A New Delhi, India, glaciologist said in June that global warming in the Himalayas is at least partly responsible for the melting of the stalagmite in the Amarnath cave in Kashmir, which is one of Hindus' holiest pilgrimage sites because the giant icicle is said to symbolize Lord Shiva (the god of destruction and regeneration), who is typically represented by phalluses. A caretaker of the site told Reuters that the stalagmite is melting rapidly, though it has varied in size from year to year, with the lean years thought to represent Lord Shiva's displeasure about something.

-- Sweden's English-language news outlet reported in June that the government's employment service had granted Roger Tullgren, 42, supplemental income benefits based on his illness of addiction to heavy-metal music. Tullgren (with long, black hair, tattoos and skull-and-crossbones jewelry and who said he attended nearly 300 concerts last year) said he had been addicted for 10 years but finally got three psychologists to sign off on calling his condition a disability. His employer now permits Tullgren to play his music at his dishwashing job.

-- Ohio inmate Keith Bowles may spend the rest of his life in prison just because a federal judge miscalculated Bowles' deadline for appealing his case. Bowles was convicted of murder in 1999, and his federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus was denied in 2004. However, the federal judge wrote "Feb. 27" as the deadline for appealing (mistakenly, because federal rules gave Bowles only until Feb. 24). Bowles' Feb. 26 appeal was dismissed as too late by the U.S. Court of Appeals and, in June 2007, by the U.S. Supreme Court.

-- In June 1995, Gordon Wood, who would subsequently be charged with Caroline Byrne's murder in Sydney, Australia, arrived at the morgue shortly after her body did, identified himself as her boyfriend, asked to see the body, and also asked, according to the attendant, "Do you mind if I look at her tits?" (The attendant, according to a police report reviewed by a judge during a June 2007 court proceeding, refused, and Wood was charged shortly afterward with having thrown the woman off a cliff.)

According to police, Derrick House and another man planned to kill four people in a 1985 Chicago drug hit and needed a stranger to knock on the door so that House and his companion could gain entry. They paid teenager Charles Green $25 to do that, and House completed the mission. Green was convicted and imprisoned for "participating" in the murder. House got the death penalty, but as a result of legal challenges, was recently released. House's companion was never convicted. Thus, the only one of the three still in prison 22 years later is the one who just knocked on the door. In August, a judge is scheduled to hear Green's latest petition for a new trial.

(1) Jenny Brown, 62, entered her sponge cake in a contest sponsored by an organization in Wimblington, England, in July, was informed by judges that she had won "second place," and was only later told that she was the only entrant (but was also told that she could not have first place). (2) According to U.S. government figures, Afghanistan's opium crop produces more than 90 percent of the world's heroin, but in July the country's council of ministers began a crackdown on smoking tobacco in government buildings.

(1) The registrar of Nigeria's university entrance exams reported in May that almost 2,000 of the students had been caught in cheating scams. (2) Arab researchers writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported in June, not surprisingly, that Middle Eastern women who dress covering all or nearly all their skin may have significant vitamin D deficiency due to lack of sunlight.

-- (1) A star athlete at Brigham Young University was arrested in Provo, Utah, in June after police saw him angrily dueling with a street cleaner using the man's mops. The cleaner had crossed a street slowly, provoking driver Kyle Perry to leap from his car, grab a mop and swing it at the cleaner (who parried the attack with another mop). (2) The representative from Boulder, Colo., in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May was 14-year-old Miss "Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan" (that's M-a-i-t-h-r-e-y-i G-o-p-a-l-a-k-r-i-s-h-n-a-n).

-- Once-classified reports obtained by the Associated Press in May revealed that three times in late 2005 and early 2006, the U.S. Department of Defense issued espionage alerts regarding newly designed Canadian 25-cent pieces, which the Pentagon warned may contain embedded transmitters capable of eavesdropping, and which perhaps were given purposely to U.S. contractors working in Canada. Some time later, according to the reports, the Pentagon learned that the coin's coating was not a film-and-mesh transmitter but merely a covering to preserve the limited-issue coin's unique design.

(1) Shafique el-Fahkri, 19, had the leg of a chair jammed completely through his left eye socket during an attack in Melbourne, Australia, in January. Five surgeons, operating for three hours, saved his life, and three months later, he had regained 95 percent of his vision (and said, of the attacker, "I forgive him, totally"). (2) As the result of a January car crash in Nebraska, Shannon Malloy, 30, had her skull separate from her spine ("internal decapitation"), but she remained alive until doctors could stabilize her with screws into her neck, and her recovery is progressing at Denver Spine Center, according to a May KMGH-TV report.

(1) Robert Theriault, 49, a courthouse security officer in Concord, N.H., was convicted in April of persuading a couple that he was a tester for an insurance company and would pay them $20 to have sex in front of him so he could evaluate a certain bedsheet and condom. (2) Aaron Meinhardt, 37, was arrested in Riverside, Mo., in July after a municipal swimming pool employee saw him expose himself. The arresting officer said Meinhardt asked him, "Am I (not) allowed to satisfy myself? It has been a long time since I have. What am I supposed to do, just keep it in?"

Crime Time in Wilmington, Del.: (1) Jesse Dale, 42, was arrested and charged with cocaine possession in Wilmington in June during a routine traffic stop after he attempted to throw his stash out the passenger window as the officer approached. (However, the window was up, and the package bounced back into the seat in "plain sight" for the officer to base an arrest on.) (2) Also in June, according to police, Branden Tingey, 28, was arrested after closing hours in the manager's office at Wilmington's Polidoro Italian Grill, trying to open the safe. It appeared that Tingey was using a computer displaying a Web page on safecracking.

(1) A 21-year-old man fell to his death in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, in April when he leaned a little too far over on a hillside rock in order to write his girlfriend's name on an available space on the surface. (Her name is Kaylee and not, unfortunately, just Kay.) (2) A 43-year-old man suffered a fatal heart attack in 2006 during sex with an exotic dancer in Pacifica, Calif., and homicide was ruled out because the death was captured on the video camera the man had set up to record their session. (On the other hand, the woman's drug use was also on the video, and she was sentenced in May 2007 to a year in jail.)

(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.)

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.)