Ralph Whittington, 57, retired in 2000 as curator of the main reading room at the Library of Congress, but was better known as the "King of Porn" for his private collection that he recently sold (500 boxes' worth) to the Museum of Sex in New York City.

Whittington's home (which he shares with his mother, after his wife left him) was, before the sale, "packed to the rafters," said the museum's buyer to The Washington Post in August. "Downstairs, you had to walk sideways to get through the rooms." Said Mom, "It's something he loves. You see men his age going to bars or on dope. But he (was) home day and night (indexing and cross-referencing). That (gave) me peace of mind."

Ferruccio Pilenga recently turned out another class of graduates at his Italian Dog Rescue School, which he says is the only one in the world that trains canines (mostly Newfoundlands, with some Labradors) to jump out of helicopters into rough waters for rescues at sea. Pilenga told London's Independent in August that it takes about three (human) years to teach them, and that they are of the most use in treacherous waters near rocks, where a rescue boat would be shredded, but his dogs, on long leashes, can fight through flailing arms and get the victim to hold on while the dog is dragged to the rescue vessel.

-- (1) Stephen Peterson, 42, went back to court in Sydney, Australia, in August to challenge the "not guilty/insanity" decision against him nearly 10 years ago, claiming that he should have been allowed to call as defense witnesses certain "higher beings" who had ordered him to bash the victim. Those entities included the "sun god," Spacedust, and the "plasma being," Kadec. The court turned him down. (2) British physician Stuart Brown, 37, was sentenced in August only to a small fine after a conviction for brutally beating his wife. Brown had explained the fight by saying that a "red mist" had descended on the room, causing him to lose control.

-- Not Our Fault: Dennis and Betty Hager filed a lawsuit in Wilmington, N.C., in July against the school system for causing them emotional pain and suffering by not stopping the love affair between their 16-year-old daughter and the school's married, 40-year-old track coach. However, the Hagers have already signed a form (to satisfy state law) to allow the daughter to marry the coach.

-- Helene de Gier filed a lawsuit earlier this year against the National Postcode Lottery of the Netherlands, claiming emotional distress from not winning, even though she never entered. That particular lottery picks a geographic postal code at random and awards prizes to all of its residents who have entered that lottery. Since so many of her neighbors were flaunting prizes, she felt particularly humiliated, she says. (Seven people on her street won the equivalent of about $18 million each, according to a June Associated Press dispatch.)

-- "Zero Tolerance" Is Just for the Kids: (1) One Alabama teacher, already fired but awaiting trial on a charge of raping a student, has not only received his regular paychecks for nearly two years, and will continue to until the trial is over, but has also been awarded two routine raises, based on a 2004 state law boosting teachers' rights (according to an August Associated Press review of records). (2) The largest school district in Montreal, Quebec, was ordered by an arbitrator to rehire a teacher whom it had fired in 2004 for illegally failing to disclose a conviction for killing his wife. The arbitrator ruled the firing improper, in that homicide is unrelated to the teacher's classroom work.

-- It's Good to Be a British Prisoner (cont.): Britain's chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, included in a recent inspection report of facilities her advice that prison wardens try to improve respect for inmates by having guards address prisoners by their preferred names and knock on cell doors before entering. A guards' association spokesman said the suggestion lacked even a "modicum" of sense.

-- Louisiana prosecutors want the death penalty in the first trial for accused serial killer Sean Gillis, but to get that for an individual murder, state law requires an "aggravating circumstance" beyond the murder, such as kidnapping or robbery. At an August hearing, a prosecutor said Gillis had actually "robbed" his first victim, in that he had absconded with one of her arms and part of a leg. Gillis' lawyer argued that that was not "robbery," in that those parts were merely "left over" from the homicide.

-- In Abbotsford, Wis., in August, Harvey Miller, 43, and Edwin Marzinske, 55, were both ticketed for DUI while driving the same car. Miller has no legs but was steering; Marzinske was operating the foot pedals. Hence, both men argued to police that neither of them was, by himself, "operating" the car.

Fetishes on Parade: A 50-year-old man was detained by police in August after complaints at Disneyland near Paris. Witnesses said the man had sprinkled itching powder on young children so that he could video-record them scratching themselves. And in September, Norman Hutchins, 56, was again jailed after incidents at England's Bradford Royal Infirmary, where he faked an illness to gain entrance so that he could steal equipment for his sexual gratification. Police records showed Hutchins as obsessed, since 1970, with oxygen masks, gowns and syringes, among other items.

