When a four-bedroom house inhabited by 50 tenants partially collapsed in October in Honolulu, at least 10 of the residents said they had been pressured to let the property manager give them experimental "stem-cell" injections. Manager Daniel Cunningham, 56 and a de-licensed chiropractor, said he has been injecting the substance, phenol, into himself for years, to treat gnarled hands (though the hands appeared to a Honolulu Advertiser reporter to be deteriorating to the point where Cunningham wears socks over them). One man said Cunningham injected him directly into the eye, and others complained of various side effects. Cunningham ran for mayor of Honolulu this year and in the September primary received 737 votes on a platform of complaining about government's meddling into health care.

-- Deceitful mating strategies may be rife in the animal kingdom (especially among humans), but Australian researchers recently documented the sexual guile of a group of orchids that basically trick male wasps into pollinating them by resembling the look and smell of female wasps. Writing in The American Naturalist, the authors noted that female wasps reproduce both with and without sperm, with the latter creating male offspring. Consequently, the researchers hypothesized, when orchids commandeer sperm, it indirectly leads to the birth of more future pollinators. (Charles Darwin's subsequent book, after "The Origin of Species," was "The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.")

-- The remote Manitoba First Nations tribes in Canada have largely moved away from alcohol abuse, according to an October Winnipeg Sun report, to the abuse of much more potent "superjuice," made with a fast-acting yeast that encourages quick brewing. According to a local probation officer, though, underbrewing results in the swill's continuing to ferment in the stomach after consumption, causing violent pain and progressive inebriation lasting for days.

-- In 2003, retired Colorado businessman John Haines, who was concerned about dangerous cracks in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, went to great lengths to find and purchase a huge slab of the identical high-grade white marble of the Tomb and offered it, free of charge, shipping included, to the Army (which has been considering reconstruction of the Tomb since 1987). In the ensuing five years, according to an August Denver Post story, the Army continues to ignore Haines, yet periodically shows interest in opening the reconstruction to competitive bidding, but mostly just allows the idea to languish.

-- In September, a Wisconsin appeals court suppressed the surveillance video that allegedly captured David Johnson, 59, having sex with his comatose wife in a Portage nursing home, obviously violating the state law against sex without consent. Nursing home caregivers had installed the camera to protect the wife, but the court ruled it an invasion of the privacy of the marital relationship.

-- In November, the Bombay high court expunged the arranged-marriage records of an Indian couple who had separated immediately after their 1998 honeymoon when the husband complained that he had been unable to consummate because the bride had large boils on her face. She has since been cured of her disorder and did not want future suitors to read of her past.

(1) Officer Keith Breiner, suspended from the police force in Beaumont, Texas, for crossing the line during an undercover prostitution sting (that is, he actually had sex), defended himself in an August hearing: "It was a job, sir. I didn't have pleasure doing it." It was, he said, "something I did for the city." (2) In his murder trial in October in Leeds, England, chef Anthony Morley testified that the killing was in self-defense, but he did admit to carving, cooking and eating part of the body afterward. "At some point (the victim's) body had just become something I would deal with at work, a piece of meat. ... That's my daily task, preparing meat."

(1) In October, the local government council in Worcester, England, ordered Bill Malcolm to take down the 3-foot-high, barbed-wire fence he had installed to deter the thieves who had broken into his storage shed three times in the previous four months. According to the Daily Mail, the council said it feared the government would be sued by a wounded trespasser. (2) In August, the local government in Dymchurch, England, said a traditional celebration of the inspirational character Dr. Syn would have to be altered because the town had been unable to obtain liability insurance. According to legend, the swashbuckling Dr. Syn braved enemy troops to bring food to starving villagers by horseback, but without liability insurance, the man portraying Dr. Syn would now have to merely walk through the village.

Two high school boys in Markesan, Wis., were hospitalized in September with broken pelvises after a "prank" went bad and a classmate inadvertently drove over them as they lay in the road in front of her car. On the other hand, a professional, Tom Owen (known as the "Human Speed Bump"), was hospitalized in October with similar injuries after he attempted to break the Guinness Book record by being run over by eight vehicles (with the last one, a box truck, leaving him in bad shape). Owen got certification, though, because the truck did pass completely over him.

(1) University of New Hampshire officials banned Bert Allen III, 44, a convicted sex offender, from campus in September for posting fliers without permission, seeking a "trophy wife." To further draw attention to himself, Allen sued for a restraining order (unsuccessfully) to allow the continued solicitation. (2) Police in Covington, Ky., arrested Gregory Griggs, 19, in October at the USA Motel, a suspected drug market. Though several people were booked that night, Griggs was the one wearing the T-shirt that read, "It's Not Illegal Unless You Get Caught."

