Bungee Baby: Nick Fennelly, 31, was rushing his in-labor girlfriend, Sharon Taylor, into the parking lot at Calderdale Royal Hospital in West Yorkshire, England, just as their baby's head started to appear, and, in a corridor inside, little Ashleigh shot out of her mother so quickly that Fennelly couldn't grab her in time. She hit the floor, skidded, and then came back on the umbilical cord, according to a December report in the Halifax Courier. Except for a bruise, Ashleigh is fine.

Melody Howell of Richburg, N.C., expanded her collection of full-sized, designer-decorated Christmas trees this year to 52, all placed inside her 2,500-square-foot home. (Said Howell's adult daughter, "My mom is over the top. (E)verything she does is over the top." On the less joyous side, the city council in Kingston Upon Hull, England, prohibited its trash collectors from wearing their traditional Santa hats this year, declaring that the hats "(do) not create a professional impression."

-- Checking a boy just before his bar mitzvah, Orthodox rabbis in Sydney, Australia, found that his rabbi-supervised circumcision had not quite been "complete" and ruled that it must be done again because, officially, the boy was not a Jew. The boy's mother objected and instead found a Progressive synagogue for the bar mitzvah (although the Orthodox rabbi, Moshe Gutnick, said she is "fooling the child" into believing he is Jewish).

-- Islamic Blues: (1) Ginnah Muhammad, 42, who was suing a rental car company in Hamtramck, Mich., in October, refused to remove her veil (which covered all but her eyes) on the witness stand, and consequently, the judge refused to accept her testimony and dismissed the lawsuit. He said judges must evaluate witnesses' credibility, which the veil prevented. (2) According to an October dispatch from Bangkok appearing in Melbourne's newspaper The Age, some Muslim teenagers are mixing Coca-Cola, codeine and the native kratom leaf to get high. "Muslims cannot drink alcohol," said one, but if you get "drunk" on that mixture, "(it) is not a sin."

-- Ruth Bell Graham, the frail wife of evangelist Billy Graham, has split with her elder son Franklin by rejecting as her burial place Franklin's planned memorial library for Billy near Charlotte, N.C. (in favor of her mountaintop retreat west of there). According to a December Washington Post report, Ruth's long-time friend, the crime writer Patricia Cornwell, told Ruth that the largely bookless "library" is "truly tacky," featuring for example a mechanical cow that greets visitors, and straw on the floor to resemble the barn of Billy's youth. Franklin's thinking is that the memorial should draw a new generation of worshipers and donors, including kids who would be attracted by the farm motif.

(1) In November, Arkansas' outgoing Gov. Mike Huckabee and his wife, who have been happily married for 32 years, nonetheless set up a wedding registry at two department stores because it was apparently the easiest way for them to receive going-away gifts. Arkansas law prohibits gifts to public officials of more than $100, with a few exceptions, such as wedding gifts. (2) In October, Judge Robert Armstrong of Riverside, Calif., dismissed an indecent exposure charge against a woman solely because a state statute makes criminal only a person who "lewdly exposes his person, or the private parts thereof," which to Judge Armstrong clearly limited the law to males. (The prosecutor quickly filed an appeal.)

-- Dan Hinkle is the commissioner of the South County Youth Association, which plays in a large football league in Fairfax County, Va., and also the father of Scott, who played on the age-12-to-14 Raptors, who were fighting for a playoff spot in October when Hinkle fired their two coaches for violating his order to play Scott only on defense. (The coaches used him successfully on offense for one game.) The Raptors, to support the coaches, voted to disband the team even though they had made the playoffs, but Hinkle wouldn't change his mind.

-- Five star cheerleaders at McKinney North High School near Dallas apparently had the run of the place over the last year, often immune from school rules thanks to the aggressiveness of their parents and the timidity of school officials, according to an independent report to the school board (disclosed in December by The Dallas Morning News). The "Fab Five" walked out of classes, ignored teachers, dressed salaciously and posed for scandalous photos on the Internet, and whenever sanctions were suggested, parents rose in anger at comparative unfairness toward their particular daughters. One staff member said the girls acted like they hadn't "been punished properly since the seventh grade." District officials are reviewing the report.

(1) Morgan Conatser, 29, was arrested a short time after making his way awkwardly out to the parking lot of the Guitars and Cadillacs store in De Queen, Ark., in November, with a guitar stuffed inside his clothes. The manager initially stopped Conatser, recovered the guitar, and let him go, but decided to call the sheriff's office when he realized Conatser had probably also hidden a wireless sound system in his pants. (2) Derek Pierson Jr., 21, was arrested in Shreveport, La., in November after allegedly attempting to rob a convenience store. He was an easy collar, as he had somehow not noticed that among the customers waiting in line at the cash register was uniformed police officer L.J. Scott, of the armed robbery task force.