According to the Internet security firm CardCops Inc., online credit-card hacking brokers appear to have stolen the identity of a "Herman Munster," whose "personal data" appeared in chat rooms frequented by such thieves. CardCops told reporters in June that in all likelihood, an international hacker, preparing a list of accounts to sell to identity thieves, and unfamiliar with the 1960s TV show "The Munsters," probably fell for a bogus MasterCard application under Herman's name and TV address, 1313 Mocking Bird Lane.

-- Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (83) The frustrated taxpayer who thinks he's punishing the government if he makes his large payment in only small change, such as Cary Malchow, who paid off his property tax bill in Muncie, Ind., in August by making employees count $12,656.07 in coins and $1 bills. And (84) blood-alcohol testing machines that show, with alarming frequency, death-defying results of around .40 and higher, even though each instance is reported in the press (based on "medical texts") as nearly lethal, such as cases two months apart this year in Washington, in which Deana Jarrett, 54, scored .47, and Rebecca Lingbloom, 45, registered .50. (Neither died or even became seriously ill.)

-- The category of stories of people keeping deceased relatives' bodies around, based either on fear of losing the relationships or a psychotic belief that the deceased will regenerate (or sometimes, to conceal the death so that government checks keep coming), has been retired. But that was before this: A funeral parlor in London told The Times in September that it was finally time to bury Annie Lamas, who died 10 years ago but whose body has been kept in the parlor's cold storage unit by her two adult daughters, who visit almost weekly to chat with her and touch her up. Elder daughter Josephine, 59, was said to make sure Mom's lipstick is fresh (on a body that has wasted to the point of leathery skin stretched over bones) and place fresh padding on her stomach cavity.

(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.)

In August, a Roman Catholic bishop in the Netherlands, Martinus Muskens, suggested that Christians start referring to God as "Allah" as a way of relieving world tensions. "Allah is a very beautiful word . ... What does God care what we call him? It is our problem." A priest in Rome said Muskens' intentions were good, "but his theology needs a little fine-tuning." Muskens said he spent eight years in Indonesia, where Catholic priests used "Allah" during Mass.

-- Bookkeepers Wanted: (1) Pentagon investigators discovered in August that a small South Carolina company fraudulently collected $20.5 million in shipping costs, including one invoice of $999,798 for sending two washers (cost: 19 cents each) to a base in Texas. According to Bloomberg News, the Defense Department was said to have a policy of automatically and unquestioningly paying shipping bills labeled "priority." (2) The Senate Finance Committee found in April that more than 450,000 federal employees and retirees owe back federal income taxes (totaling about $3 billion), including almost 5 percent of the employees and retirees of the U.S. Tax Court.

-- Bureaucrats Being Bureaucrats: (1) About 30 Iowa school districts had their funding applications for preschool grants tossed out in September, the state Department of Education said, because the paperwork was not double-spaced, as required. (2) In August, the Palestinian Authority admitted that, after Hamas violently split from the government in mid-June, civil servants nonetheless failed to act quickly and thus in July continued to pay the salaries of about 3,000 Hamas security officers (who were formerly PA employees, but who by then were fighting the PA).

-- Jane Balogh, 66, was informed in September that she will not be prosecuted for defrauding elections officials in Seattle, despite having illegally registered her dog, Duncan M. MacDonald, to vote. Balogh, protesting how easy officials have made it for people to vote illegally, put her home phone account in Duncan's name, which is all the proof required for registration, then signed him up, and when an absentee ballot arrived, she went public about her scheme. However, despite the public confession, Duncan continued to be sent official absentee ballots for the two subsequent election cycles.

-- Just Say No: In September, police in Hertfordshire, England, stood fast under criticism for their program of placing posters around the area reading, "Don't Commit Crime." Said a police spokeswoman, "If stating the obvious helps to reduce crime or has any impact at all, we will do it." (The police also installed signs at gas stations: "All Fuel Must Be Paid For.")

-- People Who Are Messes: (1) Tommy Tester, 58, minister of Gospel Baptist Church in Bristol, Va., was arrested in July after he allegedly urinated at a car wash, in front of children and police officers, while wearing a skirt. (Police said alcohol was involved.) (2) Catherine Delgado, 35, was arrested in Annapolis, Md., in August after she appeared, smudged with fudge, in a hotel lobby around midnight with "large slabs of fudge bulging out of her pockets" (according to a Washington Post story). A police officer later checked a nearby Fudge Kitchen store and found the door inexplicably open and a large display quantity missing from the front window. (Police said alcohol was involved, along with fudge.)

At about 9 p.m. on Aug. 23, a fire broke out in the Comedy Zone nightclub in West Knoxville, Tenn., right in the middle of an act in which a hypnotist had just placed 10 audience members into a trance. However, despite an "everyone for himself" attitude that typically marks such emergencies, the 10 hypnotized subjects somehow managed to make it out of the club safely.

