"What was once a gentleman's hobby among a few dozen enthusiasts at the turn of the 20th century," wrote The New York Times in July, "has evolved into a multimillion-dollar industry," namely, collecting strands of hair of famous people. Mastro Auctions of Chicago sells $100,000 worth of hair a year, and in October, a tuft of Che Guevara's went for $119,500 (and John Lennon's recently for $48,000). Westport, Conn., Americana dealer John Reznikoff (who owns strands of Lincoln, Washington, Napoleon and Beethoven) appraised Britney Spears' locks (after her 2007 head-shaving) at "only" $3,500. Reznikoff told the Times that, while he advertises his trade in books and autographs, the hair is low-key: "I'm concerned clients might not take me seriously if they see me selling a lock of Charles Dickens' hair."

-- As Denton, Texas, Pizza Patron employee Stephanie Martinez complied with a disguised robber's demand for money at closing in July, a co-worker jumped the man, knocked him down, and began beating on him. As the robber's sunglasses and wig fell off, Martinez recognized him: "Don't hit him again! That's my dad!" Police later charged Stephanie's father, mother and husband with the attempted robbery, concluding that Stephanie had been kept completely in the dark about the heist.

-- Made for "Law and Order": David Steffen was convicted in Cincinnati in 1983 of murdering a 19-year-old woman and sentenced to death because the jury found that he also raped her, a violation that was an added devastation to her parents. Steffen confessed to the killing but vehemently protested for almost a quarter century that he did not rape her, and, finally, a 2007 DNA test of semen backed him up, disturbing the family even more (and calling Steffen's death sentence into question). In July 2008, the prosecutor learned that the DNA belonged to 55-year-old Kenneth Douglas, who is not a suspect in the murder but who was a morgue assistant in 1982 when the woman's body arrived and, said the prosecutor, had sex with it. Though the statute of limitations likely prevents prosecuting Douglas, the woman's parents seemed somewhat comforted that, after all, their daughter was a virgin.

-- Among the losers in the recent housing crash was The Shire in Bend, Ore., which was to be a village of 31 homes in the style of those in the "Lord of the Rings" series, with (according to a report in the Bend Bulletin) "unique stonework, artificial thatched roofs, terraces, gardens, and a network of streams and ponds with a pathway to ... 'The Ring Bearer's Court.'" One of the only two houses completed has a "hobbit hole" for storing garden supplies. Developer Ron Meyers said he hopes the new owner will respect the concept.

-- Nevada Political Babylon: Greg Nance, 49, resigned from the state Board of Education in August after complaints about his ignoring a policy discussion at a public meeting by cooing with his new, 20-year-old wife of 12 days. (When a colleague complained that the woman should not have been seated with Nance at the board table, Nance replied, "Bite me.") Nance's replacement will be named by Gov. Jim Gibbons, whose approval rating hovers in the 20 percent range, in part because of rumors of womanizing. Gibbons filed for divorce in May, but his wife of 22 years has refused to leave the governor's mansion, and, instead, Gibbons has moved out.

-- Former British glamour model Jayne Bennington, 31, says she spends the equivalent of $600 a month on treatments and frills to make her daughter Sasha, 11, into the beauty queen she almost was herself, according to a July profile in London's Daily Mail. However, Mom has done such a good job that Sasha can't get work because she no longer looks like a child. Asked her self-assessment by a BBC documentary crew, Sasha responded, "Blond, pretty, dumb (but) I don't need brains." (At that, Mom roared with laughter.)

-- Blood Is Thicker: In Bihar state, India, a man was charged with having his father killed a day before retirement so that the son might "inherit" his government job via the traditional family-hardship policy. (If Dad had retired, the regular hiring process would have been used to find a replacement.)

