-- In December, McDonald's opened restaurants in its 100th country, Belarus, amid about 4,000 eager customers and 500 protestors, and a few days later, in its 101st, Tahiti. According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, no two countries with McDonald's restaurants have ever gone to war against each other -- because, as Friedman theorizes, countries prosperous enough to support a McDonald's are surely stable enough to resist most provocations.

-- Texas A&M student Jonathan Culpepper and his fraternity, Kappa Alpha, were indicted in College Station, Texas, in December on a criminal hazing charge because of a severe "wedgie." The grand jury found that fraternity members lifted a candidate, unnamed in news reports, off his feet by the waistband of his briefs, causing the man to require the surgical removal of a testicle.

-- The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported in December that a female inmate at the Yell County Jail in Dardanelle had been receiving regular shipments of methamphetamines via Federal Express. Jail officials had finally become suspicious and obtained the necessary search warrant to check her frequent deliveries.

-- During the Christmas Handicap race at a track in Melbourne, Australia, the horse Cogitate threw its rider and bumped the horse Hon Kwok Star, sending Hon's jockey, apprentice Andrew Payne, into the air. To break his fall, Payne grabbed the neck of Cogitate and then climbed into the stirrups and rode that horse across the finish line (though the official records would show that both horses were disqualified).

-- The Miami Herald reported in September that David McAllister, 77 and blind, a nursing-home invalid in North Miami Beach, Fla., receives daily visits from Chris Carrier, 32, who reads to McAllister from the Bible. Their only previous relationship occurred during a few days in December 1974, when McAllister kidnapped young Carrier at a bus stop and left him for dead in the Everglades with cigarette burns on his body, ice-pick holes in one eye, and a gunshot wound that left him blind in the other eye. Said Carrier, "I don't stare at my ... potential murderer. I stare at a man, very old, very alone and scared."

-- In November, ballroom dancing champion Michael Keith Withers was convicted in Perth, Australia, of the attempted 1994 murder of his wife/dance partner, Stacey Larson. He had said it was an accident, but the jury found that he had doused her with gasoline (set aside to use in a Whipper Snapper lawn trimmer he had borrowed from a neighbor) and set her afire, burning 70 percent of her body. Larson testified that she had not seen Withers since the incident, but under cross-examination finally admitted that she had slept with him 15 times since then, and another witness said Larson had bought Withers Christmas gifts in 1995, including his very own Whipper Snapper.

-- Results of a University of Minnesota study, announced in July and pertinent to the dispute between large animal feedlots and their neighbors who object to the smell, showed that home values nearer the feedlots were higher than those farther away. (No explanation was given by researchers, but some experts interviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune said increased employment opportunities at feedlots had driven up demand for housing.)

-- A 1985 lease fixed the annual rent the U.S. pays for its Moscow embassy at 72,500 rubles. That was worth about $60,000 at the time, but now with nine years to go on the lease, the devaluation of the ruble has reduced the rent to the equivalent of $22.56 a year. In August, the Russian government stepped up its demands to renegotiate, but the U.S. continues to resist.

-- The New York Times reported in December on a Jordanian company that employs veiled Palestinian women stitching together women's exotic underpants for Victoria's Secret stores and catalogs. Adding to the irony is that the products, which in 1997 will also include brassieres, are sold with a "Made in Israel" label in order to take advantage of Israel's favorable trade status with the U.S.

-- In December, Frederick Lundy was to report for a court hearing in Akron, Ohio, in which he had been told: Plead not guilty to a parole violation and be released until trial, or plead guilty and go to jail immediately. Lundy pleaded guilty and was abruptly led away. That decision could be explained, perhaps, by Lundy's desire to get on with his punishment. What was not explained was why he had come into the courtroom under the circumstances with 41 rocks of crack cocaine in his pocket, which were discovered in a routine, pre-incarceration search.

-- In November at the Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, Anthony Valencia and Fitzgerald Vandever, both age 20, were arrested and accused of roaming the Intensive Care Unit, looking to steal patients' food off warming carts. (Said a hospital spokeswoman, "Actually, we've got some pretty good (food) down there.")

-- In December in London, the first fraud cases against the parent company of Hoover vacuum cleaners went to trial, four years after the company's disastrous giveaway campaign in which it promised two free air fares with all vacuum cleaners, which retailed for as little as about $165 in Great Britain. The company sold more than a half million units during the campaign and has so far paid out about $72 million in airline tickets to about a third of the purchasers.

In 1995 News of the Weird listed four cities in which entrepreneurs had begun businesses to fly couples around for an hour so that they could have sexual intercourse while airborne. In December 1996 several homeowners near Van Nuys (Calif.) Airport complained vociferously to the Los Angeles Daily News that one of the four, Mile High Adventures (whose flights now start at $429), flies so frequently and low that they are extremely irritating. Said one homeowner, "What people do in their own bedroom is their business. What they do over our heads is the community's business."

In January, disbarred Parsonburg, Md., lawyer Paul Bailey Taylor, 61, finally snapped after years of erratic behavior and barricaded himself inside a church, armed with a rifle, for five hours before police convinced him to surrender. When he was working, Taylor ran his law practice from the bathroom of his unheated rural trailer, where he had set up a desk over the toilet so that he could sit for long periods of time because of an intestinal disorder. A social worker once described the place as "clean," in that Taylor's 12 cats were neatly housed in cardboard boxes and his legal papers were filed in an orderly fashion in the bathtub.

