The Modern Mother: Style- and environment-conscious Canadian mothers insist on cloth diapers, especially designer labels of flannel, fleece or wool-knit, according to a November report in Toronto's Globe and Mail. Handmade embroidered diapers (perhaps in tie-dye or camouflage) are priced at up to $80 each (and some babies get to wear them only just after taking care of business in an ordinary diaper). And, in London, mothers can take babies for workouts, as several gyms recently reacted to warnings about childhood obesity by creating programs to shape up kids as young as 10 months (teaching galloping, "monkey jumps" and forward rolls), and in February, one gym will begin accepting 4-month-olds.

-- In October, Italy's economic minister, noting that a third of all men over 30 still live with their parents and that rental housing markets are depressed, proposed a tax break worth the equivalent of about $1,400 for each man in his 20s who will finally leave Momma's house. (A week earlier in Sicily, one mother publicly turned her adult son over to the police for staying out too late, and also took away his house keys and cut off his allowance. The son, who immediately complained that the allowance was too small, anyway, is 61 years old.)

-- The normal daily tension between India and Pakistan arises in many forms, but one nightly ceremony on the border at Wagah crossing is particularly odd (described by a Los Angeles Times reporter in September as part pomp, part macho posturing, and part Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks). Uniformed guards from both countries march toward each other in their inexplicably complicated headgear, "glower fiercely through their mustaches" and puff themselves up, eyeball to eyeball, in a show of confidence for their respective countrymen. However, they then meekly shake hands and close the border for the night.

-- Residents of small fishing villages in northern Newfoundland have for centuries been "mumming" at Christmastime, in rituals described in an October academic journal article by University of Missouri-Columbia researchers. People disguise themselves, go to neighbors' houses and threaten violence, at which point the neighbor must guess the visitor's identity, and, if all goes well, refuse to be scared. Supposedly, the ritual induces trust by both parties, as the visitors show their good hearts by failing to actually beat anyone up, and the host shows trust by his courage and passivity. Mumming, the researchers conclude, continues today only on a "small scale."

-- "This is a college education that I can use," said sophomore Emily Felts, 19, as she praised the homemaking curriculum of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas (which leads to a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities). Men and women may be equal, the school says, but they have different roles, and for women, that includes "how to set tables, sew buttons and sustain lively dinnertime conversation," or how to use the Internet to track grocery coupons, according to an October dispatch in the Los Angeles Times. Felts said she enjoys the work (except vacuuming), but it "doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the Bible says."

-- In November, Catholic priests in Ireland and Northern Ireland complained about their respective governments' proposals to lower the presumed-impaired blood-alcohol level for drivers from .08 to .05, which they say is unfair. Because of a priest shortage, current priests expect to be driving great distances to conduct Masses this Christmas season, and since they are obliged to drink any leftover sacramental wine from each Mass, they fear inevitably approaching, or exceeding, the blood-alcohol threshold.

-- In October, Patty Cooper, 50, accused her landlord (the Central Vermont Community Land Trust) of failing to "accommodate" her disability under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act when it barred her "service horse" from living in her apartment. Cooper uses a wheelchair because of a brittle-bones disorder and says the miniature horse (100 pounds, 32 inches tall) not only pulls the chair but cheers her up. A trust spokesman said keeping rats out of the hay bales would be difficult enough, but he doubted Cooper's assurance that the horse could be easily housebroken.

-- In November, a California administrative judge sided with state dental authorities and suspended Dr. Mark Anderson's license, following complaints by female patients that he had massaged their chests to treat a jaw disorder. Anderson's lawyer, citing alleged dental journal articles, had asserted that jaw pain was related not only to pectoral muscles but even calf muscles. (In November, Anderson was also indicted for sexual battery against patients.)

-- The head teacher of Sandhurst Junior School in south London apologized in October because a professional photographer had arranged, for his own convenience, an unfortunate group photo of the school's 100-plus students. The photographer, trying to keep from having to re-set his reflector screens, lined up the kids from the lightest-skinned on the left, gradually over to the darkest-skinned on the right. Said the head teacher, "We can see that this was an error of judgment."

-- Also Questionable: (1) Japanese adults push their children to save more, but few are buying the piggy bank introduced by the TOMY Co. in November, because, if not fed with savings for a period of time, the bank just explodes, scattering the contents. (2) In September, three young men in a dinghy on a canal in Australia's Gold Coast region stood up to moon a group of people but lost their balance and fell in, with two recovering quickly, but the third was chopped in the face by the then-circling dinghy's outboard propeller and was in serious condition.

