"Cow-tipping" (the legendary prank of sneaking up on a dozing cow and pushing her over) was exposed as a near-impossibility by researchers at the University of British Columbia, according to a November report in The Times of London. Calculating the newtons of force required to topple an average cow (estimating the angles between left hooves, right hooves and the point of push; and the resistance of the cow to downward pressure), Dr. Margo Lillie found that two people could exert the required force only if the cow made no reaction at all to the initial touch, but that more than likely, a successful tipping would require at least five people.

-- Prozac Nations: An official adviser to the Blair government warned in September that Britain urgently needed 250 special treatment centers, staffed by 10,000 therapists, to deal with what he called the country's "biggest social problem": a national epidemic of "unhappiness." And in October, German companies donated the equivalent of about $35 million for a media campaign to make their countrymen feel better about themselves. (Sample script: "(O)utdo yourself. Beat your wings and uproot trees. You are the wings. You are the tree. You are Germany.")

-- Prominent Spanish entertainer Juan Manuel Fernandez Montoya ("Farruquito"), 23, was married in Seville in September to a teenage bride in a televised ceremony that included, for the cameras, the so-called Gypsy custom of the "test of the handkerchief," in which the bride's friends use the garment to ascertain whether the "three drops of blood" (said to be present in a virgin) will appear. (Mrs. Fernandez Montoya evidently passed, but women's organizations in Spain were outraged.)

-- Japan's Pro Baseball Owners' Association decided in August that, beginning next season, leaders of cheering sections at its games will be required to submit to background checks and be licensed. Permits will be required for anyone who plays drums or trumpets at the game, waves flags or banners, or leads organized chants. Owners say organized-crime gangs were moving into the cheering sections and shaking down fans for tips.

-- Strange Customs: (1) New Zealand's road safety manager acknowledged in October that the recently enacted Community Roadwatch program does indeed permit police to issue a traffic ticket solely on the say-so of another driver (if there is evidence that the reported vehicle was at the scene and provided the complainer is willing to go to court). (2) Reuters reported on the annual November ritual in Finland in which the income-tax agency makes public everyone's tax records for the previous year. (Personal disclosures of income are considered vulgar in Finland, but apparently the November ritual is welcomed.)

Adam Turgeon, 27, and Lisa Wagner, 26, were arrested in October for vandalizing the Annunciation of the Lord Catholic Church in Decatur, Ala., which they both said they were moved to do by Jesus Christ himself. Turgeon explained that the couple, independently, had experienced visions of Jesus, and when they found themselves in services on Oct. 2, they re-enacted the part of their dreams in which they wrecked the church's altar as a protest against "manmade religion" and idolatry. Turgeon said he was especially bothered by people who balance their checkbooks during church services and by religions that believe only parts of the Bible.

On Nov. 2, about 45 demonstrators lined up outside the Alliant Techsystems headquarters in Edina, Minn., to protest, for the 512th consecutive Wednesday, the company's work making military weapons that "indiscriminately" kill civilians. However, Alliant says it long ago stopped making those munitions (e.g., land mines, cluster bombs), although it still makes bullets. In fact, much of Alliant's work these days is on "alternative" military weapons that limit civilian casualties. According to a report in Minneapolis's Star Tribune, the demonstrations have taken on a life of their own as a regular gathering for the area's peace protesters, thus amusing and bemusing many Alliant employees.

(1) The Royal Meteorological Society, seeking evidence of global warming for a journal article, happened upon data collected by a fellow named David Grisenthwaite, 77, of Kirkcaldy, Scotland, who has logged detailed information about every single time he mowed his lawn since 1984; he has inadvertently documented that grass-growing season is longer lately. (Grisenthwaite said he also memorizes transit bus timetables.) (2) In England's Lincoln Crown Court, in October, municipal parking employee Julie Wall, 46, was sentenced to three years in prison for embezzling the equivalent of about $1 million over 10 years (spending nearly the entire amount on Elvis Presley records and memorabilia, most of which were found unopened at her home). (Said her lawyer, "She simply wanted to own (the items).")

