East Dublin, Ga. (in July), and Athens, Texas (in August), sponsored their own versions of Redneck Games, with events such as mud-pit belly-flopping, seed-spitting and making armpit music (Georgia), as well as (in Texas) "red-neck horseshoes" (played with toilet seats), a Spam-and-jalapeno-eating contest, a mattress chuck, men bobbing for raw animal parts in tomato paste, and the ever-popular coed butt crack contest. Wrote the San Antonio Express-News: "There was something strangely arresting about watching 10 serious-faced guys grind away at pink bricks of Spam while Steppenwolf's 'Born to Be Wild' boomed from the loudspeakers."

(1) Amy Mueller filed a lawsuit recently against Samy's Bar and Grill in Joliet, Ill., after she willingly tried to climb onto the bar to dance in May 2006 but fell and broke her ankle. Samy's should have had a "ladder" or other climbing aid, said Mueller's lawyer. (2) Jeromy Jackson and his family filed a $10 million lawsuit in Morgantown, W.Va., in August against McDonald's because there was cheese on his Quarter-Pounder, which triggered a severe allergic reaction that required hospital treatment. Jackson's lawyer said the family's order was painstakingly clear that the burger should be cheeseless, but apparently, after being served, Jackson failed to lift the bun to check.

(1) Cheveon Ford, 21, was arrested in Pensacola, Fla., in July and charged with making false 911 calls; according to authorities, Ford's only explanation was that he had no more minutes on his phone and knew that 911 calls were free. (2) In Rochester, N.Y., in June, Eric Kennedy, 38, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for molesting an underage girl over a three-year period, which he partly attributed to his poor eyesight, in that at times he might have mistaken the girl for her mother, with whom he was living.

-- Florida state Rep. Bob Allen was a co-sponsor earlier in 2007 of legislation to increase the penalty for "public lewdness and indecent exposure," such as trolling for sex partners in public restrooms (upping the crime from a misdemeanor to a felony). The bill did not pass, which was lucky for Rep. Allen, who was arrested in July in a men's room in Titusville when undercover officers said he entered and exited three times in the space of a few minutes, peered over a restroom stall and offered oral sex for $20.

-- After a 25-year-old woman was accused of murdering her father and sister (and wounding her mother) in July in Sydney, Australia, authorities revealed that she had been diagnosed with a psychotic illness in 2006. However, she had been discouraged from seeking psychiatric treatment by her parents because they are Scientologists, who by doctrine reject psychiatry and psychotropic-drug treatment.

-- Great Moments in Anger Management: Raul Ponce Jr., 20, was arrested in San Diego in April and charged with killing his teenage girlfriend by stabbing her 122 times; he was arrested later that day at his anger-management class. And Rev. Robert Nichols, who for several years had been teaching anger-management classes for accused criminals in Gary, Ind., was arrested in July and charged with beating his wife.

(1) A 12-year-old girl was sentenced in Perth, Australia, in July to two months' detention for stealing a car and leading police on a harrowing high-speed chase. According to court records, she has already been convicted of more than 60 crimes. (2) A 7-year-old named Alisha told reporters in Reidsville, N.C., in August that she was just being a good daughter when she challenged the man who tried to rob her mom (a convenience store clerk). "I was pushing on him and telling him to 'back away, back away, man.'" (Her aggressiveness foiled the robbery, but the man got away. Said Alisha, "He should be locked up by his gills and towed to the police.")

An estimated 50 followers of Hira Ratan Manek live in the Atlanta area, according to an August Journal-Constitution report, and regularly follow his teaching to stare directly into the sun, supposedly for energy and clarity of thought. Ophthalmologists consulted by the newspaper expressed alarm, even though Manek advises to start at 10 seconds' time and gradually increase (to 45 minutes!) and to stare only when the sun is near the horizon.

