-- In an October decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit voted, 8-7, not only to affirm Paul Gregory House's 1986 rape-murder conviction but also to keep him on Tennessee's death row, despite subsequent knowledge that the prosecutor's primary evidence was faulty. The eight judges accepted the conviction, even though the rape evidence was based, nearly archaically, on a match of blood "type" in semen found on the victim; much more sophisticated DNA testing later showed that the semen was not from House but from the victim's estranged husband (who, it was subsequently learned, allegedly "confessed" the crime to three witnesses, evidence that was too belatedly offered to satisfy the majority judges).

The man arrested for attempting to strangle another to death in Livingston, Mont., in August: 35-year-old Vincent Murders. And the bar that was closed down in August in an Hispanic neighborhood of Houston because it was widely believed to be an open drug and prostitution market: the Blo-N-Go cantina.

After trials in two separate cases in September (in the Chinese province of Henan and the city of Zhuhau), four men were found guilty of defrauding government banks and promptly executed. (According to figures released by China's Supreme Court in September, more than 4,200 people convicted of fraud in the last five years have received either the death penalty or life in prison or another "heavy penalty.") And a week after that, in Shenzhen, China, a couple was fined the equivalent of $94,000 and ejected from their home for violating the country's one-child rule.

(1) The District of Columbia's inspector general reported in September that the D.C. procurement office had recently sold 11 surplus fire trucks for a total of $3,125, when 11 nearly identical (year and model) trucks were sold over the Internet for more than $360,000. (2) The Washington Times reported in September that the same procurement office had recently awarded three construction contracts to a company whose principal was awaiting sentencing on a federal fraud conviction. And it gets worse: Three days after that report, the Times found that the last of the three contracts was awarded two days after another D.C. government office had officially revoked the construction company's corporate charter for failing to make required filings.

-- The Art and Science Collaborative Research Lab at the University of Western Australia is growing what it calls "victimless leather," a substance with the feel of the real thing but made without killing animals, according to an October report on Wired.com. Their work-product (a substance grown using excess mouse and human bone cells) is, now early in the process, only about 3 square inches, but as it expands, its form will be shaped into a jacket. The developers expressed disappointment at some early reaction to the project from people who focus on the ethical issue of using human cells but ignore the ethical issue of killing animals for their skin.

-- A theme restaurant for cats (the Meow Mix Cafe) opened in New York City in August, allowing owners to dine with their kitties and eat similar dishes ("Deep Sea Delight" mackerel for felines, tuna rolls for humans). No dogs are allowed, and visitors' catnip must be checked at the door. Also in August, the 96-page glossy, cocktail-table magazine, New York Dog, debuted, featuring a dog psychology advice column, dog horoscopes and dog obituaries, along with such articles as the makeover-inspiring "Queer Eye for the Scruffy Dog." (The publisher estimates that New York City has 20 million dogs.)

-- In 1999, recently widowed Mary Corcoran, who was already set to receive a $1.4 million settlement from Union Pacific Railroad in the death of her husband, met Chicago lawyer Joseph P. Dowd in a bar, and Dowd convinced her that she needed better legal representation. Dowd called a hotshot Chicago law firm, which examined the case, concluded that Corcoran could not expect more than $1.4 million, and thus bowed out without charging Corcoran. Dowd, however, continues to bill Corcoran for the customary "finder's fee" (10 percent, or $140,000) stemming from the single phone call he made to the Chicago law firm. According to an August report in The New York Times, Dowd is back in court, demanding not only the $140,000 but five years' interest.

-- The Catholic Diocese of Orange County, Calif., which should be alarmed about facing millions of dollars in abusive-priest lawsuits, has quietly since 1998 bought up at least 10 luxury townhouses (some in beach communities, one $2 million house for the monsignor) for its priests, despite plenty of room for them in 56 church rectories, where priests have traditionally lived. According to an investigation by the OC Weekly of Santa Ana, just the 10 identified properties have a total value of about $8.8 million. (For comparison, the diocese gives about $300,000 a year to charity.)

In a weird-behavior genre that has been out of the news for several years now, the Taipei Times reported that a man went to the emergency room of the National Taiwan University Hospital on Sept. 6 with an empty Taiwan-brand beer bottle lodged in his rectum, it having been inserted "wide-end first." Doctors took two hours to remove the bottle and said that the man had a history of such inappropriate insertions.

It's a bank robber's dilemma: He needs to put on his mask soon enough so no one can see his face, but not too soon. In unrelated attempted bank robberies in Hampstead, N.C. (Carolina First Bank, September), and Versailles, Ill. (Farmers State Bank, June), alert employees merely walked over and locked the doors when they spotted men approaching the banks wearing, respectively, a ski mask and a face-covering stocking. The police were quickly called in both cases, and suspects were in custody minutes later.

