Business prospects are improving for Christopher Lindhoist and Arshad Chowdhury, who recently opened their Metronaps lounge on the 24th floor of New York City's Empire State Building and whose clients pay $14 to relieve stress by dozing off for 20 minutes in private, specially made, reclining chair-pods with an array of vibrations and sounds to drown out the hubbub of the city. Chowdhury said he studied the science of napping at Carnegie-Mellon University and found a "tremendous amount of research" showing the rejuvenative value of the short "power nap," which he said improves memory, mood and learning. The Metronaps chair-pods (cost: $8,000) are being separately sold to companies overseas and may soon appear in airport lounges.

Two men and a woman, described in a Cape Times (Cape Town, South Africa) story as loan sharks, brought the corpse of Thozamile Patrick Apolis in a wheelchair into an FNB Provincial bank in June in an attempt to withdraw his pension (signing for it by "helping" Apolis move his hand across the paper), but a skeptical customer, who kept demanding that bank officials check for a pulse, scared off the three, who left the body behind.

Going against the grain of recent court decisions, the federal appeals court in New York ruled in August, 2-1, that when a man died of "autoerotic asphyxiation" (normally, strangling oneself almost to the point of passing out as a way of enhancing pleasure during masturbation, but in some cases, going too far), it was an "accident" rather than a self-inflicted injury. Thus, mom Shirley Critchlow is entitled to death benefits under her son Michael's life insurance policy (but would not have been for a self-inflicted injury).

Arrested and charged with murder: David Wayne Mears (Ludington, Mich., June); Edward Wayne Bryant (Ardmore, Okla., arrested in Houston, August); Kenith Wayne Sherrill (Yakima, Wash., July); Chadwick Wayne Wallace (Alton, Ill., August); Timothy Wayne Johnson (Raleigh, N.C., September). Already serving a life sentence for murder but charged again: Alexander Wayne Watson Jr. (Maryland, convicted of a 1994 murder, but, based on DNA evidence, charged in July with murders in 1986, 1988 and 1993). Already serving a life sentence for murder but convicted of murdering an inmate: Shannon Wayne Agofsky (Beaumont, Texas, July).

-- According to a police report in the Brainerd (Minn.) Dispatch, in August, thieves had broken into the First Integrity Bank on Excelsior Road in Baxter, Minn., but then used a hammer on a common wall in order to break into the adjacent Lakes Area Eyecare store and make off with numerous pairs of sunglasses. (In most such break-ins, crooks use the store to get into the bank, not the other way around.)

-- Federal District Judge Thomas A. Higgins of Nashville, Tenn., had just ordered David Bowman, 41, back to prison for violating his probation (cocaine possession and other offenses), and he asked Bowman if he had anything to say. Instead of asking for leniency, Bowman recited the litany of inconveniences that lay ahead (e.g., crowded bus back to prison, various transfers from bus to bus on the way) and then asked, apparently seriously, if Judge Higgins would please personally drive him back to prison. (To the prosecutor's suggestion that prison would give Bowman "a chance to think," Judge Higgins said, "I think part of the problem is that Mr. Bowman doesn't do as much thinking as maybe (we) would like him to.")

-- New York City judge Laura Blackburne came under fire from the police in June when she helped Derek Sterling (described by police as a "convicted drug dealer" but in a rehab program) escape out a side door of her courtroom so that he could avoid a detective poised to arrest him for a May robbery. She said she was angry that the detective didn't clear the arrest with her in advance. (Blackburne was already notorious for recently releasing a man charged with attempting to kill a police officer, ruling that he had not received a speedy trial.)

-- Cynthia Gorden filed a lawsuit in Chicago in May asking a judge to prevent the airing of her appearance on a "Judge Mathis" syndicated television show (for which litigants audition to appear in person in a raucous courtroom setting, making their arguments and allowing Mathis to render a decision). According to the lawsuit, Gorden, who came on the program to aggressively sue her own mother, said it was the program staff's fault that she wound up embarrassing herself.

