Most of the Japanese World War II suicide-mission dive-bombers ("kamikazes") were successful, but a few failed pilots are still alive (their missions aborted because of weather or equipment failure), according to a Los Angeles Times dispatch in September. These days, they resent being compared to extremist-Islamic suicide bombers, who, the kamikazes say, act out of hatred rather than love of country and who do not always aim at military-only targets. On the other hand, one of the survivors said that many kamikaze "volunteers" were, contrary to legend, reluctant to die but caught up in patriotic fervor.

(1) Joseph Manuel Augusto, 37, and Andres S. Diaz, 52, chased each other around a Burger King in Stratford, Conn., in July after Augusto had become enraged that Diaz had occupied the men's room too long; Augusto was flailing at Diaz with a small pocket knife, and Diaz at Augusto with a straw dispenser. (2) Attorneys for the city of Monte Sereno, Calif. (pop. 3,400), said in October they would proceed with the civil and criminal cases against defiant residents Joe and Darla Padgett over the Padgetts' 2-feet-too-high fence (and illegal chopping down of a tree), which has so far cost the modestly budgeted city $170,000 to prosecute, with no end in sight.

David Toumey, who is the county coroner in Bloomington, Ind., was hospitalized after accidentally shooting himself in the leg in September while demonstrating gun safety at a recreational facility. And a 61-year-old man accidentally, fatally shot himself in September in Rose Bud, Ark., as a result of showing off with his pistol before church. (He had removed the clip, held the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger, thinking it would not fire, but some will fire a bullet thus left in the chamber.)

Police in Sandown, N.H., charged Suzanne Viviani, 47, with threatening her daughter (age 22) with a knife held to her head because the daughter had snatched cocaine out of Suzanne's bra during a confrontation in August. (The two women reconciled and were booked into the same jail cell.) And in October, 40 miles away in Belmont, N.H., police charged Jacqueline Weiner, 36, with assault after her husband, Steven, held Jacqueline's 10-year-old son down while she stabbed him repeatedly in the arm with a kitchen knife because the boy and his brother had destroyed Jacqueline's favorite toy animal.

-- The Arabian Peninsula Women's Information Bureau (which is said to be an al-Qaida affiliate) announced in September that it had published the first issue of an Internet magazine, Al-Khansaa, designed to help women sort out their simultaneous obligations to their family and to the holy jihad. Among the inspirational guidelines: "The blood of our husbands and the body parts of our children are the sacrifice by means of which we draw closer to Allah," and "(The wife and mother) is the soldier who bears (her husband's) pack and weapon on his back in preparation for the military offensive." The first issue admonished the wife-mother to be in "top condition," to "not overindulge in eating and drinking," and to have a vast knowledge of jihad.

-- Even though wild monkeys rampage through towns in India, destroying property, eating villagers' food and physically attacking people, they are considered holy to Hindus and are pretty much left alone. However, according to a September dispatch in London's The Independent, as attacks have grown in number and severity recently, police have been finding dozens of monkey carcasses with slashed throats. Police believe that the bodies were the result of contract killings, ordered in the belief that paying someone else to harm monkeys was not quite the sacrilege of doing it directly.

-- In October, the school board in Puyallup, Wash., canceled Halloween activities because of complaints from local Wiccans that the pointy-nose, broomstick-riding "witch" icon of the holiday was offensive to their religion, which refers to its priestesses as witches. (In several other cities, in response to complaints from Christians, officials moved trick-or-treating day to Oct. 30 because Oct. 31 fell on a Sunday, which might be inappropriate to celebrate what to some is "The Devil's Night.")

-- In September, the Oakland (Calif.) police suspended their successful traffic safety program of random drunk-driving checkpoints because they had received too many complaints from illegal aliens, who were being arrested not because they were driving drunk but because, as illegals, they lack driver's licenses.

-- People Who Shouldn't Have Access to Matches: David Mason, on a Braathens airline flight home to England from Norway in February, set fire to some pornographic magazines he had brought aboard, saying he had been offended by the pictures; he was convicted in August of endangering a flight (although cabin attendants had quickly extinguished the fire). And in Pine Bluff, Ark., in September, Leroy Brown, 19, set fire to a pair of his wife's pants (because those were what she was wearing when she had a tryst with another man), but was not able to put the fire out before it destroyed the couple's home.

Kenji Hishida, 39, was arrested in September in Kobe, Japan, and charged with stealing several pairs of uniform trousers from a West Japan Railway office. He was later revealed by authorities to have been stealing clothes from that and other public transportation offices for 15 years and to have more than 10,000 uniforms. And Joseph Rizza, 56, was charged recently with two counts of vandalism to neighbors' property in Brighton, Mass.; according to a psychiatric evaluation submitted to his judge, Rizza believes he has "a responsibility to keep trees from producing pine cones."

Gary Arthur Medrow, 60, first made News of the Weird in our inaugural year, 1988, but his criminal record (mostly for impersonating police officers) goes back at least 10 years before that. Medrow's preferred scene is to call someone (usually a woman) on the telephone, pretend to be a police officer on an investigation, and ask her to try to lift up another person in the room and carry him or her into another room. He was charged again in New Berlin, Wis., in September.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) Two men removed the ATM from a Milwaukee gas station, chained it to their bumper, and drove away, dragging it through the streets, as if no one might notice. (b) A lawyer cost the European Commission the equivalent of $1.2 million when a document was not "delivered" on time because the lawyer had mistakenly faxed the blank sides of each page. (c) University of Nebraska researchers, on a grant from Monsanto Corp., began a six-week study, living in an unsanitary, 40-pet home to test an odor-displacement spray. (d) A local woman was ticketed (and later fined the equivalent of $200) at Rome's Trevi Fountain as she was explaining its history to her out-of-town guests but did not have a tour guide's license.

In October, Crystal, Minn., police Sgt. Robin Erkenbrack, summoned to the local VFW hall by a report of a medical emergency, arrived to find an Elvis impersonator, who worked a show at the hall that night, ostensibly in the middle of a seizure, just as another impersonator (portraying the late comedian John Belushi) jumped into a car that did not belong to him and sped off. As Elvis' "seizures" stopped, and frightened onlookers gathered, Elvis suddenly leaped to his feet and broke into "Viva Las Vegas!" while Erkenbrack chased "Belushi" to a nearby airfield, where he stopped him. Said Erkenbrack later, "Every time you think you've seen it all, there's something else."

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

-- 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.)