-- After a trial in Alesund, Norway, in December, a 34-year-old man was sentenced to 12 years in prison for repeatedly molesting seven boys he was baby-sitting. Before now, no child molester in Norway had ever be sentenced to longer than six years, and no one has ever been sentenced to longer than 21 years for any crime.

-- Balaclava Blues: Police in Grand Rapids, Manitoba, in December said a woman, who had chased down a thief who had stolen her group's bingo receipts, ripped off his balaclava and discovered it was her 15-year-old son. And Barry George Paquette, 40, was arrested in November for the robbery of a convenience store in Edmonton, Alberta -- a collar made easier because he was halfway through the robbery before he realized he had forgotten to pull down his balaclava. (He halted the robbery momentarily to pull it down, but the store's surveillance camera had already captured his face clearly.)

-- In October, veteran San Francisco beauty-salon owner Carla Blair opened another one, a full-service salon called "Crossers," catering exclusively to cross-dressing men. Blair said she got the idea when she sensed more and more men were not being taken seriously at women's clothing and cosmetic counters. (She said the big tip-off for her was the number of men who claimed to be looking for something for their wives and habitually said, "She's about my size.")

-- Janet Merel of Deerfield, Ill., recently introduced Diet Dirt (sterilized soil that can be sprinkled over french fries, cake, etc., to make them taste repugnant). Order $10 bags from 1-888-DietDirt.

-- Sherry Dubois and Peggy Freemark recently opened a licebusters business in Barrie, Ontario, to pick through people's hair for $30 per hour, which they say is a bargain because nonprofessionals miss about half of any resident head lice. Lice has become a major problem in school because infested kids sometimes purposely share their hats to pass lice to classmates so they can get a few days off.

-- A December Associated Press dispatch touted the male baldness remedy of cosmetic surgeon Anthony Pignataro of West Seneca, N.Y.: hairpieces with tiny gold screws that snap onto titanium sockets implanted in the top of the skull, which fuse to the bone in about 12 weeks. Pignataro said he has about 100 customers and got his idea from what he said were commonplace (in his profession) snap-on eyes, ears, noses and fingers.

-- The Chicago Tribune reported in October on Woodland Hills, Calif., sculptor Mark Maitre, who for two years has been creating casts of body parts of his clients (many of them Hollywood celebrities) at $1,500 to $4,000 per product, which includes mounting on marble. Actress Marlee Matlin had her breasts cast into a bust for her husband, and another celebrity had the small of his back and his buttocks cast into a fruit bowl.

-- Huntsville, Texas, prison inmate Steven Russell escaped in December when he walked past guards after having colored his prison whites with a green marking pen so they resembled hospital scrubs. He was soon recaptured. However, David A. Neel, 48, serving a life sentence at a prison in Point of the Mountain, Utah, did not even make it out the gate in his December escape attempt because a guard thought something looked funny about the United Parcel Service box into which Neel had had himself sealed.

-- In James City, Va., in September, Robert Pablo Montez, 46, at first showed up at the public assistance office with dark glasses and a white cane, claiming to be blind, but left when a social worker told him he'd need a doctor's certificate. A week later, he returned minus the cane and glasses and soon was arrested when he threatened to blow up a social worker's car if she didn't sign him up.

-- Ronnie Wade Cater, 39, was arrested in Hampton, Va., in October and charged with calling in a bomb threat. According to detectives, he was sitting at a bar, drunk, and had the idea to tell police there was a bomb at another bar, hoping to divert enough officers to that bar so that he might drive home undetected. However, probably because he had been drinking, he lingered on the phone a little too long while talking to the dispatcher, and the call was traced.

-- In St. Paul, Minn., in December, well-to-do dentist Gerald Dick, 58, his wife, Gretchen, 56, and their two adult children were charged with receiving up to $250,000 in stolen luxury consumer goods that they had allegedly "ordered" from a personal shoplifter who was given detailed lists of which upscale goods to procure. (In a refreshing departure from suspects' usual denials, Mrs. Dick was reported to have said to the police, "You caught us red-handed. Now what?")

