SOUNDS LIKE A PRETTY SEVERE CALCIUM AND IRON DEFICIENCY

In Lamar, Mo., a pre-trial hearing took place in February on Joyce Lehr's lawsuit against the county for injuries suffered in a 1993 fall in the icy, unplowed parking lot of the local high school. The Carthage Press reported that Lehr claimed injuries to nearly every single part of her body. According to her petition: "All the bones, organs, muscles, tendons, tissues, nerves, veins, arteries, ligaments ... discs, cartilages, and the joints of her body were fractured, broken, ruptured, punctured, compressed, dislocated, separated, bruised, contused, narrowed, abrased, lacerated, burned, cut, torn, wrenched, swollen, strained, sprained, inflamed and infected."

-- In January in Fremont, Calif., a carjacker described as 5-foot-8, about 170 pounds, yanked Cecilia Laus, 54, out of her car and drove off, leaving the woman shaken and also bewildered, since the car in question was a 1976 AMC Pacer.

-- Willie King, 37, was arrested moments after he had allegedly mugged a 94-year-old woman in a housecoat just outside her front door in New York's Greenwich Village in July. The woman is the mother of Vincent "Chin" Gigante, the reputed godfather of the Genovese crime family. (At press time, amazingly, King is still alive.)

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported on the growing fetish surrounding the act of smoking. As examples: (1) An erotic smoking video from an Oklahoma City firm, CoherentLight, described by the Journal: "The scene opens with a young blonde (Paula), dressed in a shimmering strapless gown and a veiled black hat, lighting her cigarette from a nearby candle. She takes numerous long drags." (2) A smokers' newsletter, with film reviews: Of the above video, it wrote, "(Paula) is a fabulous smoker." Another review, of the Hollywood movie "Mad Love": "Drew Barrymore smokes throughout; there are many deep inhales, although the exhales aren't great." (3) The fetish magazine Leg Show has begun to include pictorials of women smoking.

Houston police arrested a 46-year-old man in February and charged him with molesting his 12-year-old granddaughter. Police officers and social workers suspect that the man is not only the father of the girl's mother but of the girl, too, and, noting that the granddaughter is five months' pregnant, also suspect he is the father of what would be his own great-granddaughter. (The suspect denied all accusations.)

Several sexual service-providers ran for public office in 1996, but none was elected. Ex-prostitute Jessi Winchester, 53, lost her race for Congress from Nevada's 2nd District. Mistress Madison, 32, a San Diego dominatrix who operates the Slave Cave and runs a phone-sex service, ran unsuccessfully for Congress under the banner of Ross Perot's Reform Party. And Margo St. James finished barely out of the running in the balloting for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Acting on the complaint of a 59-year-old female motorist in Bloomington, Minn., in January, police stopped a driver whom she said had pulled alongside her on the highway on a bitterly cold morning and flashed her by pressing a nude photograph of himself against his window.

-- The village council of Bruntingthorpe, England, began consideration in February of one member's elaborate plan to reduce the amount of dog poop in the town of 200 people (and 30 dogs): The village would DNA-test the dogs and keep the results on file for the purpose of matching the DNA to that in any unscooped dog poop lying around the village, so as to punish the appropriate owners.

-- In March an 18-year-old dockworker at Roadway Express in Dallas was arrested at a local Western Union and charged with forgery after improperly trying to cash a check made out to his employer. The man produced a photo ID that gave his name as Mr. "Roadway V. Express." After questioning him, the Western Union manager said, "OK, Mr. Express, I'll be right back (with the money)" and then called police.

-- In April the Iowa Supreme Court turned down inmate Kirk Livingood's attempt to sue Phillip Negrete based on the state's domestic abuse law. Negrete is Livingood's cellmate and, according to Livingood, beats and torments him.

-- In July, Jason Harte pleaded guilty to smashing glass doors in a New York City building with a slingshot. He is a principal in the Adam Glass Co. of Yonkers, N.Y., and is suspected by police of breaking hundreds of other windows in order to elicit business.

-- In a federal court in Boston in July, Phillip W. Cappella, 34, was sentenced to two years' probation for tax fraud. After winning the Massachusetts Megabucks lottery, Cappella attempted to evade income tax on the first of his $135,000 annual payments by falsely claiming gambling losses to offset the income. When faced with an IRS audit, Cappella paid a lottery-ticket collector $500 to rent him a pickup-truck-load of 100,000 old, losing tickets that he tried to pass off as his own.