The obviously inexperienced Bradley S. Shugars, 21, was arrested and charged with robbing a Phillips 66 gas station in Avon, Ind., with his cousin, Karl D. Carnes. Police found Shugars in the getaway car, awaiting Carnes at another gas station, and quickly got a confession from Shugars, who started to cry. According to the arresting officer, Shugars self-pityingly lamented, "Everybody can rob you, but you can't rob nobody."

German filmmaker (Mr.) Rosa von Praunheim told reporters in July that he will finish by December his movie based on notorious convicted cannibal Armin Meiwes, who is serving eight years in prison following his January conviction for the apparently consensual murder and consumption of a man. "Your Heart in My Brain" (working title) was funded in part by a government film foundation in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and begins with Meiwes being confronted in prison by his victim's head, which, according to a Reuters report, encourages Meiwes to take pride in what he has done and to move on to more killing.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) A British couple who hadn't been able to break their two-pack-a-day cigarette habit gave it up when their pet parrot developed a respiratory illness. (b) A leading British museum announced an experiment to cover a substantial portion of its utility expenses by converting visitors' excrement from museum rest rooms into electricity. (c) A local Islamic extremist organization in France, with ties to al-Qaeda, filed several lawsuits against the city of Paris for what it called "discriminatory tax harassment." (d) Meteorological officials in one Chinese province accused their counterparts in another province of "stealing" "their" clouds, in order to seed them for rain.

In a June profile of Britain's Prince Charles, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper describes, as an example of his increasing isolation from the mainstream of under-age-65 British society, his recent encouragement of people to avoid college and accept learning vocational skills and his enthusiastic promotion of the Gerson Therapy, a widely discredited treatment for cancer patients diagnosed as terminally ill. Among the tenets of the Gerson regimen (which costs $15,000 for three weeks): drinking 20 pounds of liquified fruit and vegetables per day (specially prepared on a "noncentrifugal" juicer that costs $2,000) and taking daily coffee enemas.

Survival Instinct: In September, Jerry Allen Bradford of Pensacola, Fla., had in mind to put his seven German shepherd-mix puppies down because he could not find them homes, and had already shot three and was carrying two other dogs, and his .38-caliber revolver, in his arms. According to a sheriff's report, that's when one of the two condemned dogs managed to press his paw on the trigger, firing and hitting Bradford on the wrist. He was treated at a hospital, and the sharpshooter and his three siblings were placed for adoption.

Thanks This Week to Tanya Olckers, Marc Albert, James Jones, Donna Gasior, Mindy Cohen, Barbara Insidioso, Albert Clawson, Caitlin Richardson-Royer, Chris Menne, Nathan Karnes, Peter Smagorinsky, Don Tyler, James Mohr, Jackie LeGrand, Neil Gimon, Chris Atwell, Charles Onley, Jon Van Essen, Brandee Scheffler, Larry Clunie, and Tim Farley, and to the News of the Weird Senior Advisors (Jenny T. Beatty, Gaal Shepherd Crowl, Paul DiFilippo, Geoffrey Egan, Sam Gaines, Ivan Katz, Barbara McDonald, Matt Mirapaul, Jim Sweeney, and Barbara Tyger); to the News of the Weird Internet News Artists (Dave Beck, John Cieciel, Ginger Katz, Joe Littrell, Victor McDonald, Steve Miller, Paul Music, Kerry O'Conner, Karl Olson, and Bruce Townley); and to the News of the Weird Editorial Advisors (Paul Blumstein, Michael Colpitts, Lance E. Ellisor, Harry Farkas, Leslie Goodman- Malamuth, Fritz Gritzner, Herb Jue, Wolf Kirchmeir, Scott Langill, Myra J. Linden, Bob McCabe, Christopher Nalty, Joel O'Brien, Larry Ellis Reed, Lee Sechrest, Tom Slone, Rob Snyder, Maurine Taylor, H.Thompson, and Jerry Whittle.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Pleasures of the Educated Class: In July, Reuters profiled British mathematician (doctoral degree) Rosi Sexton, 26, on her avocation of "cage fighting" (using martial arts and near-mayhem tactics to beat opponents into submission), which she compares to chess; another cage fighter (a college professor), said the sport "requires good problem-solving skills and a good understanding of anatomy and body mechanics." Also in July, Doug Lenhart, who holds a doctorate in business administration, pleaded guilty in Pittsburgh to several charges for botching a castration, which he had performed on a consenting male-to-female transsexual.