(1) Barbara King, 35, was arrested in Largo, Fla., in October on a warrant for forgery and prescription fraud; when police knocked on her door, a man told them that she wasn't home, but a 4-year-old girl standing alongside said, "Mommy's in the closet!" (2) Police in Memphis, Tenn., reported in October that they had closed down a crack house on Rosamond Street, a task made easier because the resident usually announced the start of business hours by hanging out a sign reading, "Crack House." (3) Christina Goodenow, 38, of Medford, Ore., was arrested in October for using a stolen credit card, but a conviction would be especially disastrous for her since she just won $1 million in the lottery with a $1 ticket she bought with the credit card (thus voiding the ticket).

In November, a jury in Westmoreland County, Pa., awarded Ken Slaby $46,200 for genital injuries inflicted by his vengeful ex-girlfriend, Gail O'Toole, in 2000. While Slaby was napping (according to a report in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), O'Toole had glued Slaby's buttocks cheeks together, his penis to his abdomen, and his scrotum to his leg, all as payback for his having moved on with his life after their breakup. (O'Toole said it was all part of consensual sex between them, but she had earlier pleaded guilty to simple assault for the incident.)

-- In October, martial arts instructor Andrew Jacobs was arrested for allegedly assaulting two 10-year-old girls in their bedroom in Vienna, Va. (but being fended off by them based on skills they learned as students at Mountain Kim Martial Arts Center, where Jacobs was their teacher). Jacobs told police his plan was to tie the girls up so he could steal things from the home.

-- In a September road-rage incident in Salt Lake City, a woman sped by in a blocked-off lane to get around a 25-year-old motorist on Interstate 15, then rolled down her window and screamed at him. The man, according to a report in the Deseret Morning News, made an "obscene hand gesture." The woman then pulled out a .357-caliber revolver, shot off the tip of his middle finger, and sped away, outdistancing the man but later crashing into a barricade.

(1) Car salesman Philip Vandergraff, 35, was arrested in September on a battery charge after an incident at a Ford dealership in Atascadero, Calif. According to customer Jeff Walston, the two were haggling over a car purchase, and when Walston offered $5,000 less than Vandergraff's price, Vandergraff punched him in the face. (2) According to police in New York City, after Joe Daniels complained to neighbor Paul Kim in September that Kim's dogs had bitten Daniels' cat, Kim allegedly attacked Daniels and in the course of the fight, bit him.

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

Among the "10 Worst Jobs in Science" in Popular Science's annual November listing: Harvard researchers in Borneo who catch orangutan urine (in plastic sheets, the way firefighters catch jumpers) for studying reproduction-hormone levels; gear-packing monitors who run toward (not away from) the gases and molten rock of erupting volcanoes (dozens have been killed or wounded); U.S. Geological Survey workers at two picturesque California lakes monitoring "extremophile" microbes that thrive in the most putrid environments (work that one says resembles being surrounded by 100 "extremely flatulent people"); and "human lab rats" such as students employed in an industry-funded University of California at San Diego study for $15 an hour to have pesticides sprayed into their eyes.

-- Chief executive officers at 367 top U.S. corporations were paid, on average, $431 last year for every $1 paid to their companies' average production worker, according to publicly available information jointly compiled in September by Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. In 1990, the ratio was about $100-to-$1. (If the federal minimum wage had increased since 1990 by the same rate as the multiple for CEOs' pay, it would have risen from $5.15 an hour to $23.03, but, of course, it's still $5.15.)

-- Cutting-Edge Products: (1) In September, China's Guangzhou Haojian Bio-science Co. introduced new condoms whose names read phonetically as the "kelintun" and the "laiwensiji," which of course resemble the names of a former U.S. president and his acquaintance. (2) Women's Wear Daily reported in October that rock star Marilyn Manson said he was finalizing a personal perfume deal with a "major" company, as a precursor to his own full cosmetics line.

