-- England's Mentorn production company announced in September that it was finalizing a deal with Channel 4 TV in London for a series in which a terminally ill man would volunteer for what Mentorn called the "ultimate makeover" (the postmortem reconstruction of his body in "plastination," to demonstrate how changes could have improved the quality of his life). Among the possibilities: adding ribs, making knees back-bending, adding a back-up heart, and redoing the trachea to better keep food out. The show would be staged by artist Gunter von Hagens, whose Body Worlds exhibit consists of vivid dissections and reconstructions of body parts.

-- Police in Irvine, Calif., told the Los Angeles Times in September that, based on a recent crackdown, they were stunned at the high number of abuses of handicapped parking placards. Among those caught were a teenage girl parked at a Weezer concert three months after her grandmother died and who with a straight face said that she was her grandmother ("So you're 80 years old?" asked officer Kyle Oldoerp) and a woman who said she thought she had inherited her late husband's parking privileges as part of his estate.

Among those who accidentally shot themselves recently: Police Lt. Walter Warot (carried gun in waistband, shot in buttocks) (Woonsocket, R.I., August); a 43-year-old man (gun in waistband, shot fatally) (Ventura, Calif., September); a 43-year-old man (carjacker, carried gun in his pants) (Detroit, September); and an 18-year-old man (shot in the hand) (Artesia, N.M., September). Also, three Montanans were on the list: Undersheriff Mike Dominick (gun caught in holster) (Missoula, August); a 19-year-old gang-member suspect (gun in waistband) (Great Falls, April); and a 22-year-old man (gun in waistband, shot off right testicle) (Great Falls, May).

-- In New York City in August, businessman Herbert Black sued socialite Denise Rich (ex-wife of the Clinton-pardoned Marc Rich) for nonpayment of fees he said he earned by saving her nearly a million dollars annually as a personal financial adviser. Included alleged savings were: $125,000 in flowers (by having fewer deliveries to her apartment when she wasn't at home); $30,000 by changing the payment plan for her yoga instructions; and $52,000 in "dog maintenance" (mostly by giving away her two oldest dogs, which were so feeble that they had to be pushed by sitters around Central Park in an $8,000 baby carriage).

-- Business was booming in August for unlicensed street dentists in Lahore, Pakistan, according to a New York Times reporter, who witnessed several patients' gruesome sidewalk experiences (forced on them because one-third of Pakistanis earn less in a month than even the lowest-priced licensed-dentist procedure). Tools of the trade include ordinary pliers, wire-cutters, metal files, a container of moonshine (to rinse tools off) needle-point probes (to inflict a distracting pain elsewhere in the mouth), and a red plastic sheet (so the blood won't stand out so much). Also plentiful in the street-dentists' "offices": dust and vehicle exhaust.

-- According to the Beijing Morning Post, the government in Chengdu, China, shut down a food-processing plant in August after discovering that workers routinely pulled the bones out of chicken feet with their teeth. Workers first boiled the feet in water, then made three slits in the foot with a knife, pried open the skin with their fingers, and removed the bones with their teeth. The fastest workers could go through a foot every five seconds.

-- In Meriden, Conn., in August, music store owner Jeff Caillouette, 35, was charged with sexual assault for allegedly forcing a then-15-year-old employee to let Caillouette spank him, supposedly as punishment for various workplace mistakes. At one point, when the kid caught Caillouette in a lie, he requested and received permission to spank the boss, which he did at first while the boss was clothed but later on his bare buttocks. During the time of the alleged assaults, Caillouette was the band director at a local high school.

-- In August, the historic Shugborough Home (Staffordshire, England) announced a job opening for a hermit to live temporarily in a cave on the grounds (running water not available) and scare away trespassers; an administrator was said to be astonished at the large number of applications. Also in August, the Landmark Trust, which manages the remote Lundy Island off the southwest coast of England, announced a job opening for a shepherd for the island's 600 sheep and various rare wildlife; the island receives birdwatchers but has no nighttime electricity.