Many people believe Israelis have more important things to worry about these days, but the city government of Petah Tikva (a Tel Aviv suburb) became the latest municipality to implement a registry of dog DNA, to encourage owners to pick up after their pets in the city's streets and parks. Abandoned droppings will be analyzed and those dogs' owners punished.

(1) In August, a woman filed a lawsuit in Orange, Texas, against the manufacturer of the Sea-Doo personal water vehicle, claiming negligent design, after she fell off the back end and directly into the powerful jet stream from the vehicle's water pump. According to the lawsuit, "The high-pressure stream ... penetrated her orifices, causing massive, mutilating injuries." (2) However, in September, a federal jury in Baltimore rejected the claim by a 64-year-old West Virginia man that a Frederick, Md., surgeon had stapled his rectum shut during an operation. The jury accepted the doctor's explanation that it was the man's longtime, heavy smoking that caused his rectum to become swollen and shut for 17 days.

Gary Arthur Medrow, then 44, first made News of the Weird in our inaugural year, 1988, but his criminal record (mostly for impersonating police officers) goes back at least 10 years before that. Medrow's periodic compulsion is to call someone on the telephone (usually a woman), pretend to be a law enforcement investigator, ask her to lift another person in her home, carry that person into another room, and then describe the results to Medrow. News of the Weird reported Medrow's relapses in 1991, 1997 and most recently, in 2004, when he was charged in New Berlin, Wis.

(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.)

Dutch designer Eric Klarenbeek, 29, has developed jewelry consisting of tiny crystals or flowers that hang directly from the eye via micro-thin medical wire attached to either prescription or blank contact lenses and, in the light, give the appearance of tears streaming down the cheek. He expects to hit the market soon, according to an October report in London's Daily Mail, at a price of the equivalent of around $325. Though the adornments appear to be painful or dangerous, Klarenbeek said users of his prototypes so far have been "amazed" at their comfort.

-- Residents of an Austin, Texas, neighborhood undergoing a federally mandated sewer replacement noticed that, for several weeks starting in September, the work crews would spend the first three hours of their 12-hour days digging a huge hole in the street, and the last three hours re-filling and paving over it (repeating the process each day). The 20-by-20-by-20-foot hole in Monroe Street was too big to be covered with metal plates, and the city's "policy" of minimal traffic disruption required repaving for nighttime use, at least doubling the cost of the work.

-- Pay Those Dentist's Bills! (1) In October, a 58-year-old patient accused the Rush Green Dental Practice in Romford, England, of injecting Novocain in preparation for an extraction but then refusing to pull the tooth until he had handed over an additional 30 pounds ($47) cash. (The patient had to go home to get his ATM card, according to a Daily Mail report, and did not make it back until the Novocain had begun to wear off.) (2) Police in the Bavarian town of Neu-Ulm said they were investigating a dentist who allegedly barged into the home of a 35-year-old patient in September, tied her hands, forced her mouth open, and removed dentures worth the equivalent of about $500 because the woman's insurance company had declined to pay.

-- Blind Justice: An administrator of criminal-case appeals in Louisiana committed suicide in 2007, partly (according to his suicide note) because of guilt that, for 13 years, he had complied with a judge's order to deny, sight-unseen, all appeals filed by defendants who were acting without lawyers. (Under state law, only death row convicts get assistance for appeals; all others, even convicted murderers, either fend for themselves or forfeit the appeal right, no matter how indigent.) According to the administrator (the extent of whose claims are still being investigated by the state Supreme Court), none of the supervisory judges involved in denying the 2,400 appeals ever read a single word in them.

(1) In October, Travis Fessler of Florence, Ohio, broke the Guinness Book record by holding 11 Madagascar hissing cockroaches in his mouth for the mandatory 10 seconds. (2) Briton Sarah Burge, 49, broke the Guinness Book record for the most cosmetic surgery, having now spent a total of 539,500 pounds ($850,000) on more than 100 procedures, according to an October report in London's Daily Mail.

In November, after two years of controversy, the school board in Jacksonville, Fla., voted 5-2 to retain the designation of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which is named for a Confederate general who was also an early Ku Klux Klan leader. Advocates for change described Forrest as one of America's biggest Civil War slave traders, but a local Confederacy historian said his research indicated that Forrest was "nice" to his slaves and that "(t)hey loved him."

