Ultra-Orthodox California rabbi Nachum Shifren, 53, cuts a dashing figure on the beach at Malibu, where he is the legendary surfer "Shifty," easily spottable on 20-foot waves by his long beard, according to a September profile in the San Diego Union-Tribune. In his spare time (he says he is ready to ride 24/6, allowing for the Sabbath), he has conducted "Passover surfaris" and beach bar-mitzvahs, and his lectures on Deuteronomy include the observation that "surf punks" paddled out into the Red Sea during the Jews' exodus from Egypt. "(T)he whole religious experience," he told the reporter, "the outer body experience, is encompassed in the act of surfing."

(1) The sheriff in Tucson, Ariz., warned the public in August of a gang of women who lure horny men via newspaper ads into believing that they can buy a starring role in an adult video, citing the recent case of a man who was enticed to send $1,100 to set up a video shoot, then $7,000 more, then $8,000 more, and then another $8,000; he quit only when he learned that the women had persuaded his parents to pay $20,000 more for their son's "acting" career. (2) Lau Yat-fai, a 5-foot-9, 23-year-old basketball player in Hong Kong, paid the equivalent of about US$1,400 for electrical treatments from two "beauty centers" that had promised to make him tall. (After filing a lawsuit, he got a partial refund in October.)

A man's body was found by divers in the Pend Oreille River near Newport, Wash., on Sept. 25; sheriff's deputies estimate that he was carrying about 40 pounds of beer (a satchel full around his body, plus cans in his pocket) but said they would wait for an autopsy before commenting. And a 25-year-old driver was killed in St-Joachim, Quebec, on Sept. 24 when another car veered into his lane and hit him; police said the deceased was within his own lane but was distracted, in that he was apparently at the time engaged in sexual intercourse with a female passenger. (Having intercourse while driving, said a police spokesman, "makes driving that much more dangerous.")

-- The Muscular Dystrophy Association, a Tempe, Ariz., real estate firm, and two charity promoters were sued in September by Keith Schott, a golfer who had apparently legitimately made a fully witnessed hole-in-one during a charity round but who was allegedly turned down for the widely advertised $1 million prize when the sponsors imposed a rule that the money shots had to be videotaped. "Remarkably," said Schott's lawyer, "the defendants changed the rules on the spot."

-- North Carolina state Sen. Sam Ellis' bill to change a section of state law that actually gives an enormous right to rapists failed in committee this year, with the result that some rapists may inevitably go free. If a rape victim chooses to carry her baby, and then place it for adoption, state law requires that both parents agree to the adoption in writing, with no exception for babies conceived by rape. Thus, rapists might withhold their consent, thwarting the mother's wishes, unless she agrees not to press charges for the rape. According to a September Raleigh News and Observer story, at least three women have recently been in that situation.

-- The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Spain's El Pais newspaper, in a now-discontinued ad for a 90-day subscription, had run photos of the New York City skyline, before 9/11 and after, with the tag line, "You can do a lot in one day. Just imagine what can happen in three months."

-- Laurie David is the social-activist wife of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" TV star Larry David, well known for speaking out on, and rallying other activists on, environmental issues, such as the need for energy conservation. According to a report in the September Atlantic Monthly, David shuns commercial airliners to get to her speeches (even though the increase in fuel usage to carry a person of her size would be negligible), preferring to make special trips each time by private jet, which a New Republic columnist calculated uses as much fuel in one cross-country round-trip as a Hummer uses in a year.

-- In September, a Roanoke (Va.) Times story documented the righteous complaint of Melissa Williamson, 35, that street construction noise outside her home in southeast Roanoke, especially by jackhammers, would have a harmful effect on her unborn child, then two months from term. The published Times story ignited a firestorm of reader mail because it was accompanied by a candid photo of Williamson in her front yard, looking annoyed at the construction mess, but puffing away on a cigarette.

David Roy Truscott, 35, pleaded guilty in Cornwall, England, in September to three arsons and a burglary of a farmhouse near Redruth, but the burglary was less significant than what he did when he got onto the property. Police said Truscott had submerged himself in a manure pit in order to masturbate. (Also, containers of liquid sludge were found at his home.) At the crime scene, two items of Truscott's were picked up, but of questionable usefulness given the severity of his alleged behavior: tissues and rubber gloves.

Police in Edwardsville, Ill., charged David Wroten, 20, with fraud in September after, they say, he took out membership in an online dating service by paying with a check drawn on the county jail, where he had been held earlier this year for theft. Wroten, like all inmates, had been issued a check for the cash he had on him when he was booked, and he allegedly copied the check form. Police were confident Wroten was their man because, naturally, he had posted a photograph of himself on the dating service site.

Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) The government of Vietnam is said to be moving to lethal injection for capital punishment because its firing squads, populated with volunteers, too often nervously miss. (b) An airplane hangar in a Los Angeles suburb was found filled with bags of empty soda cans, to a height of 10 feet, with police believing a gang has been stealing cans from homeless people. (c) A California county is systematically ticketing drivers who appear to be high only on kava herbal tea. (d) A Missouri man fled a court hearing on an animal abuse charge but was captured a few minutes later hiding in a doghouse.

In September, Floyd Edwards, 78, set out to drive his friend Ruth Stancil, 62, and Edwards' son Clifford from their home near Erwin, Tenn., to nearby North Carolina towns for shopping, as they routinely do once a month. The round trip is usually about 100 miles, but once again, a senior driver became confused, lost track of time and distance, and was fearful of stopping. By the time the three returned, 60 hours later, they had traveled 1,600 miles, as far as an Atlanta suburb, where Edwards accidentally fell at a gas station and hit his head, necessitating a call to police, who were able to help the group turn around.

In September, according to a report in Tehran's daily Mardomsalari newspaper, a local court ordered a husband to stop beating his wife. However, the Iranian woman, identified only as Maryam J, said she would have accepted an order that just limited the beatings to once a week. "Beating is part of his nature," she said, "and he cannot stop it." The disconsolate husband said, "If I do not beat her, she will not be scared enough to obey me."

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

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.)