In Albuquerque, Darcy Ornelas, 31, was arrested in July after a car crash that killed her 4-year-old son. According to police, Ornelas had several drinks at a party but refused advice not to drive home. She fastened her own seatbelt but not the kid's, and then, in her Nissan 300 ZX, she became involved in a road race to prevent a Mustang from passing her, continuing to speed up and cut in front to frustrate that driver. After the fatal crash into a utility pole, Ornelas implied (according to police) that she had been concerned about being upstaged by another sports car.

Cheverly, Md., juror Levon Adams, 25, skipped out during deliberations in a September carjacking trial, and when sheriff's deputies brought him back to the courtroom the next day, he told the judge that he left because the other jurors were becoming aggressive with him. Adams told the judge that he was the only holdout against a guilty verdict and told the jurors that no matter how much evidence there was against the defendant, he could not convict him because Adams was not present at the scene of the crime and thus did not actually see the defendant do it.

The annual late-summer arrival in Boulder, Colo., of 4,000 starlings has once again drenched a 128-unit mobile home park with droppings, but city regulations prohibit even shooing the birds away. (And the Whole Foods Market company was hit with an animal-rights boycott in September after a dead mouse was found in its Boulder warehouse, showing that the company might not be using rodent-friendly catch-and-release traps). And the Telluride, Colo., Town Council brought in a shaman in August to rid the chamber of bickering among council members. And several city officials in Santa Cruz, Calif., sponsored a marijuana giveaway at City Hall in September, to protest federal crackdowns on the medicinal use of marijuana by local citizens.

News of the Weird reported in 1989 that 31-year-old swimsuit model Chanel Price, landing by helicopter at a Malibu, Calif., St. Patrick's Day party to deliver a singing telegram, acknowledged guests' attention by waving, which cost her a thumb and finger in the helicopter blades. In September 2002, 16-year-old Mexican singer Ricardo Abarca suffered a similar fate waving to fans after landing at Guatemala City, Guatemala, airport, but doctors were able to reattach two of his three severed fingers.

Executed for the 1992 murders of two little girls was Rex Mays, whose biography included part-time work in the Houston area as Uh-Oh the Clown (Huntsville, Texas). State officials cited the Key West (Fla.) municipal incinerator for briefly gagging its neighbors when it burned nine tons of contraband Miami cocaine and marijuana that had been improperly prepared for disposal. A government trade official in Iran complained that his nation's annual caviar exports are down two-thirds (to 10 tons) because of post-Sept. 11 cutbacks in first-class air travel. And European researchers found that children exposed to dirt and dust have much lower rates of asthma than kids in cleaner environments.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- Among the personal items that former Tyco International chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski bought and charged to the company (without authorization, said the company in September) were two New York City apartments ($24 million), a Boca Raton, Fla., house ($29 million), furnishings and renovations ($14 million), a travel toiletries box ($17,000), an umbrella stand ($15,000), a shower curtain ($6,000) and a pincushion ($445), along with half the $2.1 million tab for a 40th birthday party for his wife (a former waitress at a restaurant near Tyco headquarters in Exeter, N.H.). (The party, at a Sardinian resort, featured Stoli vodka loaded into a statue of a man so that it could be poured out to guests through his penis.)

-- The National Post (Toronto) reported in August on the $12,000 (U.S.) executive seminars given by the local management firm Case Solutions, centering around its clients' using customized Lego blocks to build quixotic designs as metaphors for their companies' opportunities and problems. For example, one executive made an octopus with a hard hat and holding a skeleton to show himself as a multi-tasker; the hard hat supposedly represented problems from the past, wrote the Post, while the skeleton was said to symbolize his tendency to protect himself from sales quotas. Said one Lego fan, "(People) use the Legos to make a statement that they might not have been able to make before."

