"Thierry F." recently outed himself as a professional welfare bum, bragging in his brand-new autobiography that he has lived very well off the French government for most of the last 24 years and that, even after his unemployment benefits expired, he found a second unemployment program to leech from. The latest one pays almost all of his monthly home loan, according to an October dispatch from Paris in The Times of London, and provides free medical care plus a "Christmas bonus," leaving an equivalent of $214 per month for what the delighted Thierry calls his "leisure activities."

-- Citing a "code of honor" acquired during 26 years in the Air Force, retired pilot Ralph Paul, 54, decided in March that he would not pay for the $15.99 Shrimp and Scallop Verdura at Angellino's restaurant in Palm Harbor, Fla., because it contained only five small shrimp and five scallops. After he complained unsuccessfully and walked out, the restaurant sent sheriff's deputies after him, and he was charged with misdemeanor fraud. Paul insisted to a St. Petersburg Times reporter that he couldn't look himself in the mirror if he had paid, or even negotiated a settlement, so he hired a $500-an-hour New York lawyer and, in a one-day trial in October before a restive jury, he was acquitted.

-- Oh So Clever: The top administrator of Minnesota's Freeborn County said in October that he would relinquish his personalized license plates after state officials threatened to investigate several complaints about them. Administrator Ron Gabrielsen said his FOAD1 plate stood for "Freedom Offers Americans Democracy" (No. 1 priority) (instead of what some understood to be "(word omitted) Off And Die") and his HMFICFC stood for "Helping Minnesota Farmers Increase Crops in Freeborn County" (instead of what some understood to be "Head Mother (word omitted) In Charge of Freeborn County").

-- The Problem Is Goats: (1) A traffic officer in eastern Ontario, who ticketed a speeding motorist from Switzerland in September, said the driver blamed it on the lack of goats. He told the officer that he felt liberated to drive fast because, unlike in his country, there were no goats wandering onto the highway. (2) Authorities in the Nigerian village of Isseluku arrested a man for killing his brother in September, but the man insisted that he had only tried to move a goat from his farm but that when it wouldn't move, he hit it with an ax, at which point it turned into his brother (according to an Associated Press report).

-- Charles Henson was convicted of attempted murder in Bristol, England, in October, but insisted he couldn't have done it. His ex-wife said he had stuffed his latex-gloved hand down her throat, knowing that she had a latex allergy that would be fatal within minutes. Henson said that was impossible because, according to the couple's "contract" setting out their sadomasochism, bondage and domination rules, "section four" states very clearly that "the master does not have a right to kill the slave."

-- Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley told The Washington Post in August that his brilliant performance in a December game (three touchdowns against Dallas to get to the NFL playoffs) was also the very reason that his own fantasy football team was knocked from the playoffs, in that "Chris Cooley" plays for one of his opponents.

-- Anthony Mesa failed a drug test in September because, he said, he was medically unable to urinate into a cup under supervision, and he was remanded to a judge in Deland, Fla., to reconsider his house-arrest-only sentence. Mesa's crime was that in August 2005, he spiked a Mountain Dew bottle at a grocery store with his own urine as a prank.

-- Irony in Houston: In September, when a squad car in Houston signaled Richard Ramos, 35, to pull over, he sped away, having heard in the news of the police department's new, no-chase policy for minor traffic violations. However, the pursuing officers were actually Harris County sheriff's deputies, who are free to chase, and they quickly caught him. Also in September, Houstonian Michael Kubosh deliberately ran a red light in a traffic-camera intersection for the purpose of challenging the system in court, but two Houston police officers personally witnessed the violation and wrote him a regular ticket (which overrides the camera's $75 violation with a ticket of up to $200).

In a movement that grew from several women to more than 100 by mid-October, girlfriends in Pereira, Colombia, went on a sex-strike to urge their boyfriends away from the drug-gang life. Pereira is the same city where the sensational nightly TV soap opera "Sin Tetas (No Hay Paraiso)" originates, which is the story of a flat-chested young woman who constantly schemes to raise money for breast-augmentation surgery, which she views as the only way to the good life. (In one storyline, she fails at prostitution, in that she cannot attract customers because of her flat chest.)

Terence Michael Dean, 37, was arrested in September in Cool, Calif., after a homeowner arrived from a weekend away and found that Dean had commandeered his house and set up various confusing rituals. Dean (who ran from the house clothed only in a sheet) had turned on all faucets, placed packages of meat in the sink and bathtub, built a shrine of Buddha on a bongo drum, left a trail of potting soil from a walkway to the drum, left three plant stands in the garage holding teddy bears, unearthed about 100 houseplants in the yard, and left a cup of water containing a piece of paper reading "I love Cherry."

-- Can't Possibly Be True: (1) Randall Terry, a veteran anti-abortion activist pushing a family-values campaign for the Florida state senate, acknowledged that his own family's photos in his campaign are minus his two adopted children, whom he has ostracized for, respectively, being gay and giving birth out of wedlock. (2) The election board of St. Louis County, Mo., acknowledged in October that an unnamed election judge had cast two absentee ballots for the Nov. 7 election but defended the man, saying he was old and probably just forgot that he had already voted. (3) Bill Crozier, running for Oklahoma state school superintendent, proposed in October that schools protect pupils from armed intruders by making desks out of thick, used textbooks to stop bullets and that new textbooks come with Kevlar covers.

-- Sex 'n' Politics: (1) Korinne Barnes, 29, a single mother of three running for the North Kingstown (R.I.) School Committee, was finally persuaded in September to remove her MySpace.com personal listing in which she described herself as "smart, sexy, fun" and a "voluptuous chocolate sister with a big booty." (2) By contrast, Loretta Nall, 32, the Libertarian Party write-in candidate for governor of Alabama, remains unembarrassed by her sexiness, telling reporters that she hoped that voters attracted by her cleavage would listen to her campaign platform. She offers a T-shirt to supporters reading, "More of these boobs and (referring to pictures of her opponents) less of these boobs."

Wrong Place, Wrong Time: A 50-year-old driver was killed in the Western Australian outback in October when a kangaroo was hit by another vehicle and came crashing through the man's windshield. And in October, a 32-year-old inmate at North Carolina's Caledonia Prison Farm drowned when, riding horseback on a work detail, he was thrown into a pond when a bull charged his horse and scared him.

(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.)

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.)