-- The Floyd County (Ky.) coroner complained in February that ambulance drivers were taking obviously dead people to the hospital just so they could bill the county for the rides. One man was rushed to the hospital even though his suicide shotgun blast was so powerful that it blew both eyeballs out of their sockets. Another had been dead so long that rigor mortis had commenced, leaving the body bent at the waist so that it would not fit on a stretcher, but the driver said he thought he felt a pulse.

According to a Seattle Times feature in March, Robert Shields, 77, of Dayton, Wash., is the author of perhaps the longest personal diary in history -- nearly 38 million words on paper stored in 81 cardboard boxes -- covering his last 24 years in five-minute segments. Example: July 25, 1993, 7 a.m.: "I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin." 7:05 a.m.: "Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used 5 sheets of paper."

The hog-farming Fox family of Mahaska County, Iowa, which for 10 years has been selling vials of boar semen for artificially inseminating sows, expanded its operation in January to include a drive-through window for farmers in a hurry. Said Genette Fox, of the playfulness of customers, "'(O)rder of semen and fries' -- I've heard that a million times."

Western Kentucky University student Joe Schmidt, asked by the school newspaper whether Magic Johnson's return to pro basketball in February would put other players at risk: "It would be an honor to get HIV from playing Magic Johnson on an NBA court. He's one of the greats."

In March, two convicted rapists, Allan Wayne McLaurin and Darron Bennalford Anderson, were resentenced by a jury in Tulsa, Okla., after an appeals court said their original sentences totaling 6,475 years were based on faulty jury instructions. This time, the jury said the crimes were worth an additional 260 centuries in prison -- a total of 21,250 years for McLaurin and 11,250 for Anderson.

In January, Steven Hicks, 38, and Diana Hicks, 35, were sentenced to six months in jail in Cape May, N.J., for child abandonment. While their unruly son, Christopher, 13, was hospitalized, the couple had surreptitiously packed up and moved to Inglewood, Calif.

In March, Palestinian terrorist Youssef Magied al-Molqi, who was convicted in Italy in 1986 for the Achille Lauro hijacking and the murder of an American passenger, was given a 12-day leave for good behavior and failed to return. In August, Germano Maccari, freshly convicted of the 1978 murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, was released from jail pending his appeal, as is customary under Italian law. In September, Italy's highest appeals court ruled that "occasional episodes of wife-beating," "interspersed with moments of (marital) harmony," did not amount to illegal domestic violence, which it said requires "systematic and deliberate" overpowering.

Almost 600 delegates from 17 countries attended the first World Conference on Auto-Urine (i.e. your own) Therapy held in Goa, India, in February. Adherents of the 5,000-year-old therapy claim that urine's hormones, enzymes, vitamins and minerals are so rich that urine can cure illnesses such as tuberculosis and cancer.

Featured at the Donn Roll Contemporary Museum in Sarasota, Fla., in May and June was Charon Luebbers' Menstrual Hut, a 6-by-6-by-5-foot isolation booth to symbolize the loneliness that society has forced upon menstruating women. Accompanying it were 28 canvasses created by Luebbers' pressing her face into whatever discharge was present in each of the 28 days of her cycle one month, to show the contrast.

Two Fremont, Calif., men obtained a patent early in the year for a golf club that will fire a ball up to 250 yards by an explosive charge in the club head. (The club is not expected to be approved for tournament play.) And in April, a Houston man obtained a patent for a cup that goes inside a golf hole and periscopes up after the ball goes in so that the golfer does not have to bend down to retrieve it.

Criminal suspects in 1996 seemed to be better organized than previous years' perps, judging from the numerous "to-do" lists that police are discovering. For example, two escapees from Rutland, Vt., were captured in May with a list to guide them in an imminent robbery. A 15-year-old boy was indicted for murder in Dallas in May, and evidence against him was a list that included the reminder to kill the victim. In September, former Navy Ensign Dana R. Collins, 35, was convicted of the murder of a colleague after police found a list that included "Take him out," "Cut him up/take head/fingers and toes," "Put him in 2 bags," and "Drive body to Pennsylvania. Keep head and fingers and toes -- scatter on way back." Charinassa Fairley was charged in July with killing her husband in Baton Rouge, La., after police found a step-by-step checklist: "Make a prank call to him; offer food and love; make him take a bath with you. Put on gloves" and "Make love like never before for the last time. Lay down after he falls asleep. Pop him."

