Some parents feel "unprecedented levels of angst" to pick cool enough names for their kids, with some even hiring consultants, according to a June Wall Street Journal report. Baby-book authors charge clients $50 for a list of "special" names, and half-hour phone consultations go for $95. Another adviser charges $350 for three calls plus a comprehensive linguistic history of the selected name, and one California mother paid $475 to a numerologist to "test" the name Leah Marie for "positive associations." The Journal blames the problem on too much information about names (from the Internet), as well as parents' fear of dooming their child for life by insufficiently distinguishing their kid from others.

-- Violent demonstrations in northwestern India in May left at least 18 dead, as members of the lower Gujjar caste demanded that the government put them into an even lower class, at the bottom of the social ladder (so that they would be eligible for more government benefits). The Gujjars say that being one of the government's "Other Backwards Classes" is unsatisfactory and that they deserve worse.

-- International restrictions on tuna fishing have created a shortage in Japan's sushi restaurants so dire that chefs are considering substitutes such as sushi prepared with raw horse or deer meat. While that would outrage many Japanese diners, some restaurateurs believe the plan feasible, according to a June New York Times dispatch from Tokyo. Said one: "We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good. It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell."

-- Egypt's Muslims are growing weary of the number of specific religious edicts ("fatwas") issued by the country's clerics, including two recent, highly controversial ones, according to a June New York Times dispatch from Cairo. Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at the prestigious al-Azhar Islamic University, had declared that men can be permitted to see unrelated women without their head scarves (which is ordinarily prohibited) by the symbolic act of the woman's breastfeeding the man five times, which in theory places the woman on similar footing to the man's mother. A second challenging fatwa declared that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad would be holy. (Atiya has been suspended.)

-- In May, one of the world's Christian "dental healers," the interdenominational Rev. Steve Jones, set up his latest revival tent, near Bradenton, Fla., and began not only allegedly curing toothaches but growing teeth and turning amalgam fillings into gold, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The reporter described a parade of witnesses claiming to have been healed and to have seen their crooked teeth straightened. Laying his hand on the jaw of one local resident, Jones assured the crowd, "You can see gold coming (into the filling)."

-- Sandy Sabloff had been scheduled to receive a kidney from Australian Ashwyn Falkingham in April, at Toronto (Ontario) General Hospital, but the hospital canceled it at the last minute, apparently acceding to pressure from Falkingham's mother, who said her son had been brainwashed by a "cult" called Jesus Christians, which she said is obsessed with donating kidneys as a test of spiritual devotion. (Ashwyn Falkingham said he remained eager to donate.)

(1) Hitachi's "brain machine interface," which it showed an Associated Press reporter in June, might soon allow a user to don a hat and turn an appliance on or off by merely thinking about doing so. (Until now, such thought-controlled instructions could only be done by people with devices implanted.) (2) Scientists at Italy's La Sapienza University announced in May that they had, for apparently the first time, surgically grafted a vagina (built with stem cells) onto a woman who had been born without one due to a rare condition.

Probation-Happy Judges: (1) Judge Angelo DiCamillo of Camden, N.J., thought probation (and $750 restitution) was enough for six teenagers in June, even though they had wrecked a family's home during a party ($18,000 damages), urinated and defecated on the furniture and (except for one boy) declined to apologize. (2) Also in June, Judge Harold Kahn of San Francisco thought probation was enough for a woman who had claimed the identity of another (through stolen credit cards) and run up six months of bills and bad credit, and even though the thief was already on probation. (Bonus fact: The victim had collared the perp herself, following a chance meeting, and handed her to police.)

(1) "Bishop" Anthony Owens, 35, of Duluth, Ga., out of prison less than two years following a bigamy sentence, was arrested in April on suspicion of agreeing to marry four more women. Owens said that maybe he "misunderstood" Mormon teachings. (2) Kylie Wilson, 28, was convicted in June in Brisbane, Australia, of stabbing her friend Daniel Blair because Blair literally would not stop masturbating in her home, where Wilson's 3-year-old daughter was present. According to Wilson, Blair started his adventure in the bathroom and moved to the bedroom, ignoring Wilson's pleas, until she grabbed a knife and stabbed him twice in the shoulder. Even then, the wounded Blair merely retreated to the garage, where he continued what a newspaper called his "marathon."

John Moore, 67, golfs nearly every day and has for about 20 years, according to a July St. Petersburg Times report. The golf he plays, though, consists of hitting 35 long-iron shots (five shots with each of the seven balls he owns) on a grassy median strip along Interstate 275 in downtown Tampa. "You can't play this game one day, two days in a week," he said. "You have to play it all the time if you want to do something with it." What Moore wants to do with it, he told the Times, is to someday soon make his first-ever appearance on an actual golf course.