Robert Bouslaugh dropped out of the race for sheriff in Durango, Colo., in September after he, wearing a dress, allegedly shot a man to death after the man stole his purse as he was leaving an adult bookstore; Bouslaugh said he was "working undercover" but did not elaborate. And the district attorney in Oshkosh, Wis., Joe Paulus, was beaten in the September primary after an audio tape surfaced of him bragging that he had had sex in his office with five women (but which he later denied as just "boy talk" during a night out). And the German Green party, which provided the margin of victory for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in September, drew 8 percent of the vote with such campaign billboards as the one for gay rights featuring a male couple and a female couple holding their respective partners' nipples.

-- In August, a jury in Sarasota, Fla., awarded a 59-year-old woman $2.1 million from surgeon Holly Barbour for a faulty face-lift and neck-lift. According to testimony, Barbour had offered the patient a discount operation (at $7,500) because Barbour had previously worked only on eyes and wanted to expand her practice to faces. Barbour's surgery took 10 hours (twice the norm) and left the patient with a lump on her face that made a popping sound when she blinked.

-- Vince Dominach, the county economic development director in Easton, Pa., who was in trouble in June for $1,388 worth of personal calls on his government phone, told reporters that the problem stemmed from a hectic period in which his wife and he had become sexually involved with another couple. And Jeremiah Frank Dubois, 24, pleaded guilty to rape in August in Raleigh, N.C.; police said he told them the reason he did it was that his wedding day was approaching and he wanted one last fling before then.

-- Raymond Leopold, who was the "Winston man" model in cigarette ads from 1978 to 1980, filed a federal lawsuit in Little Rock, Ark., in April, demanding $65 million from R.J. Reynolds because he is so torn up with remorse and stress at the role he played in creating smoking-related illnesses in people who were influenced by his ads.

-- Former University of Hong Kong graduate architecture student Francis Frick, 34, said in May he would resist being sent back to the United States, despite the school's having kicked him out for lack of progress. As his Ph.D. dissertation last year, Frick submitted a blank piece of paper (his only UHK thesis product), calling it an example of his "quantum arcology," which focuses on nonverbal creativity; he said he plans a legal challenge to the school because his adviser failed to understand Frick's approach.

-- In September in Carlisle, Pa., Gordon Neal Diem was convicted of several charges in connection with an alleged attempt to lure two teenage girls (one being merely a police officer posing as one online) to a motel room for sex, but according to him, everything he did was part of his life's dedication to finding and stopping adults who sexually abuse children. The 60 items of bondage and sex toys he had on him (and the Viagra tablets) were merely props, he said, to make him look like an authentic pervert, and a child-sex photo he had "helps motivate" him in his work, he said.

White supremacists Leo Felton, 31, and his girlfriend Erica Chase, 22, were convicted in July of plotting to blow up landmarks around Boston that had significance for Jews and blacks so that a "racial holy war" would erupt. Chase dressed demurely during the trial, hiding her numerous Aryan tattoos (including "white power" on her toes). Felton has attributed his anger and aggression to the fact that he has a black father (and white mother, and both were civil-rights activists), and courthouse observers speculated that Chase's distancing of herself from him during the trial reflects her growing ambivalence about his heritage.

No Exit Strategy: David Christopher Lander, 51, was arrested in Gainesville, Fla., in July, locked inside the Infiniti car he was burglarizing; while inside, he had accidentally triggered the car alarm, which automatically locks the doors. And in September, Andrew Birch, 21, was arrested in Renfrew, Scotland, after becoming wedged in the window of the car he was climbing through in order to (according to authorities) steal. (Alcohol was involved in both incidents.)

In August, a federal judge in New York rejected the Tommy Hilfiger company's lawsuit against the makers of Timmy Holedigger perfume for dogs, which Hilfiger had said was a threat to its trademark in that consumers were likely to confuse the two products. (The Holedigger people also make Pucci dog cologne but haven't yet heard from Gucci.) Still unresolved, however, is AOL Time Warner's lawsuit, to protect the trademark of its magazine Entertainment Weekly from a ranting, urban hip-hop-culture startup called Niggertainment Monthly, whose Yonkers, N.Y., founder said he was forced to pull 700,000 copies from newsstands when the lawsuit was filed in April.