In April, Nevada County (Calif.) judicial candidate Robert Litchfield, attempting to rectify his low standing among local lawyers, offered to kneel and wash the feet of any lawyer in the county as a gesture of his desire to serve them. Said Litchfield, "What I (offered) was an act of faith, and I don't think that's something a news reporter can understand." At the scheduled washing, Litchfield showed up with a basin and towel, but no lawyer came forth.

In May, Stanford University won the right, over the University of California at Berkeley, to house the literary legacy of the late Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning writer William Saroyan, apparently because it also agreed to take custody of Saroyan's nonliterary property, which included hundreds of boxes of rocks, matchbook covers, old newspapers (numbering in the thousands), labels peeled off cans, and a plastic bag filled with about 10,000 rubber bands.

In July in Dadeville, Ala., Mr. Gabel Taylor, 38, who had just prevailed in an informal Bible-quoting contest, was shot to death by the loser.

An increasing number of vicious criminals with the middle name of Wayne made the news in 1996. For example, Conan Wayne Hale, 20, a triple-homicide suspect who allegedly confessed to a priest in Portland, Ore., was embroiled in a constitutional court fight to have the confession ruled inadmissible. Escaped murderer Michael Wayne Thompson was recaptured in July near Farmersburg, Ind. A few days later, Danny Wayne Owens, 38, was arrested in Birmingham, Ala., for allegedly murdering a neighbor. In November, Georgia executed Ellis Wayne Felker for the 1981 murder of a college student. Also in November, the suspected rapist of a 12-year-old girl in Petaluma, Calif. (two miles from where Polly Klaas was abducted in 1993), Larry Wayne Cole, apparently died of natural causes while on the lam. And in October, the Oregon Parole Board turned down the latest bid by Richard Wayne Godwin, serving a life sentence for a 1979 rape and murder.

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 pinpoint-sized lens protruding from the toe of his shoe, connected by wires to a camera hidden in his waist pouch.

In May, Quebec legislator Andre Boulerice denounced voter fraud during a committee meeting, citing one particular example of bogus names registered to vote in Old Montreal. "I know there are famous people in my (district)," said Boulerice, "but I doubt 'Omar Sharif' would be voting (here)," especially since, according to voter records, he shares an apartment with "Martina Navratilova." The next day, neighbors of the couple reported, Sharif, son of the actor, is indeed married to a stockbroker named Martina Navratilova.

The London insurance brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson announced in August it would begin to offer policies to cover people worried about alien abduction. A premium of about $155 a year would pay about $160,000 to an abductee (provided the abductor was not from Earth) and double that if the insured is impregnated during the abduction. Since alien powers are unknown, men can purchase the impregnation rider, also. Said Goodfellow director Simon Burgess, "I personally would not buy (this) policy."

Postal worker Douglas C. Yee, 50, was indicted in February in San Mateo, Calif., for pulling off bulk-mail scams totaling $800,000. Found in Yee's garbage were notes he had written to God expressing gratitude for His continued help in evading police. Read one, "Lord, I am having a difficult time myself seeing you as a God who hides crime, yet your Word says that it's your privilege (or glory) to do just that."

(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. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- Ontario College of Art student Jubal Brown told the Associated Press in November that it was he who vomited publicly on two masterpieces this year and that he plans a third episode. At the Art Gallery of Ontario in May, he regurgitated red food coloring on a Raoul Dufy work, and at New York City's Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 2, he threw up in blue on a Piet Modrian painting. His third work will be in yellow. His goal, he said, is "to liberate individuals and living creatures from [art's] banal, oppressive representation."

-- Roberto Alomarism in the News: In September, East Pittsburgh, Pa., school custodian Anthony DePaulo spit on the car of a city councilman he did not like; in October, Robert Cossia in Belleville, Ill., spit on the truck of Gregory Brown (and allegedly on Brown himself), after a dispute over a bounced check; in November, British doctors reported in The Lancet that meningitis was passed to a man when another spit in his face; and also in November, according to U.S. News & World Report, the National Spit Tobacco Education Program happily reported that televised tobacco chewing and spitting during the 1996 World Series was down 80 percent from the average over the last 10 years.

-- In August, the parents of Alexandra Taylor, 5, received an undisclosed settlement from Continental Airlines because the airline permitted another customer to bring a 6-foot-long python into the cabin of a 1994 flight, which allegedly caused Alexandra to have severe nightmares. The snake's owner had brought along her companion as a "support snake" prescribed by her therapist to help her overcome the trauma of being sexually harassed by a professor.