(1) A 27-year-old man, arrested in July after allegedly trying to rob a Bank of America in Enid, Okla., told police he merely intended to help repay the national debt. (2) Thomas Pinckney, 18, charged with trespass in Tomah, Wis., in June after a woman awoke at night to find him holding her arm, told police that he had found the woman's keys in her apartment door and was just trying to return them. (3) Mr. Thubten Dargyel, 53, who was arrested for sexual assault on a mentally disabled woman in Madison, Wis., in June, explained the presence of his semen by claiming that he ejaculates when he sneezes and that, in fact, he was surprised only that his semen doesn't show up on many other patients, too.

Koko, the famous gorilla that was taught about a thousand words in American Sign Language, had recently been telling her handlers at her apartment at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, Calif., that her mouth hurt. It was only a toothache, but treatment would require her to be anesthetized, and the foundation decided to take advantage and give her a complete physical, with specialists volunteering to work on a "star." (Said Dr. David Liang of Stanford's medical school, "Koko is less demanding" than other celebrities.) Afterward, according to an Associated Press reporter, Koko met with her doctors and motioned one woman to come closer. The woman, awed by this brilliant animal, playfully handed Koko her business card, which Koko promptly ate.

In June, Nebraska's Health and Human Services agency revoked the license of mental health therapist Robert Powers based on an incident in which he, after receiving a memo denying him his own key to the office supply cabinet, pulled out a .22-caliber handgun and fired several shots at the document. And Clay Sullivan faced municipal charges in July resulting from his behavior as a parade marshal (on horseback) during the Cheyenne (Wyo.) Frontier Days; protesting the needless towing of a car along the parade route, Sullivan lassoed the tow truck driver and yanked him away from the car.

-- Writing in the journal Pediatrics (August 2004), Israeli physicians cautioned against a traditional form of circumcision in which blood is cleaned from the wound not by a suction device but by the circumciser's taking wine into his mouth and then sucking the blood from the wound. Researchers, led by Dr. Benjamin Gesundheit of Ben-Gurion University, found eight cases of infants having developed herpes from circumcisers' mouths.

-- In a federal court in Austin, Texas, in June, accused bank robber Adam Martin, 38, acting dramatically as his own lawyer, inexplicably called his brother Michael as a character witness even though he knew that Michael had already pleaded guilty to being Adam's partner on four robberies. Adam asked if Michael had ever committed any crimes. Predictably (that is, to everyone except Adam), Michael responded, "Yeah. You were with me on four different bank robberies, Adam. You know that."

-- In June, Norway's Labor Inspection Authority rejected the official registration papers filed by the Skjargard School, a private Christian fundamentalist institution that nonetheless receives much federal assistance. The authority said it needed to see a better organization chart in order to track lines of responsibility, because the chart Skjargard submitted merely listed as its CEO Jesus Christ.

-- Separation of Church and Bedroom: A 43-year-old Catholic priest and a 26-year-old nun were sentenced to six-month suspended sentences in July after they were caught by police having sex in the back seat of a Toyota Corolla at the Lilongwe International Airport in Malawi. And in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria, in August, police raided the headquarters of an Islamic breakaway sect, the Yan-Gwagwarmaya, whose conventions are at odds with the mainstream in several ways, most notably its devotion to wife-swapping.

The legendarily devoted anthropologist John Peabody Harrington passed away in 1961 and left six tons of disorganized belongings in various warehouses, attics, basements, and even chicken coops. Most of the items were quixotic, inexplicable junk. However, according to a July 2004 Los Angeles Times report, there are also 1 million pages of valuable notes in nearly indecipherable code, which will require 20 years to organize and are strewn amongst, apparently, everything Harrington ever possessed, including dirty laundry, half-eaten food, and "a box of birds stored for 30 years without the benefit of taxidermy." According to anthropologists, Harrington's records are absolutely crucial because in some cases his work forms the only written evidence of certain Native American languages.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (Answer below.) (a) Identical male twins were revealed to be the registered owners of a Russian Web site devoted to nude photos of female Siamese twins. (b) A male nurse who had just pleaded guilty to lewd conduct with a handicapped boy was merely transferred by his employer (a California government agency) away from children, to work in its animal-care facility. (c) A distributor in Florida moved more than 10,000 units of a plastic toy premium (inside bags of candy) that depicts planes flying into the World Trade Center. (d) An Oregon couple pleaded guilty to several instances of punishing their two kids' bad behavior by allowing their pit-bull dog to attack them.

