-- Life Imitates Monty Python: The Salem (Mass.) Evening News reported in March on an incident in which Ms. Carmen LaBrecque, 51, had to outrun a rabid skunk, which was literally snapping at her heels, for 15 minutes before an animal control officer arrived to shoot it. Unable to slow down enough even to open her front door and get inside, LaBrecque circled her yard 12 times, a foot or two in front of the skunk. On one pass by her front door, LaBrecque's elderly mother handed her a cell phone, which LaBrecque pantingly used to call 911.

-- In March, at the height of the civil unrest in Albania, when the U.S. diplomatic mission was evacuating personnel for safety reasons, The Washington Post reported that the State Department had just sent a cable to the diplomats in Tirana reminding them of the department's "(evacuation) policy for safeguarding of sterling silver flatware (cutlery)."

-- The public-service goal of an advertising campaign by England's Children's Society was to enlighten people that child sex abuse could occur in anyone's town and not just in notorious sex-tourist spots in the Far East. However, its slogan, announced in billboards released in February, came out this way: "Why travel 6,000 miles to have sex with children when you can do it in (the English town of) Bournemouth?" When questioned by a reporter, a society spokesman expressed pride in the campaign and said it would be extended to Manchester and Leeds.

-- In January, motorist John Tanayo, 30, was stopped in New York City and a search of his car turned up 573 pounds of cocaine worth about $5 million. He only drew cops' attention when, in traffic in front of a police cruiser, he failed to signal a right turn.

-- A 38-year-old apartment building manager was arrested in Whitewater, Wis., in January and charged with surreptitiously videotaping a female tenant with a camera hidden in the ceiling of her shower. The 20-year-old tenant had become suspicious because of the fixture the manager had installed in order to disguise the lens: Why, she thought, was a smoke detector placed in the ceiling of a shower?

-- The Robles family placed an ad in a newspaper in the town of Leon, Guanajuato, north of Mexico City, in January, to the attention of robbers who had been breaking into their house and stealing things. In exasperation, but perhaps unwisely, the family begged robbers to stay away, announcing that they had been cleaned out except for the TV, the VCR and the refrigerator.

-- In November, Washington, D.C., inmates Antwan Hudson (drug charges) and Kingsley Ellis (a Texas credit card fraud suspect), in a holding cell, apparently thought they were each in less trouble than the other and thus agreed to a scheme to swap identities for an upcoming court appearance. Ellis was shocked to learn in court that Hudson was also wanted on several more drug charges and for threatening his wife. Hudson was even more shocked to find that Ellis was facing deportation to Jamaica and thus blew the whistle on the scheme.

-- In a Virginia case reported in the December Mental Health Law News, Susanna Van de Castle was awarded $350,000 against her psychiatrist-husband, Robert, for malpractice. According to the lawsuit, after having diagnosed her as suffering from multiple personality disorder, he then married her and continued the therapy but also sought deals for a book and a movie about her, in addition to staging public lectures (charging admission) in which she was showcased as his subject.

-- In November, Brownsville, Texas, insurance agency owner Raquel Cantu Garza was charged with impeding IRS agents who had come to seize her business on a tax matter. According to the prosecutor, Garza instructed the two employees on duty at the time to leave and lock the agents inside. When one agent pounded on the door to get out, a Garza employee allegedly said, "Call a locksmith," and walked away.

-- In Guthrie, Okla., in October, Jason Heck tried to kill a millipede with a shot from his .22-caliber rifle, but the bullet ricocheted off a rock near the insect's hole and hit pal Antonio Martinez in the head, fracturing his skull. And in Elyria, Ohio, in October, Martyn Eskins, attempting to clean out cobwebs in his basement, declined to use a broom in favor of a propane torch and caused a fire that burned the first and second floors of his house.

-- Early New Year's morning, a 16-year-old girl in Kalamazoo, Mich., was arrested for erratic driving in a car she allegedly stole from Patricia Conlon. The girl was unaware that the next day Conlon would begin a term as county juvenile court judge. Also in Kalamazoo on New Year's Eve, Derrick Demones Gunn was sentenced to one to five years in prison for attempting to escape from a halfway house one day before his original sentence was up.

-- In October, Heber C. Frias, 20, on the lam from a first-degree murder charge in Florida, saw his freedom come to an end in an Arlington, Va., 7-Eleven when he tauntingly stole a candy bar right in front of a clerk, provoking a call to the police, who apprehended Frias just outside the store.

North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge made News of the Weird in 1995 when he denounced state funding for abortions for rape victims as unnecessary in that a woman who is "truly raped" doesn't get pregnant because "the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work." In March 1996, North Carolina House Speaker Harold Brubaker appointed Aldridge co-chair of the Committee on Human Resources, which oversees abortion funding.