-- In September, Texas-based Electronic Data Systems (the company founded, and later sold, by Ross Perot) won the contract to collect the unpaid parking tickets for the city of Madrid, Spain. A few weeks later, the city treasurer accused the company of creating as many as 73,000 bogus tickets in order to collect more money on its contract.

Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously in 1989. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina's electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. In March 1989, sitting on a metal toilet in his cell and attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted. On Jan. 1, 1997, Laurence Baker, also a convicted murderer once on death row but later serving a life sentence at the state prison in Pittsburgh, Pa., was electrocuted by his homemade earphones as he watched his small TV while sitting on his metal toilet.

Wilmetta Billington, 68, an inveterate collector of trash, which she stored in her home in Metropolis, Ill., asphyxiated in December when she stumbled and fell into one of her many stacks, causing debris to fall on top of her. So jam-packed was the room that it took authorities 20 minutes to unstack the debris from on top of her body. And British tourist Stephen John Pepperell, 39, lost his balance as he was tossing a melon off a second-floor balcony into a trash can in Nicosia, Cyprus, in October and fell to his death.

(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.)

-- Latest Ear Technology: In November, police in Independence Township, Mich., arrested a 45-year-old man and charged him with peeping into windows at the Clarkston Motor Inn, basing the arrest on the earprints he allegedly left on the windows. And one month later, in Vancouver, Wash., Judge Robert L. Harris ruled that the prosecutor could use an earprint found on the bedroom door of a murder victim in the trial of his suspected killer.

-- Actress Anya Pencheva announced in November a plan to divert her fellow Bulgarians' attention from grim economic problems: She would have a plaster cast made of her breasts, to display in the National Theater in Sofia. Said Pencheva, "It is a pity to focus everything on (budget cuts) when there are such beautiful breasts around."

-- According to a September report in Toronto's Globe and Mail, the University of Toronto's medical school employs actors and other people for $12 to $35 per hour to be practice patients for its students. Bob LeRoy, 45, commands the top pay because he is a rectal-exam patient. Said LeRoy, "I always hope the student with the biggest finger goes first."

-- The Wall Street Journal reported in September that about 100 "laughing clubs" had sprung up in India in the last year based on the philosophy of Dr. Madan Kataria, who says the ancient yoga breathing and laughing exercises can help people shed inhibitions, build self-confidence, stop smoking, alleviate high blood pressure and arthritis, and stop migraine headaches. After conventional stretching, adherents engage in silent laughs, out-loud laughs with their lips closed, and the roaring "Bombay laugh." Dr. Kataria worries only that some day the government might try to tax laughter.

-- Suicide Chic: A September story in London's Sunday Times described Venice, Italy, as a new trendy site for unhappy Europeans' and Americans' suicides, inspired by the movie "Death in Venice." (About 50 people attempted suicide in the past year; all but a half-dozen were unsuccessful, usually because the canals into which they leap are deceptively shallow.) And the San Francisco Examiner reported in September that 11 people in the previous 18 months had rented handguns at local gun ranges and killed themselves on the premises.

-- According to an August dispatch by Britain's Guardian News Service, the family of Chiang Kai-shek (the Chinese ruler who was chased out by the communists, to Taiwan, in 1949 and who died in 1975) is growing weary of the "temporary" storage of his skeleton in Taiwan, where it has been kept in preparation for its triumphant return to the mainland upon the fall of the communist government. According to practitioners of the art of feng-shui, the spirits are upset that the skeleton is kept in a box in the living room of the family estate instead of being buried in China.

-- Students rioting in August at South Korea's Yonsei University apparently found weapons in short supply and used whatever was available. When police finally quashed the protest, the geology department faculty discovered that about 10,000 rare rocks, collected over 30 years and considered irreplaceable, were missing. A few were recovered from the streets, chipped or broken.