(1) In July, a federal appeals court ruled that no one could challenge President Bush's order permitting warrantless eavesdropping on phone calls into and out of the United States, unless it was a person actually eavesdropped on. However, according to law professors cited by the Los Angeles Times, anyone who could prove that would be barred under other national security laws from revealing that fact in public. (2) Pamir Safi will soon be retried in Lincoln, Neb., accused of raping a woman in 2004 (after a hung jury in the first trial), but this time, Judge Jeffre Cheuvront has prohibited prosecutors from using the terms "rape" or "sexual assault" in front of the jury because they might prejudice Safi, who claims the sex was consensual. The alleged victim said she feels humiliated to refer to the incident as mere "sex."

-- The Orient Industry Co. of Tokyo each month turns out 80 life-size, anatomically correct and finely detailed "love dolls" that retail for the equivalent of $850 to $5,500 each, for men who would rather hang out with toys than women, according to a July Reuters dispatch. The more expensive models are admirably life-like, made of silicon and with 35 movable joints. Reuters found one customer, Mr. "Ta-Bo," who owns at least two dozen of them (each with a name), even though he claims to be seeing five real women on the side. "Sex with human girls was better," he said, "but I hate the process of dating."

-- In July, a tractor-trailer overturned on Walker Road in Norridgewock, Maine, and its contents of nitrogen-concentrated chicken manure spilled onto rusted cars and the rest of the property of junk dealer Richard White. Days later, "There's stuff still 20 feet up the tree," he said. "It was like a tsunami wave of hot chicken (manure)," he told the Waterville Morning Sentinel. White grumbled that the truck company was slow on the cleanup, probably, he said, because his property is largely junk. "They think I'm a hick and don't matter. But my life didn't smell like this before." And "I hate flies."

Another prominent company of very large dancers is flourishing (this one in Cuba), performing with remarkable grace the forms of classical ballet, and even popular steps, despite sometimes thundering across the stage, "convey(ing) an excitement akin to a stampede," according to a July New York Times dispatch from Havana. Like others (such as Henri Oguike's Big Ballet in the U.K.), Danza Voluminosa is home to talented ballerinas who happen to be much too hefty (several around 300 pounds) for traditional troupes. Danza capitalizes on its bulk by offering storylines on gluttony, fat prejudice and the psychological problems of obesity.

(1) "(British National Health Service) Dentists Turn Away Patients With Bad Teeth" (a May report in London's Daily Telegraph) (compensation is sufficient only for routine treatments). (2) "Indian Lawyers Tie Man to Tree, Beat Him" (a May Reuters report from Lucknow, India) (the man had declined to marry one lawyer's niece). (3) "Principal Admits Throwing Excrement (at a kid)" (an April story in the Toronto Star) (said suspended principal Maria Pantalone, "I couldn't take it anymore").

(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.)

Kyle Krichbaum, 12, of Adrian, Mich., has had an obsession with vacuum cleaners since infancy, when he was mesmerized by the whirring, said his mother, and for years, he says, he has enjoyed vacuuming so much that he does the house up to five times a day, with one of the 165 new and used vacuum cleaners in his collection. Said a former teacher, "It's not that he didn't like recess. He just preferred to stay inside vacuuming." Older sister Michelle, interviewed for a July CBS News profile of Kyle, spoke for all of us: "He's constantly vacuuming. I'm just like 'why, why, why, why, why, why?' I don't understand."

-- In April, Britain's Office of Work and Pensions acknowledged to the Daily Mail that the multiple wives of polygamous husbands who are legally in the country routinely draw dependents' unemployment allowances from the government (even though polygamy itself is illegal in the U.K.). A single person receives the equivalent of about $120 a week, and a married couple about $180, with each additional wife about $60.)

-- Miles Nurse and Jennifer Plomt, condominium owners in Vancouver, British Columbia, learned in July that they would have to cohabit with as many as 80 bats that had infested their unit for the following six weeks because the B.C. Wildlife Act prevents disturbing the critters during their mating season, which would end in late August. At press time for a July Vancouver Sun story, the couple had found one bat in bed with them, another hanging upside down from a bathroom door frame and five in the ceiling over a kitchen pantry.