(1) In an incident likely to be repeated as Americans get larger, the body of a 600-pound man who was cremated at the Garner Funeral Home in Salt Lake City in October started a grease fire when leaking body fluids overheated the conventional oven. (2) John Leonard Young, 46, pleaded guilty in October to the now-familiar charge of using the Internet to lure an underage girl for sex, but the backstory was unusual. Though Young had bought her a plane ticket to Seattle, she decided to buy her own ticket but mistakenly booked "Washington, D.C." When she arrived there all alone, she sought help from authorities, and Young's plot unraveled.

(1) Jeffrey Turpin, 41, was arrested in August in Wytheville, Va., for malicious wounding of a woman after chasing her across two farms on a tractor. According to a witness, when the woman fell, Turpin dropped the tractor's bucket to the ground and rolled it over her, breaking her leg. (2) Three women were arrested in Columbus, Ga., in September and charged with forcing a pregnant teenager to drink turpentine, which the three (and several other family members) had heard would induce an abortion.

-- About a dozen Asian women living in Seattle flock to Bigelow Street every September, for hours at a time, to gather fallen chestnuts to take home and boil, according to a report in The Seattle Times. The residents of the upscale homes say they've come to accept the ladies, some elderly, who thoroughly search yards for hours and make themselves at home on the properties (including relieving themselves in the shrubbery) while waiting for the next batch to fall.

-- After the aircraft maintenance staff of Turkish Airlines finished up a repair job ahead of schedule in December, they celebrated by sacrificing a camel at Istanbul airport, with hundreds of pounds of meat distributed to workers. (The government of Turkey, which is working hard to be accepted into the European Union, might have preferred the sacrifice be done elsewhere.)

(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.)

Christian stand-up comedian Brad Stine says his muscular GodMen revivals are a reaction to the "wuss-ification" of the Promise Keepers movement and encourage spiritual men to "cowboy-up" and "thank God for testosterone!" According to a December Los Angeles Times report, GodMen celebrates traditional male excesses, such as cussing, raucousness and sexuality. Added a Stine associate, "(F)or heaven's sake, don't ask the guys (as Promise Keepers does) to take the hand of the guys next to them." "Do not think Sunday morning worship. Think Saturday afternoon tailgate." Back to "Onward Christian Soldiers" rather than Jesus love songs. And tell your wife the rules, Stine says: "Learn to work the toilet seat. (I)f it's up, put it down."

-- The Oklahoma City company Skulls Unlimited International is, it claims, the world's leading supplier of bones -- cleaning and polishing human and animal heads by picking off the tissue by hand and then using dermestid beetles to eat what's left. Said owner Jay Villemarette, on the greasiness of the human head: "I am not exaggerating. It is nasty." But, said an employee, you get used to the work: "I've been waist-deep in a dead hippopotamus, and I'd rather do that than change diapers."

-- Cutting-Edge Inventions: (1) South African inventor Willem van Rensburg has begun to market the Pronto condom, which he promised can be applied directly from wrapper to penis in three seconds (and, with practice, one second). It's available now only in South Africa, but he has obtained a U.S. patent. (2) On display at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis., in October was a $250,000, self-service milking machine (introduced in Europe in 2005) in which the cow wanders in, and lasers and video cameras guide the rubber cups to her teats, with a computer directing the actual milking.

An appeals court in Florida finally applied the brakes to the so-called "contingency fee multiplier" available under state law for lawyers who assist mistreated insurance customers. In extraordinary cases, a lawyer is permitted to recover up to 2 1/2 times the customary fee, which supposedly helps customers with smaller claims to find legal representation. However, the court said the fee is being granted too routinely, and in one October case, a client won his $1,315 claim while his lawyer got $193,750.

-- A Georgetown University student, whose dad bought him a $2.4 million off-campus house and who wants his eight best friends to live (and party) with him, ran up against a Washington, D.C., zoning law permitting no more than six unrelated people per house. In October, after researching the issue, the students filed papers declaring themselves a "church" (The Apostles of O'Neill, after owner Brian O'Neill) because churches are allowed to house up to 15 unrelated people. O'Neill's dad supports the students, as judged from his testy response to a Washington Post inquiry: "Who says they aren't a (real) religion?"

-- Surgeon Michael Koenig of Cologne, Germany, who said he was cheated out of thousands of dollars in fees by women who failed to pay for their breast enlargements, said in October that he had no photos of the women but did have photos of their new chests, and he gave them to the police, hoping they would somehow help in finding the women.

-- The United Nations Millennium Campaign's worldwide program to "stand up against poverty" solicited amateur videos for distribution to help dramatize the issue in industrialized nations, but one video drew the attention of a Wall Street Journal reporter in October: Three men were sitting around a table, eating beans and raucously discussing their gas-producing qualities, when the men suddenly turned serious. One looked into the camera and said, "Some folks don't even have a bowl of beans to eat." The videomaker said he was "a little disappointed" that his piece was rejected.