-- In September, David Cook of Caledonian University (Glasgow, Scotland) told the British Psychological Society's annual conference that his three-year study shows that politicians have significant behavior patterns in common with criminal psychopaths. Cook said that criminals were relatively easy to analyze but that he did not have as much data as he would like on politicians: "(They) don't like to be studied."

-- In October, Miss Canada International, 20-year-old Danielle House, was removed from further competition after being charged in St. John's, Newfoundland, with punching out her ex-boyfriend's current girlfriend in a bar. Ms. House said she had been in counseling recently for "low self-esteem."

-- In Santa Fe, N.M., Christine Bodman announced in November that a group of massage therapists has formed the Massage Emergency Response Team to minister for free to stressed-out firefighters, police officers and paramedics.

-- Latest Bobbittizations: On the evening of November 17, Ms. Renu Begum, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Ms. Raquel Nair Lucio, in Tiete, Brazil, at about the same hour on the clock (but 10 time zones apart) severed their respective husbands' genitals in jealous rages.

-- In August, a federal judge in Springfield, Mo., dismissed the lawsuit of Jennifer Stocker Jessen, now 24, who had claimed that repressed memories of childhood abuse by her step-grandfather returned to her in 1988. The triggering mechanism, she said, was her hitting an opossum in the road with her car.

In September in East Orange, Vt., Christie's auction house sold almost $2 million worth of automobiles (including 33 Stutz Bearcats) that belonged to eccentrics A.K. Miller, who died at 87 a few years ago, and his wife, Imogene, who died in 1996. The couple left millions more in gold and silver and other valuables but lived like paupers, sometimes eating dog food or bread made of flour they had swept off the floor, sometimes shopping at yard sales, sometimes dressing in rags. As treasurer of his church, Mr. Miller had once refused to accept a small increase in electricity rates and converted the entire church to kerosene lamps. The Millers paid property taxes but no other ones, and the federal and state governments are now claiming $8.2 million.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (13) The gun expert who accidentally shoots himself while demonstrating safety techniques, as did Constable Randy Youngman, who took a shotgun blast in the leg while teaching a safety class in Medicine Hat, Alberta, in December. And (14) the periodic warnings about global warming caused by excessive methane production by flatulent livestock, as was announced in a European Commission strategy paper released in November in Brussels.

(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.)

-- On Dec. 5, for the 17th consecutive year, hundreds of Thai men underwent free vasectomies to honor King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 69, on his birthday. The day-long festivities included free food and drink and a condom-inflating championship. The king has been praised by family-planning organizations for cutting Thailand's population growth rate by two-thirds over the last 25 years.

-- The Sanctity of Heterosexual Marriage: In September, Painesville, Ohio, judge Fred V. Skok issued a marriage license to Paul Smith and Debi Easterly, even though he was aware that Paul describes himself as a lesbian, usually dresses in women's clothes, and is on a three-year regimen toward a complete gender change. Judge Skok, mindful that he could not under Ohio law approve a female-female marriage, merely required a doctor's certificate that Paul currently still has male sex organs.

-- In the Tasmanian Supreme Court in November, Martin Bryant pleaded guilty to the April murders of 35 people at a tourist attraction in Port Arthur, Australia, but he couldn't stop laughing. Wrote the Associated Press, "Bryant laughed so much he had trouble saying the word 'guilty' and had to be hushed by his own lawyer." And convicted child molester Francis Robinson, 76, at a September bail hearing on a charge of sexual abuse of an infant in Markham, Ill., had to be admonished by the judge because he chuckled while prosecutors described how Robinson allegedly fondled the girl.

-- In October, a court in Kerrville, Texas, granted Darlie Router's request (she's on trial for the Susan Smith-like murder of her two small children) to have her hair done in jail at taxpayer expense. Router had convinced the judge that if she arrived for her trial with dark roots, the jurors might infer that the reason she hadn't taken care of her hair was because she is locked up, and thus they might not give her the presumption of innocence.

