The chosen professional interest of biologist David Scholnick of Pacific University (Forest Grove, Ore.) is in how shrimp act when they get an infection, which he gauged by building a tiny treadmill in order to run crustaceans through their paces to measure blood lactate levels. "As far as I know," Scholnick told LiveScience.com in October, "this is the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill." To increase the shrimps' stress, Scholnick designed tiny backpacks out of duct tape but still found that healthy shrimp could go for about an hour without fatigue.

-- Sitcoms: In October, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in Pittsburgh to campaign for U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, antagonized anti-Santorum demonstrators by blowing them a kiss, and in the ensuing chaos, Bush was forced to take refuge in a train station supply closet. And Kansas state Rep. Vaughn Flora was charged with a misdemeanor after an October political event when he allegedly roughed up an anti-abortion protester dressed as a cockroach. And in Tampa in August, public-access TV host Tony Katz threw a chair at his guest, county commission candidate Joe Redner, hitting him in the head (after he had called Redner a liar and Redner had called him fat).

-- Family Values: Republican U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood of Pennsylvania was trailing in his race for re-election, owing in large part to the lawsuit filed two years ago by his 29-year-old mistress, alleging that the supposedly happily married Sherwood beat and strangled her. (Sherwood settled the lawsuit and acknowledged the affair but denied any abuse.) And Ohio Democrats had to scramble in September to find a replacement to run for a U.S. House seat after their original nominee, Stephanie Studebaker, was jailed along with her husband after the couple brawled at their home in Dayton.

Simon Pope's "Gallery Space Recall" exhibit at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Wales, in October is a startlingly empty room, with patrons called upon to supply the art by imagining another art show they have seen so that, wrote Pope, the two exhibits "exist at two locations simultaneously, both here and there." (Pope wrote that the exhibit suggested the brain-injury disorder "reduplicative paramnesia," in which a person has a delusional belief that something exists at two places at once.)

-- The Havering town council in Romford, England, prepared a 300-page report in October, which was the result of a 12-month investigation, to find out who had heckled a speaker at a zoning meeting by making "baaa" noises. The authors said they had narrowed the list of suspects. And in September, London's mayor Ken Livingstone defended his downtown anti-pigeon program, which consisted of empowering two hawks to scare the birds away, even though the three-year cost of the program (including a handler) was the equivalent of more than $400,000, which reduced the menace by 2,500 pigeons, or about $170 a bird.

-- A civic group in Vienna, Austria, gathered 157,000 signatures on petitions in May and presented them to city officials to encourage a government program toward cleaner streets. Under the proposal, the government would assign the populace the task of counting and mapping dog droppings as a first step to greater penalties for owners who fail to clean up after their mutts. Critics were pessimistic that citizens wanted to count and map dog droppings.

In October, Robert Russel Moore, 33, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the burglary of an Arby's in Prince Frederick, Md. Actually, Moore was assistant manager of the restaurant and was identified by clues from the surveillance tape. Four employees said they recognized the burglar's body shape, clothing and (when he bent over) the distinctive top portion of his buttocks, as being those of Moore. (The owner of the restaurant said he had had to counsel Moore "more than once" about the inadvertent exposure of his butt crack.)

-- In October, California environmentalists and health officials said they might have to undertake a one-by-one investigation of septic tanks in the movie-star-populated Malibu community in order to find the leaks that have been fouling the coastline. The final decision won't be made, according to an Associated Press report, until officials test the sea water to determine whether the sewage has human DNA or is from animals, such as runoff from chicken farms, which is the preferred explanation of actress-vegetarian Pamela Anderson.

-- In 2004, Bruce McMahan, then 65, whose success with his McMahan Securities hedge fund in the 1990s made him one of America's wealthiest men, married (perhaps unofficially) his own daughter (who had been born of a 1968 McMahan fling) following a two-year affair (according to a September report in Florida's Broward-Palm Beach New Times, based on court documents generated when the daughter sought a break-up). McMahan denied the affair and the marriage, but New Times found, among other things, many wedding photos and marriage-acknowledging e-mails, and reference to a vibrator laden with "evidence." All lawsuits relating to the matter were settled, and the files sealed by the court, in early September.

-- A 33-year-old woman was detained by police in September after complaints by residents at a mobile home park in Michigan City, Ind., that she had been having sex in an untinted-windowed limousine on one of the park's streets, in front of what grew to be a large crowd, mostly yelling at her for her indecency. At one point, according to police, the otherwise-occupied woman yelled back at the crowd defiantly that she was "doing adult business" and "I've got to do what I've got to do."

Slapstick: (1) Inspecting the Dukovany nuclear power plant in Moravia in September, an unnamed American official with the International Atomic Energy Agency wandered away from the group and fell into a water tank. (2) In September, firefighters in Spokane, Wash., rescued a worker whose head had become stuck in a water meter enclosure for about four hours. (3) In October, when Turkey's prime minister Tayyip Erdogan fainted from low blood sugar, his security team rushed him to a hospital but mistakenly locked him and the keys inside his fortified car; after they pounded on it for a while, a nearby construction worker with a sledgehammer saved the day.

In October, health officials in China again warned citizens against the increasingly popular but seriously painful leg-stretching "Ilizarov procedure" (mentioned in News of the Weird in 2002), believed to add as much as a couple of inches to a person's height (and, consequently, stature). The patient's leg is deliberately broken and affixed to a rack, with the leg stretched slightly every day so that the bones fuse together to cover the separated space, lengthening the leg. (Said one 33-year-old, 5-foot-tall woman in 2002, aiming for four more inches: "I'll have a better job (and) a better husband. It's a long-term investment.")

The latest casualty of quick-draw practice: a 19-year-old man in Evans, Colo., in September, who, working out in front of a mirror, somehow fatally shot himself in the head. And the latest pedestrian-train collisions: (1) a 30-year-old woman in Little Rock, Ark., in October, who was walking along the tracks carrying a beer and listening to music with headphones, and (2) an 18-year-old man in Kenosha, Wis., in September, who, probably inebriated, first left the tracks well in front of the train but then returned, stood on the tracks, and made a finger gesture at the conductor.

(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, 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.)