-- To settle a discrimination lawsuit by transsexual men in October, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority agreed to open all of its restrooms on the basis of individuals' "gender expression," meaning that, for example, any man dressed seriously as a woman could choose the ladies' room. And the New York City government is currently considering adopting a rule to permit people to switch genders on their birth certificates, regardless of whether they've had surgery, as long as they've lived in the new gender for two years and a physician and a mental-health counselor approve.

-- Karen Madden, 38, goes on trial in December in Harrisburg, Pa., after allegedly confessing to stealing $550,000 worth of jewelry and handbags from the residence of her former boss, who is the chancellor of the state's college system. The chancellor, testifying at a July hearing on the charges, said Madden had called her recently and apologized but then went on to say, "I hope you and I can still be friends, and I would like to use you, can I use you as a reference, just for the work part?"

-- Britain's Home Office announced in November that it had agreed to a settlement in a lawsuit by 197 heroin-addicted prisoners that it was "assault" and a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights for them to have been almost immediately denied all drugs when they were arrested. For forcing the inmates to go "cold turkey," the government agreed to pay each the equivalent of about $7,000.

-- (1) Britain's Channel 4 public television announced in July that it would soon schedule a week of documentaries on masturbation, including one by self-designated "orgasm coach" Betty Dodson, "Masturbation for Girls," teaching hands-on techniques to three women. (2) The pendulum swung the other way in October, however, when Britain's Tesco stores agreed that a kit for learning pole dancing (advertised on its Web site), to "(u)nleash the sex kitten inside," with a garter and suggestive DVD, was perhaps unsuited for its "toy" section, where it might have been appealing to adolescent girls. (Tesco moved the listing to its physical fitness section.)

-- Two men in a Dodge Neon were seriously injured in a rollover accident on Interstate 75 near Toledo, Ohio, in October after a red bra flew from the radio antenna of another car, startling the Neon driver and causing him to swerve and lose control. The Ohio Highway Patrol later learned that the owner of the bra had hung it from the aerial after she realized that it had broken due to her dog's having chewed on it earlier that day. A prosecutor said a misdemeanor littering charge would be filed against the woman, but was exploring whether there had been out-the-window socializing between the cars' occupants before the rollover.

-- After shooting video undercover in 10 Army recruiting offices in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, ABC News released in November an episode of recruiters telling a prospect that no one is going to Iraq anymore. "No, we're bringing people back," he said, and his partner followed with, "We're not at war. War ended a long time ago." In a separate on-camera interview, Col. Robert Manning, who is in charge of Army recruiting in the Northeast, generously told ABC News that he disagreed with the recruiters. "We are a nation and Army at war still."

-- (1) Race-separatist cult leader Yahweh Ben Yahweh is awaiting a decision on release from parole (after serving 11 years of an 18-year sentence on racketeering charges in connection with as many as 23 gruesome murders, some involving beheadings) and is dying of cancer. His lawyer asked a federal judge in October to approve his immediate release so that his client could "die with dignity." (2) Washington, D.C., council member (and former mayor) Marion Barry was charged in September with DUI and other vehicle violations but told The Washington Post that authorities were just trying to "embarrass and discredit" him.

-- An investigation by a state agency is under way in Revere, Mass., of a residence condemned by local officials as (according to a neighbor) "worse than any Stephen King movie" because it reeked of garbage, feces and cockroaches. It is the home of Andrea Watson, a child-rights advocate who lived there (until the condemnation) with her two children and two grandchildren. Watson's colleagues told the Boston Herald that she is a tireless activist for children who put her "heart and soul" into Parents for Residential Reform.

-- (1) An apparently poorly trained Kentucky election worker physically tossed a voter out of a polling station in Louisville on Election Day because he hadn't marked all the offices on his ballot. (2) And a voter in Allentown, Pa., was arrested after he suddenly erupted in the voting booth and began pounding the machine with a paperweight.

-- In elections for sheriff, Chris Abril was elected in Polk County, N.C., despite his arrest in August on years-old charges of statutory rape (which Abril said he'd straighten out as one of his first orders of business), and Rick Magnuson was soundly defeated for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., after "all of my skeletons (were) exposed," he said, in the course of the campaign. Among the skeletons was a stint in alcohol rehab; his unauthorized use of a criminal database; his onetime letters to Osama bin Laden as part of an "art project"; and (also as an art project) the video he made of himself masturbating into a hole in the ground in the Mojave Desert.

-- A prison inmate named Calvin Miller, who was angry with a former partner in crime who had escaped conviction, called police in Kansas City, Mo., in 2003 with information that led them to reopen that cold case, and eventually the partner, Johnny Chapple, was convicted of murder (along with two others). However, also convicted was a fourth participant: Calvin Miller. While Chapple received a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, Miller got 17. (By the way, Miller's well-known nickname, acquired before any of this transpired, is "Cheesy Rat.")

-- James C. Burda surrendered his Ohio chiropractor's license in September after an investigation (mentioned in April in News of the Weird) revealed that he offered to treat patients via telepathy (for $60 an hour) and had the ability to go back in time to realign bones and joints at the point at which they were damaged, via his techniques of telekinetic vibration, which he called "bahlaqeem vina" and "bahlaqeem jaqem," which he admitted were nonsense words that came to him one day while he was driving around. An exam ordered by Ohio chiropractic regulators found, not surprisingly, that Burda suffered from "delusional disorder, grandiose type."

-- The Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported in October that the much tighter border security that resulted from the recent war with Hezbollah guerrillas had caused marijuana prices in Israel to jump as much as 800 percent. And, though general tensions between Arabs and Jews remain high inside Israel, prominent ultra-Orthodox Jews joined militant Palestinian Muslims in fierce opposition to the November gay-pride parade in Jerusalem, according to a Boston Globe dispatch. (Said activist Rabbi Yehuda Levin, "Only this onslaught of homosexual radicalism could bring together such disparate voices.")

(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.)

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.)