-- At an October retrial in Leeds, England, jurors took about an hour to acquit police officer Andrew Whitfield, 30, of stealing a calculator worth about $4. The cost of the trial, plus the original mistrial, plus keeping Whitfield on paid suspension for 14 months as required by law, was about $158,000.

-- In September, Barbara Monsky filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in Danbury, Conn., against local Superior Court Judge Howard J. Moraghan for permitting his dog to roam the courthouse, especially since Moraghan should know that the dog habitually sticks his snout under women's skirts and allegedly did so to Monsky. Monsky's attorney, Nancy Burton, said the dog had sniffed her, also. Burton analogized to the traditional "one free bite" rule for determining whether a dog is legally "vicious," arguing that Moraghan long ago knew that the dog had had his one free sniff.

-- Rodney L. Turner, 55, called his office on Oct. 2 in Kansas City, Kan., and said he wouldn't make it to work that day as a result of his 2 a.m. arrest for DUI that resulted in his detention until 5 a.m. Turner, a lawyer, is a part-time municipal judge and on Oct. 2 had been scheduled to hear a full day's docket of DUI cases.

-- At the trial in his racial harassment lawsuit against Pitney Bowes in Los Angeles in September, black salesman Akintunde I. Ogunleye testified that he had been addressed by one co-worker as "Akintunde, ooga-booga, jungle-jungle." The co-worker, who is of French-Canadian ancestry, later testified that he was misunderstood, that what he said was "Bonjour, bonjour." The jury awarded Akintunde $11.1 million.

-- In September, Roy T. Moore was convicted of exposing himself while seated in his car at a gas station in Goderich, Ontario, despite his explanation that what a witness saw was actually only a half-eaten cookie from a bag he was holding in his lap. The judge refused to admit the cookie as evidence but did allow Moore's lawyer to wield a tape measure to illustrate to the jury the size of the alleged cookie.

-- Philippines army logistics officer Brig. Gen. Rolando Espejo told a senate hearing in Manila in September that the 4,500 weapons captured in coups against then-President Corazon Aquino have been stolen from two armories and can never be recovered because all documents referring to them are missing. The general said the documents were all eaten by termites.

-- Orlando, Fla., Juvenile Court Judge Walter Komanski was caught by office workers making printouts of pornography in the courthouse in October and of keeping pornographic videos and magazines in an office cabinet. He said he kept them at work only because he had teen-age boys at home and that, as a responsible parent, he didn't want them to find his stash. Also, he said he had surfed Internet sex sites only to research how to restrict them from his kids. (He was reassigned to finance cases.)

-- According to a report in the Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star in November, a dog was briefly, though improperly, admitted to the local Kenan Auditorium with its owner to take in a performance of the opera The Barber of Seville. (The owner took the dog away after it started to bark.) Manager Don Hawley said one of his staff members had allowed the woman to bring the dog in after she said she was hearing-impaired and that the dog was a "hearing-ear dog." In retrospect, said Hawley, "That was silly."

-- Singer Stevie Nicks' lawyer told the Internal Revenue Service in November that the reason she spent (and tax-deducted) so much for clothing in 1991 was that she had to throw away each outfit after one use because of "the energy levels of her performances and the heat generated on stage from lights and physical exertion."

Imprisoned Kentucky child molester Lou Torok announced in July 1995 that he had persuaded the governors of six states to proclaim Oct. 7 of that year as "Love Day." Despite the attention that Torok's petition drew from News of the Weird and other news outlets at that time, Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton OK'd the "Love Day" designation again for Oct. 7, 1996 (though he later said he should not have). Torok complained that America is "not a forgiving country" and said that he is "in a cesspool of negativism" (in prison) and is just "trying to make the world a little better."