Crime-fearing female pedestrians in Tokyo can soon protect themselves with fashion designer Aya Tsukioka's skirt that opens into a realistic-looking (except made of fabric), full-size vending machine that she hopes thugs will pass right by. It's one of several fanciful crime-avoiding creations of the genre that Japanese inventors are noted for, according to an October New York Times dispatch. Another, the "manhole bag," resembles a sewer covering when laid on the ground but can hold a person's valuables, again provided that the thug passes it up. Yet another is women's wraparound sunglasses that are extra-dark so that even shy, eye-contact-avoiding females can stare unobserved at potential perverts in trains to guard against the ubiquitous groping.

-- As several sightings were made around Washington, D.C., of dragonfly-looking bugs hovering in the air at political events, government agencies were denying that they had released any tiny surveillance robots, according to an October Washington Post investigation. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?'" asked a college student at an antiwar rally in Washington. "They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But ... those are not insects." Several agencies and private entities admitted to the Post that they were trying to develop such devices, but no one took credit for having them in the air yet.

-- Air Safety: (1) Nepal Airlines, which was having technical trouble with one of its two Boeing 757s in August, announced that it had fixed the problem by sacrificing two goats to appease the Hindu sky god Akash Bhairab. (2) As passengers boarded a Vueling Airlines flight from Madrid, Spain, in June, they noticed that 29 of the 32 rows of seats on one side were out of service, but they could hardly have been comforted by the captain's announcement that "(W)e have a safety problem with the door at the front. Don't worry, it's only a safety problem." (No incidents were reported on the flight.)

-- School Security: (1) MJ Safety Solutions of Danvers, Mass., has developed a $195 bullet-proof backpack for students, using a lightweight, police-equipment-quality panel, and is seeking approvals from school boards to promote them, according to an August Boston Herald report. (2) Britain's Bladerunner company has developed student jumpers and blazers lined with knife-resistant Kevlar, starting at the equivalent of about $260, according to an August BBC News story.

-- In August, representatives of New East Britain province in Papua New Guinea formally begged the forgiveness of the Fiji High Commissioner for incidents in 1875 when PNG tribes killed and ate Fijian missionaries who had come to spread Christianity. (In fact, the PNG spokespersons pointed out that "forgiveness" was a major tenet of the Christianity that PNG came to accept from the missionaries.)

-- Medical student Wes Pemberton was scheduled to be officially measured in October in Tyler, Texas, for his upcoming spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. He told KLTV that he has a leg hair 5.0 inches long, surpassing the incumbent record of 4.88 inches. Pemberton said that his prize hair is growing amidst other normal-length hair, and that he has been treating it with conditioner to keep it strong for the measuring.

A new condominium development in New York City, near 11th Avenue and West 24th Street (with prices starting at $6.25 million), features in-unit garages, allowing the resident to drive into the En-Suite Sky Garage System at street level and be lifted to his own unit. Guests and residents who don't own cars will just have to use the ordinary elevators.

Spectacular Errors: (1) The Kuala Lumpur phone company Telekom Malaysia acknowledged in April that it mistakenly sent a bill for the equivalent of $218 trillion (that's 218 followed by 12 zeroes) or 806.4 trillion ringgit. The account was for the late father of Yahaya Wahab, whose final bill should have been the equivalent of $23. (2) Jayantibhai Patel, 57, was arrested in Foster City, Calif., in October after admitting that he smacked his father in the head with a hammer, requiring his hospitalization. Patel told police that he wanted the father to be put in a nursing home, but was under the impression that only a hospital could assign him to one, and thus, he needed to get him into a hospital.

(1) After some mild bickering during a delivery at a Wal-Mart in October in Indiana County, Pa., according to police, a Pepsi Cola route man allegedly repeatedly punched a Coca-Cola route man in the face. (2) Reuters reported in September that a 50-year-old man who bought two large sausages at a butcher shop in Mannheim, Germany, returned shortly afterward to have them wrapped for a flight to Dubai. On inspection, the butcher found that the man had stuffed each sausage with an anatomically correct latex dildo, for smuggling into Dubai.

In September, Matt Wilkinson admitted to KGW-TV of Portland, Ore., that he had been in a coma for three days recently and nearly died after he decided to stick his pet Eastern diamondback rattlesnake into his mouth while drinking with some buddies: "Me, being me, I put his head in my mouth." A doctor told the station that Wilkinson barely made it to the hospital in time because his airway had nearly swollen shut from the venomous bites. Wilkinson said that the incident was "kind of" his "own stupid fault."