Kenneth Moore, 49, admitted that he was the one who shot his friend Darrel Benner to death in 1995 during a beer-drinking binge, in front of two witnesses, in Piketon, Ohio, but an appeals court later ruled that he was entitled to a new trial because prosecutors had withheld evidence. At a new trial, with memories failing, Moore was found not guilty. State law thus calls Moore's nine-plus years served "wrongful imprisonment," entitling him to compensation, and in July the Ohio Court of Claims approved a payment of more than $500,000 (plus legal fees) for Moore's having pulled the trigger that night.

-- (1) Landlord Richard Ott, 30, was arrested in Newark, Del., in August after he finally snapped in anger at his tenants, who were behind in their rent. According to police, Ott hopped into his Hummer in the middle of the night and crashed into the "tenants'" front door. (2) In July, a guest at the Delta Beausejour hotel in Moncton, New Brunswick, had a morning court date that he had been stalling on for a while and as the clock ticked down, he decided to beg off once again and asked the hotel's concierge to go deal with the judge. (The judge told the concierge to inform his "client" that he had just been found guilty on all counts.)

-- Chutzpah! Philadelphia Traffic Court Judge Willie Singletary has been facing charges since April from the state Judicial Conduct Board based on a 2007 political appearance. At a meeting of motorcyclists, Singletary was captured on video begging for campaign donations by asking, "You're all going to need me in Traffic Court, am I right about that?"

Spectacular Failures of Prison Rehab: (1) Michael Ogle, 29, was arrested for allegedly robbing the BBT Bank in Seymour, Tenn., in August, right after his release from jail for robbing the same bank last November. (2) Timothy Wallace, 38, was arrested after allegedly robbing the Superior Bank in Elkmont, Ala., in July, after his release from prison, where he had served a 12-year sentence for robbing the same bank in 1995.

Insurance companies, especially in Europe, seem game for underwriting almost any odd risk anyone is willing to pay for, and thus News of the Weird has reported on people insured against alien invasion, the Loch Ness monster, and, for three Scottish nuns, the expense of Jesus Christ's second coming if he were born to any of them. The bedding company SilentNight in Lancashire, England, recently insured mattress-tester Graham Butterfield's buttocks for the equivalent of about $2 million, finding that particular part of his body to be so sensitive to tiny variations in fillings that he knows, quickly and certainly, if the proper materials have been used.

In three instances reported in August, American kids were found living in such filthy squalor and isolation that authorities feared they were nearly as developmentally stunted as feral children raised in the wilderness. A 36-year-old man in Lavonia, Ga., was arrested for having imprisoned his wife and three never-schooled children inside their small trailer home for at least the last three years. And in Burke County, Ga., a woman and 11 never-schooled children were found in a filthy trailer home without electricity or running water. And in Polk County, Mo., six children were found among three families living in a clump of 12 isolated, junk-packed trailer homes with 360 animals and the only water coming from a series of connected garden hoses.

(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.)

Great Moments in Capital Punishment: Prosecutors in Portland, Ore., took the death penalty off the table for Tremayne Durham in July, accepting a minimum-30-year prison term for an "aggravated murder" over a business deal. Durham agreed to plead guilty when prosecutors relented to his additional demand of two pig-out meals (featuring KFC, Popeye's and Haagen Dazs right away, and pizza and lasagna on the day the judge accepts the plea). Prosecutors said they hated appearing to cater to the whims of a murderer, but eyeing the expense of a long trial and lengthy appeals, as well as the turmoil for the victim's family, they agreed. In August, the judge accepted the deal.

-- Though it has been on national cable TV since mid-July, ratings have not been spectacular for the G4 channel's show, "Hurl!" leaving many Americans unaware of precisely how far standards of taste have fallen. "Hurl!" contestants are forced to gorge themselves, then are purposely, rapidly, twirled and shaken on carnival-type rides, with the last player to retain his stomach contents declared the winner. Wrote a Washington Post reviewer, it's "for people who found 'Fear Factor' much too nuanced."