Lutheran minister David Benke, the main voice on the church's national radio show, was demoted in June solely because he spoke at an all-denomination prayer service in New York City just after Sept. 11; Lutherans are strictly against praying with "pagans" because that would imply that there is more than one God. And ex-con and illegal Iranian immigrant Peyman Bahadori, who works (illegally, of course) as a private investigator in Colorado Springs and who was pursuing another Iranian man (who turned out to be a legal resident), was charged with impersonating an immigration agent after he harassed the man in August; Bahadori somehow persuaded four Aurora, Colo., police officers to help him in his pursuit of the man.

Reuters reported that a 40-year-old Yemeni man named Yahya, who had left his wife of 15 years because of her screaming, married a deaf-mute woman (Dhamar province, Yemen). Beckman Research Institute investigators working with genetically engineered flies converted them temporarily from heterosexual to homosexual by merely turning up the temperature past 86 degrees (Duarte, Calif.). The latest person to be killed by a flying cow was a 54-year-old truck driver, who crashed after another driver knocked the cow into his truck on U.S. 160 (near Kayenta, Ariz.). A 43-year-old man was charged with kidnaping his wife and roughing her up during an argument about whether to attend church (Salt Lake City).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- September reports in the New York Post and the Toronto Star, quoting parents' Web site "reviews" of the Mattel $19.99 Nimbus 2000 plastic-replica broomstick from the latest Harry Potter movie, highlighted its battery-powered special effect: vibration. Wrote a Texas mother: "I was surprised at how long (my daughter and her friends) can just sit in her room and play with this magic broomstick." Another said her daughter fights her son for it but complains that "the batteries drain too fast." A New Jersey mother, sensing a problem, said her daughter could keep playing with it, "but with the batteries removed." Still another mother, age 32, said she enjoyed it as much as her daughter.

-- In Perth, Scotland, in September, Edwin Young was ordered to pay Yvonne Rennie the equivalent of $10,000 for a 1998 accident that was caused when Young had an epileptic seizure while driving and lost control of his car. In an un-politically correct twist, almost $6,000 worth of the compensation was to pay Rennie for the post-trauma stress, including having to endure watching Young while the seizure continued.

In the June debate between Republican candidates for Alabama secretary of state, Dave Thomas heatedly challenged Dean Young to a fistfight. And immediately after a June Democratic Party meeting in Atlantic City, N.J., the head of a challenging faction and the head of the eventually victorious incumbent faction pulled knives on each other. And East Palo Alto, Calif., school board candidate Leland Francois said he would remain on the November ballot despite disclosure that his only legal residence in the district was a vacant lot that housed his van, sleeping bag and portable stove. And disbarred lawyer Mike Schaefer announced he was running simultaneously (and legally) for a county office in Las Vegas, Nev., and the GOP nomination for an Arizona congressional seat.

-- Among the 11 proposed constitutional amendments on the November ballot in Florida is one to make pregnant pigs more comfortable by forbidding farmers to house them in "inhumane" 2-foot-by-7-foot cages, even though, reportedly, only two farmers in the state still use the cages, and they say the cages prevent injury to the pigs. If it passes, it will likely be the only animal right enshrined in a U.S. constitution.

-- In August, the state attorney in Palm Beach, Fla., began investigating psychic Linda Marks after two former clients accused her of exploiting them. Veronica Lynn Boys admitted that she had paid Marks $1.1 million over a seven-year-period, including $150,000 cash on the spot at their first session, when Marks warned Boys of bad luck as a small snake emerged from an egg Marks had placed on a table. Also, an 88-year-old woman said she signed over her condo to Marks, and paid $22,000 for furniture and improvements to it, under similar circumstances.