-- Two 16-year-old boys were hospitalized after trying to extract gunpowder (for July 4 fireworks) from shotgun shells by using a sledgehammer (Houston). A 19-year-old man used an explosive to blast a fire hydrant cap into the air on July 4 to see how far up it would go, but was hospitalized when the cap landed on his head (Chicago). A 17-year-old boy was killed when he peered down a mortar tube at the wrong time during a July 4 fireworks demonstration (Webster, Wis.).

The unnamed young man who won the latest "Jackass" contest, sponsored by Chicho's Restaurant in Virginia Beach, Va., in August, first came to the attention of police when he was spotted wandering around at 1 a.m. bleeding from an amateur Mohawk haircut. Also, his chest, stomach, buttocks and legs were heavily industrial-strength stapled, and he had slice marks on his side and a broken collarbone (from a back flip off the bar). He had also swallowed and vomited a live goldfish and broken a beer bottle over his head, but all in all, he said, he was proud. (The restaurant manager was fired.)

John Hutcherson, 21, was arrested in Marietta, Ga., in August for vehicular homicide and DUI after he drove 12 miles home and went to bed, allegedly oblivious of the dead body of his good friend that was hanging out his passenger-side window. According to police, the 23-year-old pal had been decapitated by a telephone pole guide wire when he stuck his head out the window after Hutcherson veered off the road. A neighbor alerted police the next morning when he saw the body still draped on the door of Hutcherson's truck.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Among the reality-TV series being batted around in London, according to recent reports in the Daily Telegraph and The Independent, is "Make Me a Mum," in which a woman reduces a field of men to the two whom she believes will make her the genetically best offspring. At that point, producers will inseminate the woman with sperm from both men and, using intravaginal micro technology, will attempt to record a "race" to see which sperm gets to the egg first. Said Remy Blumenfeld, the creative director for the Brighter Pictures production house, "(This show is) much more about the rule of science than the rules of attraction."

-- British surfboard designer Jools Matthews, working with Intel Corp., built an Internet-ready surfboard with an 80-gigabyte, wireless laptop, powered by solar panels and housing a video camera, for exhibition in June in Devon, England. The waterproofed circuitry adds about 5 pounds to the 9-foot-long board and is carefully placed so as to retain surfers' balance points.

-- A commander at a military conscription unit in Finland told reporters in August that some men recently have been discharged shortly after enlisting because they had become "addicted" to the Internet and longed for their computers. Said the official, Jyrki Kivela: "For people who play (Internet) games all night and don't have any friends, don't have any hobbies, to come into the army is a very big shock." (All males are scheduled for at least six months in the military, but about 20 percent get specially exempted.)

-- McDonald's franchisees in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Brainerd, Minn., and Norwood, Mass., recently began outsourcing their drive-thru order-taking to a call center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Thus, a Big Mac order shouted into a microphone in Missouri gets typed into a computer in Colorado (and a digital photograph of the customer's car is taken in order to reduce errors) and then clicked back to the originating restaurant's kitchen, which has the order ready in less time (30 seconds less, on average, with fewer errors) than the average McDonald's takes.

-- An econometric study of "happiness" by professors David Blanchflower (Dartmouth College) and Andrew Oswald (Warwick University, England), announced in July, found that a successful marriage brings such a level of joy that those without it would need an additional $100,000 to compensate. They conclude: Money can buy happiness (but each unit of it is very expensive); increasing the frequency of sex from monthly to at least weekly brings the same happiness as a $50,000 raise; and those who must buy their sex are the least happy of all.