-- Least Competent Multitaskers: A Dallas entrepreneur recently created a programmable device for those busy, busy parents who actually need to be reminded that they brought their tots with them in the car (lest their child become one of the several hot-car deaths a year in America). Provided that they're not too busy to set the system up, an alarm alerts them if they exit the car without the baby. Said one Texas woman interviewed by NBC News, "As a mom, you can get really distracted."

-- A rule for federal lawsuits (Rule 8a) requires the initial pleading that commences the case to be "short and plain," and another (9b) requires it to be to the point, with several pages usually plenty to give the other party notice of what he's being sued for. In June, federal judge Ronald Leighton summarily tossed out the initial pleading of Washington state attorney Dean Browning Webb, whose client is suing GMAC Mortgage, because Webb had submitted 465 pages, with meticulous detail, including 37 pages quoting e-mails, and 341 pages asserting claims that freely repeated each other on points they had in common.

-- Believers: (1) Rocky Twyman of Washington, D.C., started Pray at the Pump, a brief, scattered national campaign in June to urge prayer to bring down gas prices. A colleague in St. Louis claimed his prayer sessions caused the price drop in July, pointing to his use of the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" (and his new verse, "We'll have lower gas prices"). (2) In July, Salinas, Calif., Mayor Dennis Donohue, frustrated at this year's dramatic surge in gang violence, kicked off a campaign to urge a citywide fast, which he said was a proven technique in achieving social justice.

-- In a July ceremony, Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan honored SWAT officers for their bravery and professionalism during a December middle-of-the-night raid of a house that supposedly contained a gang's guns. However, it was the wrong house, and the bewildered, frightened resident started shooting back. Said Dolan, "The easy decision would have been to retreat (but the) team did not take the easy way out." The house got riddled with bullets, but no one was hit, and the chief later apologized but still felt that it was "a perfect example of a situation that could have gone horribly wrong, but did not because of the (team's) professionalism."

-- Unrealistic Expectations: (1) Victor Rodriguez, 21, about to be arrested on a domestic assault charge in Bridgeport, Conn., in June, turned to his 9-foot-long pet python and, as police approached, shouted to the snake, "Get them!" (It remained motionless.) (2) In July, Josef Fritzl, the man who imprisoned his daughter and her children for 24 years in a dungeon in their home in Amstetten, Austria, told his own jail's officials that he needs daily exercise outside because he hates being cooped up in his cell.

While most major opera houses provide sign-language interpreters at the side of the stage, producer Marita Barber recently staged the opera "The Hunt of King Charles" in a version in which all performers sign as they sing, with only a two-piece orchestra in the background, for patrons with hearing. At Barber's venue, the Theatre Totti on a Finnish island, actual baritones and sopranos were sought for their respective roles, even though they would all sign their lyrics, because, said Barber, "(W)e need facial expressions and gestures to get the feeling and the atmosphere across" to the deaf audience, for example, when lyrics call for elongating a word to fit the music.

(1) Lamont Cooke was arrested by a SWAT team in Vernon, Conn., in July after spending the last year on the run from Philadelphia and Maryland authorities, who wanted him for charges of kidnapping and murder. According to the arresting U.S. marshal, Cooke surrendered quietly, except that he wet his pants. (2) A police task force in Orem, Utah, arrested a 21-year-old gang member in June, catching him riding a tricycle that he had just stolen from a little girl.

Montreal, Quebec, psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold believe they have identified five patients between them who are deluded to the point where they are certain they are starring in reality TV shows or movies about their lives. In the well-established Capgras delusion, a patient believes that his immediate family has been replaced by look-alike actors, but the Golds' five patients believe that their every movement is being broadcast around the world (and have named the disorder the "Truman Show delusion" after the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey), according to a July National Post story.

