-- In May, a San Francisco Chronicle feature alerted readers to the problem of people addicted to lip balm, and especially Chapstick brand. According to one addict who studied the problem, the Chapstick ingredients fuse with the skin, requiring constant re-use. Another source cited a better, nonaddictive lip balm: a person's own nose oil, which is reported to have been used by watchmakers for years to lubricate tiny gears.

-- Sexual Rejuvenations: The Hong Kong Standard newspaper reported in February on the thriving business of a Dr. Liu, who runs a virginity- (hymen-) restoration practice in Ghangzhou province, China, charging about $500. "So many Hong Kong girls come to us," she said. "They come just before their wedding. They don't want their husbands to know they had many boyfriends in the past." And New Scientist magazine reported in January that the German government, fearful of immune-system reactions and the spread of "mad cow" disease, has banned the popular sheep-fetus injections that men and women have been receiving to firm up their buttocks.

-- Following in the footsteps of her completely unsuccessful predecessors (Mr. Mellon E. Bank and Mr. Roadway V. Express, reported in News of the Weird in 1989 and 1996, respectively), Keisha Yvette Gregory was arrested in Durham, N.C., in March and charged with theft of a check made out to the Tension Envelope company, which she tried to pass off as a personal check made out to Ms. Tension Nicole Envelope.

-- Tacky, Tacky, Tacky: The trial of National Institutes of Health police officer Bruce Blum ended in a hung jury in April on the Dec. 19 accusation (based on a surveillance videotape) that he stole the current issue of People magazine from the NIH library in Bethesda, Md. And Rhode Island state traffic court clerk-typist Sharon James, 30, was fired in March for stealing a bag of potato chips and some coins on the counter of a blind vendor in the traffic court building.

-- In March, in cases in San Diego, Calif., and Norfolk, Va., prosecutors came under fire for allegedly allowing witnesses in a gang murder case and drug case, respectively, to have numerous conjugal visits in government offices after business hours while in custody as part of deals to coax their testimony.

-- A 24-year-old, unidentified woman was arrested in Waukesha, Wis., in April on suspicion of child abuse. Her son had complained of a nose infection, which she said was caused by acid from a wristwatch battery that he had put in his nose several months earlier, but which she had declined to help him remove until the battery started leaking.

-- Peter Lerat, 33, was arrested in Toronto, Ontario, in May and charged with two robberies, one in a doughnut shop while he was carrying a goose and one on the street while he had a raccoon. In each case he threatened to kill the animal unless someone gave him money. He cleared $60 from a woman in the doughnut shop, but a prospective victim in the second robbery ran to call police, and Lerat was captured nearby.

-- In January, West Palm Beach, Fla., police officer Ed Wagner filed a lawsuit against the city for removing him from the SWAT team following a complaint he made about a neck injury. The injury occurred at a car-crash scene in 1993 when one of Wagner's colleagues playfully grabbed his head and gave him a noogie. And Franklin, Tenn., water and sewer director Eddie Woodard was suspended for three days in February after he goosed police chief Jackie Moore at a fire scene.

-- Richard Lee Hamrick, 28, was picked up in Longview, Wash., in February, suspected of being the guy who robbed a Safeway a few minutes before. Not only was the robber wearing bikini briefs on his head, backward, with eye holes cut in the derriere, but, according to the officers who had to book the evidence, they were soiled.

-- Life Imitates the Three Stooges: Julio Guaman, 31, landed in a tree, with a broken pelvis, after a five-story fall from his Queens, N.Y., apartment in December. According to his wife, Julio had lunged at her in a fight in order to push her out the window, but she ducked, sending him out.

-- Life Imitates Prison Movies: Joshua John Jaeger, 25, housed at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre in Toronto in January, and David Anderson, housed at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville in April, became the latest inmates to escape by tying bedsheets together and lowering themselves to the ground. (Anderson even left a pillow-and-blankets dummy in his bed as a decoy.)

-- Marsha Watt, a 1990 graduate of Northwestern University School of Law and formerly an associate at the prestigious Winston and Strawn law firm in Chicago, had charges filed against her in February by the Illinois Bar Association's discipline committee over her most recent conviction for prostitution (i.e., the kind involving sex, for which her published rate, according to a personals ad, was roughly three times what the law firm billed for her).

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (19) The person easing into the parking lot of the driver's license office, either arriving for the exam or just completing it, who accidentally crashes into the office's storefront, as a woman did in Hillsboro, Ore., in May and a man did in Barrie, Ontario, in March. And (20) the burglar attempting to enter an establishment from the roof via a vent pipe but who gets stuck and must be rescued by the police, or, as with a 20-year-old man in Dayton, Ohio, in December, who suffocated.

Guns in the Reading Room: In April in Chandler, Ariz., Johnel Trinidad, 18, sitting on the toilet inspecting a gun he planned to buy from a friend, accidentally shot himself in the knee. Said police Sgt. Matt Christensen, "Bathroom gun safety and gun safety in general pretty much dovetail." It was Chandler's second such shooting in a year. In July, Harold Hughes, 52, was on the toilet, his gun on the counter and his pit bull lounging nearby, when the dog became startled and knocked the gun to the floor, where it fired a shot into Hughes' leg.