-- Christine Marmolejo, 39, of Downers Grove, Ill., pleaded guilty in October to a plot in which she had her 14-year-old son plant marijuana and prescription drugs in the backpack of another boy to embarrass that boy's mother, with whom Marmolejo had been feuding for years. Marmolejo's son eventually confessed, and now Marmolejo faces an enhanced penalty since she involved a 14-year-old in drug possession.

-- New-Age Punishments: Rosewood Elementary School (Rock Hill, S.C.) teacher Daniel Johns was investigated in October for having his students line up and stomp the feet of a classmate, as punishment for the kid's own foot-stomping. (No criminal charges were filed.) And in a non-classroom incident, Alcorn State University professor Festus Oguhebe was sentenced in Jackson, Miss., in November to two years in prison for disciplining his 11-year-old son by tying his hands and then covering him with ants (which Oguhebe said was a traditional punishment in his native Nigeria).

In Mentor, Ohio, firefighters struggled to keep avid Christmas shoppers from continuing to enter the Dillards at Great Lakes Mall after a Dec. 6 electrical fire filled the store with smoke. And in Anderson, S.C., driver David Allen Rodgers, who was driving a float in the town's Christmas parade on Dec. 3 (despite being inebriated), was arrested after impatiently breaking out of the slow-moving parade line and speeding down Main Street, endangering riders and spectators. And in London, the regional manager of unemployment offices banned traditional Christmas decorations because he did not want his clients (since they are jobless in the holiday season) to feel worse by witnessing any festive spirit.

(1) The man who stole the safe from a Runza restaurant in Omaha, Neb., in October was forced to abandon it in the middle of a street when he realized his getaway plan (dragging it through town from the back of his car) attracted attention that he had somehow not anticipated. (He fled empty-handed.) (2) Federal inmate Brandon Sample won his appeal in November and is entitled to have on computer disks the public records he requested (rather than the paper copies the Bureau of Prisons was offering). However, Sample still lacks a computer to read them on, and the appeals court ruled that he has no legal right to one.

Still More Texas Justice: Death-row inmate Daniel Acker's court-appointed lawyer, 26-year veteran Toby Wilkinson, filed a writ of habeas corpus for his client in 2003 that consisted largely of verbatim text from an earlier letter that Acker himself had written to the judges, including this passage: "I'm just about out of carbon paper. As soon as I get some more typing supplies I have about 30 more errors I wanted (noted) in my appeal." (Wilkinson was paid $22,270 for "writing" the writ.) However, in November 2006, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied the writ, satisfied that it raised no issues not resolved in Acker's 2000 trial.

(1) Last summer, a British Passport Office in Sheffield turned down the application for Hannah Edwards, 5, because her mother had submitted a photograph showing Hannah from the neck up, as prescribed, but wearing a sunsuit that left her shoulders bare. The Passport Office said that Hannah's exposed skin might be offensive in a Muslim country. (That decision was later overruled, according to a report in London's Daily Telegraph.) (2) Also in Britain, the Robert Walters employment agency notified its offices in October that the words "vibrant," "dynamic," "ambitious," "energetic," "experienced" and 17 others must not be used in recruiting ads, lest the company risk lawsuits for age discrimination.

(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.)

Christmas Madness: (1) In November, the upscale New York City menswear and accessories store Jack Spade removed from its holiday catalog a $40 frog-dissection kit (with a real carcass) after numerous queries from people wondering what in the world the store was thinking. (2) A holiday party for inmates at Britain's Peterborough Jail promised a fun time with Xbox and PlayStations, along with cash gifts of 5 pounds each (about US$9), which is greater than the value of the candy boxes the jail will give its guards for Christmas. (3) Police in Rock Hill, S.C., put a 12-year-old boy under arrest at the insistence of his mother after he had defied her and opened his Christmas gift three weeks early.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned the cocaine-possession conviction of Timothy Stone in September, ruling that a search of his person was unconstitutional even though he had given police permission. The judges agreed with Stone that when he consented, he never expected that the search would include the officers holding out the waistband of his sweatpants and shining a flashlight on his genitals (which is where he happened to be hiding a small container of cocaine).

(1) The "Berkeley Pit" in Butte, Mont., is the nation's largest environmental-disaster site, with 40 billion gallons of highly toxic copper-mine waste that the federal government has long feared too expensive to clean up. However, Montana Tech researchers, writing in the Journal of Organic Chemistry in July, have found more than 160 types of "extremophiles" (organisms that thrive in toxicity) in the pit and have demonstrated that some are effective against lung and ovarian cancers. (2) Kimberly Baker, 22, sought child support in Warrensburg, Va., in October from the father of her daughter. However, when officials realized that the father, now 16, would have been 13 when the child was conceived, that made him a rape victim under state law, and thus, they arrested Baker.