-- It's Good to Be a British Prisoner: (1) Faced with overcrowding, the government announced earlier this year that 25,500 inmates would be early-released, and since that would take away their "free" housing for the remainder of their sentences, awarded each released person "room and board" expenses to live on until their terms expired. (2) Britain's Prison Service announced in May that inmate obesity was such a problem that it had hired "dozens" of fitness trainers to serve at 25 U.K. jails. Trainers will provide individualized exercise routines and "holistic, alternative therap(ies)," according to a report in The Sun.

-- Seven years ago, the city council of Bainbridge Island, Wash., set out to build a public restroom for downtown Waterfront Park so visitors would no longer have to use portable toilets. Today, the toilets are still there, following council battles over million-dollar proposals such as a glass-tiled structure dug into a hillside, a combination restroom/scenic-viewing area, and a design that anticipated $45,000 just for artwork. In May 2007, the council gave the public works director some money and ordered him to (in the words of one council member) "just (build) a bathroom."

-- In February, a New Jersey appeals court ruled against the town of Voorhees, which had waged a nearly three-year battle with a businessman because it disputed the shade of paint he had used on his Friendly's restaurant. Town officials said it wasn't "sandy" (the required color for buildings in that particular shopping center), but rather "creamy yellow." The township spent $20,000 fighting for "sandy," and the restaurateur spent $70,000 to show that "creamy yellow" matched the other buildings, and the appeals court judges seemingly just shrugged.

The Horror of War: A U.S. law professor representing Guantanamo prisoners compiled a book of poems by some of the detainees, to be published this month by University of Iowa Press and featuring a cover blurb by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Among the verses, for example, by Sami al Haj, quoted in a June Wall Street Journal story: "When I heard the pigeons cooing in the trees / Hot tears covered my face" and "My soul is like a roiling sea, stirred by anguish / Violent with passion." The U.S. military had to approve the text, citing the ease with which imagery could be used as coded messages to colleagues outside.

-- (1) James Coldwell, 49, was arrested in Manchester, N.H., in July and charged as the man who robbed a Citizen Bank branch dressed as a tree (branches duct-taped to his body and head, obscuring much of his face, though he was still identified from the security camera). (2) A prosecutor in Chelsea, Vt., refused in June to pursue police officers' charges against Jayna Hutchinson, 33, that she had committed a crime because she made faces at a police dog and "star(ed)" at him.

-- Community Policing: One traditional opportunity for police in the United States to mediate problems occurs when they facilitate the exchange of driver information (identification and insurance) in traffic accidents. Similarly, in Braunschweig, Germany, in June, police were called to a legal brothel to mediate a prostitute-client dispute following the rupture of a condom during their encounter. Police were successful in encouraging the prostitute, and the reluctant customer, to exchange information, in case of future health problems.

(1) Authorities in Doylestown, Pa., arrested 34 people after a seven-month police investigation of drug-dealing, which began last December when a man on probation gave the police information about the ring in order to avoid going back to prison. He had been facing a charge of public urination. (2) Chicago police arrested three alleged dope-sellers in June after casually spotting one of them inside a garage with the door open, bagging $670,000 worth of marijuana. The police came upon the garage while chasing a man who had been urinating in public.

-- Accidents that leave victims relatively normal but with severely heightened sexual desires have been mentioned several times in News of the Weird, back to a 1978 collision with a Pepsi truck that, according to a jury in Detroit, left a man with a spontaneous, intense desire to become a woman. In 2002, motorcyclist Kunal Lindsay was hit by a car and, after an arduous physical recovery, realized he had become maniacally horny (and, incidentally, unusually interested in cell phones) and that his marriage was near collapse because he constantly pestered his wife for sex, often in "pornographic" terms. London's High Court approved an insurance settlement in March 2007 for the equivalent of about $2.4 million (with more should Lindsay's condition "deteriorate").