-- (1) Coast Guard officials said they rescued Louis Pasquale, 35, near Freeport, N.Y., in September as he was towing his disabled 35-foot fishing boat back to port 20 miles away by dragging it behind an inflatable boat he was paddling against the current. (He had covered about 100 yards in three hours.) (2) In August in Middlesex Township, Pa., two men from Virginia, who were on the job for a moving company, were detained by police for public intoxication in a motel parking lot, fighting over the question of whether Virginia is north or south of Pennsylvania.

-- Don't Criminals Need to Keep a Low Profile? (1) Community activist Steven Myrick, 41, was convicted in October of a rape in Torrance, Calif., that had gone unsolved for seven years. Myrick had called attention to himself during a public housing demonstration in which he mooned police officers and was arrested (and a subsequent DNA test tied him to the rape). (2) Vincent Scheffner, 63, a municipal parking-meter worker in St. Paul, Minn., was under investigation at press time on suspicion of theft after a local credit union reported that he had been regularly depositing, for the last year, enormous amounts of coins into his account.

Mandy Bailey, who lives in a suburb of Phoenix, is the mother of conjoined 1-year-old girls and wanted to take them to a family reunion in Maryland. She called Delta Air Lines to make sure the girls could ride for free on her ticket. No, said Delta, because even though a child under 2 can ride for free, each infant would need an oxygen mask in case of emergency, and thus, a separate ticket was needed. Bailey kept complaining (giving the story international reach) until a Delta higher-up compromised for the flight: Bailey's sister-in-law, who had been assigned to another row on the flight, was put next to Bailey so she could share her oxygen with the second twin.

(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.)

Junior New York City hedge fund trader Andrew Tong charged in October that his boss forced him to take female hormones to dampen his aggressiveness, which the supervisor said was leading him to make bad trades, according to a CNBC report. In his lawsuit against Mr. Ping Jiang (a big-time trader who reportedly earns $100 million a year) and employer SAC Capital (one of the biggest hedge fund names on Wall Street), Tong claimed further that he was harassed and even sexually attacked, and had started wearing dresses.

-- Israeli police announced in September that they had arrested a gang of eight young Israeli neo-Nazis from the city of Petah Tikva (near Tel Aviv), who had been attacking and harassing religious Jews (and also gays and foreigners), beating them and videotaping the attacks. A police search turned up weapons and also Nazi materials such as uniforms, portraits of Adolf Hitler and symbolic references to Hitler's Third Reich. Reportedly, the gang members hail from Russia and emigrated under Israel's policy of admitting anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent.

-- Retired assistant school principal Nelson Winbush, 78, of Kissimmee, Fla., is an African-American who has become a passionate promoter and historian of the Confederate States of America, even though it was that entity's secession from the Union that sparked the Civil War. Winbush told the St. Petersburg Times for an October profile that his grandfather had fought for the South, not to retain slavery but because he thought the South was being overtaxed. Winbush became more aggressive in the 1990s, opposing campaigns to remove Confederate flags from government buildings in the South. He has declined to be drawn into the racial implications of the Confederacy, telling the Times, "Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray."

-- A federal judge ruled in September that New York's College of Staten Island (a public school) could deny formal recognition to a men-only campus fraternity. The Chi Iota Colony sponsored various programs open to women, but not membership, and the college pulled its funding, citing gender discrimination.

-- The city of Toronto is campaigning with posters and a Web page to urge citizens to vote a 1-cent set-aside tax for municipal services, but in October received a bill from Canada's mint for about $47,000 in licensing fees. The mint cited the posters' use of a photograph of a penny and the campaign's use of the phrase "one cent" (as in the Web site address www.OneCentNow.ca), which a spokesman said are "registered trademarks of the Royal Canadian Mint."

-- The 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard returned recently from extended duty in Iraq, which was reportedly the longest consecutive deployment of any outfit (22 months, counting extensions). However, the Guardsmen still do not qualify for government education benefits. The law allows the benefits only for those on "active duty" at least 730 days, but the Minnesota Guard's orders (as well as some other outfits' orders), were specifically written for "729 days."

Convicted of murder in a home invasion, Mr. Andrew S. "Junebug" Warrior (the "S" stands for Sweetie) (Tucson, Ariz., June). Discouraged by school officials from attending a Catholic school because of his name, the 5-year-old Max Hell (Melbourne, Australia, July). Arrested for stealing three rolls of toilet paper from a courthouse, Ms. Suzanne Marie Butts (Marshalltown, Iowa, June). Leading a fight in the Kenai Peninsula Borough (Alaska) Assembly to defeat a term-limit rule, Assemblyman Gary Superman (Soldotna, Alaska, September). Arrested on more than 30 counts of child pornography facilitated by peering through bedroom windows, Mr. Jeffrey Ogle (Vallejo, Calif., August).