-- Ricardo Meana, 81, was charged with attempted murder in November in Sun City, Fla., when his 82-year-old wife, who has Alzheimer's, was found inside a van in a store's parking lot struggling with the plastic bag over her head. Police were called, but Meana seemed unconcerned and even nonchalantly resumed shopping, saying that he often put the bags on when his wife felt sick, so that she would not vomit on herself.

-- Not Our Fault: In 2002, Jeffrey Klein and Brett Birdwell, both 17 at the time, trespassed onto a railroad yard in Lancaster, Pa., and climbed atop a boxcar to see what the view was like, but were severely burned by a 12,500-volt line on the roof and thus sued Amtrak and Norfolk Southern railroads for not having done enough to prevent them from trespassing. In October, a federal jury awarded the two men a total of about $12 million in compensatory damages plus $12 million in punitive damages.

-- In a deposition, Ennis, Texas, physician Aniruddha Chitale admitted that semen that patient Sherry Simpson found on her face after a 2004 colonoscopy was his and thus later pleaded guilty to sexual assault. However, in his deposition (according to a report by Dallas' WFAA-TV), Chitale insisted that the act that produced the semen was "unintentional." (Simpson is now suing Ennis Regional Medical Center for having tolerated Chitale's behavior.)

-- Federal prosecutors have insisted so far that any ill-gotten money that former Enron executives had squirreled away in their spouses' names still can be fully recovered by the government, except for one executive. Michael Kopper, once a director of Enron's global finance unit, pleaded guilty in 2002 to illegally obtaining $16.5 million, but he is openly gay. And since his home state of Texas does not recognize his union with his longtime partner, prosecutors cannot treat the partner as a "spouse" and have lumped him with "third party" transferees, whose assets are much more difficult to obtain (according to a November report in Washington Blade).

-- University of California, Irvine, professor Elizabeth Loftus, a prominent scholar on people's overconfidence about memory, was turned down by the judge as an expert witness in November in the forthcoming trial of "Scooter" Libby (Vice President Cheney's former assistant, who has been charged with lying to prosecutors about phone conversations, which Libby says weren't lies but just forgetfulness). At a hearing on Loftus' credentials, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald not only exposed some problems with her research but elicited from Loftus the confident assertion that the two had never before met. However, Fitzgerald then immediately refreshed Loftus' memory, reminding her that he had cross-examined her in court once before.

Pleading guilty to manslaughter in Pierre, S.D., in August was Mr. Austin First In Trouble, 19. And in Providence, R.I., in November, the teenager sentenced to life in prison for murder (where his life might rot away) is Mr. Phearin Rot. On the brighter side, a linebacker for South Sumter High School in Bushnell, Fla., had a good year: Yourhighness Morgan (whose brother Handsome Morgan and cousin Gorgeous Morgan were undoubtedly proud of him).

A 41-year-old engineer in suburban Toronto has accumulated, and worn, about 800 pairs of sports socks over 15 years (half of them off the feet of professional athletes), according to a lengthy November profile in Canada's National Post, which did not reveal his name. The worst part of his hobby, he said (besides having to keep it secret from his wife), is that he is often contacted by foot and sock fetishists, which he denies that he is, preferring to think of himself as sort of a "custodian of history," wrote the Post. (A more conventional fetishist, Masashi Kamata, 28, was arrested in Nagoya, Japan, in October after police found about 5,000 pairs of used girls' and boys' shoes at a rented warehouse. "I was enjoying their smell," he said, according to Mainichi Daily News.)

Noel Methot, 24, was cited for inattentive driving after her car wound up half-submerged in a pond near downtown Orlando, Fla., in November. She was driving down a street but apparently missed the signs warning of the end of the road, and according to witnesses, the most likely reason for that was that she was arguing loudly with her boyfriend over her cell phone. The car went airborne about 20 or 30 feet before splashdown, but Methot was not seriously hurt.

In yet another case of a person practicing what is allegedly acceptable in another country but illegal in the United States, a 28-year-old woman from Cambodia was arrested in Las Vegas, Nev., in October for kissing her 6-year-old son's penis, which she said was simply an expression of motherly love. An official in California's Cambodian Association of America confirmed the custom to the Las Vegas Review-Journal but said it never extends past age 2.

(1) With dozens of puzzled beachcombers witnessing, a cow marched into the surf off the coast of Queensland in Australia in November and swam out as far as 300 yards for four hours (returning to shore twice but venturing out again) before drowning from swallowing water. (2) In October in Vancouver, Wash., a Doberman pinscher named Victoria jumped on an electric stove and accidentally nudged a switch that started a fire in her apartment, resulting in about $100,000 damage. It was the second time this year that Victoria had jumped on the stove and started a fire, but the first one did much less damage.

(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.)