Two more cases made the news recently in which a government agency (Washington state Department of Employment Security) and a hospital (Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y.) mailed out invoices (using 37 cents postage) to collect payments due, respectively, of 5 cents and 1 cent. Sandi Bryan in East Wenatchee, Wash., had been overpaid on her unemployment compensation claim from six years ago and was billed for a nickel, and Gloria Benavides-Lal had paid a bill of $1,109.72 last year, but the hospital said she owed $1,109.73.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) A Canadian province's human rights commission ruled that adolescent girls and boys playing on the same hockey team can't be segregated into separate locker rooms. (b) A man in Montreal applied for a marketing job by handing a receptionist his resume inside an Arabic newspaper inside a package with a ticking clock. (c) A public library in Denver revoked meeting-room privileges for a group whose members made library patrons nervous because they wore aluminum-foil caps in meetings. (d) A hospital in Shanghai, China, reported a 400 percent increase this year in men getting breast (pectoral) implants.

According to police in Edmond, Okla., Trent Spencer, 27, whose marriage was apparently in trouble, decided to hire two students to break into his home and menace his wife so that Spencer could conveniently drop by, see the danger in progress, and heroically rescue her. The grand scheme started off as planned, but when the wife broke free of her duct-tape binding, she called the police, and when the fake burglars were eventually caught, they ratted out Spencer, who was charged in October with causing the false police report.

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

The Los Angeles County child-support agency, on the losing side of a June California Court of Appeal paternity decision, asked the state Supreme Court to officially not tell anyone about the decision, so as to discourage additional paternity challenges. (Normally in America, if a man acquiesces that he is the father of a child, he is permanently responsible for child support, until adulthood, even if a DNA test later proves he is not the father. Going against the grain, the appeals court overturned Manual Navarro's paternity order based on a DNA test, and the agency petitioned the high court in August to "de-publish" that decision, fearing that other "fathers" might get negative DNA tests and thus stop paying support.) (Update: The state enacted a statute in October permitting such paternity challenges.)

Austin Gullette, 45, was arrested on Aug. 31 in West Monroe, La., after his sister caught him allegedly having sex with one of her three pigs. Two days later about 100 miles away in Florien, La., Timothy Garner, 35, was arrested after being spotted inside a henhouse, allegedly having sex with a chicken. (A sheriff's official in the West Monroe case said he had never before, in his 29-year career, seen a case of a man having sex with a pig, but then he added, to a Monroe News Star reporter, that of course there were cases involving men with "dogs, donkeys and sheep.")

Christopher Lehan, 36 (an employee of the exclusive Sedgewood Golf Club in Kent, N.Y.), was arrested in September sitting in a golf cart at night with a flashlight and a 20-gauge shotgun, after he had allegedly shot three skunks that were menacing the grounds. He was charged with various hunting violations and with carrying a loaded firearm in a moving vehicle.

University of Queensland (Australia) researchers told an entomology conference in August, after doing DNA "fingerprinting" of Nepalese and Inner Mongolian lice, that their team had disproved the apparently important general belief that body lice and head lice are separate species. And in September, Edward Cussler and Brian Gettelfinger, writing for a chemical engineering journal, showed that people swam no faster in water than in a substance twice as thick (after experiments in a pool to which "guar gum" had been added to the water to create something that, said Cussler, "looked like snot").

-- High school teacher Sonia Ornelas and her husband were charged with providing alcohol to minors after police cited at least 42 students from Pearsall (Texas) High School (mostly football players, band members and cheerleaders) for drinking at a raucous party in the Ornelases' home. The Ornelases defended themselves by saying that they had no idea alcohol was served and that they were upstairs asleep the whole time and didn't hear a thing.

-- Glen Paul Darby, contesting his drug conviction at the state Court of Appeal in Sydney, Australia, in September, argued that he not only was "searched" (sniffed) by a drug dog without probable cause but was also "assaulted" when the dog nudged Darby's pants with his snout to indicate just where the drugs were. A civil liberties advocate argued that some people are unusually traumatized by a dog's thrusting his snout against that area of the body.

-- The Montana Supreme Court ruled in September that just because police are permitted to enter a home through homeowner consent (during a loud party), they are still not permitted to open a bathroom door when a person inside is vomiting. (The vomiting woman was cited for underage drinking, but the court overturned the charge based on the illegal search.)

