-- After marathon partisan sessions in March, the Alabama senate reached agreement to permit Lt. Gov. Steve Windom to retain his traditional presiding powers. However, during the fierce debates, Windom was forced to remain continually at the presiding officer's podium, and things got so tense on March 28 that he had to urinate into a pitcher because opponents would have won votes if he had taken a restroom break. Afterward, the director of the state archives asked for the pitcher, but Windom said it had been discarded.
-- Berkeley, Calif., Councilman Kriss Worthington announced in April that he would propose that the City Council pass a reparations package to heal sociopolitical wounds dating back to the 1960s. Included were proposals for official apologies to anti-Vietnam war protesters and to Patricia Hearst Shaw, who was kidnapped by (and later joined) the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. Worthington also proposed that the city erect a statue of Hearst Shaw in her notorious gun-toting pose and declare the abduction house in Worthington's district a historic site.
In January, a pair of popular dolls was introduced in Japan from the firm Mataro, consisting of a female with her hands out asking for a loan and a male banker in a business suit rejecting her. And in Mompos, Colombia, in March, local teachers stole about 50 Easter figurines from a church and vowed not to return them until the city issued their six-months-overdue paychecks. And Nike announced in March to great fanfare that it was raising the minimum wage for its Indonesian workers, to about $37 per month, which in the U.S. buys one-fourth of a pair of Air Jordans.
-- Unitel Corp. announced in March it was relocating its 100-job telemarketing office from small-town Frostburg, Md., to Florida. Unitel said Frostburg workers' telephone manner is too polite for the telemarketing business.
-- According to a February Science News profile of University of South Florida pollution microbiologist Joan B. Rose, her career is devoted to flushing fecal-germlike "phages" down toilets and then sending monitoring crews into local waterways to track down where they end up. She has found, for example, that some bacteria flushed into septic tanks can seep into nearby canals within 11 hours.
-- Another germ ranger is University of Arizona environmental microbiologist Charles Gerba, whose specialty, according to a February New York Times article, is discovering germ patterns in kitchens, bathrooms and laundries. In random home visits, Gerba found that 25 percent of washing machines are contaminated with fecal matter and that hepatitis A and salmonella survive even a very hot dryer and remain on clothes. He is noted for developing the "commodograph," a visual display of where droplets of water land after they are sprayed into the air when a toilet is flushed. (Hint: Gerba keeps his toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.)
-- Janice Peck, 50, filed a lawsuit last year in Salt Lake City against the state Division of Wildlife for alienation of affection. The agency had assigned Janice's then-husband, Randal, to partner up with agent Jodi Becker, now 33, as a married, outdoor couple in order to infiltrate a poaching operation. Apparently, the couple was so good at portraying a couple that Randal divorced Janice after 23 years' marriage and married Becker. Randal and Jodi said they initially slept together in their government-supplied trailer only to give their relationship greater authenticity.
-- News of the Weird reported in 1994 on a Nassau County, N.Y., cell block bragging contest and fight over pay-telephone privileges between notorious murderers Colin Ferguson (race-motivated, commuter-train killer) and Joel Rifkin (serial prostitute killer). Better spirited, according to news reports in March 1999, are the twice-a-week bull sessions at the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colo., of bombers Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City), Ramzi Yousef (World Trade Center) and Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber). Said one former prosecutor, "This is the oddest kaffeeklatsch in the history of Western civilization."
-- The late Bennie Casson's unsuccessful lawsuit against a Sauget, Ill., stripper's club for neck injuries caused by a dancer's swinging her breasts at him was all over the news in 1997. In February 1999, Mark Kent, 28, filed assault charges against the Kappa Kabana club, Kappa, Ill., after a dancer tried to wrap her legs around his neck while holding onto a pole on stage, causing Kent to fall off a bar stool and hit his head and elbow.
-- News of the Weird reported in 1993 that a Santa Monica, Calif., cafe was selling $130/pound Kopi Luwak coffee, produced from choice beans that have been run through the digestive tract of a Sumatran marsupial before being processed for sale. A March 1999 Wall Street Journal story from Vietnam reported on a similarly made "caphe cut chon" (fox dung coffee), employing a mongoose-related civet cat, whose taste in finding the finest coffee beans in a field is said to be uncanny. (The coffee is in shorter supply lately because Vietnamese diners are finding the civet cat, itself, tasty.)
-- News of the Weird has reported several times on capital punishment in China for crimes somewhat less serious than murder. Among the latest: Gao Yunliao, executed in January in Henan province, for stealing a statue. Executive Tang Mihong and his employee Zhao Jian, executed in December in Beijing, for smuggling computers. And Jie Hua Huang, 34, granted asylum in Canada in November because he faced a certain death penalty in China for tax fraud.
-- Stories demonstrating different smell tolerances have once again been in the news. In February, a 52-year-old woman in Hong Kong gave in to the smell after a week and turned her dead husband's body over to authorities; she had held on to the body in the hope that he would revive. And in January, authorities in Thunder Bay, Ontario, recovered the body of an 85-year-old man, dead for four years, which had to be extricated from a house that one officer called "a tremendous biological soup of garbage and debris"; the neighbors had noticed a smell a few years ago but did not think it was bad enough to report.
A 22-year-old woman in an automobile collision in Pendleton, Ore., in January was placed in an ambulance, but seconds later a tractor-trailer skidded into it, crushing it and killing the woman. And a 36-year-old man survived a head-on crash into a utility pole in Miami Beach, Fla., in January, and was waiting to be picked up when the pole fell on top of him, killing him. And a 72-year-old man was slightly injured when his car went off the road near Penicton, British Columbia, in December, resting on a ledge; when a rescuer attempted to reach him, the car slipped off and fell 30 feet, killing the man.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)