-- Least Competent Criminals: (1) In May, Damion Mosher, 18, of Lake Luzerne, N.Y., became the most recent person to injure himself by needing to find out if putting a bullet into a vise and hitting it with a screwdriver would cause it to fire. (It would; he was slightly wounded.) (2) Two men and a woman were among the recent wave of people trying to cash in on the high price of copper scrap metal when they broke into an abandoned nursing home in Gainesville, Ga., in July. However, they had missed the sign at the entrance announcing that the building had recently been converted into a training facility and kennel for police dogs, and they were quickly sicced on and arrested.

(1) Police in Brandon, Fla., arrested Willie Tarpley Jr., 46, in May, alleging that he killed his ex-wife's boyfriend because he was upset that she was dating a man who was a registered sex offender (even though Tarpley and his ex-wife are reportedly also registered sex offenders). (2) At a Toronto nursing home in May, a 69-year-old resident angrily kicked a 79-year-old fellow resident, causing him to fall and fatally hit his head. The victim had taken up with a female resident, thinking she was his wife, but the jealous younger man thought the woman was his own wife. She was actually married to neither; all three had Alzheimer's disease. (No charges were filed.)

(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.)

Australian Jeffrey Lee is the last surviving member of the clan that controls the Koongarra uranium deposit near Kakadu National Park (east of Darwin), and federal law requires his permission for the French energy company Areva to extract the estimated 14,000 tons, perhaps worth the equivalent of $4.2 billion (U.S.), but Lee vouches never to sell because "if you disturb that land, bad things will happen." "This is my country," he told the Sydney Morning Herald in July. "I'm not interested in money. I've got a job. ... I can go fishing and hunting. That's all that matters to me."

-- Widower Charlie Bonn Kemp, 77, of Vero Beach, Fla., took especially hard the loss of his wife, Lee, in 2006 because she was unquestionably the love of his life even though the couple stopped having sex even before they got married in 1978, according to a June St. Petersburg Times profile. Lee had been Charlie's gay lover for 26 years, until revealing in 1978 that he could no longer resist the urge to become a woman, and especially a housewife. Such was their attachment that, following Lee's full sex change, she and Charlie decided to take advantage of Lee's new status and legally marry and continue their devotion, even though Charlie remained sexually attracted only to men.

-- Kenya, in addition to the usual problems of a developing African nation (poverty, tribal frictions), has recently endured the rise in power of the Mungiki, which is a secret society that is (according to a June New York Times dispatch) "part Sicilian Mafia, part Chicago street gang, with a little of the occult sprinkled in." Police say the members aim to destabilize the country in the midst of the current political campaign by devil-worshipping acts of violence (skinning heads, drinking human blood from jerrycans). A district commissioner in Nairobi said the Mungiki had threatened her with genital mutilation. The gang originated in the 1990s much as organized crime in the U.S. did, by taking over such urban enterprises as bus transit and garbage collection.

-- Latest in Brain Science: (1) French neurologists writing recently in the journal The Lancet described their surprise in finding, via brain scans, that a normally functioning 44-year-old man had a brain "more than 50 percent to 75 percent" smaller than average, consisting of little more than a thin sheet of brain material surrounding a large fluid buildup. (The man is employed as a French government bureaucrat.) (2) Researchers at the University of Calgary said in July that female mice in their study were not only sexually aroused by whiffs of male mouse pheromones but that the scent apparently made the females' brains grow larger.

-- Northbrook, Ill., husband Arthur Friedman persuaded his wife that after 10 years' marriage, they should become mate-swapping swingers, which he thought would enhance their relationship. His wife, reluctant at first, began to participate and eventually fell in love with another swinging husband, an event that precipitated the Friedmans' breakup, reported the Chicago Sun-Times. Friedman, with an inadequate appreciation of irony, sued the husband under Illinois' alienation-of-affection law, and in June, a jury actually found in his favor, for $4,802.87. However, the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs. Friedman said she felt humiliated by the implication that she had been "worth" just $480 a year.