(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.)

-- April's annual religious fertility celebration in Nagoya, Japan, designed to improve the rice harvest, featured as usual a 12-foot-long, bright pink, plastic penis, carried through the street, followed by displays of smaller organs and a giant banner of a blood-vesseled penis, testicles and pubic hair. Souvenir candy of the same shape was sold during the event, and at the end of a parade, the giant organ was placed on the fertility shrine.

-- In mid-April, five weeks before the national elections, the governing party in Indonesia announced, via "scientific calculation," according to one leader, that President Suharto had won re-election with 70.02 percent of the vote.

-- Edmond James Ramos had his first-degree burglary charge (burglary of an occupied dwelling, a more serious crime than burglary of a vacant dwelling) thrown out in Los Angeles in January by an appeals court. Ramos' lawyer had demonstrated that the only "occupant" that night had passed away of natural causes minutes prior to Ramos' entry; thus, the dwelling was legally empty.

-- In February, Maryland circuit court judge Thomas Bollinger Sr. agreed to wipe the record clean of Charles Weiner's spousal battery charge after he completes probation -- for the sole purpose of helping Weiner join the Chestnut Ridge Country Club, which had until then rejected him because of his criminal record. (In 1993, Bollinger gave a rapist probation for an attack against a drunken woman, remarking that finding an unconscious woman on a bed was "the dream of a lot of males, quite honestly.") Four days later, Bollinger reversed his decision and removed himself from all domestic violence and sexual offense cases.

-- In April, the science journal Nature reported that, for the first time, nonhuman DNA was used in a criminal trial and was the crucial link that convicted Douglas Beamish of murdering his estranged girlfriend on Prince Edward Island, Canada. A single strand of hair from Beamish's cat Snowball was found on a jacket that contained the victim's blood and that had not yet been proven to be Beamish's.

-- A Texas district judge in Houston declared a mistrial in March in the murder trial of John Bradford Crow, 25, based on the misconduct of prosecutor Craig Goodhart. During his closing argument to the jury, while sarcastically referring to Crow's claiming to be a good guy, Goodhart walked over to the defense table and slapped Crow aggressively on the back, eliciting gasps from the spectators and rendering Crow's attorney momentarily speechless.

-- In Santa Cruz, Calif., in February, Mr. Danis Rivera, 25, rejected a plea bargain that would have sent him to prison for one year for having sex with underage girls. However, at his trial he was in such a foul mood that he constantly spit at court personnel and finally had to be outfitted with a Hannibal Lecter-type bonnet over his face. He was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison.

And in a Providence, R.I., courtroom in April, Latin King gangster George "Animal" Perry, on trial for murder and racketeering and frustrated at the length of the prosecutor's closing argument, which denied him a much-needed restroom break, rose from his chair, unzipped his fly, and took one anyway.

-- In March, Donna Skinner, 30, was arrested at a pay phone in Irwindale, Calif., and accused of having made 1,500 obscene calls since August to a local Home Savings of America bank. Police confiscated a script they say she had been reading from, though they gave no motive.

-- In March, border guards discovered a plastic tube running from the home of a bootlegger in Latvia to a field 400 meters away in Estonia and through which flowed the vodka they accused him of smuggling. The Latvian man was taking advantage of a 60 percent price premium in Estonia.

-- In October, the Unitarian Universalist Church and heirs of Jonathan Holdeen settled their 20-year-old dispute on the disposition of Holdeen's estate, which was created in 1945 as a series of trusts that eventually would have amassed so much money they would allegedly have funded the entire federal government and rendered taxation unnecessary. In fact, the church, which was a nominal beneficiary of the trusts, argued for their abolition in 1977 on the ground that they would soak up so much of the world's money that the administrators of the trusts would become too powerful.

-- St. Charles Catholic Church (Picayune, Miss.) and nearby St. Margaret Mary Church (Slidell, La.) posted security ushers at the doors in February to make sure that parishioners were not pocketing communion wafers. Devil-worshiping ceremonies often use wafers for symbolic desecration, and when six people were seen leaving St. Charles in December with their wafers, the churches' leaders began to fear a local Satanic conspiracy.

-- In April in Houston, Robert Perry Russell Jr., 44, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexual assault and diapering of a 14-year-old boy, but police say the number of victims may have been as many as 10. According to police, Russell liked to take boys out in a boat, tell them a tale about a headless killer seeking to rescue a toddler from the dangerous lake and who kills all other people, and suggest that putting on the diapers he happens to have with him would be a good way, should the killer appear, of convincing him of his toddler status.

In October, after more than three years of litigation and 18 days of trial, a judge in Chicago awarded condominium unit owner Eleanor Mellick $217,000 in her lawsuit against the condo board. According to the lawsuit, the board president had moved a Dumpster away from his own parking space, resulting in a narrowing of Mellick's space from 111 inches in width to 93, and parking in the cramped space had aggravated her arthritis.