The adolescent offspring of some well-to-do parents are serious art collectors, according to a September Wall Street Journal report, and their interest appears not to be motivated solely by parents' strategies to shield income from the tax collector. Ms. Dakota King, 9, for example, owns 40 pieces and specializes in animals and "happy colors." Ms. Shammiel Fleischer-Amoros, 10, who admitted, "I'm really scared, but Daddy told me I have to negotiate," succeeded in getting $200 knocked off of a $3,200 sculpture she really wanted. An 11-year-old last year "waved a paddle" to win a $352,000 Jeff Koons sculpture.

Just when Internet newspaper sites appear to be gaining ground as replacements for printed editions, a 70-year-old woman identified only as Maggie told the Edmonton (Alberta) Sun in September that her paper edition of the Sun is a crucial part of her daily diet, literally. She eats it, in strips, and has, she said, for the past seven years because it tastes good. "I can't explain it," she said, and it was only when she recently experienced a blockage of her esophagus, and doctors found a ball of paper, that she revealed her obsession. Doctors cited by the Sun said that except for the blockage danger, newspaper eating is not unhealthful.

Too Puny for a Life of Crime: Keith Bellanger, 20, failed in his attempted burglary in Duluth, Minn., in September when homeowner Wayne Boniface, age 69, walked in and beat him up so thoroughly that Bellanger had all his clothes ripped off trying to get away. And in Bay Shore, N.Y., in September, a 32-year-old man wielding a tire iron, who was attempting to mug Bruce Ferraro, 74, on the street, was forced to abandon the job and run for it when Ferraro, after a struggle, took the iron away from him. (The mugger was captured by police nearby when his car stalled.)

Some Americans continue to prefer to "do it themselves" to get rid of pests on their property, with tragic results. In June, Mike Harstad of Jamestown, Calif., attempting to eliminate a wasps' nest with a can of Pledge and a cigarette lighter, ultimately burned down his mobile home and contents and destroyed an outbuilding, a truck, a boat and a trailer. In August, a Whitehall, Pa., man, William Sekol, 82, attempting to destroy a yellow jackets' nest beneath a storm sewer grate in his front yard, put a dried tree over the grate, doused it with gasoline, and lit it (supposedly to suffocate the yellow jackets underneath). However, some gasoline ran into the sewer, where its fumes combusted. In the resulting explosion, Sekol's mustache and eyebrows were singed.

Surprisingly Complicated: A 24-year-old woman in Lawrenceville, Ga. (in July), and a 59-year-old woman in Lincolnton, N.C. (in August), were killed after failing to negotiate driver's-side devices allowing them entrance to, respectively, a gated parking lot and an automatic car wash. The Georgia woman had leaned out her window to insert a card into the gate-opening machine when her car lurched forward and pinned her head between the car and the door. The North Carolina woman had reached out her open car door to punch in a code for the wash when her car lurched forward, similarly pinning her head. (Police in both cases said that the cars should have been in Park.)

(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.)

The periodic Christian Nudist Convocation took place in July at the Cherokee Lodge nudist camp in Tennessee, and according to a dispatch in Nashville Scene, the group evokes skepticism not only from most Christians (who dislike the flaunting of naked bodies, even if innocently done) but from most Cherokee Lodge members, who see them as too intense for naturism's laid-back attitude. One CNC attendee acknowledged that many Christians would not approve of Cherokee Lodge, but to him "(I)t's Jerusalem." Another compared his work at nudist camps to missionary work: "(S)ome people get sent to Africa, some people get sent to South America and the Lord was like, 'I want you to go to nudist resorts.' And I'm like, 'Wow, what an assignment.'"

(1) In July, National Hockey League player Derek Boogaard, an "enforcer" known for his willingness to brawl, opened the Derek and Aaron Boogaard Fighting Camp in Regina, Saskatchewan, to train teenage hockey players in that highly essential skill. (2) Iran's state-sponsored news agency IRNA announced in July that its agents had broken up a Western countries' "spy ring" that employed more than a dozen squirrels trying to bring "spy gear" of foreign agencies into the country.

-- Modernizations: (1) Congregants of Rev. Tom Ambrose, of St. Mary and St. Michael Church in Trumpington, England, met in September to complain of several things about their vicar, most notably that he delivered the Christmas sermon last year (and several since then) using Microsoft PowerPoint. (2) George Zokos is a professional shepherd in Tyrnavos, Greece, but due to health problems three years ago (according to an August Agence France-Presse dispatch), he now herds the sheep from his car.