-- Lithuania's Ombudsman for Children, visiting Ireland in June to investigate complaints of mistreatment of her countrymen, told reporters that many of the estimated 30,000 Lithuanian children in Irish Republic schools felt unsafe and that violence was common. In one Irish town, she said, "Lithuanian children are beaten only because they are more beautiful than Irish ones," and in general, she said, Lithuanians are disliked because we dress well instead of looking the part of poor immigrants.

(1) The New Zealand Herald reported in June that a prostitute may be eligible for worker's compensation based on her having been injured when the car in which she was riding plunged down a hillside. Because the driver was a john who was taking her to a site he had chosen for their encounter, the Prostitutes Collective trade union said hers were "workplace" injuries. (2) Former Brooklyn Center, Minn., car-washer Douglas Williams, 56, was fired last year when, in response to the sales manager's requiring him to clean up litter, he refused, colorfully, by telling the manager to perform an anatomically impossible act. However, the state court of appeals ruled in June that Williams was nonetheless owed unemployment benefits.

-- A toddler broke from his mother's supervision in May at the Rhime Buddhist Center in Kansas City, Mo., and accidentally trampled the meticulously created colored-sand picture that eight monks had to that point spent two days creating, but the monks impressively responded with patience. "No problem," said one, from India's Geshe Lobsang Sumdup monastery. We have three days more (before the show closes). So we will have to work harder."

-- Inattentive Drivers: Trucker Merv Bontrager accidentally crashed his 18-wheeler in Minot, N.D., in April when he looked away briefly to check the floor for the doughnuts he had tossed aside for later eating. And Kristopher Lind accidentally crashed his car in Vancouver, British Columbia, in March when he tried to open the tightly packaged sex toy he had bought earlier that day. And Andrew Workman accidentally smashed his car into another in Shepley, England, after he lost control when a bee flew through the window and stung him in the crotch (according to the findings of an inquest in April).

-- In June, a 17-year-old boy survived but was seriously injured when he fell about 75 feet onto some rocks at California's Mount Diablo State Park. He had climbed over a handrail in order to fake a fall so that his pals could capture the plunge on video to put on his MySpace Web page.

(1) Hiroshi Nishizaki, 46, was arrested in Osaka, Japan, in May and accused of causing damage of the equivalent of about $5,500 by pouring urine on a neighbor's house on 169 occasions, because it was blocking Nishizaki's view. (2) Wheaton, Ill., lawyer Donald Ramsell sued Geneva, Ill., lawyer Douglas Warlick in June, demanding that Warlick continue to sell him "his" two of the four season tickets to Chicago Bears games they had split since 1985 but which Ramsell suspected Warlick might keep for himself this year. Warlick complained to the Chicago Tribune in June that Ramsell had never contacted him, but just filed his lawsuit out of the blue. Said Ramsell, "The courthouse is where you go when you have a dispute."

(1) In June, Pfc. Duncan Schneider finished training with his Oregon Army National Guard unit, immediately married his longtime girlfriend, and prepared for deployment to Iraq; the marriage means that Schneider's unit's first sergeant is now his mother-in-law. (2) Officials at the Masters games in Milan, Italy, in July announced in advance that, since the invited athletes ranged in age from 35 on up to the 90s, the javelin competition would be moved to a site far away from most of the other events.

(1) A burglar was killed trying to sneak into the Maranatha Used Clothing store in Miami on May 31; police said the man had crawled between the blades of a large, idle ventilation fan but that before getting all the way through, he accidentally tripped the "on" switch. (2) In Forst, Germany, in May, as a 43-year-old man and a 12-year-old boy vied in a spitting-for-distance contest from a second-story balcony, the grown-up, trying for extra momentum, thrust himself forcefully up to the railing, launched his saliva, and accidentally fell to his death.

(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.)