-- Parents pf McGovern Elementary School students in Medway, Mass., complained to the Boston Herald in October because Paul Trufant's septic-sewage service, located across from the school, boasts the identifying slogan on all its trucks: "Shit Happens." Trufant said he would advertise however he wants to: "This is America, not Iraq."

-- More Weird Mating Habits: (1) In October, researchers said they had tagged a great white shark and tracked him 12,400 miles over nine months, from Africa to Australia and back again, ostensibly seeking to mate; according to the report in the journal Science, sex was the best explanation because food was so plentiful around Africa. (2) The male nursery web spider uses a cheap trick to get sex, according to an October report in the journal Biology Letters; the male gives the larger female a dead insect, then collapses, feigning death, distracting the female, which turns to the insect, at which point the male springs back to life and mounts her. (On the other hand, the female sometimes just eats the male, after or instead of copulating.)

-- Those Versatile Goats: (1) David Valentine, 12, often bounces on a trampoline with his pet goats, D.J. and Blessing, but officials in Miami Township, Ohio, threatened to crack down this fall since goats are not permitted within the town limits; David's parents say the goats are necessary to help with David's Attention Deficit Disorder. (2) The economy of the section of Morocco around Tiout is dependent on a renowned cooking oil made from nuts of the argan tree, but only nuts that have been eaten and excreted by goats (that actually climb into the trees and stand on branches to eat the nut-bearing fruit). According to an October New York Times dispatch, locals are trying to shift gradually from predigested nuts without spoiling the oil's taste.

-- Python Mania: In a 10-day period in October in and near Miami-Dade County, Fla., non-native but super-predatory Burmese pythons killed and swallowed a turkey, a 15-pound cat, and (most famously, unsuccessfully) a 6-foot-long alligator. (The alligator ultimately burst the snake open, and the turkey's bulge prevented the python from slithering out of the bird's pen.) Officials have captured 150 pythons in recent years and estimate 250 more are in the area, the result of people discarding pet snakes once they reach adult length.)

-- Erica Salmon, originally a fantasy-football-league "widow" because of her husband's seasonal mania, has now become mogul of her own fantasy league: of famous fashion designers. According to an October report by the Des Moines Register, managers draft teams consisting of three clothing designers, plus one each designer of shoes, handbags, jewelry and celebrity clothing, and then three celebrities, and they get points daily for the number and quality of name-mentions in Women's Wear Daily and other fashion and style magazines. As with football leagues, trades are permitted once a week.

-- More Signs: (1) Judge Norene Redmond, facing the necessity to release prisoners from overcrowded Macomb County (Mich.) Jail, asked the public (via an October online poll) which types should be freed first; drug-possession and DUI defendants were deemed the most worthy, but Redmond said the final decision was hers. (2) An October Business Week report labeled mothers who are obsessed with buying their toddlers only upscale merchandise as "Yoga Mamas" who extend their own lifestyle to their babies; the report suggests that the toddler who receives a $129 pair of shoes would probably "have more fun with the box they came in."

-- Shortly after Hurricane Wilma struck Florida in October, officials said 911 operators in Palm Beach County were flooded not only with storm-related calls but with self-imposed injuries. Some of the problems (according to an October Palm Beach Post story): brush-clearing chain-saw accidents; the old "cigarette-lighter-to-check-fuel-level-of-a-generator"; people falling off roofs while making repairs; setting up a generator too close to a window; cooking inside on a charcoal grill; pouring gasoline into a generator while it's running; failing to respect downed power lines; and stacking items atop a previously "on" electric stove so that, when power resumes, they catch fire.

-- Police in Twin Falls, Idaho, confiscated almost $1 billion in counterfeit money in October in a doomed scheme in which the loot consisted only of bills of the denomination of $1 million (which does not legally exist); a man from Buhl, Idaho, had tried to give a bank that amount as collateral for a loan. And according to police in Lafayette, Ind., in September, Earl Devine's counterfeit money was not much better: Though a popular name for $100 bills is "Benjamins" (for the face of Benjamin Franklin), Devine's $100 bills still had the face of Abraham Lincoln from the $5 bill he allegedly used as a model.

