-- A New York Times report on the first day's rescue operations for TWA Flight 800 in July mentioned a man in an Army uniform who showed up at the crash site command center and helped direct helicopter traffic for about 12 hours before those in charge realized they had no idea who he was. Though authorities agreed that the man had done a fine job, he was escorted from the area. In October, the man, David Williams, pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized practice of a profession and was sentenced to six months in jail. Previously, he had impersonated a physician diagnosing Medicare patients for a private firm and teaching physician seminars, and in both cases, employers were pleased with his work despite the fact that he is not a doctor.

-- In October, Linda Pugach bailed her husband, Burton, 69, out of jail after his arrest for threatening to kill his mistress of five years. Linda and Burton go way back. In 1959, she was blinded in both eyes by a lye attack arranged by Burton after she spurned his marriage proposal. He was released from prison in 1974 and went on a TV-show campaign to win her heart, and a few months later, she married him. Asked by a reporter her reaction to Burton's current paramour, Linda responded, "Did you call Hillary and ask her how she feels?"

-- An Indonesian prison guard, identified only as S.M., on trial in September for helping inmate Eddy Tansil escape, testified that Tansil did give him about $400 but denied it was a bribe. He said he was good at his job as a jailer, and "I only took the money as a tip."

-- A Winnipeg, Manitoba, court ordered accused wife-killer Dean Eric Wride to undergo routine psychiatric tests in September, despite his lawyer's protest that such pre-trial treatment might actually cure him and thus hurt his insanity defense.

-- Ohio University Prof. Dwight Pugh was officially reprimanded in October by his dean for having filled out and submitted his own course evaluations, for six consecutive quarters, as if done by students. (He rated himself very high.) When confronted with the charges, Pugh said his work was all part of an experiment to test the evaluation process.

-- Pro football player Mark Carrier told a Greensboro (N.C.) News Record reporter in September that the presence of evangelist Billy Graham at the Carolina Panthers' stadium during a practice session was inspirational. "Even after we battle on the football field and beat each other's heads in," said Carrier, "we come together and thank God for just being able to do that."

-- The Romanian soccer federation fined the junior team Atletic Bucarest about $16,000 in October for grossly violating rules by walking out of a recent game before it was over. The players, who were losing 16-0 at the time, said the only reason they left was that a group of their fans were screaming that if they gave up two more goals in the final two minutes, the fans would charge onto the field and strip the players naked.

-- According to their lawsuit in Salt Lake City, two U.S. West telephone company technicians admitted they were paid a $70 per diem allowance for more than two years for working away from home when they had never moved and were actually working in the same place they had always worked. Still, when the company discovered its error and cut off the per diem, Charles Mangrum and Alan Montierth filed lawsuits challenging the cutoff and also sued their union for not helping them fight it. In September, a federal judge granted summary judgment for the company.

-- Arrested for murder in central Georgia in 1992 and briefly left unsupervised in a police car, Melissa Leslie Burgeson discussed the crime with her boyfriend, including how they should have done some aspects of the murder differently. A hidden tape recorder captured the discussion, which was introduced against Burgeson in her trial. She challenged its use, claiming that an arrestee has a constitutional expectation of privacy sitting in the back seat of the police car. In September 1996, the Georgia Supreme Court said no. (The boyfriend is on death row for the murder.)

-- Arturo Sanchez, a former Texas transit commission chairman who had been convicted of sexually harassing an employee, filed a counterclaim in June against the employee to recover some of the money she stands to gain in a civil lawsuit making the same sexual harassment charge against the transit agency itself. The San Antonio Express-News reported in June that Sanchez figures the woman needs his testimony about how the agency was lax in its sexual harassment policy, and he figures his help is worth part of her winnings.

-- In a September Washington Post report on a legal, marijuana-serving cafe in the harbor town of Dalfzijl, Netherlands, manager Ernst Gunst boasted of his establishment's rejection of cannabis grown with artificial pesticides or other impurities. "We think that's important. That's why we sell no soft drinks. Coca-Cola is just sugar and water. It's not healthy."

-- According to a Canadian Press report in September, a customer at the Napierville, Quebec, pet shop Animalerie Napierville threatened to report the shop to the government's French-language monitoring office because she was shown a parrot that spoke only English.

-- In April, a 48-year-old woman from Mill Valley, Calif., survived a suicide plunge in her car off of a seaside cliff in Sonoma County. Witnesses said she was traveling 45 mph and fell 350 feet but emerged with only minor injuries, probably because she had neglected to unfasten her seatbelt before hitting the accelerator.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (9) The miscreant funeral home owner who either neglects or mixes up bodies, as the Lanford-Pollard Funeral Home of Spartanburg, S.C., allegedly did in September, dressing one body with another man's suit, glasses and teeth. And (10) the disgruntled consumer who calls the police to report being sold either bogus or very weak illegal drugs, as did Linda Marie Davis, 41, in August in Houston. (Unfortunately for Ms. Davis, it was weak, not bogus, crack cocaine, and she was arrested for possession.)

