-- Hiding Place of Choice: In September in Mound Bayou, Miss., Robert L. Johnson, 42, was captured after a three-hour foot chase during which he managed to elude police while rolling a spare tire containing about 6 pounds of marijuana. Said police chief Richard Crowe, "That's the fastest runner I've ever seen, of somebody rolling a tire." And back in February, in Kanab, Utah, Germain Berrelleza, 18, was arrested for marijuana possession hours after his car broke down. He aroused the suspicion of the tow-truck operator when he insisted on taking the spare tire out of the car before it was towed and carrying it with him to a nearby motel.
-- Exotic dancer Pamela Harrison complained in October that she was wrongfully fired by the Kat Tales club in Stuart, Fla., because of a disability. Harrison said that fellow dancers had complained of a health hazard because surgery forces Harrison to wear an ostomy bag tucked into her G-string, into which body waste can flow during her performance. An expert cited by the Associated Press said there is no health hazard to others.
-- In August, Reuters news service reported that Brian Howson, 51, of Perth, Australia, repaired his single-engine plane's landing gear, in flight, while dangling out the door at 4,000 feet with three passengers holding his legs.
-- In September, Michael Potkul, 33, won a $400,000 malpractice award against surgeon Dominic A. Brandy in Pittsburgh. Brandy had convinced Potkul that he could give him a nearly full head of hair by surgically (in six operations) grabbing the hairy back of his scalp and stretching it over the thin-haired top of his head. Potkul suffered such pain and depression by the fifth operation that he attempted suicide.
-- Mean Business: In July, in Cape Town, South Africa, four cab drivers were killed and several customers wounded as gunfire erupted again in a continuing war over competition among taxi companies. And in September in Los Angeles, police said that four of six recently missing boarding house residents had actually been kidnapped by a rival boarding house; stealing boarders apparently is an increasingly common competitive tactic to land other houses' customers in order to get access to their government checks.
-- In July in Japan, a 4-year-old boy drowned while frolicking unattended as his mother played Pachinko, a pinball/slot-machine craze sweeping the country. More than two dozen toddler deaths have been attributed to parents' obsession with the game. Also in July, The New York Times reported that the Russian government is cracking down on various gambling manias, including "one purely Russian refinement -- virtual-reality cockroach races," in which images of the insects scurry competitively across video screens.
-- The Providence Journal-Bulletin reported in August on the environmental-regulation troubles of Manuel and Ana Martins of Swansea, R.I. Because their house is built on fill dirt in a wetlands, their septic tank cannot be installed very deep. In fact, it is largely above ground, covering their front yard in a mound of dirt 30 feet by 50 feet, rising 5 feet high, almost concealing the house from passersby.
-- In July, researchers at Utah State University and other schools announced that they had solved the problem of how to mate sheep to produce the mutation known in the animal genetics community as "beautiful buttocks," which means the lamb will have about 30 percent more meat. Answer: The trait will be passed on only if the ram has the gene and the ewe does not.
-- The parents of 4-year-old Sarah Engstrand filed a $1.2 million lawsuit in New York City in September against the girl's grandparents because the elder couple's Akita dog, Becky Bear, bit and deeply scarred Sarah's nose and cheek during the girl's birthday party in 1994. The grandparents are heartsick at being sued by their own son, who not surprisingly is a lawyer, as is his wife.
-- In May, Maria da Conceicao Dos Reis, 66, married British citizen David Ian Harrad, 38, in Rio de Janeiro. She agreed to the marriage only to help her son Toni, who is Harrad's lover and who would lose Harrad to deportation unless Harrad got married.
-- Quality Time: In July, a 33-year-old woman in Stone Mountain, Ga., was arrested and charged with hitting her 15-year-old son on the wrists with a meat cleaver after he broke the TV remote control unit. And in July, police in Newark, N.J., said a woman pushed her 9-year-old daughter through a department store window after learning that the girl had left the family's $900 on a city bus. And in July, police in Tunbridge Wells, England, arrested a couple in their 20s who were lying on the ground outside a sports shop having sex in the middle of the day, with the woman using one of their two kids as a pillow for her head.
-- The Jakarta (Indonesia) Post reported in August that a Sumatran woman and her two grown children ganged up on a neighbor, who had allegedly been spreading rumors of her 21-year-old daughter's nonvirgin status, with all three viciously biting the neighbor "all over her body."
Apparently little has been done about the alarming report in News of the Weird in 1988 that an ingredient in barnacle-resisting boat paint was causing spontaneous sex changes in a snail called the dog whelk. A British biologist reported then that female dog whelks were developing sperm ducts and growing penises "of alarming lengths." A Canadian government biologist said in September 1996 that similar findings were reported in the country's Atlantic provinces. In Halifax (Nova Scotia) Harbor, his team found 50 female dog whelks with penises.
Recent Reasons for Killing People: Wouldn't stop playing the piano (a Highland Park, Ill., boy allegedly chased his father out of the house, into the street, and stabbed him to death); upset about being scolded for high America Online bills (a California, Mo., boy shot his mother to death and then himself); dispute over method for paying off a water bill (a Kamloops, British Columbia, man allegedly strangled his wife of 28 years).
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com.)