In July 2007, four would-be suicide bombers were convicted in London of a botched terrorist act that came two weeks after their more successful colleagues attacked trains and a bus in that city two years earlier. The second attack failed because the leader, Muktah Said Ibrahim (who was said to have flunked math in school) miscalculated the amount of ingredients, rendering the bombs useless. However, terror fighters make mistakes, too, as the U.S. Government Accountability Office revealed in July. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had recently granted a license for handling radioactive materials (enough for a so-called "dirty bomb") to a fake company set up by the GAO, consisting of nothing more than a telephone and commercial mailbox in West Virginia.

Smoking Kills: David Pawlik called the fire department in Cleburne, Texas, in July to ask if the "blue flames" he and his wife were seeing every time she lit a cigarette were dangerous, and an inspector said he would be right over and for Mrs. Pawlik not to light another cigarette. However, anxious about the imminent inspection, she lit up and was killed in the subsequent explosion. (The home was all-electric, but there had been a natural gas leak underneath the yard.)

Dr. Brady Barr, a reptile specialist with the National Geographic TV channel, needed to get close enough to Nile crocodiles in Tanzania (length: up to 20 feet) to attach data monitors to their tails and decided to dress up as a croc and crawl to them. With a crocodile suit, a prosthetic head and a metal cage (and hippopotamus dung to mask his human scent), he was able to apply tags, with video to prove it (according to a June report in London's Daily Mail), with the scariest moment coming not from crocodiles but when a hippo wandered by, attracted by the dung scent.

(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.)

It is increasingly difficult these days for a girl to go through the stage of "plain old kid," according to a June Arizona Republic story, because clothing fashions seem to move from "toddler" directly to some form of "teen" (including "tween" and now "pre-tween"), with spaghetti-strap dresses and "ultra miniskirts," but in tinier-than-ever sizes. In fact, reported the newspaper, GapKids recently offered a "white, crocheted string bikini you'd likely see Anna Kournikova wearing on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (except that it) was for a 12-month-old."

Exciting New Products: (1) a washing machine with a built-in MP-3 player and speakers (U.S. patent applied for in June, from the South Korean firm LG Electronics) and (2) Liver Love, Carob Crunch, Honey Hearts and other dog treats that are marketed as snacks that owners can enjoy along with their dogs (from Britain's Alldog Bakery), but with the principal drawback that they are more expensive per gram than lumpfish caviar or the priciest of gourmet chocolates.

-- (1) A Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) researcher reported in June that his work reveals that cockroaches have memories and the ability to learn, in that they can be taught to salivate (upon exposure to a specific odor), just as Pavlov showed that dogs could be taught to salivate (upon hearing a bell). (2) The human nose's ability to differentiate smells is greatly improved by mucus, which helps the nose by separating the scents chemically, and researchers from the UK's Warwick University said in April that they had developed an artificial mucus (a thin polymer coating over an artificial nose that enhances that device's effectiveness).

-- Among the recent discoveries of substances that provide similar virility outcomes as Viagra: the venom of a variety of black widow spider found in southern Chile (according to a researcher at Universidad de la Frontera in Temuco, Chile); the health drink Boost Plus (according to a June lawsuit filed by Christopher Woods of New York City, who developed priapism); the winter-flowering heather plant (according to botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, Scotland); and walnut extract (according to a researcher at Universiti Malaya in Malaysia) (though one would need 7 pounds of walnuts to achieve the effect of one pill).

-- Faced with falling prices for domestic wine, a group of French vintners has made terroristic threats against the government and retailers who carry imports. The guerrilla gang, wearing black ski masks, released a video in May (so far ignored by the Sarkozy government), reminding officials about recent incidents in which small explosives were detonated in supermarkets that carry imported wines and in which a tractor-trailer carrying imported wine had been shot at. Said one hooded protester, "Blood will flow" if prices don't soon rise.

-- Parents With Too Much Money: Backyard play sets can range in price from less than $100 to high-end outfits of $2,000 to $12,000 that would typically include fancy combinations of rock walls, rope ladders, sandboxes and tunnel slides, and maybe a tower with roofs and rotating plastic guns mounted on the walls, according to a May report in Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel. Also available: the King Kong Carl McKee Custom, at 46 feet by 58 feet, featuring towers 16 feet high (price: about $46,000, installed).

-- In June, for the fourth year, professor Paul Worsey of the University of Missouri-Rolla conducted his Summer Explosives Camp, with 20 high-school-age kids learning the techniques of blowing things up (e.g., a tree stump, a watermelon, a dead chicken). Said one camper, "Some people like baseball (but) I just like to set off bombs." Worsey's main goal is to recruit mine-engineering majors to his school, but another benefit, he told National Public Radio, is that the school "attract(s) the kids that might otherwise get into a little bit of trouble (and) give(s) them ... an opportunity for a career."