Several men were arrested recently and charged with sex "crimes" involving inanimate objects. In Ayr, Scotland, Robert Stewart was convicted of sexually aggravated breach of the peace (and officially labeled a sex offender) after being caught alone and pantsless in his hostel bedroom thrusting against a bicycle. Craig McCullough, 47, was arrested in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in October after allegedly being caught "in a compromising position" with an inflatable toy doll, in an otherwise-empty public restroom. Steven Marshall, 18, was arrested in Galashiels, Scotland, in November (and officially labeled a sex offender) after being caught simulating sexual intercourse against the pavement of a city street.

In Monticello, N.Y., Steven King, 40, was indicted in October as a result of a traffic stop, for allegedly doing nearly every single thing wrong: intoxicated, driving in oncoming-traffic lanes, with an open beer container, not wearing a seat belt, driving an uninsured car, with expired safety inspection sticker, with license plates belonging to another car, and with his 2-year-old daughter-passenger neither in a car seat nor belted in.

Something About Dentists: Hard-core federal income-tax resisters are frequently in the news, but a recent spate of them involved dentists. In October, Ed Brown and his dentist-wife, Elaine, were arrested after a nine-month standoff with federal marshals in Plainfield, N.H., where they had holed up, vowing to die before paying the federal government any of Elaine's $1.9 million in unreported income. In October, dentist Nancy Montgomery-Ware was convicted on two counts of tax evasion in Tampa, Fla., still believing that the federal government has no authority over her taxes or her practice, based on her research finding that there's no such thing as a "U.S. citizen." In October, Slidell, La., dentist Louis Genard was a U.S. citizen, though he renounced, but was nonetheless found guilty on three tax-evasion counts after a court was unimpressed that he had become an "ambassador of heaven" who is exempt from federal taxation.

(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.)

As an alternative to burial, cremation is no longer green enough, say environmentalists, because it releases smoke and mercury, and thus the industry is considering "promession," in which the body is frozen in liquid nitrogen to minus-320 degrees (F) and then shaken until it disintegrates into powder. For green burials, the United States has at least six cemeteries that require biodegradable casings and for bodies to be free of embalming chemicals. The Forever Fernwood cemetery in Mill Valley, Calif., goes even further, according to an October Los Angeles Times story, banning grave markers, but, said the owner, "We issue the family a Google map with the GPS coordinates" so they can find their loved one.

(1) The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in October that attorney Michael Inglimo did not violate a state regulation that bars a lawyer from having sex "with a current client": Inglimo had sex with a client's girlfriend during a three-way session, but according to the judges, the regulation bans only direct sex with the client. (However, the court suspended Inglimo's license based on other grounds.) (2) Philadelphia Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni outraged women's activists and the local bar association in October when she dismissed rape charges against four men who had sex with a prostitute at gunpoint. Because the woman had initially agreed to a business proposition, said the judge, the men should properly be charged with "armed robbery" for "theft of services." Said Deni, "She consented, and she didn't get paid."

-- (1) A price war broke out in November among chain stores in Britain, with Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda vying for the cheap-drunk customers, and at press time, Asda was leading by offering a low-end lager in multipacks for the equivalent of 46 cents a pint, which is less than colas or bottled water. (2) For those Britons who drink in pubs but miss the atmosphere as it was before smoking bans (for example, who may be disoriented by "new" smells that are no longer masked by cigarette smoke), the company Dale Air has introduced, in aerosol cans, a fragrance that it says mimics the musty, ashtray-based scent so familiar to veteran pub-goers.

-- Bahadur Chand Gupta bought an old Airbus 300 and now offers weekly sessions in Delhi in which any of the 1 billion Indians who have never flown before can sit on a genuine (though disabled) airliner, listen to pilot announcements ("We are about to begin our descent into Delhi"), and be served by flight attendants. Said one customer (who paid the equivalent of about $4), "I see planes passing all day long over my roof. I had to try out the experience."

-- Babies Out of Order: (1) Amelia Spence, 29, gave birth in Glasgow, Scotland, in October to two babies, one just minutes before the other, but they were not twins. The apparently super-fertile Spence, though on contraceptive pills, conceived twice in a three-week period with eggs from successive monthly cycles ("superfetation"). (2) In Cary, N.C., a woman gave birth to twins early in the morning of Nov. 4, one at 1:32 a.m. and the other 34 minutes later, at 1:06 a.m. (after Daylight-Saving Time ended).

-- The prominent Rotterdam Natural History Museum in the Netherlands, which houses over 300,000 species, announced in October that it was missing a particular one that it fears is dying out: crab lice (pubic hair lice). In a June science journal article, researchers had hypothesized that the "Brazilian bikini wax" was in part responsible for the scarcity; said the museum's curator, "Pubic lice can't live without pubic hair."