In October, a 33-year-old pastor at the University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, standing in a baptismal pool preparing to immerse a parishioner in front of hundreds of congregants, mishandled a microphone and was electrocuted. On the same day in Johannesburg, South Africa, a pastor at the Jerusalem Apostolic Church drowned during a river baptism ceremony when he and the parishioner (who also drowned) lost their footing on rocks in the river bed.

Accidents by elderly drivers whom police suspect momentarily confused the gas pedal for the brake (or accelerated in the wrong gear): Age 90, crashed into another car in a funeral procession, injuring nine, Birdsboro, Pa. (May). Age 89, crashed into a Winn-Dixie, injuring seven, Lakeland, Fla. (November). Age 87, crashed into a hospital's lobby, injuring five, Bismarck, N.D. (October). Age 83, crashed into a garage and house, killing the driver, Chicago (September). Age 82, crashed through four walls and a steel door of a security company, injuring one, Anderson, S.C. (November). Age 80, crashed into four parked cars, no injuries, Rockford, Ill. (November). Age 78, crashed into several cars and a large crowd at an auto auction, injuring 20, Yaphank, N.Y. (July). Age 77, crashed into the operating room of an eye clinic, just missing a sedated patient, no injuries, Newark, N.J. (August).

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

At 10 p.m. on Oct. 19, Ralph Parker, 93, in his Chevrolet Malibu, eased up to a tollbooth on Interstate 275 in St. Petersburg, Fla., inattentive to the fact that there was a dead body lodged in his windshield (the result of a collision about three miles away). According to police, Parker was off by about 10 miles when asked where he was and by two months on the date, and he thought the body had just fallen from the sky. Parker's son, 66, said he was aware his father had been deteriorating mentally, yet Parker's driver's license was renewed last year through his age 99, based on Florida's lax renewal policy (toughened for the state's 54,000 age-80-and-up drivers only by a vision test). (By contrast, for example, Florida requires 16 hours' training every two years for its licensed cosmetologists.)

-- Actor Robert Blake, testifying in October at the wrongful-death trial against him brought by the family of his ex-wife Bonnie Lee Bakley, said the reason why he had traces of gunshot residue on his hand after the murder was because he regularly plays with cap guns, according to a report in the New York Post. "Without sounding like I'm pretty weird, I missed my childhood. (F)or me, (toy soldiers and) cap guns bring it all back. If (that) makes me nuts, then label me."

-- Neelesh Phadnis, 24, acting as his own lawyer, earned himself a conviction in Seattle in October for killing his parents, in large part (according to a Seattle Times story) because of his defense that the crimes were committed by, first, a gang of 400-pound Samoans, later augmented during his testimony to include their girlfriends, two whites, two blacks, a Native American and a transsexual, and later still, to be described as more than 30 armed Samoans. (They were all slow runners, too, for Phadnis said he outran them all to escape, despite being seriously wounded. When he finally summoned the police, he told the arriving officers that he was too tired and hungry to talk about his parents' bodies and that they should "go home.")

-- Chicago lawyer Stephen Diamond has filed about 100 lawsuits since 2002 against companies for failing to charge him sales tax on items he bought, earning himself about $500,000 in settlements and judgments, according to an October Wall Street Journal report. Diamond has exploited a law in Illinois that allows citizens to receive part of the proceeds from certain law violations, including from companies that might be authorized to collect sales tax on Internet purchases but have chosen not to because the law is not completely settled. (Tennessee and Virginia, which have similar laws, have amended them to prevent lawsuits like Diamond's.)

-- Park Hyatt hotel maid Louise Kelsey, 58, testified in August in Melbourne, Australia, that she was kissed against her will in 2001 by a hotel guest (an Uruguayan soccer player in town for a World Cup match) and suffered a post-traumatic stress disorder that led to her being declared legally blind in 2002. Though a doctor for the defense derided it as "the most powerful kiss in history," the hotel's insurer agreed to its liability in October and said it would negotiate the money amount.