-- In June, the town council in Ledbury, England, turned down Timothy Fry's request to be allowed to exercise his two snakes, Rose and Buddy, in the town's park. He said he'd been letting them roam, leashless, for the last year with no complaints, but admitted that the two (a corn snake and a rat snake) were getting stressed from all the attention they have been receiving.

-- Pablo Castro, 26, was sent to the hospital twice in Decatur, Ala., on June 24, once after being stabbed in an argument and, after his release later that day, being stabbed again while arguing with a different person. And Tony Hicks was hospitalized in Knoxville, Tenn., for separate wounds on July 1, 2 and 3; he was hit by a car one night, then released from the hospital the next day, but was back in after an intruder attacked him in his home, and after his release the next day, he was back after police shot him in connection with a robbery.

-- A judge in London's Southwark Crown Court sentenced Mr. Bonney Eberendu, 36, to a mental health facility in June after he admitted that he was the one who smeared his feces inside at least six trains over a several-month period last year. Eberendu said the voices in his head had, on at least five occasions, instructed him to go kill someone and that, somehow, he was able to overcome the voices by doing what he did on the trains.

On May 31, veteran big-rig operator Gilberto Cantu drove his 18-wheeler all the way through the Lincoln Tunnel (1.5 miles, from Weehawken, N.J., to New York City) even though the load was 6 inches too high for the tunnel, so that the truck's roof continuously ripped and peeled off, slowing the truck and making a screeching noise the whole way. In addition, Cantu apparently ignored the several sound warnings and flashing lights by officers who tried to stop him inside the tunnel, and according to their reports, he appeared not even to understand why they had stopped him after he finally emerged. Cantu was not alcohol-impaired and, until then, had a "spotless" safety record.

One of the standard "panic" rumors that throw some African villages into turmoil is the report that a couple (usually unmarried and therefore deserving of bad fortune) has become stuck together during sex and cannot be unstuck without medical attention. A reporter for Kenya's East African Standard happened to be in the middle of a frenzied mob in front of the Naselica Hotel in downtown Kisumu on May 26, brought together by rumors that an ambulance had been called for a stuck couple. The reporter was convinced that most in the crowd were true believers, but the hotel manager said one of his competitors probably had planted the rumor, hoping to tie up traffic for the day and to create the impression that the Naselica is unlucky.

Recent Play-Dates: Conneaut, Ohio, March (image of Jesus on a pancake); Glasgow, Scotland, March (image of Jesus in a woman's ultrasound scan); Kamloops, British Columbia, March (image of Jesus on a baking sheet); Sacramento, Calif., March (image of Jesus on burned wallpaper); Houston, Texas, February (image of Jesus in a pizza pan); Crystal City, Texas, February (image of Jesus in the bark of a tree); Morton, Texas, January (image of Jesus in ice in the freezer of a grocery store); Avery Park, Ga., January (image of Jesus stained on shower tile).

(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.)

Africa's largely primitive Hadzabe people, down to their last 1,500 members after surviving thousands of years of disease, famine and encroaching civilization, fear their final blow will be the recent deal that Tanzania made to turn the tribe's prime hunting grounds over to United Arab Emirates royalty for private safaris. The land comprises 2,500 acres near the Serengeti Plain, and some Hadzabe (who still make fire by rubbing sticks together) are resigned either to fight the "invaders" (with bows and poison-tipped arrows) or to migrate to towns for survival, according to a June Washington Post dispatch from Tanzania's Yaeda Valley.

Andres Vasquez, 20, of Verona, Ky., initially told the 911 operator in May that someone had "thrown" his truck on top of him, but he finally admitted he was drunk, had had a one-vehicle accident, was trapped upside-down and was in dire pain, fading in and out for over two hours to the dispatcher. The operators pleaded the entire time for Vasquez to just say where he was so that they could send a rescue party, but, as the Kentucky Enquirer put it, "When repeatedly asked his location, (Vasquez's) answer was always the same: 'I'm under the (expletive) truck.'" (He finally gave a clue and was rescued.)

-- Lame: (1) Jonathan Powell, 17, was convicted in April of sexually assaulting a college student in Iowa City, Iowa, after his DNA was found in several places on her body. Powell explained the DNA by claiming that he had merely bumped into the woman accidentally while jogging and had become so "entangled" with her that he was unable to free himself for about "45 minutes." (2) In April, Donald Duncan Jr., 34, was convicted of invasion of privacy in Carlisle, Pa., after his wife discovered a hidden-camera video of two girls who were disrobing in a bedroom in the couple's house. Duncan said he had set up the camera because he suspected there were ghosts in the house and wanted proof.