-- Doctors at Mackay Base Hospital in Australia saved the life of a 24-year-old Italian tourist in August after he had ingested a large amount of poisonous ethylene glycol (found in antifreeze), perhaps in an attempted suicide. The antidote, pharmaceutical-grade alcohol, was in short supply at the hospital, but doctors improvised by setting up a gastric drip and feeding him vodka at the rate of three standard drinks an hour for three days. He made a full recovery, according to an October report in Melbourne's The Age.

-- University of Maastricht (Netherlands) researcher David Levy told the Web site LiveScience.com in October that he believes robots will be so highly developed by the middle of this century that a few people will even begin to marry them: "Once you have a story like, 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo(politan) magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon." (Georgia Tech researcher Ronald Arkin added that perhaps robotic children could be used to satisfy pedophiles enough to keep them away from human children.)

-- Pennsylvania Superior Court judge Michael Thomas Joyce, 58, was indicted in August for fraud in connection with $440,000 he received after his car was nudged (at 5 mph) in a 2001 accident. Joyce claimed that he was in such neck and back pain as to be prevented from certain activities such as holding a coffee cup, but prosecutors said he not only played golf frequently after that but went scuba diving, renewed his scuba instructor's license, went inline skating, and went through private pilot training and licensing (50 flights).

-- In testimony at his divorce hearing (according to transcripts obtained by KUSA-TV), federal judge Edward Nottingham admitted that he had visited strip clubs in Denver, and on two consecutive nights had run up tabs of over $3,000, but that he didn't know what else happened those nights because he was too drunk. Judge Nottingham's behavior was not courtroom-related, but the charge against Cincinnati Municipal Court judge Ted Berry in July was. Berry had just sentenced Ivan Boykins to 30 days in jail, provoking Boykins to shout, "F--- you," which prompted a return "F--- you" from Judge Berry. (The bar association's response has not been reported.)

In November, Britain's new weather-themed Cool Cash lottery game was canceled after one day because too many players failed to understand the rules. Each card had a visible temperature and a temperature to be scratched off, and the purchaser would win if the scratched-off temperature was "lower" than the visible one. Officials said they had received "dozens" of complaints from players who could not understand why, for example, minus-5 is not a lower temperature than minus-6.

(1) Once again, someone found a suspected live explosive on his property, put it in his car, and took it to the local police station (this time, a hand grenade, in Devon, England, in November). (For the record, emergency personnel would rather be told about an explosive than have it brought into their building.) (2) Once again, a motorist casually traveling on a highway had his vehicle crushed by an airborne cow (this time, near Manson, Wash., in November). The 600-pound cow had fallen off a cliff, totaling the minivan but not injuring the driver, who was quoted in an Associated Press dispatch saying repeatedly, "I don't believe this."

(1) The Catholic archbishop overseeing a convent near Bari, Italy, closed it down in August after the mother superior was attacked and beaten by her two nuns, who were angry at her authoritarian ways. (2) Ex-parishioner Angel Llavano, who had left a phone message for Father Luis Alfredo Rios criticizing one of his homilies, filed a defamation of character lawsuit in September after Father Rios retaliated by denouncing him in front of the Crystal Lake, Ill., congregation. Asked Rios (perhaps rhetorically), "Should we send (Llavano) to hell or to another parish?"

(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.)

Update: The man noted in News of the Weird in 1996 for keeping an almost unbelievably detailed personal diary died in October at age 89. For 25 years, Rev. Robert Shields of Dayton, Wash., had chronicled his life in five-minute segments of banalities, leaving 37 million words on paper filling 91 boxes. His self-described "uninhibited," "spontaneous" work was astonishing in its mundaneness. Examples: Aug. 13, 1995, 8:40 a.m. "I filled the humidifying basin mounted over the Futura baseboard heater." 8:45 a.m.: I shaved twice with the Gillette Sensor blade (and) shaved my neck behind both ears, and crossways of my cheeks, too." July 25, 1993, 7 a.m.: "I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin." 7:05 a.m.: "Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used 5 sheets of paper."

-- In interviews with reporters from McClatchy Newspapers in October, cemetery workers in Najaf, Iraq, lamented the recent downturn in violence in that city, as they admitted having grown accustomed to the income from the estimated 6,500 caskets a month that they serviced. (The number had fallen to less than 4,000 a month, and others dependent on the death industry around Najaf were said to be similarly suffering.)

-- In October, following 18 months' investigation, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission concluded that the state government requires too many reports (a total of more than 1,600). About one-fourth of them either were duplicative of others or were still required even though the receiving agency no longer exists or are dutifully prepared year after year even though it is evident that they go unread. The commission issued its findings in a 668-page report.