-- One priority of President Vladimir Putin's Nashi national youth movement is procreation to build up Russia's declining population, according to a July report in London's Daily Mail (which also charged the Nashi with inculcating authoritarianism). Its two-week convention in July (with 10,000 in attendance) featured on-site sexual encouragements with not a condom in sight. And in Russia's Ulyanovsk province, the government again this year promoted Sept. 12 as a patriotic conception day, featuring SUVs and other prizes to couples who manage to time their blessed events for June 12, which is Russia's Constitution Day.

-- Sweden's English-language Internet news site, The Local, reported in August that a couple in Kinda Municipality had just been denied generous welfare benefits because they object to the government's work requirements. The husband wanted the payments even though, he wrote, "Conventional work is out of the question for me, both in terms of my conscience and on an intellectual level, as it seems objectionable with regard to both my personal well-being and the well-being of society as a whole. Emotionally, too, (conventional work) creates unbearable pain and dejection."

-- Video Nation: (1) A 38-year-old man drowned off Ocean City, Md., in July, trying to save his two sons from a rip current. Two men from a nearby parasailing boat had jumped in to help and could have used more assistance, one said, except that the boat's passengers declined, with several more concerned with video-recording the drowning. (2) As a 27-year-old woman lay dying from a stab wound incurred at a Wichita, Kan., convenience store, in June, at least five customers stepped over her to enter the store, including one who stopped to photograph her on a cell phone camera.

(1) In August, employees at the bar Changes, in Seattle, had to break up a karaoke-night attack by a woman on a man who was singing the Coldplay song "Yellow." The woman had shouted, "Oh, no, not that song. I can't stand that song." She charged the stage, screamed at the man and shoved him (and it eventually took four men to hold her for police). (2) Megan Conroy, 18, pleaded guilty in Brisbane, Australia, in September, to assaulting a 40-year-old man in May (by kicking him in the testicles) because he had mispronounced her first name. (And if you ever meet her, it's "mee-gan," not "may-gun.")

-- Quinton Thomas, 22, inadvertently strengthened the murder charge against him in April when he mailed a letter from the jail in Rockville, Md., believing that the contents would not be read by jail officials. However, Thomas had gotten the recipient's address wrong, causing the post office to "return to sender," and, as longstanding policy, officials inspect all incoming mail (for contraband). According to an August Washington Post report, Thomas characterized his emerging alibis and also wrote about a witness, "This white (expletive) can't make it to court on May 7 through May 12, ya feel me. I don't care what you gotta do, you don't even gotta stink the cracker, he just cant make it to Rockville that whole week, Homie."

-- Bad Judgments: (1) In Huntsville, Ala., in June, Dwight Clark, running his finger inside the rim of his car's gas tank to clear some gunk, got it stuck past the first knuckle, and it took doctors at Huntsville Hospital, plus a Sawzall tool, about two hours to free him. (2) Jenny Robertson, purchasing a house on a golf course in Maricopa, Ariz., had the home scrutinized according to "feng shui" principles to assure open spaces and the correct placement of doors and windows, according to a June New York Times story, but to her consternation, apparently nowhere in feng shui teaching is the concept of "bad golfers." Said Robertson, "When I go outside, it's like dodgeball out there."

News of the Weird reported in February that Estrella Benavides had been sued by the city of San Mateo, Calif., for refusing to clean off the words that she had written in big lettering all over the outside of her house, even though she said those messages had been dictated by God. In August, she similarly wrote all over a second home she owns, in Belmont, Calif. (For those readers seeking the word of God: "Help worse crime ever; evil + out of mind: from Bush to neighbors using witchcraft + technology against people not belong to their religious group.")

-- Australian rugby league player Ben Czislowski, 24, complaining of an eye infection and pain in July, was found by doctors to have, embedded in his head, a tooth belonging to opponent Matt Austin, with whom he had violently collided in an April match. Austin also lost several other teeth in the collision.

-- A Solution More Disturbing Than the Problem: David Armour, then 13, "wheezed all the time and could not do any exercise," said his mother, of Glasgow, Scotland, speaking about her son's severe asthma. His complete recovery, according to a July report in the Scottish Daily Record, is attributed to two years of dedication in learning to play the bagpipes.

(1) A Lake Charles, La., man was killed in August by a single gunshot, which was explained by Sheriff Tony Mancuso: "(The man and his girlfriend) were engaged in consensual sexual behavior involving a firearm when the firearm was discharged, resulting in his death." (2) A 60-year-old female rancher was killed in August in Mitchell, Australia, when a 10-month-old male camel (recently arrived as a birthday gift for the woman) apparently mistook her for a female camel, knocked her to the ground, and lay on top of her in what one camel expert said "no doubt" was "sexual" behavior, crushing her with his 330 pounds.

(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.)