-- Homeowners are often startled to find that, in many states, if they give someone permission to stay with them for a while, and that guest eventually overstays his welcome, the homeowner can no longer easily eject the guest, or even have a sheriff do it, but rather must go through formal and lengthy eviction procedures. This issue surfaced most recently in Potomac, Md., when a retired social worker took in a down-on-her-luck, 39-year-old woman who, after a series of testy exchanges between the two, repeatedly refused to leave, feeling immune from eviction until the law had run its course. In August, according to police, the guest, Susan L. Sachs, was charged with murdering her host.

The race for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma (to succeed the retiring Don Nickles) was described in the press in September as so close that independent, former Green Party candidate Sheila Bilyeu, might take enough votes away from one or the other leading candidate as to influence the outcome. Bilyeu has gained notoriety in the last two decades by filing numerous lawsuits against the federal government (all eventually dismissed) demanding the removal of a radio-like device the military allegedly planted in her head in the 1970s. The device, she said, mostly sends her messages that are highly critical of her. She added in a later lawsuit that President Clinton had ordered her gassed and had stolen her dog.

A man named Ian Fleming, 33, was arrested in September in New York City after he attempted to deposit bogus, computer-generated checks into his account at a Commerce Bank in Forest Hills, in the amounts of, respectively, $5 billion and $6 billion. Police said that the week before, Fleming had done a trial run by successfully depositing bogus checks in the amounts of $350 and $1,300 and thus probably felt he was ready to move on up.

In 2002, News of the Weird mentioned a Wall Street Journal dispatch from Cuba, suggesting that Fidel Castro's 1987 vision of "apartment cows" was still a ways off. (Castro had pushed farmers to breed small cows, not much larger than dogs, that families could keep in small homes and that would supply their minimum daily quantities of milk.) Two months after that story ran, a farmer in Rockwell, Iowa, said he had bred such miniature cows but that they were not good milk producers. Cut to September 2004: An Associated Press dispatch from San Juan Y Martinez, Cuba, touted rancher Raul Hernandez, who has now apparently successfully created a small herd of 28-inch-high cows that can deliver about five quarts of high-quality milk.

Cleveland Indians pitcher Kyle Denney survived a random gunshot on Sept. 29 fired at the bus taking him and his teammates to the airport in Kansas City after a game. The bullet hit Denney's right calf but did not penetrate deep and was immediately removed by the team trainer. The bullet might have gone deeper except that Denney had on high plastic boots as part of the cheerleader's uniform he was wearing. (In end-of-season rituals in major league baseball, rookies like Denney are forced by their teammates to wear ridiculous outfits.)

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) A Hawaiian company opened a big market in Japan for ultra-premium bottled water pumped from the ocean floor off the Big Island coast (and desalinated). (b) A man fleeing police in Maine was caught when he jumped into a car and started the engine before he noticed that the owner, working on it, had left it on jacks. (c) Police in Houston, called out on a loud-music complaint, stumbled upon a fetish party, finding 12 nude men, all virtually immobilized in clear plastic cling wrap. (d) Some farmers in Nebraska supplement declining income with adoption programs in which animal-rights advocates pay them not to slaughter their cattle.

Answer to Almost All True: (a), (b) 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.)

A new computer gadget enables someone to apply direct physical stimulation sexually to another person over the Internet, thus advancing "cybersex" far beyond its previous limitation of mere words and pictures. According to a September report on Wired.com, the vibrating "Sinulator," with wireless receiver, can be activated remotely at different speeds and force by a spouse or anyone else who uses the device's password at Sinulator's Web site, and that manipulation can be done not only by keyboard and mouse, but by a male placing the Sinulator's transmitting sleeve ("Interactive Fleshlight") over his penis and thrusting at his (or the recipient's) preferred speed and force. "Thus," summarized the Wired writer, "a man can be thrusting in Cleveland while a woman is penetrated in Seattle."

In Clarksville, Ind., in June, Jason Grisham, 22, miraculously survived after climbing an electrical tower (scrambling past several obstacles and ignoring warning signs) and accidentally absorbing a virtually always-fatal 69,000 volts. And in September, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned a judge's order to Sean Talty to not procreate further until he had settled the $38,000 child-support tab for his first seven children (thus facilitating Talty's fathering even more people with his perhaps-genetic predisposition to irresponsibility).

In February, a 38-year-old Disneyland worker was killed when he fell from a three-part parade float and became trapped between the second and third sections. Disney's float was termed a "serious" workplace violation by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and in August, it fined the multibillion-dollar company $6,300.

