Apparently believing that religious competition in the Middle East is not exciting enough already, the television station Kanal T in Istanbul, Turkey, is preparing a reality game show for September release in which 10 certified atheists try to resist conversion by a priest, a rabbi, a Muslim imam and a Buddhist monk. The exact rules have not been disclosed, but the "winning" convert will receive an expense-paid trip to the holy land of the most persuasive religion (the Vatican, Jerusalem, Mecca or Tibet). According to a July Reuters report, Turkey's Islamic Religious Affairs Directorate, not surprisingly, had vowed never to co-operate.

-- By early July, Jonathan Baltesz and his wife and kids were desperate to find their 10-year-old black Labrador mix, Simon, who had run away. They had one more plan, however. The family members urinated into containers and sprinkled the contents at various locales around their town (Bristol, England), laid out so that Simon could follow a trail home. (Results were unavailable at press time.)

-- The British charter airline Thomas Cook announced at the gate in the resort island of Mallorca in June that, regardless of seat assignments on a departing flight, passengers should sit toward the rear of the aircraft in order to balance the load (since it was already front-heavy with cargo and therefore harder on the pilot). Not surprisingly, 71 apprehensive passengers refused to board. (Also, some incoming passengers on that same aircraft, which experienced a similar balance problem, had dramatically dropped to their knees in the terminal, kissing the ground, calling the flight their worst ever.)

The New Age movement might be growing too inclusive, according to a July report in the St. Paul Pioneer Press (published in a city where the concept of "New Age" is already highly nuanced). "(P)agans feel jilted," wrote the reporter. "Chiropractors want out (of consideration)," "channelers wonder if they belong," and "organic farmers don't want to be near pet psychics." Said one St. Paul merchant, "I have customers who completely believe in fairies and will laugh at you if you believe in Bigfoot." But, said one New Age magazine editor, the movement should "encompass anything on a spiritual path -- Bigfoot, Jesus, Buddha. Even worshipping a frog is sort of OK."

-- Some parents of students at the Al-Islah Muslim girls' school in Blackburn, England, discovered that a staff secretary, Shifa Patel, 28, had a Facebook page, featuring innocuous photos of herself but dressed in other than her full-body robe and headscarf, which are her everyday school attire. The photos also reveal that she has close-cropped hair. One assumption led to another, and soon Patel was accused of being a man who dresses as a woman in order to mingle with females. Patel went to the trouble of getting a doctor's certificate of her gender, but the parents refused to accept it, and in June, Patel (and the school's headmistress) resigned in despair.

-- A young copperhead snake trespassed into a building near Poolesville, Md., in June and delivered several venomous nips to the hand of Sam Pettengill. Often snakes do not survive such encounters because the victim's first impulse is to kill the attacker. Fortunately for this snake, it had wandered into a Buddhist temple, and Pettengill had an obligation, according to a Washington Post report. Before he set out for the hospital for treatment (which turned out to be four antivenin cycles), Pettengill took the snake in his throbbing, increasingly pain-wracked hand, circled a prayer room three times to bless it, and released it back into the woods.

-- World's Toughest Job: Farah Ahmed Omar was appointed recently as chief of Somalia's navy, which ordinarily would be on the front lines against the throng of pirates operating off the country's coast. Omar's job is difficult, though, because the Somalian navy has not a single boat nor a single sailor, and Omar himself has not been to sea in 23 years. However, he told a reporter he was optimistic that the piracy could be stopped.

-- An 18-year-old, severely mentally challenged, Paris, Texas, man was sentenced in February to 100 years in prison for a single act of what might amount to the childhood sex game of "doctor" with a 6-year-old neighbor. The man has an IQ of 47, and no coercion or violence was involved, but the jury was not given the option to send the man to a care facility in lieu of prison. In fact, his original lawyer failed even to argue his client's incompetency as a defense because, he said, he thought the man obviously would get probation. In a final touch, Lamar County judge Eric Clifford, able to punish the man on just one count with four other counts running concurrently, instead chose to stack the five counts to total 100 years, and in April, after listening to a parade of witnesses beg him to reconsider the sentence, he refused.

-- It's the Shoes: Palm Beach County, Fla., defense lawyer Michael Robb resisted a courtroom motion in June to force him to discard his well-worn Cole Haan loafers and go buy a new pair. The plaintiff's lawyer Bill Bone had complained that jurors would see the holes in the bottoms of Robb's shoes and be unfairly sympathetic to Robb's clients as humble and frugal and therefore more deserving to win. The motion was denied. According to a Palm Beach Post story, Robb said later that he has a renewed enthusiasm for the shoes.