-- What Goes Around, Comes Around: (1) Tajuan Bullock, 33, was allegedly caught in the act of burglarizing a home in Montgomery, Ala., in October, and, while the resident held him at gunpoint for police, he made Bullock clean up the big mess he had made when he was rummaging for valuables. (2) Police in Bakersfield, Calif., came to the aid of a man and a woman at the bottom of the Panorama Bluffs near town and told reporters later that the man had attempted to toss his girlfriend over the cliff but that she grabbed him, and the pair tumbled down 300 feet together (and that he was hurt worse than she).

-- Hawaiian Airlines is suing Mesa Air Group on a business matter and believes Mesa's chief financial officer, Peter Murnane, has, or had, documents relevant to the lawsuit on his office computer but that, recently, conveniently, the documents had been deleted. Mesa acknowledged in a September court filing that Murnane had indeed recently erased a huge number of files from his office computer, but said he was merely deleting his massive collection of pornography.

-- Anthony Azzapardi, 80, agreed in September in Bridgeport, Conn., to plead guilty in connection with a sexual encounter with a 5-year-old girl. Until recently, his story was that the girl had aggressively led him by the hand into the bedroom, pushed him down on the bed, and sexually assaulted him.

-- Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, an official with the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy, was suspended in October when he was recognized in a hidden-camera TV documentary about gay priests. However, he told the La Repubblica newspaper in Rome a few days later that he is not gay, but was only pretending to make sexual advances to a man in order to gain the trust of "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity."

At press time, the top-notch Basketball Town recreational facility for kids in Rancho Cordova, Calif., was on the verge of closing permanently because its legal fees stood at about $100,000 and counting, for the lawsuit filed by a wheelchair-using man who said he was once prevented from attending a party there because the mezzanine level was not accessible to him. Even though a local benefactor offered to donate a $35,000 wheelchair lift, the acrimony generated by the plaintiff's intransigence, and counterclaims by the property owner and the facility operator, made most local observers pessimistic that the facility would survive, according to an October Sacramento Bee report.

(1) In August, entomologists found a spider web in a state park about 45 miles east of Dallas, covering trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch. The originally white web had turned brownish because "millions" of mosquitoes had been trapped in it. (2) In September, wildlife experts tried to assure the public that the jellylike blobs ("millions of tiny organisms known as zooids," wrote The Dallas Morning News) attached to trees and dock pilings along Grapevine Lake between Dallas and Fort Worth were harmless. (3) The latest sighting of the legendary "chupacabra" (the mythical hairless, blood-sucking goat), near Cuero, Texas, in August, was determined in November to be that of a dead coyote.

In Charlottesville, Va., in October, a judge found white-nationalist leader Kevin Strom not guilty of the sexual enticement of an 11-year-old girl, despite humiliating testimony from Strom's wife. According to prosecutors, she (also a white-nationalist activist) had caught him at home naked, masturbating to photographs of nude women whose faces had been replaced by face shots of two prominent but very young white-nationalist singers. Subsequently, charges were filed over Strom's obsession with a local girl (to whom he had sent presents and about whom he had described his feelings to his psychotherapist). However, in the end, a federal judge said the obsession did not amount to a crime (though Strom remains in jail on a child pornography charge).

The Providence (R.I.) Journal, reporting on a campaign by the area's legal immigrants this summer to apply for citizenship, selected Juan Garcia, 54, as typical of the community. Garcia said he decided to apply after being encouraged by this year's immigration-reform debate, adding that he had been in the United States legally since 1978, with permanent-resident status since 1985. According to the Journal, however, Garcia explained all of that "through a translator."

Ticketed for DWEC (Driving While Eating Cereal): Four people were injured in Houston in October when a driver failed to stop for a red light while eating a bowl of oatmeal and collided with a transit bus. (Three passengers were hurt, in addition to the motorist, and witnesses said oatmeal was found all over the inside of the car, and also inside the bus and on the ground, according to a KPRC-TV report.) Two weeks earlier, in London, Ontario, a driver accidentally lost control of his car while eating cereal, drove through a grassy median, and hit two oncoming cars (but no serious injuries resulted).

A federal magistrate in Tampa, Fla., ordered a doctor's appointment in October for the incarcerated Brian Wilcox, who is being detained on several child pornography charges, after he complained that he was suffering from a series of medical problems. He said that his back hurt from a 4-year-old injury; that he has problems with his eyes; that his feet and groin area are numb as if they are "asleep"; that there is a bulge on the left side of his groin; that he is worried about a mole on his nose because of his family history of cancer; that all of his remaining 16 teeth are either decaying or cracking (keeping him from eating, and he's lost 40 pounds); and that he has "severe flatulence at all times."

(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.)