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere.)

-- 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.)

-- Within two days of each other in August, in the Kansas towns of Lawrence and Dodge City, runaway tourist-attraction stagecoaches crashed. The Lawrence coach veered into a ditch, injuring one man. A horse on the Dodge City coach slipped down on the street, then took off, carrying the coach into a parked car, after which it overturned and bloodied five elderly passengers.

-- Opponents of Thailand's prime minister Banharn Sipla-archa said he lied about his birthday this year when he claimed it was Aug. 19 and not July 20, and they claimed that he changed the date on the advice of an astrologer so he could be a Leo and thus a better leader. And in June, India's new prime minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, said he moved into his official residence a week ahead of schedule because his astrologers said it would be better for him.

-- A Washington Post story in May on marital abuse in central and southern African nations found that among certain ethnic groups, only 3 percent of wives think they should report a beating to the police. Said one social worker, "A lot of men -- and women -- think that beating your wife is something you do if you really care about her." In some groups, said another, if a man's wife dies without his having beaten her, he rehabilitates his manhood by beating the corpse.

-- The New York Times reported in September on Tokyo's trendy "host clubs" which feature young men as servers and dance partners and which cater only to women -- largely middle-aged women who say such clubs are virtually the only places in the country in which they can be treated well and not be expected to wait on men. And the Los Angeles Times reported in August on the success of the long-standing, 370-female Takarazuka Revue, whose most successful production number has its women cross-dressing and portraying the kind of man many Japanese women do not often get to see, according to them: the suave, romantic, affectionate, considerate male.

-- In August, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported on the modernization of the traditional Mongolian meal of boodog, which is goat broiled inside a "bag" (which is merely the carefully cut and tied skin of the goat): The goat is no longer barbecued over an open fire; it is now typically cooked with a blow torch.

-- The Islamic Court that sets rules for the northern half of Mogadishu, Somalia, announced in September that men must have beards, as did the prophet Mohammed. Said the court chairman, "Those who shave like Elvis Presley, Sylvester Stallone, and the U.S. Marines will not go unpunished." Two weeks later, Afghanistan's new ruling Taleban leadership made a similar decree for male government employees.

-- In September, Peggy-Sue Khumalo, 23, the recently-crowned Miss South Africa, said she would soon sacrifice a goat to her ancestors in gratitude for her success. She also said that if she won the Miss World title in India in November, she would step up her spiritual gratitude to slaughter a cow and 10 oxen.

-- By custom in the mountain region of northern Albania, a teen-age daughter whose father passes away may make a lifetime commitment to dress and behave and conduct business as a male so as to assure that her family is not left unprotected by the absence of a man. According to a July Knight-Ridder report, other males in the villages know about the transformation and generally accept the new "men" with full male privileges.

-- The Latest in Pervert Technology: Police in Toronto, Ontario, arrested a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher in September for allegedly videotaping under the skirts of about 30 women via a "shoe cam" pinpoint-sized lens connected by wires to a camera hidden in his waist pouch. And in July, Portland, Ore., police accused Jess Mitchell Townsend, 36, of rigging a "toilet cam" in public ladies' rooms over the last two years with the wide-angle lens barely visible from inside the tank.

-- In August, Tennessee became the latest state to recognize the inadequacy of its anti-perversion statutes when it charged an Eagleville man only with indecent exposure because the state has no law against what police really believe he did, which was to have sexual intercourse with a miniature horse. But on Sept. 30, a previous oversight in Florida was corrected when its first-ever anti-necrophilia law took effect.

-- Physicians writing in the February 1996 issue of the journal Genitourinary Medicine reported having to prescribe surgery for a man with genital pain. The man reluctantly admitted that about 12 years before, during sex play, his wife had inserted a mascara brush into his urethral opening and that the tip of the brush broke off. Doctors found that fibrous tissue had covered the brush piece, trapping it.

-- This year as usual, summertime brought out foot fetishists, including a man described as age 25 and husky, who posed as a national shoe company representative in August and got at least one woman in Parsippany, N.J., to remove her shoe so he could inspect it nasally, and including a Boston high school teacher who was suspended in June for allegedly sucking the toes of a female student after school.

-- For at least the fifth time in News of the Weird's nine years, a girl or young woman has been convicted of dressing as a male for the purpose of improving her chances of dating another girl or young woman. A 17-year-old girl was convicted in Kingsport, Tenn., in September of three counts of sexual assault by fraud against another 17-year-old girl.

-- A 28-year-old expert mountain climber fell to his death near Redding, Calif., in September as he was demonstrating safety techniques to a group of teen-agers. He had severed his main line to demonstrate the security of the second line, but the second line failed. And two racehorses with eight victories between them died at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., in August, when they crashed into each other head-on during a morning workout.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere.)