In November, a judge upheld a rule passed by a condominium association in Golden, Colo., prohibiting owners from smoking even inside their own units (in that neighbors had been complaining for five years that a couple's cigarette smoke had been seeping into their town houses). A few days earlier, Belmont, Calif., became the first American city to ban smoking everywhere in the city limits, including condominiums and even cars (but not detached, single-family homes). (A day before that, however, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to instruct the police to treat marijuana-smoking as the city's lowest law-enforcement priority.)

-- Bright Ideas: The City Council of Greenleaf, Idaho, passed an ordinance in November to require nearly all residents to keep a gun at home in case the town becomes overrun by people relocating after Gulf Coast storms. Also in November, a report from the Missouri House's Special Committee on Immigration Reform blamed much of their state's acquiescence to illegal immigration on the fact that since Roe v. Wade in 1973, 80,000 potential Missourians have been aborted, thus helping to create job vacancies for aliens.

-- Super-protective: The Powys County Council in Wales warned the maker of Welsh Dragon sausages in November that it must label its product better, such as by marking it "pork sausages" (so as not to mislead about the type of meat it contained). And in October, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sought to extend its abstinence education program (which currently gives grants to states for programs for teenagers), to start reaching unmarried people up to age 29.

-- A New York City housing program begun in the 1970s to encourage new construction has enabled huge reductions in property taxes on certain buildings in Manhattan, and those savings continue to this day (and at least through next year and maybe beyond). Among the beneficiaries: Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, who saves $130,000 a year on his $4 million Trump World Tower apartment; designer Calvin Klein ($134,000 savings on his penthouse); and actress Natalie Portman (saving $26,300 a year on her $5.8 million condo) (according to an October New York Post report).

-- "I've always had the desire to play (the cello) naked," said Ms. Jesse Hale, a music major at Austin Peay State University (Clarksville, Tenn.) and member of the CJ Boyd Sexxxtet of nude cellists who play their experimental, chant-like songs in concert around the country. Hale, who says she's been playing naked since sixth grade, explained to Austin Peay's newspaper in September that cellists "make full body contact with (their) instrument," and their legs even "wrap" around it so that "(i)t just feels natural."

-- Social Messaging: (1) The magazine Time Out New York reported in September on the "artistic palettes" of the Sprinkle Brigade of artists who dress up dog droppings on New York City streets with glittering candy bits and colorful toothpicks, for "urban beautification." (2) British performance artist Ian Thorley, working on grants from several local councils, did a week's stint on an Ashington street in October, stepping onto and off of a doormat while wearing a badge identifying him as a government doormat tester.

-- At the county jail in Dubuque, Iowa, in November, Michael Kelley Jr., 29 and accused of attempted murder, was swapping stories with inmate Jamie Brimeyer, 34, when he asked about Brimeyer's facial scar. As Brimeyer described being stabbed in the cheek by an unknown assailant in 2005, Kelley realized that he was the one who had stabbed him and recalled the incident so well that he corrected some of Brimeyer's recollections. Brimeyer later reported Kelley, who is now also charged with assault with a dangerous weapon.

-- Police Blotter: (1) (from the Morning Sentinel, Waterville, Maine, Nov. 10) "6 p.m., a woman said she suspected someone had sabotaged her washing machine. A police investigation concluded that an imbalanced laundry load had caused the shaking." (2) (from The Star Press, Muncie, Ind., Nov. 4) "(A man) reported the burglary around 10 p.m. Thursday after he returned from the hospital and found his 36-inch Samsung TV missing. It (had been) replaced with an RCA TV that was missing a power cord. ... Decorative items were placed around the new TV, apparently in an attempt to fool (him)."

Libertarian Steve Osborn finished second in the U.S. Senate race in Indiana to incumbent Richard Lugar, more than 1 million votes behind, but two weeks later asked for a recount in 10 precincts. And Utah officials are investigating results in Daggett County, where 947 people were registered to vote on Nov. 7 (compared to the county's entire 2005 census population of 943). And in tiny Waldenburg, Ark., the mayor and his challenger tied at 18 votes each, with the only other candidate, Randy Wooten, receiving zero, which Wooten said was impossible because he had voted for himself. And in Lysowice, Poland (with November voting, also), an elections official became so distraught at irregularities at her polling station that she grabbed a box of ballots and locked herself in a restroom until police convinced her to come out.

(1) England's Liverpool Magistrates Court granted police a temporary "sexual offenses prevention order" in October against Akinwale Arobieke, 45, who had been jailed for pestering people with requests to feel their muscles. Arobieke is prohibited from touching, feeling or measuring muscles or asking people to do squat exercises. (2) In October, airline baggage courier Rodney Petersen, 30, pleaded guilty in Melbourne, Australia, to stealing hairs (head and pubic) from clothing or hairbrushes in women's luggage. At his home, police found 80 plastic bags containing hairs, labeled with each owner's name.

Amateurs: A teenager, 17, was booked into a juvenile detention center in Lynnwood, Wash., in October after he got his arm stuck in the dog door of a house he was allegedly attempting to burglarize. (Experienced burglars avoid houses with dog doors because that usually means that a dog is present.) And in Sheboygan, Wis., in November, police arrested Leah Jerolimek, 21, and charged her with trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill at a gas station, even though the bill (made with a computer and printer) was blank on the back.

News of the Weird first noted Professor Jukka Ammondt of the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland in 1995, and apparently his twin passions (Elvis Presley and Latin) have only grown stronger since then. He performs Elvis' songs in the "dead" language that's far from dead in Finland -- a country that features a regular radio newscast entirely in Latin (drawing about 75,000 listeners), according to an October BBC dispatch from Helsinki. Among the Ammondt-Presley standards: "It's Now or Never" ("Nunc hic aut numquam") and "Love Me Tender" ("Tenere me, suaviter").

(1) A 48-year-old woman died from a timber rattlesnake bite during services at the East London Holiness Church in London, Ky., in November. The church features a monthly snake-handling service, during which people can prove they are true believers by not getting bitten. (2) In Shamokin, Pa., in October, Terry Jackson, 36, distraught for an undisclosed reason, kept police at bay in a suicidal standoff in which she wielded five poisonous snakes (from an aquarium in her home). They bit her hand and face numerous times, leaving her bloody, until police subdued her with a Taser gun. She was hospitalized in critical condition but survived and will face charges for threatening police.

(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.)

-- 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.)