Celebrity Trademark News: The gruff, former Chicago Bears player and coach Mike Ditka recently teamed with a California winery to sell a signature line of wines, including a premium taste retailing for $50 a bottle. And actor Andy Griffith filed a lawsuit in November demanding that the former William Fenrick change his legal name back from "Andy Griffith," which he admitted he acquired only to help himself get elected sheriff of Grant County, Wis. (he lost). And a man in China's Fujian province applied to the government in November to sell female sanitary pads under the trademark "Yao Ming" (China's superstar pro basketball player), catching Yao's agents dumbfounded at the man's audacity.

-- Among the indigenous rituals that survive today in Madagascar is the quinquennial (or so) "turning of the bones," when families dig up their ancestors' remains, polish them, show them around the village (so the departed can see how things have changed), and re-dress and re-inter them. Not to partake is to show disrespect, bring bad luck, and risk one's own unsatisfactory afterlife, according to an October Wall Street Journal dispatch from Antananarivo.

-- Asia's Game: According to an October report in the Asian Wall Street Journal, golf camps in China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore teach kids as young as 2, in many cases merely because parents are awed by the financially successful pro golfer Michelle Wie, who started at age 4. Some adult golfers in Thailand understand the obsession, such as those who play the Kantarat course in Bangkok, whose fairways are between active runways of Don Muang airport, with the "smell of kerosene on the first tee" and the occasional need to dodge planes to play a tough lie. And China's Xiamen University recently began requiring that students majoring in management, law and software engineering take a course in golf, to round out a "socially elite" education.

-- Bad Water/Good Water: Some churches in Canada have begun actively condemning commercial bottled water (except where no other sanitary water is available), either as environmentally destructive or as the commercialization of God's gift of life (according to a September report in Toronto's Globe and Mail). At the same time, in Mumbai, India, as many as 1 million Hindus once again this year ritually dunked hand-made idols of the elephant-headed Ganesh, thus worsening the hopelessly polluted waters around the city.

-- New York City Episcopal priest Timothy Holder ("Poppa T"), whose HipHopEMass and "Hip Hop Prayer Book" have turned south Bronx youth into parishioners over the last two years, issued a music CD in November featuring Bible stories in street language. For example, the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is all that / I need for nuthin' / he 'lows me to chill."

Frank Williams, 48, filed a lawsuit in Pittsburgh in August, accusing the state Department of Corrections of improperly punishing him four years ago when he was immediately ordered back to prison for missing a parole appointment. Williams said he was not able to contest the decision then because he was hospitalized, unconscious, having been shot on his way to the appointment, and in the intervening years, his medical condition has worsened because of inadequate medical care in prison.

-- Dead candidates continued to enjoy electoral success, with at least four winning hard-fought races in November. Katherine Dunton tied in an Alaska school board race but, though dead, won the coin toss and was elected. Glenda Dawson won her Texas state House seat, thanks in part to a colorful campaign mailer that went out a month after her death, touting her achievements (but making no campaign promises). And Sam Duncan won a seat on a North Carolina county soil and conservation board, which was such a low-key race that even some of his backers were surprised to learn after the election that he had died in September.

-- Smashmouth Politics: Barbara Cubin barely won re-election to the U.S. House from Wyoming after she angrily threatened to slap her wheelchair-confined opponent over a comment about campaign finance reform after an October debate. And former Texas state House member Rick Green took a swing at the man who beat him in 2002 when both arrived at the polls to vote at the same time.

Bryan Hathaway, 20, was arrested in Superior, Wis., in October and charged with molesting a deer carcass that he said had sexually aroused him when he saw it in a ditch. (Hathaway's lawyer has raised the defense that the anti-bestiality law only applies to sex with live animals.)

Twice in October, motorists were arrested for DUI after driving up to the security guard house at the nuclear power plant in Braidwood, Ill., by mistake. According to police, Lloyd Kuykendall, 38, drove up and handed the guard $1, thinking it was a highway toll booth, and 10 days later, Stanislaw Drobrzawski, 51, tried to align his car with the guard house, thinking it was a gas station pump. And in Des Moines, Iowa, in October, customer Michelle Marie Engler, 45, was arrested for public intoxication at the Big Tomato Pizza restaurant after boisterously demanding to know why her food was taking so long. (An employee explained that she hadn't ordered yet.)

Since 1999, News of the Weird has reported stories of perhaps the same man who, posing as a cop, made periodic phone calls to managers of fast-food restaurants in several states demanding that a young female employee be interrogated about a crime while he listened in and steered the questioning to sex. Last year, police finally made an arrest after identifying the purchaser of a calling card used to phone a Kentucky McDonald's as David R. Stewart, 39, of Fountain, Fla. (The caller had demanded that the employee undress and jump up and down so that the manager could sniff her sweat for traces of drugs.) However, a jury in Shepherdsville, Ky., acquitted Stewart in October. The employee still has a lawsuit pending, and authorities in other states want to talk to Stewart.

-- Sarasota, Fla., dermatologist Michael Rosin was sentenced to 22 years in prison in October for subjecting numerous patients to unnecessary, frightening cancer surgery so that he could bill them (and Medicare) for millions of dollars. An FBI investigation had revealed that Rosin had once detected aggressive cancer from a slide that contained not a skin sample but chewing gum and another time from a slide that contained plastic foam.

-- When oil prices rose in the summer, Steve Jordan began drilling what would be an 8,500-foot oil well under his house near Lake Charles, La., because prices were finally high enough for him to recover the $2 million he thought the operation would cost. (Crude oil, which peaked in July at about $77 a barrel, had fallen to $65 by the time Jordan gave his last reported interview, on CNN in September, and at press time was about $56 a barrel.)

(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.)

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.)