In March, Shulamit Dezhin, 82, passed her driver's test in Ashdod, Israel, after 35 failures. She said she originally wanted to learn to drive so she could get to Tel Aviv to visit her parents, but it took so long to get her license that now they're dead. And in February, Sue Evans-Jones, 45, of Yate, England, passed her driver's test after only three failures. However, she had taken 1,800 lessons over 27 years with 10 instructors, most of whom had told her she was such a bad driver that she should not even attempt the exam. (Her policeman-husband explained her problem to a reporter: The first thought crossing her mind about crashing, no matter what the circumstances, causes her to flail wildly at the brakes and steering wheel.)

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@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 Milwaukee, the family of Robert Senz demanded shortly after his burial last July that Borgwardt Funeral Home dig up the body because his wallet was missing. Sure enough, the wallet containing $64 and credit cards was still in Senz's pocket. In February 1997, Borgwardt sent the family a reburial bill for $2,149, but then decided the whole thing was the county medical examiner's fault and sent the bill there, but that office has denied responsibility.

-- In March, four strippers at the Scene Karaoke and Coconut Karaoke bars in Pattaya, Thailand, were fined a total of about $80 for indecency for an act in which live ducklings were placed inside plastic "eggs" (with air holes) and inserted into the women's bodies so that in the course of their routines, they would "lay" the eggs, which would then "hatch."

-- In February in Redwood City, Calif., Rachel Landa, 48, got out of her van to pump gas, but when she realized the hose wouldn't reach, she instructed her 14-year-old daughter to get behind the wheel and back it up. By the time the girl wrestled the van to a stop, the mother had been run over three times (broken ankle, foot and finger), and the van had crashed into a traffic signal box adjacent to the station.

-- Latest Highway Truck Spills: Several hundred thousand apples near Brighton, Mich., in November; a tractor-trailer full of Hills Bros. ground coffee in downtown Louisville in December; a truck hauling spaghetti sauce and ranch dressing (colliding with a truckful of computers) on I-35 in Austin, Texas, in January; and during a November ice storm, a tractor-trailer full of nuclear weapons near Brownlee, Neb. (an accident kept secret for a month by the federal government).

-- John O'Neill, 73, had to be rescued by firefighters in Huntington, N.Y., in February after he wandered out of a bar late at night and somehow got wedged between two buildings overnight. He was stuck so tight that he had to be pulled out from above.

-- A breathalyzer company executive testifying in a Knoxville, Tenn., DUI trial in September, disputing the defendant's contention that an untimely belch yielded a falsely positive reading: "Belching? I frankly have never seen a belch that brought alcohol up into the oral cavity."

-- Honduran Congressman Julio Villatoro, reacting in February to the bigamy charge filed by his wife: "(I) have problems with my wife, even though she knows a handsome man is not for one woman but for several. God gave me a physique attractive to women, and I take advantage of it."

-- Employees who have become ill in asbestos-laden workplaces have their own class-action lawsuit, so lawyer Michael V. Kelley filed one in January in Cleveland on behalf of employees in those workplaces who are perfectly healthy (in case they someday become ill). Said Kelley, "It's very proactive."

-- King Letsie III, 33, king of Lesotho, imploring other southern African monarchs and dignitaries in December to help him find a wife: "The pressure on me to find a wife soon is heavy, especially (from) my mother. (I) sometimes feel jealous when I see other leaders getting partners with such remarkable ease."

-- Kevin Carter, 21, and Michael Harrison, 26, were charged with murder and armed robbery in Boynton Beach, Fla., in December. Motive: to raise money to attend the police academy.

-- Darrel Voeks, 38, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Appleton, Wis., in December for stealing $100,000 worth of pigs from his farmer-employer. Motive: to pay for breast implants for a stripper at a club he patronized.

-- Michael Pollina, 26, pleaded guilty in Chicago in February to three bank robberies. Motive: to pay for a lavish reception that he and his fiancee had planned for their upcoming wedding.

-- Jack Swint, 42, pleaded guilty to passing bad checks in Roanoke, Va., in November (while he was awaiting trial on other bad-check charges). Motive: needed to pay for counseling sessions to help him kick his bad-check habit.

The famously dysfunctional Sexton family, headed by Eddie and Estella, of Canton, Ohio, and Tampa, Fla., made News of the Weird in 1994 and 1996 based on almost unimaginable charges of incest, child molestation and murder. In March 1997, son Willie, 26, was found to be "competent" after two years in the Florida state mental hospital, and now will stand trial for killing his sister's husband (as allegedly ordered by Eddie, who feared the husband would turn Eddie in for killing the man's baby, whose crying annoyed Eddie). Ostensibly, the dead baby was Eddie's own grandson, but according to trial testimony in a case against Estella, the baby was actually Eddie's own son, the result of a father-daughter coupling.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@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 March, a judge in York, Pa., sentenced a woman to a first-offender rehabilitation program for assaulting her 10-year-old son by giving him what she called a "titty twister." According to a police report, she asked the boy, "What's worse than a tornado?" and then pinched and twisted his nipples, causing soreness and noticeable damage.