-- Don Bates, 55, running for the school board in Inverness, Fla., as one of the self-proclaimed "God guys" who would beef up religion at board meetings, resigned in August when it came to light that he had been arrested in 1994 for masturbating (while naked from the waist down) in a parking lot in nearby Crystal River. The day before the story broke, he had asked supporters for unusually large campaign contributions, citing "the scriptures."

-- In Gainesville, Fla., in August, accused drug dealer Marcus Isom, 26, was convicted of ordering the murder of Lemuel Larkin, who he believed stole from him. According to testimony, Isom had consulted both Georgia spiritual adviser "The Root Man" and "Miss Cleo's" psychic hotline to find out who scammed him, and both gave descriptions that led Isom to finger Larkin. Investigators believe a man named Truth Miller was the hit man, killing Larkin as he emerged from Boobie's Bar in Archer, Fla.

-- Four of the five county commissioners in Pensacola, Fla., were indicted for land-sales corruption in April, and by September, two had agreed to testify against a third (the alleged leader, the former dean of the state senate, C.D. Childers). Among the principals are a commissioner who owns a funeral home with a drive-through window (and who, as a payoff, arranged for bedroom furniture for his paramour, who rejected it as too cheap); a man who needed the bribe money to buy his son's wife breast implants because she said she was "tired of wearing a training bra"; a huge, cigar-chomping car salesman who always carries thousands of dollars in cash; and two commissioners who denied they violated the state open-meetings law during their private scam sessions, in that one of them was always careful to remain silent.

Turkmenistan's president Saparmurat Niyazov made two decrees five days apart in August, first changing the names of the seven days of the week and the 12 months of the year, e.g., April became "Gurbansoltan-edzhe" (the name of Niyazov's mother), and Tuesday became "Young Day." In the second decree, 12-year life cycles were created, beginning with "childhood," "adolescence" (up to age 25), on up to "wise" (age 73 to 85) and "old" (to 97).

The Lost Art of Disguises: Hit man Paul Bryan, 41, was sentenced to life in prison in May for three shootings after witnesses were able to identify him under his mask because he had cut the eyeholes so large (Leeds, England). And Michael Steven Pavlich, 48, was charged with trying to rob a Circle K store in September wearing a plastic foam cooler on his head; he was unsuccessful, in part because the cooler made it impossible for the clerk to understand what Pavlich was saying (Augusta, Ga.).

Cats whose guardians smoke are up to three times more likely to develop lymphoma, according to a Tufts University Veterinary School researcher (August). And Yvonne Stubbs told a reporter she was trying hard to quit smoking because her Jack Russell terrier, Patch, has developed a 20-butt-a-day chewing habit from raiding her ashtrays; Stubbs said she was considering nicotine patches (for Patch, not for herself) (Middlesborough, England, July).

A 23-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man were found dead and nude in a car in his family's garage, in a love clench, with the garage door closed and the car's engine running (for the air-conditioner) (Corona, N.Y., June). And a 21-year-old woman, hiding in a closet to surprise her boyfriend, made a noise that provoked him to fearfully grab his pistol, and when she flung open the door, he fired, killing her (Council Bluffs, Iowa, June). And when a 43-year-old man insisted on driving home despite being drunk, his best friend shot out the air in the man's tires, so angering the drunk man that a fight ensued, during which the drunk man was accidentally shot to death (Bastrop, Texas, August).

The Australian version of AAA (the NRMA) reported that, following a morning headlights tribute to the victims of Sept. 11, "thousands" of forgetful motorists called in with dead batteries. An inebriated man was convicted of firing his handgun down through the floor of his upstairs den (after an argument with his wife of 32 years) and fatally hitting her as she stood in the kitchen, pouring his booze down the sink (Savannah, Ga.). A 24-year-old man was cited for littering after he allegedly shaved his head and tossed the clippings over a fence into his neighbor's yard (Cedar City, Utah). A female official of Sweden's conservative Christian Democratic party publicly advocated more freedom for pornography, on the ground that it might improve the birth rate.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)