(1) The Sun reported in September that officials at London's Holloway Prison had recently staged a morale-boosting costume dance party for female inmates, even though Holloway houses Britain's worst female murderers. As a result, families of murder victims learned that the killers had a jolly good time dressed up as, for example, vampires and ghouls covered with fake blood. (2) Britain's Prison Service issued guidelines recently calling for guards to refer to their male charges by "Mr." and their surnames, to foster "decency" and "respect." Inmates should be treated, said one official, "like (we expect) our children to be treated."

(1) Police in Cobb County, Ga., said in October that County Commissioner Annette Kesting had asked local "high voodoo priestess" George Ann Mills to perform a "death ritual" on her longtime political rival Woody Thompson ("cancer" or a "car accident" preferred). Mills acknowledged helping Kesting on some "family" issues, by sacrificing three hens and a rooster, but said she would never help take a human life. (2) In Flint, Mich., two people (an assistant to the mayor and a local activist) accused City Councilwoman Jackie Poplar of assault following a rancorous council meeting. Poplar allegedly sprayed the pair with a can of Raid, proclaiming, "Pests! We need to get rid of these pests!"

(1) Akira Hino, 51, was arrested in Tokyo in September and charged with stealing a woman's underpants, using a fishing rod to reach a laundry pole on an apartment balcony. Police found more than 500 women's undies in his apartment. (2) A 34-year-old primary-school teacher was convicted in September for a 2007 incident in Clydebank, Scotland, in which, during a drive to work, he was arrested after he stopped in front of a high school and was caught watching students while fondling himself with an electrical vibrator plugged into his car's cigarette lighter.

Jose Diaz Jr., 35, was arrested and charged with shoplifting from a Wal-Mart in Madison Township, Ohio, in October after attempting to run from the store with a digital camera. He first crashed into the glass front door (which looked open, but was closed), cutting himself badly, but then exited into the parking lot, where he almost immediately ran into a cement post, allowing security personnel to catch up with him.

The latest evidence that, for men, size is important: (1) Following a men's room argument in Durban, South Africa, in September, five men of Indian descent left a bar, returned with guns and killed three patrons. According to police, the altercation started when one Indian man at a urinal called attention to a white South African man's "small" size, and the incident escalated. (2) In August, the indecent-exposure conviction of a Houston urologist was upheld on appeal despite the doctor's insistence that he is so "small" (2.8 inches) that it would have been impossible for his sex organ to be seen by anyone, even if he had tried to expose himself.

Initially, authorities ruled the March shooting death of Texas restaurant executive Thomas Hickman, 55, a kidnap-murder, since he had been shot in the back of the head and the body dumped in the New Mexico desert. Later, however, investigators found the murder weapon nearby, attached to balloons that had snagged on cactus, and in July concluded that Hickman had killed himself but rigged helium-filled balloons to carry the gun away as he lay dying (a plan that resembled a 2003 episode of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation").

Researchers at Plymouth University in England, with a small Arts Council grant, could not quite test whether an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare, but did see what six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys would write with a computer over a four-week period. According to a report in The Guardian, the apes produced about five pages of text between them, mostly consisting of the letter S. According to professor Geoff Cox, the monkeys spent a lot of time sitting on the keyboard.

(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.)

Recent research in the Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy sheds light on the thorny social issue of why females continue to earn less money than males, even in similar jobs. Competing hypotheses have been advanced: It's either gender discrimination or simply that more women than men de-emphasize career aggressiveness in favor of family. The recent research suggests discrimination. Researchers found that females who were established in jobs and who then underwent sex changes actually increased their earnings slightly, but that males who became females lost about one-third of their earning power, according to an October summary of the research in Time magazine.

(1) A 38-year-old man was cited for disorderly conduct in Fond du Lac, Wis., in September after he bought a beer for his sons, ages 2 and 4, at the county fair. He could not be cited for providing alcohol to minors because, under Wisconsin law, parents are exempt, but he was written up for swearing at police. (2) Meleanie Hain's Pennsylvania concealed-weapons permit was revoked in September after spectators complained about her openly carrying her loaded, holstered Glock at her 5-year-old daughter's soccer game. However, the only penalty under state law is the loss of the privilege of concealment, so that if Hain continues to carry the gun, she must do so openly.

-- Rituals: (1) The chairman of a Nigerian development company was charged in August with stealing what is now the equivalent of $5.5 million, and burning $2 million of that in cash so he could smear the ashes over his naked body in a nighttime "fortification" ritual in a cemetery. (2) Four people were arrested in October after a family gathering in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when a Ramadan-ending ceremony turned into the fatal beatings of two relatives, who were being administered an aggressive ritual, supposedly to stop their tobacco habit.