-- In February, the electric co-op in the Philippine province of Illocos Norte shut off power to the refrigerated crypt of former president Ferdinand Marcos because his wife, now a member of the legislature, is about $215,000 behind in the electricity bill. The government will not permit Marcos to be buried in Manila because he was suspected of having appropriated billions of dollars during his 20-year reign that ended in 1986. Shutting off power, said Mrs. Marcos, was "the ultimate harassment, the harassment of the dead."

-- Each December for four months, the Ice Hotel residential igloo opens in the Lapland region of Sweden, housing about 40 people at about $130 a night for a double room, and with a bar, restaurant, conference facilities and a bridal suite. Room temperatures range from 27 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit, and sleeping bags are used, cushioned by spruce boughs and reindeer skins.

-- According to a trade association of prostitutes in Harare, Zimbabwe, massive layoffs in the economy have led to an oversupply of women taking up prostitution and a reduction in men's spending power, causing them either to ignore prostitutes or to visit bars only to drink and flirt before going home to the wife. To save their jobs, the association recommended in January that prostitutes raise their price from about $2.80 to about $4.60, but also requested that wives loosen the pursestrings to allow husbands to spend more when they go out.

-- The Associated Press reported in February on the Time Machine lounge in Tokyo, and the "relief room" at the Yamanakako resort, in which stressed-out workers pay from about $80 to $125 for a few minutes of satisfaction by smashing fake ceramic antiques in a museumlike sitting room. Often, say the proprietors, the names of tyrannical bosses or unfaithful spouses will be yelled out as the destruction takes place.

-- A February Associated Press story described how two midcareer, Berkeley, Calif., professionals (nurse Raphaela Pope, 52, and lawyer Sam Louie, 36) became prosperous telepathic "pet psychics." Pope charges $40 per half-hour by telephone, which sometimes includes talking directly to the pet. Said one of her customers, "I learned (from Pope) that Scarlette (the cat) thought I didn't want her around. Scarlette changed immediately after talking (sic) to Raphaela, and we're happy again."

-- Locksmith Harley Hudson filed a claim for damages against the city of Wenatchee, Wash., in November, saying that he is due about $250,000 in damages for lost business because the friendly police department helps for free motorists who lock themselves out of their cars. Hudson calls this kindliness an "unconstitutional gift of public funds."

-- In February, the Palm Springs (Calif.) Regional Airport Commission issued hygiene rules for cab drivers serving the airport, including requiring drivers to shower daily with soap, brush with toothpaste and eat breath mints. After vociferous complaints, the commission softened the specifics on "fresh breath" and "pleasant body odor." Said cabbie Ken Olson to the commission, "You're not my mother."

-- Six nurses at a government health care facility for the disabled in Barrie, Ontario, were fired in December for disobeying new countywide rules that required them to provide sexual assistance to their patients (e.g., helping them masturbate, positioning couples for sex, assisting to put on a condom). In January, the agency said it would reconsider the rules, but the women remain jobless and have filed a lawsuit.

-- In November, the European Commission on Human Rights rejected the appeal of Manuel Wackenheim, aka "The Flying Dwarf," whose stage show was banned in France because it consisted of allowing customers to pay to toss him around. Wackenheim said his show "is part of a French dwarf tradition," but authorities said it "damages human dignity."

-- According to an October Chicago Tribune report, Illinois and most other states interpret the federal "motor voter" law to require mental health agencies to help all clients register and vote in national elections, even those with mental ages down to 5 or 6. The only ones who cannot vote are clients formally declared by a court to be mentally incompetent (about half of Illinois agencies' clients). One woman in the Tribune story, now qualified to vote, took 20 minutes to write her first name at the registration desk; another was registered despite the fact that his only communication ability seemed to be to repeat the last words he hears. Relatives fear the clients will be ridiculed at the polls and that agencies' personnel, while "assisting" them to vote, will simply complete the ballots as they wish.

-- In February, the staff of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission found that The Cafe, a gay and lesbian bar, had illegally discriminated in an August incident in which a straight man and woman were ushered out the door for smooching too heavily. According to a witness, the bartender told the couple, "What you're doing is very offensive to people here," even though gays and lesbians freely make out on the premises. (The Cafe says it has since adopted a policy barring heavy kissing by anyone.)

In November, attempting to influence an Arlington, Va., jury to give him a light sentence for 20 counts of credit card fraud, Oludare Ogunde, 28, at first asked for mercy but then said the jury should keep him out of prison because if he were locked up, he would just teach other inmates -- the "hardened criminals" -- how to commit credit card fraud. "And," he reminded the jury, "we're trying to prevent crime in America."

In February, Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed in Lompoc, Calif., as he fell face-first through the ceiling of a bicycle shop he was burglarizing. Death was caused when the large flashlight he had placed in his mouth (to keep his hands free) crammed against the base of his skull as he hit the floor.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@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.)