Latest Negative-Cash-Flow Robbery: The man (dressed as a woman) got away after the attempt at Joe's Cafe‚ in Metairie, La., in July, but he lost money in the deal. As a ruse to get a clerk to open the cash register, he handed over a $5 bill to pay for two doughnuts, and, with the register then open for change, pulled a gun and demanded the contents. The clerk immediately became hysterical, screaming, and the robber, frightened, fled the restaurant without his $5 or his doughnuts.

Stripper Susan Sykes, 47, known as "Busty Heart," was rejected in July as a contestant for the NBC show "America's Got Talent," as the judges were unappreciative of her ability to crush empty beer cans with her enormous breasts. As News of the Weird reported, Sykes was sued in 1997 by an Illinois strip-club patron who claimed a serious neck injury after Sykes, in a little audience-participation, playfully trapped his head between her breasts while she danced. Eventually, the lawsuit was dropped.

Revenge of the Critters: A 44-year-old woman accidentally shot herself in the knee while pursuing a mouse inside her travel trailer (Potter Valley, Calif., July). And a 27-year-old man accidentally shot himself in the head while chasing a skunk (Elwood, Utah, May). And a 45-year-old woman accidentally shot herself in the foot while stalking a woodchuck in her garden (Ferryville, Wis., June). And a 57-year-old man accidentally shot himself in the hand while aiming at bees (Williamsburg, Pa., April). And a retired police officer accidentally shot himself in the chest while aiming at a snapping turtle behind his house (Bensalem, Pa., August).

(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.)

Martha Padgett gave birth to quadruplets in Riverside, Calif., in July, but she only did half the work. The other two babies were born to her partner, Karen Wesolowski, using Padgett's eggs and the same sperm donor, and whose two came along 22 hours after Padgett's two. The women carried two fertilized eggs each only because they had failed five times before with in-vitro fertilization and just wanted to improve the odds of having at least one child between them.

-- "Someone's getting a new spinal cord tonight!" yelled Canadian tent-revival preacher Todd Bentley in July during his crusade in Lakeland, Fla. (also telecast on GodTV and the Internet), according to an Associated Press observer. Miracles are "popping like popcorn," he promised, punctuating each hands-on salvation with an Emeril-type "Bam!" His unorthodoxy extends to sometimes roughing up the afflicted, he admits, because that's what God tells him to do, e.g., kneeing a "cancer patient" in the stomach, banging a crippled woman's leg on a platform. Anyone in need of healing should, Bentley shouts often, "come and get some!"

-- The most popular UK Hindu temple east of London appears to be the spare bedroom of Sushila Karia and her husband, Dhirajlal, in a quiet residential neighborhood in the resort town of Clacton-on-Sea. On holy days, the line of pilgrims extends down the hall and stairs, through the living room, out the door and across the lawn, according to a May report in London's Daily Mail. The temple, inaugurated 29 years ago to save Hindus the 90-mile round trip to London, contains 17 marble gods that were specially blessed for the occasion by priests in India.

-- France's Council of State turned down an otherwise-acceptable petition for citizenship by a French Moroccan woman in July, on the ground that her total submission to her husband makes her "insufficient(ly)" "assimilat(ed)" into the country's ethos of gender equality. The 32-year-old Muslim veils her entire body in public except for a narrow slit for the eyes and, for example, rejects the idea of voting, in that such matters should be left entirely to the discretion of her husband and male relatives.

-- "The days of the ceramics trade here are numbered," lamented Francisco Figueriredo, 68, and the specific ceramics trade of his region (Portugal's Caldas da Rainha) happens to be ornamental penises. For more than 30 years, Figueriredo and his wife have been two of a small number of craftspeople who have shaped and molded various models for export (e.g., mugs with penis extensions, penis-shaped bottles, ceramic soccer figures with penises peeking out from under flags). A July Reuters dispatch attributed the decline to a general loss in the provocativeness of public sexual displays.