(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.)

-- One Man, One Vote: Because of an obscure state constitutional amendment that few voters and politicians noticed, the terms of office of the four incumbents on the Loretto, Ky., City Council automatically expired in November without their having had an opportunity to campaign for re-election. Travis Greenwell, 23, voting by absentee ballot, was perhaps the only person in town (population 800) who read the voting literature and thus cast the only votes in the election. For the four slots, he wrote in the names of his mother, his uncle, a friend and a local character who runs a hardware store. (All except the hardware store guy declined to serve.)

-- Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Phoenix cosmetic surgeon Steven Locniker, on the lam for avoiding child-support charges, was arrested in September after he called attention to himself as Cosmopolitan magazine's "Bachelor of the Month." And Thomas Georgevitch, 22, on the lam for impersonating a police officer, was arrested in Bay Shore, N.Y., in October after a detective heard him call in to a radio station to make a song request (Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man"). And Tom Tipton, 63, wanted on two warrants in Minneapolis, was arrested in November when a sheriff's officer recognized his name as the man singing the national anthem before the Vikings-Broncos game.

-- Chris Morris filed a $1 million lawsuit against the state of Michigan in November, claiming that he caught a cold in the rotunda of the state Capitol while viewing an art exhibit there earlier in the year.

-- Dale L. Larson's $41,000 trial-court award was upheld by a Wisconsin appeals court in October, which agreed with the trial court that the Indianhead golf course in Wausau was 51 percent responsible for Larson's needing nine root canals and 23 dental crowns. Larson tripped on his golf spikes and fell hard on his face on a brick path outside the clubhouse, and he argued that he wouldn't have fallen if it had been a smooth concrete sidewalk rather than a brick path. The trial court had found that only 49 percent of the accident was due to Larson's having consumed 13 drinks that evening, which left him with a blood-alcohol level of 0.28 90 minutes after the fall.

-- Andrew Daniels filed a $500,000 lawsuit against M&M/Mars Co. and a Cleveland retailer because one of the Peanut M&Ms he bit down on had no peanut in it, and as a result, his teeth bit through his lip, which required his hospitalization and various surgery bills. One claim against the retailer is under the legal theory of "failure to inspect" the candy.

-- In August, Julie Leach filed a lawsuit in Macomb County, Mich., seeking at least $10,000 from the owners of a beagle named Patch, which Leach said was constantly enticing Leach's German shepherd, Holly, to chase him. In 1995, during one of Patch's escapades, the pursuing Holly was run over by a car and killed. Leach says Patch's owners should pay for permitting their dog to harass Holly.

-- Jamie Brooks, 18, filed a $5 million claim against Kiowa County, Oklahoma, in June, asserting that it is the county's fault that she became pregnant six months earlier while housed in the jail awaiting her murder trial. She said the father is inmate-trusty Eddie Alonzo, who had access to the hallways and who she said impregnated her through the bars of her cell.

-- In July, Alex Alzaldua filed a $25,000 lawsuit against Dennis Hickey in Raymondville, Texas, alleging injuries caused by his "suddenly without warning" having tripped over Hickey's dog in the kitchen of Hickey's home. According to the lawsuit, Hickey should have warned Alzaldua that he was walking around in the kitchen "at his own risk" and that Hickey had failed to warn Alzaldua of "the dog's propensity of lying in certain areas."

-- Trucker Franciszek Zygadlo was committed to a mental institution in Rochester, N.Y., in November after he led police on a 280-mile, high-speed chase in his trailerless cab through three states in September. According to police, after finally driving the truck into Irondequoit Bay, Zygadlo ran toward the officers and proclaimed himself a hero for defusing a bomb on the truck that he said would have exploded if he had ever slowed to less than 40 mph.

-- On Oct. 17 firefighters took two hours to extinguish a fire at the Cal-Compack Foods plant in Las Cruces, N.M., that started when a silo full of red chile powder grew so hot that it began to smolder.

-- In August, the Caron family of Sandown, N.H., was granted an extension of time to file a quarterly federal tax return after they discovered that their home had been ransacked by the family's pet pygmy goats while they were on vacation. Among the items the goats had eaten were toilet bowl cleaner, a lampshade, a telephone directory, and all of the family's income tax paperwork.

-- Jeen Han, 22, was charged with conspiracy to commit murder in Irvine, Calif., in November, against her twin sister, Sunny. According to a police lieutenant, the "evil twin" was angry that the "good twin" had snitched on her regarding stolen credit cards and thus wanted to kill her and assume her identity.

In November, a 60-year-old Polish man in the village of Kosianka Trojanowka, identified only as "Czeslaw B," was accidentally shot to death by two homemade guns he had mounted on his garage door to ward off trespassers (just two of 28 booby traps in his house). And in Slidell, La., in December, Jason Jinks, 20, decided to open his car door and back up at 25 mph in order to look for his hat that had just fallen off; when he hit the brakes, he fell out on his head and, three days later, died.

Veteran Belleville, Ill., jail inmate Kelvin Lewis, asked by the Belleville Journal in January to evaluate the jail's new black-and-white, thick-horizontal-striped uniforms, graded them an 11 on a 10-scale: "I like their style. The younger generation will like (the rolled-up cuffs)."

(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.)

-- 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.)