(1) Day-care operator Ronald G. Lesniak, 60, on trial in September in West Chicago for allegedly sexually molesting a child, said that it was legally impossible for him to have committed that particular crime because brain surgery 30 years ago left him with no sex drive and that his wife would testify to that. (2) And in New York City in September, a state Supreme Court justice ruled that a criminal conviction could not be overturned merely because a juror was tipsy during deliberations (the result of sipping from a 16-ounce water bottle that was half-vodka). (The juror was reported by his colleagues as "overly effusive," "scatterbrained," and "inappropriately forthcoming with opinions and directions," but the justice pointed out that New York has no law against a juror's drinking.)

-- When Montana State University-Bozeman student Jesse Huffman, 19, emerged from answering a brutal nature's call in the men's room at the Port of Sweet Grass on the U.S. side of the Canadian border in August, officers noticed that the toilet was clogged. Although Huffman said he had a medical problem and offered to try to fix the toilet, officers took Huffman into custody for "criminal mischief." Incredulous, Huffman was detained for six hours before being released pending a court date, but a few days later, a prosecutor dropped the case.

-- According to an August Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal report, a huge oak tree on Cypress Street in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., marks the spot of a major open drug and prostitution market that is the scene of several dozen arrests every month. The sheriff's office, weary of the constant parade of crimes and arrests and pressured by a community activist, recently told county officials that it had arrived at a solution: It asked permission to cut down the tree.

-- Twice in August, wounded suspects who had been detained by police but who needed hospitalization had their arrests delayed solely because the respective governments, in Vermont and Virginia, tried to avoid getting stuck with the men's hospital bills. In each case, police intended to formally arrest the suspect only after he got well, but in both cases, the suspects fled the hospital in wheelchairs before the police sent guards to their rooms. (Vermont burglary suspect William Stone, 39, rolled out with two broken legs, and attempted-murder suspect Obryan Cecil Braxton, 25, paralyzed from the neck down in a shootout, fled a hospital in Williamsburg, Va. Both were recaptured, and Stone was charged additionally with wheelchair theft.)

The 223-page novel "The Train From Nowhere," by a French writer using the name Michel Thaler, is reported to be the first novel in history with no verbs, and its May publication was met with damning reviews. "Thaler" has called the verb "like a weed in a field of flowers" and his book a "revolution in the history of literature," that it "is to literature what the great Dada and Surrealist movements were to art." Critics noted the book's lack of action, in that it consists only of, according to London's Daily Telegraph, "lengthy passages filled with florid adjectives in a series of vitriolic portraits of dislikable passengers on a train."

A Quad City Times (Davenport, Iowa) columnist reported in September on a man who recently drove into his housing community at 10:30 p.m. to discover about 500 14-inch-high, ceramic-faced Ronald McDonald dolls neatly lined up in the middle of six streets, two to three feet apart, with no witnesses or explanation as to how they got there or why. The columnist, Bill Wundram, discovered only that the dolls were probably taken from the warehouse of a promotions company in nearby Camanche, Iowa, but is still stumped as to motive.

A 28-year-old robbery convict with a history of escape attempts tried to tunnel his way to freedom at the prison in Coimbra, Portugal, in June but was intercepted by officials after excavating about 6 feet. He still had 70 feet of tunnel to dig just to clear the building he was housed in, but a larger problem was that the man was apparently direction-challenged: His tunnel was pointed not toward the prison perimeter next to the building but toward a patio well inside the walls.

In 2002, Boston surgeon (and Harvard Medical School graduate) David Arndt, 43, made News of the Weird when his license was suspended for leaving a patient in the middle of an operation in order to run out to cash a check, and shortly after that he was arrested on drug possession and underage-sex charges, which are still pending. He was arrested again in 2003 when he allegedly received a pink, phallus-shaped Mexican pinata filled with an estimated $100,000 worth of crystal methamphetamine. In August 2004, a federal magistrate once again denied him bail on that charge, and anyway, he would have had trouble making bail since his parents, who put their house on the line to bail him out earlier, said they would no longer help him.

Stephen P. Linnen, 33, who was a lawyer for the Ohio House Republican state legislators' caucus, was sentenced in September to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to 53 misdemeanors, including 40 times springing out from hiding places while naked and photographing the faces of women reacting to the surprise (and also for fondling 13 of them). However, the judge refused to label Linnen a "sexual offender" and said he poses "absolutely no risk to public safety."

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) A zoo in Alaska announced it will build a special treadmill for its overweight elephant to exercise on. (b) A couple rented out a pornography store in Mannheim, Germany, for their wedding, since they had first met at the store when she rang up his purchases as a cashier. (c) Surveillance cameras at a London animal shelter revealed that one dog was using his teeth to unlock his cage and those of his pals so they could roam the premises night after night. (d) Owners of buildings across the street from Chicago's Wrigley Field earned more than $15 million this season charging people to watch Cubs' games from their roofs.

Answer to Almost All True: (b) is not true, as far as I know.

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