Dishwashing: In March, a busboy at a Key West, Fla., Marriott resort allegedly shot and killed a supervisor who had apparently made some constructive criticism of the busboy's loading of the dishwasher. And in May, police in Helena, Ark., detained a 15-year-old boy they suspect shot his older sister to death after a dispute over which one would wash the dishes.

(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 April, commenting on the breakthroughs in cloning, Ann Northrop, a columnist for a New York lesbian and gay publication, argued that cloning could give women total control over reproduction: "Men are now totally irrelevant," she wrote. "Men are going to have a very hard time justifying their existence on the planet." And a week later, two Rutgers University researchers reported confirming that an alternative nervous-system route to sexual arousal exists, from the cervix to the neck to the brain, thus accounting for why some spinal-cord-injured people can nevertheless have orgasms. One of the researchers said it might thus be possible to induce orgasm chemically by stimulating the specific neurotransmitter.

-- University of North Carolina law professor Barry Nakell, 53, a nationally known expert on death-penalty law, was fired in February after pleading guilty to shoplifting food and a book from a store in Chapel Hill. He had also been charged with shoplifting in 1991, but the charge was dismissed after he performed community service.

-- The Los Angeles Times reported in December that nearly 2,000 criminals, "hundreds" of them violent or repeat offenders, have escaped in the last two years from a lackadaisically run work-release program of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. In most cases, inmates were merely asked if they preferred work-release, with no examination of their criminal records.

-- In a September statement, Joseph Sniezek, an official of the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Injury Prevention, lamented the serious injuries suffered by rodeo bull riders and suggested a solution might be to require helmets.

-- In November, as part of a growing trend to micromanage school curricula, the New York legislature required that all public school students age 8 and above receive formal instruction in the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. That follows a requirement that students be given instruction weekly on how animals fit into "the economy of nature." (New Jersey already requires instruction on the potato famine, via amendment to its law requiring instruction on the Holocaust.)

-- In January in an experiment to exercise better crowd control over opposition-party demonstrations in Jakarta, Indonesia, the local police chief put seven cobras in a glass case in front of the main police station and said they would be used to intimidate protesters. He said police would wave the cobras at the crowd, but it was not clear whether officers relished handling the snakes in the first place or that such crowds would allow the officers to get close enough for the snakes to strike.

-- The National Wilderness Institute charged in January that the Department of the Interior has failed to remove several plant and wildlife species from the government's endangered list despite the common knowledge that they (such as the "Maguire daisy") do not exist. The government resists because it says it costs $37,000 to remove a name from the list but meanwhile has added hundreds of new ones in recent years.

-- The governing commercial body of Europe, the European Union, ruled in February that despite a six-century tradition, wooden shoes manufactured in the Netherlands would no longer be permitted in the workplace unless they could meet the same standards as steel-toed safety shoes. Shoe manufacturers warn that Dutch clogs might soon disappear altogether. As one shoe executive said, "It would be like Paris without the Eiffel Tower."

-- In December, the Canadian Defence Department issued a 17-page set of guidelines for manufacturers who wish to compete for new contracts to supply underwear to the military. Among the most challenging requirements are that one pair must be able to be worn for six-month stints in the field and that the garment must be invisible to night-vision goggles so that a skivvy-clad soldier does not offer a target to snipers.

-- The Sunday Times of London reported in December that 300 tons of humanitarian aid from Western countries was sitting in Bosnian warehouses because it is useless. Included were birth control pills with an expiration date of 1986, weight-reduction tablets from Britain, mouthwash from the United States, and chemical waste from Germany. According to the Times, some war-zone drivers have been killed transporting these supplies, and the German chemicals by law cannot be returned, thus creating a hazardous waste disposal problem for Bosnians.

-- The Associated Press reported in February on Ms. Myassar Abul-Hawa, 52, the first female taxicab driver in Jordan. Her business is brisk, in part because some devout Muslim men ask for her by name to chauffeur their wives and daughters so they won't be alone with male drivers. (As is sometimes the case in the United States, Abul-Hawa turned to taxi-driving when she could not put to use her degree in English literature.)

-- In the last six months, several reports have surfaced from the old Soviet Union countries that nearly bankrupt factories have been forced to pay their workers merchandise instead of cash. Included were eggs paid to farm workers in Klyuchi, Siberia; old train cars given to railroad workers in Ukraine; salaries of from 33 to 42 brassieres a month by an underwear factory in Volgograd, Russia; and, from another Volgograd factory, rubber dildos (which are in surplus, according to The Economist magazine, because the market has turned to electronic vibrators).

Carrying on a 40-year tradition, Filipinos in the village of San Pedro Cutud recently conducted their Easter audience-participation crucifixion ceremonies, with 12 volunteers nailed to crosses with sterilized 4-inch spikes in a show of absolution. As News of the Weird reported in 1990, for several years the Philippines Department of Tourism was an official sponsor of the event.

In March in Lipovljani, Croatia, twin brothers Branko Uhiltil and Ivan Uhiltil, 57, committed suicide in separate incidents within hours of each other, apparently with utterly no knowledge of each other's plans. And in January, Jim Hare, 65, driving his identical twin brother, Tom, near Bellefontaine, Ohio, lost control of the car, and in the ensuing crash, both were killed instantly, at the same moment.

(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.)