-- In June, a federal magistrate ordered physician Susan J. Powers to pay the government $292,000 for breaking her contract to provide medical care to underserved rural areas in exchange for the government's having funded her medical education. Powers tried to get out of the contract by claiming that she could not leave her "support network" of friends in the San Francisco Bay area, or she would become despondent and possibly suicidal.

-- The Minnesota Civil Liberties Union was successful in gaining the right to vote in the November elections for three diagnosed "sexual psychopaths" confined by law to a hospital in St. Peter but who have no pending criminal sentences. One was escorted to a polling place, but the other two were not permitted out and had their ballots brought to the hospital by an election monitor.

-- Charles Murphy, who is bald-headed, filed a lawsuit in August against Lisa Aune, the manager of the federal building in Eugene, Ore., after he was dismissed as security officer. He claims Aune fired him for violating a neat-grooming rule merely because he has too much chest hair, which bulges out in the summertime when rules permit him to wear open-necked shirts.

-- After four months of increasingly violent attacks on them by vigilantes, South African criminal gangs began lobbying for police protection in November. More than a thousand gangsters stood outside the gates of Parliament in Cape Town, begging for "justice" and "peace" in the wake of news that one gang leader was shot 72 times by a vigilante and his body set on fire. The gang members claim they are basically good people and that their own murdering, thievery and drug-dealing were merely attempts to cope with apartheid.

-- In November, a federal appeals court turned down Albert Johnson's lawsuit against the Cook County (Ill.) Jail to reassign female guards away from the showers and toilet areas, saying their presence was "humiliating" to his religious belief in "Christian modesty." A dissenting opinion agreed with Johnson that permitting the monitoring by females was "cruel and unusual" punishment.

-- British doctors, writing in The Lancet in November, announced they were stumped and asked for help worldwide in diagnosing a man's infected hand that has for five years carried an incredibly putrid odor. A finger was nicked while the man was dressing chicken carcasses, with the cut yielding an "overpowering" odor that is "almost intolerable" in a closed examination room.

-- China's Xinhua news agency reported in September that Ms. Lui Yuxue, 16, had successfully undergone tongue-reduction surgery to snip off several inches' worth that extended outside her mouth.

-- German physicians from Eberhard-Karls University in Tubingen reported in a November New England Journal of Medicine that a 53-year-old surgeon accidentally transplanted a patient's malignant tumor cells into his own hand when he nicked it during surgery on the patient.

-- In an October issue of The Lancet, pediatrician Andrea Scaramuzza and his colleagues at the University of Pavia in Italy reported that boys aged 10 to 14 who train intensely in soccer tend to have smaller testicles and less blood circulation to their testes than their less-athletic peers.

Knoxville, Tenn., dentist Stephen Cobble, who made News of the Weird a year ago when patients and former employees described alleged unorthodox treatments (such as transferring C-section scar tissue to treat a jaw disorder and prescribing a diet of beef, salt, and at least two eggs and a quarter pound of butter daily), had his license revoked in November by the state Board of Dentistry after protracted hearings over whether his unconventional anesthesia methodology might have contributed to a patient's death. And retiring U.S. Rep. Wes Cooley of Oregon, who made News of the Weird in March 1996 over accusations of serial lying, was indicted in December for falsely claiming on his official state voter's guide biography that he had fought in Korea during the Korean War. Cooley apparently was done in when he offered as verification the name of his Army supervisor who he thought was dead but who turned up alive and revealed that Cooley spent the war in Georgia.

At least 25 religious pilgrims drowned in November when an overcrowded ship sank in the Acara River in northern Brazil; the boat was headed to the town of Acara to celebrate the Virgin of Nazareth. And in August, at least 113 Hindu pilgrims, nude and smeared with ash, died in a snowstorm in the Himalayas as they were en route to worship a stalagmite believed to be the phallus of the god Shiva.

(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. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- In October, Miriam Flores, serving six years for robbery in Mexico City, was selected Miss Mexico Jailhouse in a pageant that featured 14 of the city's foxiest female inmates. A week later, Ms. Pham Ngoc Tam won first place in a nationwide beauty contest of female jail guards held near Hanoi, Vietnam. (A press report said Pham is "probably best described as 'handsome.'")

-- In October, Richard Evans, a member of the Australian Parliament, proposed that the country eliminate all cats within 25 years. Evans offered evidence that cats have killed off nine native species of wildlife and proposed that a fatal virus to be released on feral cats. He said also that domestic cats should be neutered until they die out and that in the interim, cat curfews and a registry should be put in place.