-- The government of France announced that, starting next year, it will regulate the booming business of country-western line dancing, by, among other measures, requiring licenses of teachers, after 200 hours' instruction. Inexplicably, at least 100,000 people in the country line dance weekly, and the popularity is growing, according to a May dispatch in The Times of London. A French Dance Federation official said he guesses the preference of line dancing over square dancing is the French preference for no physical contact.

Questionable Judgments: (1) Dr. Frederick Lobati, 47, was charged last year with felony abuse of his daughter in Ozark, Mo., but in June 2008 offered the defense that, being of African heritage, he was merely applying a "konk" (a bare-knuckle punch), which is an acceptable punishment in his culture. (2) In June, the High Court in Johannesburg granted the request by a Chinese civil rights organization to switch Chinese South Africans from "caucasian" (as they were during apartheid) to "black" (which would allow them to better qualify for government benefits).

(1) The president of Japan's Osakana Planning Co. told attendees of the Japanese Seafood Show in July that his tuna makes superior sushi because his company administers acupuncture to each fish prior to its death, in order to reduce stress. (2) A Welsh oil painting, "Newport Nude," which was mothballed 60 years ago for being too brazen for public display because the model is naked, drew fresh criticism when reintroduced in July at a public gallery in Wales but this time only because the naked model is holding a cigarette.

Boston fire inspector Albert Arroyo, on tax-free disability since March ("totally and permanently disabled," wrote his physician) from an unwitnessed on-the-job injury, apparently heroically overcame his condition and six weeks later finished eighth in the 2008 Pro Natural American bodybuilding championship. Said his lawyer, James Dilday, time in the gym was actually a way for Arroyo to get his mind off his depression at being forced to take early retirement at age 46. (A Boston Globe investigation in January found 102 firefighters with mostly questionable job injuries, taking full retirement, with some manipulating paperwork to retire at a higher grade than when they were "injured.")

Rodney McLagan, 48, acknowledged that a few pornographic images of children might have been among the 31,000 that he had downloaded from the Internet, but that he has never had a sexual interest in children. Rather, almost all of the images are of adults having sex with animals. As his lawyer pointed out in court in Hobart, Australia, in July, McLagan has such low self-esteem that he considers himself, too, a "beast." Included in the sex collection were dogs, ponies, snakes, tigers and, in one case, an octopus.

In June, police in Spokane, Wash., arrested Calvin Robinson, 19, who had set up inside the lockable family restroom at a mall because he needed an electrical outlet to run the color printer he had just bought for $100 (in real money) in order to make counterfeit $10 bills. Police recovered a sheet of uncut, poorly made copies, which Robinson said he had intended to use to buy "90 dollars" worth of marijuana.

In 2001, News of the Weird noted Hong Kong jeweler Lam Sai-wing's monument to excess, the solid-gold bathroom (including flushable toilet), built as a tribute to Vladimir Lenin's critique of capitalism's wastefulness. ("(W)e shall use gold," wrote Lenin, "for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities in the world.") Lam later added more fixtures, furniture and statues to his display, using a total of six tons of 24-carat gold. However, the world economy is different now, as Lam noted in a July Wall Street Journal profile, with gold that cost around $200 an ounce in 1999 now valued at nearly $900. He has decided to begin melting down the entire structure, except for the toilet, that is. "I don't care if gold hits $10,000 an ounce," he said. "I'm not melting (that) down."

Recent Playdates: Salt Lake City, July (image of Jesus in a three-gallon container of spumoni at an ice cream shop); Salinas, Calif., July (image of Mary in the floor drain of a restaurant undergoing renovation); Monterey, Calif., May (image of Mary in the leg wound of a biker who slid 50 feet along the pavement when he lost control of his motorcycle); Darlington, England, April (image of Jesus in the foil wrapping on a bottle of cider served at the Tanners Hall pub); Lorain, Ohio, April (image of Jesus in a woman's ultrasound picture); Iowa City, Iowa, May (joint appearance of Jesus and Mary on a plastic bag used to bring home groceries from Wal-Mart).

(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.)