Alternative-world online games like Second Life allow players to create identities and personalities, to communicate, and to interact commercially in a self-contained universe. Players buy, sell, invest and generate wealth using a virtual monetary system. Currently, Second Life players bump up against real-world taxes only if they earn real-world money from cashing out in-game wealth, but a congressional economist told Reuters in October that the House and Senate would soon be considering whether also to levy taxes on property and currency left inside the system ("virtual capital gains"). (Second Life's in-game economy is so robust that it is growing at many times the rate of the U.S. economy.) (The story was filed by a real-life reporter embedded as Reuters' Second Life "bureau chief.")

-- The small, specialty restaurant Guolizhuang, in Beijing, serves mostly dishes made from various animal penises, according to a September BBC News dispatch, attracting discerning customers who come for the reputed health benefits. Sheep, horse, ox and seal are good for the circulation, said the restaurant's staff nutritionist, and donkey improves the skin. Tiger, she said, has no particular value to justify its high price, but snake ("two penises each," she said) is great for potency.

-- No sooner did Abel Gonzales Jr. develop a State Fair of Texas prize-winning recipe for his Fried Coke than a competitor popped up at the North Carolina State Fair. Gonzales' fried batter balls are made with strawberry and Coke syrups topped with cinnamon sugar, whipped cream and more Coke syrup. In October, Greg Seamster in North Carolina served a similar concoction but as fried strands of dough in a cup.

-- In October, The Washington Post reported the growing movement among psychiatrists to call compulsive buying a separate, identifiable disorder and recounted this 62-year-old "shopaholic's" therapeutic conversation with herself: "I would say (to the jewelry she felt compelled to buy), 'You are so beautiful, I can't live without you, I love the way you sparkle.' The jewelry would say back, 'You need me. You look pretty when you wear me.' I would say, 'I do need you. I can't possibly think of being without you. But something has to change. I need to stop this. I can't afford a penny more.'" The patient said she eventually came to believe that her compulsion stemmed from her relationship with her mother.

-- 21st-Century Medicine: (1) Researchers at the University of Bradford in the UK said in October that bandages soaked in maggot secretions were successful in accelerating tissue repair. (2) In September, researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, seeking to create a robot to traverse the colon but without tearing the colon's delicate walls, successfully tested one such tiny robot that can propel itself smoothly by gliding along mucus.

-- According to 2005 transcripts made public by The Wall Street Journal in September, a British Airways 747 flew its entire 10-hour-plus route from Los Angeles to Manchester, England, even though the pilot knew that one of its four engines had caught fire and burned up 30 seconds after take-off. The pilot surprised the Los Angeles tower by radioing his decision to fly on "as far as we can" (after checking with BA headquarters, which might have been mindful that returning to Los Angeles would have meant dumping $30,000 worth of fuel and possibly incurring $275,000 in European Union fines for the delay). The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration initially proposed a fine for BA but recently closed its investigation.

-- Even though protests grow against Wal-Mart for supposedly treating its employees badly, Kellie Guderian is not fazed. In October, she and her husband won Iowa's $200 million Powerball lottery, but she cheerfully said she was keeping her job at the Fort Dodge Wal-Mart. Guderian, said her husband, "loves her job, and the people she works with are like family."

-- Hard-working Britain: The Birmingham City Council revealed in October, first, that a man whose job is to paint white lines in the street made more than twice the average annual British wage, and then that a city lightbulb-changer was paid at about the same rate. And in October, London's Daily Mail profiled Keith Jackson, 57, an engineer for the AquaTec Coatings company in Wales, whose occupation for the last 30 years has been watching paint dry (to gauge its application time). He said the job pays "fairly well" but "can be stressful."

In October in Cincinnati, lines once again formed well in advance of the grand opening of a Chick-fil-A restaurant, populated in part by out-of-town customers who chase openings around the country much as rock fans follow their favorite groups on tour. As usual, there were tents, sleeping bags, lawn furniture and portable generators in evidence. "We've been planning it for two weeks," said a 24-year-old woman from New Richmond, Ind., who was there with her grandmother. (The first 100 in line received coupons worth $260.)

In September, health officials in Macerata, Italy, rescued a 57-year-old woman identified only as Carmela, after a brother reported he wouldn't be able to keep delivering food to her. It turns out that Carmela had become fearful of influenza 26 years ago, had sealed the windows of her apartment, and had not ventured out the entire time except to collect the food her brother left at her door. She weighed about 65 pounds and had hair 7 feet long, and workers required respirators to enter the home.

Peggy Sue Hesskew, 44, was arrested in Kerrville, Texas, in November after she made a down payment to a hit man (actually, an undercover police officer) for a contract on her ex-husband. She made the contract even though the Kerrville Daily Times had reported the day before that police were on the lookout for a woman who had been asking around town for hit men. "You don't get the paper?" asked the magistrate when she was arrested. "I was out of town," she said.

In 2001, News of the Weird noted a U.S. tour by the Indian spiritual leader "Amma" (Mata Amritanandamayi), whose mission in life is to dispense random hugs in her attempt to calm the world's stresses, sometimes putting in 20-hour days of straight hugging. In some countries, however, public hugging has not taken hold. Random huggers working the streets in three Chinese cities in October found that most people ignored them, and in Beijing, police detained the huggers for questioning. And in north London in October, two New York coaches staged the country's first (non-sexual) "cuddle party" to a slowly warming group of Brits that eventually loosened up and hugged. (A recent study cited by London's Daily Telegraph reported that at a Puerto Rican cafe, diners touched each other 180 times per hour, vs. zero in a British cafe.)

(1) In October, a judge freed Tammy Skinner, 22, of Suffolk, Va., who had been charged with killing her unborn, third-trimester child by shooting herself in the abdomen. The judge said Virginia's anti-abortion law, like those of other states, makes criminals of doctors and others who abort third-trimester fetuses (absent special medical circumstances) but exempt the mother herself. (2) Lawrence Roach of Seminole, Fla., complained in October that the $1,200 monthly alimony payments he has been making to his ex-wife should end, now that she has undergone a sex-change. Said Roach, "I'm a man, and I don't want to be paying alimony to a man." (Legal experts were pessimistic about his chances.)

(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.)

"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.)