-- Construction worker Sidney de Queiroz was hospitalized in Sorocaba, Brazil, in October when a barroom fight left a 5-inch-long knife blade partway inside his brain after he was stabbed close to his right eye. The blade remained in his head for a week while doctors pondered how to get it out without causing more damage. Finally, in nine hours of surgery on Nov. 2, the knife was removed.

-- In Huntsville, Ala., in November, Justin Lee McKinney, 24, whose truck rammed a chain-link fence, was impaled on a 3-inch-wide, 20-foot-long steel pipe, which went completely through his chest. Surgeons successfully removed it, but, said Dr. Russ Jaicks, "If anyone (at the accident site) had pulled that pipe out, he would've died (of blood loss)."

-- In November, a Calgary, Alberta, man collapsed and fell face-first in his office while brushing his teeth. The bristles end of the toothbrush penetrated about an inch into his eye socket below the eyeball, but ophthalmologist Rob Mitchell said the man would suffer no permanent injury.

-- In July, in Denver, a machine that packs explosive devices into car air-bag detonators blew up in the face of Nicolas Villarruel, 29, leaving one explosive lodged in his nose, sending him to the hospital. The device was removed by surgeons in lead-lined gowns and with Villarruel's head under water because the explosive is activated by air.

-- In July, Jesse James Taylor, 32, drove himself to the Pikeville, (Ky.) Methodist Hospital emergency room with a meat cleaver stuck in his head and part of a butcher knife in his back, as the result of a fight with his girlfriend's 16-year-old son over rent money. After surgery, he was released the following day.

-- Paul Stiller, 47, was hospitalized in Andover Township, N.J., in September, and his wife, Bonnie, was also injured, by a quarter-stick of dynamite that blew up in their car. While driving around at 2 a.m., the bored couple lit the dynamite and tried to toss it out the window to see what would happen, but they apparently failed to notice that the window was closed.

-- Among the latest highway truck spills: a load of frozen french fries on I-70 in Columbia, Mo., in July; a pickup truck full of ricotta cheese in Providence, R.I., in July; 21 tons of large plates of glass in Davenport, Iowa, in July; 30,000 cans of Milwaukee's Best beer in Belpre, Ohio, in August; 12,000 roofing nails (that punctured tires of about 50 cars) in Baton Rouge, La., in September; and 103,000 eggs on Highway 92 near Winterset, Iowa, in July.

-- Jimmy "Jim Dog" Williams Jr. was arrested in New Haven, Conn., in October and charged with taking the life of a 19-year-old man in a brawl. Police were drawn to Williams when they found a set of gold-plated teeth inscribed "Jim Dog" at the scene of the fight.

-- To assure that she would not be disqualified in last summer's Olympic Games, Brazil's female heavyweight judo champion Edinanci Fernandes da Silva, 19, underwent surgery in May to remove partially formed testicles that were responsible for her abnormally high levels of testosterone. "I'm a normal woman," said da Silva.

-- A company called Polo International, from Switzerland, announced in October that it would introduce "snow polo" to the U.S. on Dec. 28, in Aspen, Colo. It is regular polo, played on a frozen lake, on horses outfitted with shoes with 2-inch spikes.

Perhaps America's most dysfunctional family, the Sextons of Ohio and Florida, made News of the Weird in May 1994, when sex abuse charges were filed against Mom Estella in Canton, Ohio, alleging that she sexually assaulted one or more of her kids, either acting alone or with husband, Eddie, who is now on death row in Florida. Son Jamie Sexton, 20, was charged in November 1996 with aggravated murder in Canton after allegedly setting a fire to kill a former friend. The month before, Jamie had testified against Estella, helping to convict her on those 13 sex-abuse counts. Eddie is still on death row, convicted of killing a son-in-law who knew that Eddie had smothered the man's baby for excessive crying. (However, the paternity of the deceased baby is in dispute, in that one or more of the Sexton kids say that their sister's baby was actually fathered either by Eddie or by one of the kids.)

Benjamin Arley Ortega suffocated in October in Napa, Calif., when his head got stuck between a wall and the ceiling of a storage shed he was burglarizing. And Rafael Miettunen drowned near Cleveland, Tenn., in April as he was making a getaway on a Jet-Ski he had stolen. And Rex C. Stark, 36, drowned in a pond near New Castle, Ky., in November where he had sought refuge from a state trooper, who had chased him after a car accident.

(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. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)