(1) Todd Hall, 36, was sentenced to a year in prison after his conviction in Bentonville, Ark., in June for habitually biting the toes of his son, which Hall said he did up to age 6 as routine discipline. (He had earlier been on probation for the disciplinary biting of his 10-month-old daughter.) (2) In June in Muncie, Ind., in his second such conviction in seven months, Robert Stahl, 64, was found guilty of resolving disputes with men in their 50s by reaching into their mouths and yanking out their dentures.

(1) A Polynesian man in his 20s was being sought as the robber of the Black Diamond Equipment store in Salt Lake City in June. He made off with some gear from the ski and climbing accessory store, but had originally demanded jewelry, as he apparently thought he was knocking off a "diamond" store. (2) Motorist Zackary Johnson was arrested in Athens, Ga., in June after pulling over a passing police car to inquire whether he had any warrants outstanding against him. No, answered the officer after a computer check, but he noted that Johnson's driver's license is under suspension, and he was arrested.

Rarely has a city experienced a "better" year of weird news than Akron, Ohio, in 2000. A father was indicted for constantly roughing up his gifted teenage daughters to encourage even higher achievement (including threatening to kill one for misspelling "cappelletti" in the National Spelling Bee). A man was found living with his father's corpse for 11 years, discovered only when his mother died, and he failed to bury her, also. A 69-year-old man sued a woman for tricking him into marrying her when he had intended to marry her mother. A woman defended a charge of sexually molesting her 7-year-old son, by claiming that the family dog had raped him. A 10-year-old boy, trying to avoid leaf-raking chores by hiding underneath them, was hospitalized when his mother accidentally drove over the leaves. A high school coach got caught cheating when he sneaked in to run the second leg of his school's 4x100 relay at a track meet.

Unconventional Medicine: British construction worker Martin Jones, 42, who lost one eye and was blinded in the other in a 1997 explosion, regained his sight this year as a result of surgery in which part of his tooth was implanted in the eye. Dr. Christopher Liu of the Sussex Eye Clinic used a piece of tooth because a "living" "anchor" was necessary to hold a patch of Jones' skin underneath his eyelid, to generate blood supply while a new lens formed. When the lens was healthy enough, Dr. Liu made a hole in the cornea for light to pass, and Jones feasted his eye on his wife, whom he had married four years ago, sight unseen.

-- Until Mayor Sharon McShurley changed the protocol this year, fire stations in Muncie, Ind., had been delivering reports to department headquarters downtown by dropping them off in fire engines. McShurley ordered the department to learn how to send reports by e-mail.

-- In June, the New York Police Department spent $99,000 on a typewriter repair contract, which will take on increasing importance since last year NYPD bought thousands of new typewriters, manual and electric, costing the city almost $1 million. The NYPD still is not even close to computerizing some of its daily-use forms, such as property and evidence reports.

-- Hundreds of Los Angeles' down-and-out live not just underneath local freeways but inside their concrete structures, according to a June Los Angeles Times report. The largest "home" is a double-gymnasium-sized cavern under the Interstate 10 freeway in the suburb of Baldwin Park. That space is nearly inaccessible, requiring squeezing through a rusty grating, traversing a narrow ledge, and descending a ladder to reach "a vast, vault-like netherworld, strewn with garbage and syringes," with toys and rattles and a cat carcass visible on an upper platform marginally harder for rats to reach. Authorities shy away from the area, out of fear, but every few years, state officials try to seal the entrance (which the homeless quickly unseal as soon as the officials leave).

-- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was livid in June when he learned that inmate Tuvia Stern, housed in the city's notorious lockup The Tombs, had arranged a privately catered, 50-guest bar mitzvah for his son inside the facility's gym, officiated by a prominent rabbi and assisted by five jail guards. The caterers were even allowed to bring in knives for food preparation and dining. It was not surprising that it was Stern who pulled it off, because at the time he was awaiting sentencing for running two slick business scams.

According to the Pentagon, there are only 566 surviving U.S. prisoners of war from the Vietnam era and 21 from the first Gulf War, but the Veterans Administration has been paying POW-labeled disability benefits to 966 and 286 people, respectively, according to an April Associated Press investigation. The AP found that, even though the Pentagon POW list is posted online, the VA does not routinely check it when a veteran applies for POW status. (POW claimants go to the front of the VA disability-application line and receive various other privileges.)

(1) Thomas Stites, 25, was charged with first-degree sexual assault of a child in Manitowoc, Wis., in June, thus becoming the fourth Stites brother to face sex charges recently. (In addition, brother Michael Stites' wife and their son have also been charged with sexual assault.) (2) Mykal Carberry, 13, was arrested in Hyannis, Mass., in March and charged with arranging for the murder of his 16-year-old half-brother, Jordan, so that, according to police, he could take Jordan's place atop the family's prosperous Cape Cod cocaine distribution ring. (The boss's job was open following the boys' father's recent imprisonment.)