-- A U.S. Army laboratory in Natick, Mass., has developed a lightweight, dried-food meal that can be safely hydrated by adding virtually any kind of liquid, from dirty swampwater to a soldier's own urine, according to a July report in New Scientist. A membrane with ultra-tiny gaps allows only water molecules to pass, filtering out "99.9" percent of any bacteria and most chemicals. (While urine will theoretically work in a pinch, the developers discourage its use since urea is not blocked and will build up in the kidneys over time.)

-- Least Competent Animals: Police in Yuba City, Calif., responded to a motorist's call and freed a chicken that had flown into a car and become tangled in its windshield wipers (August). And a black bear drowned in the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania after he resisted several attempts by Samaritans to remove the plastic jar that had become stuck on his head after he had raided a camper's food supply (July). And organizers of a 93-mile homing pigeon race, between the Swedish cities of Ljungby and Malmo, let 2,000 go on a perfectly clear day, but only 500 found their way home (July).

The Gentle Wind Project of Kittery, Maine, was recently in the news for filing a federal lawsuit against a couple who had allegedly slandered the group with claims of mind control and child neglect, among other charges. According to a Gentle Wind spokesperson, each human lives inside an energy field 8 to 10 feet high, 4 to 6 feet wide, which sometimes gets damaged and must be repaired. Its "healing instruments" are just the tools to do that, bringing good health, based on "20 years" of research. For example, its "Puck Puck" (which resembles several tuning forks) is said to bring relief from high blood pressure, arthritis, migraines, ulcers and chronic fatigue to those who merely hold them, and it has even been known to help people "forgive." On the other hand, wrote the spokesperson, "We're not New Age wackos."

A New Hampshire judge was suspended, and the state's attorney general resigned, both over allegations of sexual misconduct stemming from their after-hours behavior (in separate incidents) at the same conference, which had been called in May as a workshop on preventing sexual and domestic abuse. Five women complained of being groped by Judge Franklin C. Jones, 55, and one woman complained that Attorney General Peter Heed had touched her inappropriately on the dance floor. (The local prosecutor later said there was not enough evidence to file a criminal charge against Heed.)

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) A high school principal in Boston was admonished by the school board for trying to shut down football practice as violating the school's new "zero tolerance" rule for violence. (b) Hong Kong's mainstream press reported that a lonely widower in Beijing was found to have, as "pets," 200,000 cockroaches in his home. (c) A 17-year-old boy in New Haven, Conn., arranged for a friend to shoot him in the leg, later explaining that he didn't want to be sent to Iraq and thus was scheming to avoid the "draft." (d) A 47-year-old woman in Lumberton, N.C., was charged with animal cruelty for giving pap smears to her Boston terrier. (Answer at end of column.)

More Unprofitable Counterfeiting: Japanese police have made no arrests in connection with a flurry of 400 counterfeit 1,000-yen notes that keep turning up in vending machines in Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo; in each one, a real 1,000-yen note is cannibalized to supply a key part of the bogus note. Similarly, in Calgary, Alberta, in July, Jason James Cremer was fined about Cdn$800 for passing a set of counterfeit $20 bills that he made by removing the optical security devices from real $20 bills and inserting them onto his bogus ones (and discarding the remnants of the real bills, believing them then worthless, which police said was not true).

More Clumsy Gunmen: Drew Patterson, 27, getting his .22-caliber pistol ready after news got out of an escaped fugitive in the area, stuck the gun into the waistband of his trousers and accidentally shot himself in the buttocks (Bristow, Okla., August). And David Walker, 28, carrying his shotgun back into a pub to settle an argument over whose turn it was to buy, accidentally shot himself in the scrotum and then in July was sentenced to five years in prison for illegal possession of the shotgun (The Crescent, Dinnington, England).

In August in a camping area of Baker Lake, Wash., Fish and Wildlife agents found a black bear passed out amidst three dozen empty (clawed- and bitten-open) cans of locally brewed Rainier Beer. "And (the bear) definitely had a preference," said an officer, noting that only one can of Busch beer had been drunk, though many unopened ones were nearby.

Answer to Almost All True: (b), (c) and (d) are true.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)