but system guidelines against using real blood for class work. All students were tested, and results were pending at press time.

-- "Mr. Yamaki, you are an incredibly lucky man," said New York City federal magistrate Lois Bloom in September, presiding at a bail hearing for Japanese executive Yoshio Yamaki, 56, who had been charged with stealing $7 million from his employer to fund his gambling habit. Bloom was referring to the fact that his substantial bail had been jointly arranged by Yamaki's wife, Hiroko (whom he had walked out on in January), and his mistress, Megumi Tsuji, with whom he had been living.

-- In August, Alexandria, Ind., dentist David Steele proudly showed off to an Anderson Herald Bulletin reporter the two gold crowns he had fitted on his 1-year-old Persian cat, Sebastian. Though he said the crowns were ostensibly to strengthen Sebastian's teeth, the reporter said that their prominence suggested "a hip-hop star's guard-cat or a movie villain's pet." Steele also put a gold crown on his Boston terrier.

(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 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.)