-- Wrestling in Turkey (I): Villages in western Turkey traditionally hold camel-wrestling matches during gala weekend festivals in winter, which is mating season and the only time bull camels will fight (and even then, not always). There is at least one professional league, and sometimes, camels embody the pride of an entire village. A female is paraded in front of two males, then led away, and the supposedly frisky bulls tussle but only occasionally reach a resolution in which one subdues the other by sitting on him, according to a dispatch in Germany's Der Spiegel. Usually, judges have to pick the winner on style, and sometimes the decision is easy, as one camel has simply run away.

-- Wrestling in Turkey (II): Camel-wrestling is a winter celebration, but the summers are (and have been for 650 years) for Kirkpinar, the country's oil-wrestling celebration and tournament, during which a thousand men, slathering on two tons of olive oil, fight matches until one man earns the solid-gold title belt. Several months of regional tournaments lead up to Kirkpinar, which, incidentally, has recently experienced the same doping controversies as mainstream world sports.

-- Athletes Demanding Respect: "I think one day it should be an Olympic sport," said Jeannine Wikering, 26, who finished third while representing Germany in the 10-nation European pole-dancing championship in Amsterdam in September. And Australia's champion sheep-shearers prepared to once again lobby the country's Sports Commission for official recognition, which would enable them to apply for training grants and corporate sponsorship. Shearers are revered in New Zealand, with televised matches and large prizes, according to an August dispatch from Sydney in Britain's Guardian, but Australia's top shearers get much less respect.

-- In September, despite an increasing chorus of complaints, Peruvians celebrated the annual Gastronomic Festival of the Cat in a village just south of Lima, serving a variety of feline delicacies (fried cat strips, cat stew, grilled cat with spicy huacatay). For the most part, according to a Chicago Tribune report, the dishes are made with specially bred cats rather than street prowlers, and are consumed for their health benefits, though centuries-old tradition is the likeliest explanation. Said one Peruvian, such cultural events "are our roots and can't be forgotten."

-- A Buddhist temple in Nakhon Nayok, Thailand, offers quickie "reincarnation" sessions in which people climb into "coffins," "die" while a priest's chants chase away the evil spirits of the old person, who is then "reborn" as someone different. The temple has nine such coffins to serve the long lines of optimists (who must stand well back while waiting, so as not to absorb the "dying" people's escaping evilness), many of whom adhere to predestination beliefs based on one's name and time of "birth," according to a September New York Times dispatch.

-- Spiritual Rulings: (1) The highest ranking Muslim authority in the Turkish province of Adana declared in August that observing the fasting requirement of Ramadan could be assisted by the use of medical "patches" that reduced hunger pangs. (2) In September, Chad Hardy released the 2009 version of his Men on a Mission calendar, which features photos of young, shirtless Mormon men, intended, he said, to help his church overcome its image of being stodgy, and he said he plans a female version for 2010: Hot Mormon Muffins. (In July, Hardy was excommunicated for producing the 2008 Men on a Mission calendar.)

(1) In the town of Sekiu, near Port Angeles, Wash., in October, Ms. Cory Davis, 56, was shot in the leg by her stove. (A .22-gauge shotgun shell had found its way into some newspapers that she had put on to burn. "There's always that one problem stray," she said.) (2) A 21-year-old woman was arrested in Hamilton, New Zealand, in October after she allegedly kicked in the door of her ex-boyfriend's home, then assaulted him because of a custody dispute between the couple over their pet possum.

In July Scott Bennett, 48, lost an eye in a fight at the Mavericks night club in Sioux City, Iowa. Then, on Oct. 12, in another fight at Mavericks, Bennett lost his other eye. (Coincidentally in October, Britain's worst professional boxer, Peter Buckley, announced he will retire after his next bout. He has lost 88 in a row, and overall his record is 43-256.)

Kory McFarren, 37, was the boyfriend of the Kansas woman found stuck to the toilet seat of her home in February after living reclusively in the bathroom. Though McFarren somehow had been unable to coax the woman out of the bathroom for long periods of time over the last several years, he was lucky enough, in October, to win $20,000 in the state lottery, and in fact it was his second lottery win this year.

(1) A burglary suspect, running from police on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill in September, jumped over a 3-foot wall, apparently not realizing that on the other side was a 200-foot drop. He died at the scene. (2) A 22-year-old woman was fatally hit by a car in Dallas in June when she stopped on the busy LBJ Freeway to take pictures of an accident scene. She was apparently just an overly curious rubbernecker. (3) A 54-year-old road-raging woman burned up in her car in London in September after ramming the back of another car, bringing both to a stop, and then failing to realize that a fluid from her car had ignited the underside.

(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.)