(1) William R. Cohen filed a $1 million lawsuit in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in May against a family after their Jack Russell terrier bit his left nipple, causing him (according to the lawsuit) medical expenses, loss of income, pain, disfigurement and "loss of sexual comfort and desire." (2) In June, Ronald Barrett, 68, a longtime school administrator in Bucks County, Pa., was suspended after he punched a 15-year-old student who had touched his chest. Barrett said there had been a long-running problem of boys at the school engaging in "titty-twisting," and Barrett said, "I didn't want anyone touching my nipple."

(1) Po Shiu-fong, 58, was sentenced in July to six months in jail in Hong Kong for stabbing her boyfriend, 49, in his eyes with a chopstick because she thought he was cheating on her. (At the hearing, Po admitted that she had already blinded him in the left eye six years earlier by poking him with her finger because of alleged cheating.) (2) Allen Beckett, 53, was charged with assault in Oklahoma City because, in June, he had allegedly become enraged at a patron who had entered Henry Hudson's Pub wearing a University of Texas T-shirt. Eventually, the two men brawled, during which time Beckett grabbed the man's crotch and would not let go until he tore the scrotum, requiring more than 60 stitches.

-- Australian Les Stewart holds what the Web site Oddee.com calls the "third most bizarre" of all Guinness Book world records: having typed out the written numbers "one" through "one million," over a period of 16 years from 1983 to 1998, according to an August story in his local newspaper Sunshine Coast Daily. He said he typed for 20 minutes at the beginning of every waking hour during that time because he "wanted something to do." "It just came naturally to me."

-- In May at Boston's Howard Yezerski Gallery, photographer Karl Baden displayed contact prints of the 7,305 images he took of himself, one a day every day for more than 20 years, beginning Feb. 23, 1987. Baden admitted, though, that on Oct. 15, 1991, he was late for a class he was teaching at Rhode Island School of Design and promised to do the photo when he returned but then forgot. He says it's his only blemish, but in fact proves the humanness behind his art.

-- Recurring Theme: In August, News of the Weird wrote about 12-year-old Kyle Krichbaum's lifelong obsession with the sound and feel of vacuum cleaners and his collection of 165 machines and his five-a-day vacuuming habit. In September, two Georgia Tech researchers told a conference in Austria that many owners of the Roomba vacuuming robot seem to ascribe human qualities to it, including giving it a name and, in some cases, dressing it up. Professor Beki Grinter and her colleague said part of the Roomba obsession was because a robot qualifies as a gadget, which means that males can be expected to do more of the household vacuuming.

(1) The Washington, D.C., Department of Corrections fired three jailers in August after finding that they had locked up Virginia Grace Soto, 47, in the men's detention unit following her July arrest, despite her protests and despite a formal strip search and despite observing her in the shower. Their reasoning: A paperwork error listed Soto as a male, and they could not change that. (2) Two high-ranking D.C. school officials were charged in recent months with stealing money from the school system, including Brenda Belton (who pleaded guilty in August), who stole almost $650,000 while she was in charge of all charter schools in Washington, D.C., and Eugene Smith, who allegedly stole $46,000 just after he left the job as the schools' director of internal audit.

(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 the northern Albanian countryside, about 40 women still practice an ancient tradition as "sworn virgins," who are young females who renounce sex forever in exchange for being treated as men, according to an August Washington Post interview of Elvira Dones, an Albanian native who recently completed a documentary on the subject. The oath is usually taken in front of a town's elders, and the likeliest candidates come from homes in need of a male head of household (because of death or abandonment). Even in such a male-dominated society, according to Dones, men seem to accept the "sworn virgins" as equals.

-- This past summer, two capital-murder inmates (who might have been executed, regardless) were put to death after curious court policies failed them. Luther Williams' execution was carried out in Alabama in August after the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to stop it, despite his plea that the state's lethal injection procedure was unconstitutional. However, one month later, the court voted to accept for consideration another case questioning the constitutionality of the injection. (Court policy is that four votes are needed to accept a case, but five are required to stay an execution.) In September, just minutes after the court's lethal-injection case was accepted, lawyers for Michael Richard, who was scheduled to die that evening, rushed to file a stay with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal and promised delivery by 5:20 p.m. The court clerk responded, "We close at 5"; the petition didn't make it, and Richard was executed at 8:23.

-- Spaniard Manuel Gozalo organizes bus trips of women from Madrid to isolated rural villages, which most of the native females have long since abandoned for cities, leaving lonely single men. His "caravanas de amor" (caravans of love) have made 32 day-trips since 1995, promising the ladies some fun and dancing (and possible romance) and the men perhaps a last chance at finding a companion (and Gozalo told London's Independent in July that his caravans have produced at least 40 marriages).