(1) Researchers in Japan and Spain found recently that Argentine ants, normally highly aggressive and territorial, are actually one huge global colony with three expanding centers: a 3,700-mile-long stretch in Europe, a 560-mile strip in California, and a swath of Japan's west coast. Researchers hypothesized the kinship because, when members from those groups were thrown together, they became docile. (2) A June article in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases reported the worldwide reach of incidents of tapeworms that grow inside humans to nearly 40 feet in length. The most serious carrier, according to a Scientific American summary, is salmon sashimi. (Anthony Franz's 2008 lawsuit against a Chicago sushi restaurant, for a 9-foot-long tapeworm, is still pending.)

Former elementary school principal John Stelmack, 62, was sentenced in July in Bartow, Fla., to five years in prison for a collection of child pornography, even though no child was directly involved. Without the aid of computer software, but rather, using scissors and paste, Stelmack had meticulously placed photos of the faces of young girls over the faces of adult women in sexual poses.

Questionable Judgments: (1) Christopher Lister, 21, pleaded guilty to a home burglary in June in Leeds (England) Crown Court. He and two pals had attempted to steal a plasma TV in broad daylight last year, but witnesses easily identified Lister. He is 7 feet tall and lives only a few doors down from the crime scene. (2) Markeith Webb, who was wanted by police for a bank robbery in Easton, Pa., in June, left a string of indignant phone messages at a police station, angry that cops had released his photograph to the media. Just for that, he said, he would make sure they never caught him. He was captured six days later.

News of the Weird reported in 2003 on San Francisco artist Jonathon Keats' project to sell "futures contracts" on his brain cells (provided science discovers how to keep them alive after he dies), with $10 buying a million of Keats' radically imaginative neurons. In a new recent project, which critiques today's hyperactive media, Keats has published a story in print that will take almost 1,000 years to read beginning to end. Actually, it is only nine words long (published in the interactive multimedia print magazine Opium) and, according to the instructions, the ink will reveal itself, ever so slowly, as it is exposed to air and light, taking about one century per word.

(1) A British prison research organization revealed in July that, over the last 10 years, the country's notoriously generous inmate furlough program has seen almost 1,000 of its prisoners escape, including 19 convicted murderers. (The government said the rate of "non-return" is less than it used to be.) (2) The East Anglian Daily Times reported in July that its Freedom of Information Act request for the names of recent escapees from the Hollesley Bay prison had only been partially fulfilled by the government. A list of the crimes represented by the 39 escapees was handed over, but not their names, because prison officials said that would violate the escapees' right of privacy.

Michael Warner, 58, passed away in May 2004 of acute alcohol poisoning (with a 0.47 blood-alcohol level) in Lake Jackson, Texas, from ingesting three liters of sherry wine, which entered his body by enema. His widow, Tammy, told authorities that he had been addicted to taking them since childhood and even had favorite recipes, such as enemas by coffee, by Castile soap, by Ivory soap. Said Tammy, "I'm sure that's the way he wanted to go out because he loved his enemas." Tammy was originally charged with negligent homicide for helping prepare Michael's fatal wine dose, but the prosecutor dropped the charge.

Scientology trains its leaders a good deal more aggressively than other religions do, judging by the revelations by four former church officials to the St. Petersburg Times in June. In an exercise concocted by founder L. Ron Hubbard, leaders who screw up are taken out to sea and forced off a gangplank with the admonition, "We commit your sins and errors to the deep and trust you will rise a better Thetan (immortal spiritual being)." The rituals can also take place in a cold swimming pool, with the transgressors in business suits. Also, to test leaders' commitment, the head Scientologist, with a boombox, conducts games of musical chairs to reward the last man sitting (using the music of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody": "Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality").

The nomadic Vadi tribe, in the Indian state of Gujarat, continues to be adept at flouting the country's 18-year-old ban on snake-charming. Historically, the Vadi have taught their children, beginning at age 2, to be at peace with cobras through affection and respect. According to a June dispatch in London's Daily Telegraph, male children practice the iconic flute routines, and females provide hands-on care and feeding. The cobras are not de-fanged (which would be disrespectful), but each is fed an herbal solution that supposedly neutralizes the venom and is released back into the wild after a few months' service.

-- A June Government Accountability Office report revealed that people on the U.S.'s suspected-terrorist list tried to buy guns or explosives on at least 1,000 occasions in the last five years and were successful 90 percent of the time. One suspect managed to buy 50 pounds of explosives. Federal law treats the suspected-terrorist list as "no-fly" and "no-visa" but not "no-gun."