-- Lee Ka-wai filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong's Small Claims Tribunal in September against the Rolex Corp., claiming intense psychological trauma from a rash she developed on her wrist after wearing the company's US$3,800 Oyster Perpetual watch. Lee blames the rash on the label on the back of the watch, which Rolex says everyone knows must be removed after purchase but which Lee left on out of fear that removal would void the warranty.

-- In September, to preserve "respect and dignity" for newborns, the neonatal unit of Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax, England, officially banned visitors' "cooing" at infants. Said hospital official Debbie Lawson, "Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me." To illustrate the rule, officials displayed a doll holding a sign reading: "What makes you think I want to be looked at?"

-- Australian Rights: (1) Mr. Jirra Collings Ware was awarded the equivalent of about US$7,300 from his employer by the Federal Magistrates Court in Sydney, Australia, in October after he was fired for being repeatedly drunk at work (even once urinating into a trash can). Ware says he has Attention Deficit Disorder and that his employer, OAMPS Insurance Brokers, should have done more to accommodate the illness. (2) On the complaint of imprisoned rapist Simon Jacob Smith, 25, police in Melbourne, Australia, agreed in October henceforth to protect prisoners' privacy by not publicly releasing their mug shots without giving them a chance to appeal in court. (The new policy does not apply to photos of escapees or to those relating to solving crimes.)

Animal control officers raided a house in Torrance, Calif., in October on reports that birds were being improperly kept there and ultimately found about 300, of which about 120 were dead. Gerard Enright, 61, was arrested when police caught him in the act of performing a tumorectomy on his No. 1 pigeon, Twister, that he had sedated with vodka. Enright is not a surgeon but said he had watched his veterinarian closely enough to know what he was doing.

(1) "Woman Charged $1,133 to Clip Toenail" (a September Associated Press report on a class-action lawsuit against Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle for allegedly excessive fees, including a test-preparatory toenail clipping). (2) "Man Sues Over Leg Amputation After Ingrown Toenail" (a September story on the WOAI-TV-radio Web site in San Antonio, Texas, reporting a farmer's lawsuit against Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Waco, Texas, claiming that he contracted the flesh-eating bacteria after ingrown-toenail surgery).

-- A well-to-do couple (the husband owns a surveying company) were convicted in Manchester (England) Crown Court in October of creating an elaborate scheme to avoid two camera-detected speeding tickets and were fined the equivalent of about $20,000, almost 200 times the cost of the tickets. Stewart and Cathryn Bromley had offered an alibi, explaining that the driver of their car was a (fictitious) Bulgarian friend, and Cathryn made up a postcard "from" the man "to" the Bromleys that incriminated him, and then actually traveled 1,400 miles to Bulgaria to mail it with an authentic postmark.

-- More Schemes: (1) Robert and Viki Warren were sentenced to six and five years in prison, respectively, in September in Charlotte, N.C., for fraudulently collecting more than $9 million in federal crop insurance payouts by having their employees saturate a tomato field with ice cubes and then beat the plants to make them appear weather-damaged. (2) Britain's Ann Summers lingerie store chain said in October that it has begun to install customer-activated peepholes in changing rooms so that women could show off for their companions (some of whom previously regarded accompanying a woman shopping for clothes as boring).

Archie W. Roth, 68, was indicted for murder in Yorktown, Va., in May for killing his wife; he said he was angry because the couple had been living in the home for "several years" but still hadn't unpacked. And Mark Raggiunti, 42, of Sharpsburg, Pa., pleaded guilty in July to killing his father after the father (who was blind) had yelled at him for leaving a light on. And Christopher Offord, 30, was sentenced to death in August in Panama City, Fla., for killing his wife because she had been nagging him to cuddle after they had sex, contrary to his desire to watch sports on TV.

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