-- A particularly environmentally conscious Catholic priest in Suffolk, England, set up a confessional in August at a Greenpeace festival to permit parishioners to relieve their guilt over despoiling the Earth, according to a report in The Times of London. At the festival, however, the priest, Dom Anthony Sutch, also had to deal with the August announcement that the Vatican would begin transporting 150,000 pilgrims a year on chartered, high-carbon-footprint airliners.

-- Hindu officials persuaded the Indian government in September to withdraw a report on a construction project because it treated a prominent bridge as a natural stone formation instead of (as Hindus say) a bridge created by the god Ram and his army of monkeys. In another victory for Hindu sensibility, the government cracked down on the rustling of "sacred" cattle in August by issuing ID cards with photos of individual cows, to help guards at the Bangladesh border halt the illegal trade.

-- God's Will Be Done: (1) In August in Atlanta, televangelist Thomas Weeks was arrested for allegedly beating up and threatening to kill his estranged wife, televangelist Juanita Bynum, in a hotel parking lot before a bellman rescued her. (Weeks blamed Satan for the incident.) (2) Pastor Walter Steen pleaded guilty in Detroit in August to tax fraud and was sentenced to 15 months in prison. He had started the God Will Provide Tax Service in 2005, but prosecutors said 1,573 out of the 1,578 returns he prepared for clients claimed tax refunds.

-- Shoe designer Marc Jacobs recently crossed a frontier in fashion by introducing women's high-heeled shoes with the "heel" in the front. Wrote London's Daily Mail: "A chunky, 4-inch heel nestles horizontally just under the ball of the foot. Where you'd expect a heel, there is nothing but fresh air." Models of the shoe are priced in the $500 to $700 range.

-- Questionable Menus: (1) Puzzlingly, young adults in Japan seem particularly drawn toward mayonnaise, and thus Koji Nakamura might have a shot at success with his Mayonnaise Kitchen restaurant in a Tokyo suburb, according to an August Reuters story. Included in his fare are several mayonnaise-flavored cocktails, including the "Mayogarita." (2) Health officials in Rockland County, N.Y., issued two complaints against the Great China Buffet restaurant in September after an employee was seen preparing the day's garlic in back of the building by stomping a large bowl of it with his boots on.

-- Maritza Tamayo, principal of New York City's Unity Center for Urban Technologies high school, was fired in August following revelations that she was so concerned about the unruly behavior of some students that she brought in a Santeria priestess in December 2006 to cleanse the building of evil spirits. The students were on holiday break, but workers found chicken blood sprinkled around the building, and Tamayo and two other women in white dresses were seen, chanting, with one balancing a silver tray on her head, holding 40 lit candles.

Officials of the Miss Ventura County (Calif.) pageant said in September that they are tired of waiting (now, two years) and would seek police help in getting the disqualified 2005 winner Hilary Gushwa to return her crown to them. Gushwa was ousted for being secretly married at the time, a violation of pageant rules. She responded at first that she did not recall her wedding, in Las Vegas, because she was on medication, but subsequent evidence showed her actively planning the ceremony and reception.

People who decide to urinate in public continue to find the practice dangerous, as News of the Weird has documented many times. A 40-year-old man, somewhat inebriated, attempting to urinate into the River Bulbourne in Hemel Hempstead, England, fell in and drowned (April). A 58-year-old man stood up in his boat to urinate while fishing and fell into a lake near Farmington, N.M., and drowned (August). A train driver in Berlin, Germany, apparently attempting to urinate out of a door at 70 mph, fell to his death (May).

(1) A 19-year-old man was arrested in Darwin, Australia, in August after he shoplifted a pornographic magazine and retreated to a public restroom in the Karama Shopping Centre. A security guard trailed him, joined by a police officer, but they decided to wait until he was finished before apprehending him. (2) A 26-year-old man was convicted in September of masturbating in a University of Manitoba library in Winnipeg. He explained, "I was just sitting at a computer, downloading a few things, and I got a little horny. ... I do it all the time." (According to the Winnipeg Sun, one of the conditions of his six-months' probation is that he not masturbate "in a library or anywhere else.")

(1) A 27-year-old woman was killed in Melvindale, Mich., while setting off Fourth of July fireworks when she failed to move her head out of the way after launching a 3-inch mortar bomb. (2) A 55-year-old man in Fall River County, S.D., was killed in August when he accidentally shot himself in the stomach. According to police, he was attempting to show friends that a key point in a recent CSI television show was wrong (that is, according to the script, a victim could not physically have managed to shoot herself in the stomach).

(CORRECTION: A News of the Weird story three weeks ago (based on a report in London's Daily Telegraph) declared that a top-of-the-line Oral-B toothbrush employed "navigation technology" to allow the user to guide the brush usefully through the mouth. Contrary to the Daily Telegraph story, no such technology is in use, and the standard digital readout on the toothbrush merely coaxes the user to move from one part of the mouth to another at suggested intervals.) (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.)