-- "Pop" is a 2 1/2-year-old Swedish kid whose "gender" is unknown to everyone, including Pop. "It" will be counseled that people do not have identical apparatus between their legs, but Pop's folks told the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in June that they intend to ignore all cultural characteristics of "boys" and "girls" in raising Pop. To the parents, "gender" is a social construct, and Pop will someday decide which roles seem appropriate.

-- The normal way that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons transfers "low-risk" inmates between institutions is to buy them bus tickets and release them unescorted with an arrival deadline. In the last three years, reported the Las Vegas Sun in May, 90,000 inmates were transferred this way, and only about 180 absconded. Though supposedly carefully pre-screened for risk, one man still on the loose is Dwayne Fitzen, a gang-member/biker who was halfway through a 24-year sentence for cocaine-dealing. (Since the traveling inmates are never identified as prisoners, Greyhound is especially alarmed at the policy.)

-- The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Prayer order in La Crosse, Wis., is now in its 131st consecutive year of around-the-clock prayer, in shifts, at its Adoration Chapel. The Sisters' ritual is based on an 1865 promise by the order's superior that if God graced their ministries with success, they would build a chapel and pray non-stop.

-- Ms. Dyker Neyland is one of the few parents who have successfully challenged a school board's restrictive student dress code for adolescents. Neyland persuaded the board in Irving, Texas, this spring that devout religious modesty (as prescribed in the Bible by 1 Timothy 2:9) should take precedence over the district's no-untucked-shirttails rule, in that the extended shirttail provides additional cover for her 7-year-old daughter's backside.

Crisis Intervention: A certain bridge in Ghangzhou, China, has become popular for suicide (12 attempts in a 45-day period in April and May), and with each incident, traffic is slowed or halted for hours while crews attempt to talk the distraught person down or perform rescues. Mr. "Chen" was on the ledge in May, according to an Agence France-Presse dispatch, but he couldn't make up his mind about jumping. One frustrated motorist, Lai Jiansheng, ended the suspense by walking up to Chen and pushing him off. Chen survived, and Lai was arrested.

(1) In May, police in Winder, Ga. (pop. 10,200), arrested a marijuana seller with a quite-low-tech delivery system. A wireless doorbell was hidden on a tree in woods alongside a house, and when the buzzer sounded, a bucket was lowered from a second-story window. The buyer put money in, the bucket was raised, and the dope would be sent back down. (2) A former Australian state deputy premier revealed in June that the federal government had so far paid out 67,000 compensation claims regarding the February brush fires, though only 2,000 homes were damaged.

Lawyer Larry Wilder, who works part-time as city attorney for Jeffersonville, Ind., was found by police in the early morning hours of June 3, sleeping off an apparently heavy night of drinking. He was discovered in a neighbor's yard, his head and torso inside a garbage can that was tipped over on its side, with his legs sticking out. He had recently represented the city in a high-profile case in the Indiana Court of Appeals.

(1) Kendrick Pitts, 20, and his brother Marquise, 19, were arrested in May in the ladies' room of a small office building in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where they were hiding in stalls after being chased by police investigating a stolen truck. Their ruse failed when they tried, using falsetto voices, to persuade the cops that the only people present were women. (2) WCBS-TV (New York City) reported (illustrated with the store's surveillance video) the unsuccessful robbery of Mohammed Sohail's deli in Shirley, N.Y., in June, in which Sohail surprised the perp with a shotgun. Suddenly, as Sohail recounted, the robber dropped to his knees, crying and begging. When the robber spontaneously even offered to convert to Islam on the spot, Sohail tossed $40 at him and sent him on his way.

(1) In June in Xianyang, in China's Shaanxi province, a family hired a service for the equivalent of $4,400 to dig up a female corpse for their recently deceased son to "marry." It's the latest incidence of trying to overcome a centuries-old curse that forecasts a bad afterlife for men who die unmarried. (2) In shootings in May (in Rodeo de Medio, Argentina) and April (Salvador, Brazil), victims of chest wounds survived when robbers' bullets were partially deflected. According to Agence France-Presse dispatches, the Argentine man was an evangelical pastor who was holding a psalm book to his chest, and the Brazilian woman was protected by a wad of cash stuffed in her bra.

Transsexual Tammy Lynn Felbaum (formerly Tommy Wyda), 43, was found guilty in December 2001 of manslaughter in the February death of her sixth husband, James Felbaum, from a botched castration. Tammy initially said James castrated himself, then admitted she did it but only at James' written request. The Butler County, Pa., judge reached his decision based on evidence that Tammy had pressured James into the removal as punishment for James' recent affair, and on testimony from one of Tammy's earlier spouses, Lynn (formerly Tim) Barner, who let Tammy castrate her (formerly him) because she was an "expert." Said Barner, "(Tammy) could castrate a dog in less than five minutes." Tammy was also known in the community for her career as a stripper, specializing in crushing soda cans between her breasts.