In September, the headmistress of the Dvergsnes primary school in Kristiansand, Norway, proposed that boys be taught to urinate while seated, in order to reduce splashing and mis-targeting, which burden the cleaning staff, but many parents and politicians reacted bitterly. Said Vidar Kleppe of the Justice and Order party, "It's a human right (for a boy) not to have to sit down like a girl," adding that the school was "fiddling with God's work." Parent Nancy Bakke was proud of her 7-year-old boy's ability to aim: "This rule goes against everything I've tried to teach my son."

-- Youth cheerleading coach Christine Smith was dismissed in September by the Frederick (Md.) Youth Sports Association for a sideline gesture she said was to re-energize her 7- and 8-year-old girls when their football team fell behind. Smith drew a smiley face on her stomach, which she said they found "hilarious," but allegedly three people complained of the unseemliness of Smith's lifting her shirt slightly, to draw the face. Said association president Kathy Carey, "(P)ulling your shirt up is ... not what our organization is about."

-- Akira Haraguchi, 60, spent 16 straight hours on Oct. 4 reciting the value of pi from memory to 100,000 decimal places, breaking his old record of 83,431. Haraguchi, whose day job is psychiatric counselor, performed in front of officials at a public hall in Kisarazu, Japan, and rattled off the numbers continuously except for a five-minute break every hour. (In 2002, two University of Tokyo mathematicians, using a supercomputer, calculated pi to 1.24 trillion decimal places.)

-- Civilization in Decline: (1) In October, Britain's public health minister said she had been warned by counselors that some pregnant teenagers were purposely smoking in order to make their babies smaller so that childbirth would be less painful. (2) Australia's Herald Sun reported in September that a Target store in Melbourne was selling padded "bralettes" from the child clothing and doll manufacturer Bratz Babyz, aimed at children aged 6 to 10.

-- Government air-travel rules against carry-on knives, guns, cigarette lighters and other potential weapons should be very well known by now, five years after Sept. 11, but airports continue to report almost comically widespread ignorance (or forgetfulness) by travelers. The Boston Globe reported in September that screeners at Logan International Airport confiscated about 12,000 items a week before the August 2006 restrictions drove more travelers to check their bags. Every few weeks, Logan officials take about a ton of confiscated items to a warehouse in Concord, N.H., where bargain-hunters buy them for pennies on the dollar.

-- In August, about a dozen masked men lugged six 40-gallon trash bags full of sauce packets into the Taco Bell on South Western Avenue in Marion, Ind., leaving a note explaining that they had been accumulating them for a while and decided to give them back. They suspected they had 25,000 packets. (Taco Bell said it hands out about 6 billion a year.)

Lorenzo Martin, 34, was charged with domestic violence in September, accused of holding his estranged wife's leg in a bed of fire ants, resulting in more than 100 bites (Cottonwood, Ala.). And Mary Kay Gray, 58, was charged in September with shooting her husband in the shoulder in retaliation for the husband's allegedly having shot and killed Mary's favorite chicken (Cheshire, Ore.). And spiritual counselor Nickie Marks said he was contemplating a lawsuit in September after the town of Greensboro, Ga., confiscated the half-ton statue of Jesus from his front yard (based on a zoning ordinance banning wordless signs, originally intended to keep business owners from welding cars to the tops of poles).

-- Adult video star Mary Carey, once again running for governor of California, said she is a new person from the woman who was an also-ran in 2003: "I've got brown in my hair (instead of the 2003 blond) because brunettes are taken more seriously." She said she also has lost weight, replaced her teeth, gotten breast implants, and given up smoking, contraceptives and alcohol. "I've actually been sober for five days now," she said on Aug. 9.

-- (1) West Virginia state senator Randy White decided in October to remain in the race for re-election despite the surfacing of photographs taken two years earlier, of White nude except for body paint, in a group of similarly decorated men. White said he had had a "personal identification situation." (2) After a reporter for the Rochester (Minn.) Post-Bulletin noticed similarities in expression between mayoral candidate Pat Carr and an pseudonymous supporter who posted message after message of praise of Carr on the newspaper's web site, Carr admitted that the "supporter" was actually he, himself. Said Carr, "I stand by what I (wrote)."

-- Audacious: (1) A 37-year-old man was charged with burglary in Waterbury, Conn., in September after he was caught selling the victim's distinctive furnishings at a yard sale just a few doors down the street. (2) Christopher Bordne, 17, was arrested in September in Newton, Mass., after a police officer, waiting behind Bordne at a traffic light at 1:40 a.m. through several light changes, checked to find Bordne with his foot on the brake but otherwise sound asleep. After yelling at Bordne and rapping repeatedly on the window with his flashlight, the officer watched as Bordne woke up, drove off and crashed into a tree.

-- Two unnamed Egyptian men in their 20s, in Russia on tourist visas, illegally crossed the border to Belarus and then headed to Poland, which, as a European Union country, is harder to enter. According to an August report from BBC News' Moscow bureau, the pair dug a hole under the border (using shoehorns), and once in Poland, intended to enter Germany the same way, but they had gotten turned around during the dig and instead of Germany, they mistakenly tunneled back into Belarus, where they were captured. They were sent back to Moscow but later were trying to leave the country again when Russian guards at the Ukraine border took them into custody.

Two News of the Weird old-timers made the news recently: H. Beatty Chadwick, jailed for contempt of court in 1995 for failure to hand over assets to his ex-wife after their divorce (because he claims not to have control of them), has now passed Day 4,100 in a county lock-up outside Philadelphia, according to an ABC News report. And Massachusetts inmate Michelle Kosilek, who was Robert Kosilek when he went to prison, is now awaiting a federal court decision on whether the prison system must fund the final-step surgery in his gender switch. Kosilek says being trapped in a man's body is agonizing: "The greatest loss is the dying I do inside a little bit every day." (Kosilek's wife, though, did all her dying at once, when Robert murdered her in 1990.)

(1) In September, a youth sports association raffle in Weaverville, N.C., offered an Uzi submachine gun as a prize for a while, until the association responded to complaints and stopped it. (2) Underachieving former St. Thomas Law School (Miami) student Thomas Bentey filed a federal class action lawsuit against the school in August, alleging that it knew when it accepted him that he couldn't muster the necessary 2.5 grade-point average to stay in school (and thus defrauded him, and dozens of his classmates of similar talent).

(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.)

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.)