-- Lawyer Charles Curbo filed a motion in Memphis, Tenn., in June, claiming that his client, Tony Wolfe, who was convicted of murder, failed to get a fair trial due to the ineffectiveness of Wolfe's lawyer (i.e., Curbo) because the lawyer was often too sleepy to do a good job. However, the prosecutor pointed out that part of Curbo's strategy had been to "wear down" witnesses "by extensive cross-examination" and that it was no wonder that he was exhausted.

-- Tiffany Weaver pleaded guilty in April to having stolen a lawyer's official ID and impersonating the woman in order to gain access to the jail in Baltimore so that she could visit her incarcerated boyfriend, but she denied, through her lawyer, that she and the boyfriend had had sex while they were together. "There was never any sexual intercourse," said attorney Ivan Bates. "There was no thrusting whatsoever."

-- Unclear on the Concept: (1) After the owner of a wrought-iron business in Brussels, Belgium, abruptly turned away a 53-year-old Nigerian native who had applied for a job, the local labor office declared the owner racist. However, the man said he was just trying to protect the Nigerian from the owner's dog. "My dog is racist," he said. "Not me." (2) Police in Kyoto, Japan, said in March that a man had been detained after firing a dozen rounds from his house toward a new, 11-story condominium building next door. The man explained that he was angry that the building was blocking the sunlight he had previously enjoyed.

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock was killed in an April car crash after he collided with a stopped tow truck on Interstate 64 in the middle of the night, and according to a police report, Hancock was intoxicated, speeding, un-seat-belted, and talking on his cell phone at the time. Nonetheless, in May, Hancock's father filed a lawsuit claiming that the causes of the crash were (1) the tow truck operator, (2) the driver who was being assisted by the tow truck operator, and (3) the manager of the restaurant in which Hancock had been drinking.

The local government in Dalkeith, Scotland, has decided that, notwithstanding global warming and carbon "footprints," the lights will stay on all night, every night, in the building that formerly was Dalkeith High School (but which has been vacant since 2004) because councilors fear that trespassers would hurt themselves in the darkness and sue them. A Green Party spokesman called it "an unbelievable triple whammy (cost, fire risk, environmental waste)."

In April, Los Angeles gynecologist David Matlock licensed his 2-year-old G-spot-enhancing technology to 35 other doctors around the country to help spread the benefits of collagen injections that swell the so-called Grafenburg Spot (a supposedly pleasure-registering zone which is, at best, tiny and hidden, but according to some doctors, nonexistent). With the patient's help, the doctor guides the 3-inch needle to the most promising location, and one injection renders the G-spot the size of a coin. Many patients claim their sex lives are greatly enhanced, but no peer-reviewed research has yet been done.

Chief Deputy Terry Thompson was driving around Rayville, La., in June when he saw several cars stopped for an 8-foot snake in the road, with some motorists threatening to run over it or shoot it so that traffic could pass. Thompson stepped in to save it and then realized that he recognized the snake. It was, he remembered, the one-eyed boa constrictor that had turned up missing in March after owner Chad Foote had moved into town, and Foote said he was ecstatic to have it returned, considering the handsome price one has to pay for a snake with one eye.

Twelve hundred troops from Poland were deployed to Afghanistan in June as part of a NATO buildup to patrol the Pakistan border, searching for Taliban forces, but Polish commanders admitted that they would not be combat-ready for several weeks because the keys to all their Humvees had been stolen. One commander said spare keys had been ordered.

News of the Weird first mentioned "Breatharians" in a 1999 report, referring to people who claim to subsist on only water, air and sunlight, even though there is scant proof of their self-denial and utterly no scientific evidence that humans can live beyond a few weeks on such a diet. In June, London's Daily Mail profiled German Michael Werner, who claims not to have eaten (except for fruit juice, coffee, wine and an occasional grape or nut) since 2001 yet is active and appears robust at 6-feet-2 and 175 pounds, attributing his success to a hunger-ignoring state of mind. The two most famous Breatharians (Australian Ellen Greve and American Wiley Brooks) were both later exposed in the press as having sneaked food on the side.

Elderly drivers' recent lapses of concentration, stepping on the gas instead of the brake: An East Meadow, N.Y., man, 91, crashed into his wife (March). A prominent biochemist from the 1940s, age 88, crashed through a wall of the Civic Center in San Rafael, Calif. (June). An 84-year-old woman, playing golf with another woman, accidentally ran her down in her golf cart, Medford, Ore. (April). A Shiloh, Ill., woman, 84, drove into the cafeteria of Shiloh Elementary School, hitting one girl (January). A Deland, Fla., woman, 84, driving to pick up a prescription, smashed into the pharmacy (November). An Eastbourne, England, man, 80, crashed into the lobby of Eastbourne General Hospital, coming to visit his wife (June). An Oshkosh, Wis., man, 77, smashed into a restaurant (with pedalwork that was complicated by his cane, leaning against the driver's seat) (December).

(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.)