-- In November, Paul Z. Singer, head of Singer Financial Corp. in Philadelphia, was sentenced to nine months in prison for an extreme reaction to what he called business pressures. One night in 1996, an extremely depressed Singer decided to deal with his tension by loading a backpack full of spray paint cans into his BMW. When he was arrested, said police, he had written graffiti all over 31 walls, windows and automobiles.

-- Kenneth Curtis, 32, was arrested in November in Hartford, Conn., and state prosecutors will again attempt to bring him to trial for the 1987 murder of a former girlfriend. Curtis had avoided trial earlier because of mental incompetence due to a brain injury caused by his shooting himself in the head in a suicide attempt. A judge had released him in 1989, saying Curtis had almost no chance of ever regaining his faculties, and an appeals court removed an order that he be retested every year. He was freed simply because Connecticut has no law to require him to be detained. WTNH-TV, New Haven, found that Curtis is currently enrolled in a pre-med curriculum at Southern Connecticut State University, with 48 credits and a 3.3 (B) average, and that a state agency had given him almost $1,000 in tuition assistance.

-- In Springfield, Mo., in June, Vernon Wayne Richmond, 18, stood up in court to give the details of his crime as part of a plea bargain to cocaine possession. Richmond said he found cocaine, put it in his pocket, and then was arrested by police after a Wal-Mart guard detained him. Unfortunately, Richmond had misunderstood which of his cases the plea was for. Actually, the district attorney was prosecuting him for an earlier arrest for having cocaine in his car and was unaware of the Wal-Mart arrest.

-- Army military policeman Daniel Christian Bowden, 20, was arrested in June at the Fort Belvoir (Va.) Federal Credit Union as he attempted to deposit almost $3,000 cash into his account. A teller had called police on Bowden because she recognized him as the very man who had robbed the credit union of nearly $5,000 two weeks earlier.

-- In September in Wichita, Kan., police officers staking out a convenience store inadvertently unnerved two men parked innocently at an adjacent liquor store. According to police, a 19-year-old man in the car had a gun and thought that since police officers were nearby, he ought to get rid of it, but in the process of pulling it out of his pocket, he accidentally fired one round, which hit him in the leg, went through the front seat, and hit the companion, age 20. According to police Capt. Paul Dotson, the officers on stakeout, who had until then ignored the liquor store, had their attention engaged by the gunshot and the gun owner's limping out of the car and throwing the gun over a fence. The shooter was charged with illegal possession of a firearm, and his companion was treated at a hospital and released without charges.

-- Carlos Manuel Perez, 21, was jailed in Anniston, Ala., in October after a series of missteps that almost begged for his arrest. He stopped in front of a local government building in a stolen car, which had no license plate. His intention, he told the first person he saw, was to inquire about getting a nonphoto identification card, since he was not carrying a driver's license. That first person happened to be Sheriff Larry Amerson, in uniform. When pressed for ID, Perez produced a Social Security card with the name Matthew Nowaczewski (though Perez has a dark-skinned Hispanic complexion). He also produced a birth certificate under that name but with some information erased and rewritten in pen, including his birthplace of "MiSSSissippi." Said Amerson later, "I know we're from Alabama, but we're not that stupid."

-- A 17-year-old motorist was cited for driving without a license in Springfield, Ill., in September. When stopped, he gave the name "Johnny Rice," but police got tough with him when he was unable to spell "Johnny" in any of the conventional ways. His real name, he said then, is Dyvon D. Stewart, and after an inquiry of the car's owner, police learned that Stewart had legitimately borrowed it and that despite the false name, he was not wanted by police on any other matter.

-- Tax Reform: In September, Albanian Socialist Party leader Gafur Mazreku and Democratic leader Azem Hajdari got into a fistfight on the floor of the parliament about the wisdom of raising the country's value-added tax from 12.5 percent to 20 percent. Two days later, Mazreku returned to the chamber and seriously wounded Hajdari with four shots from a handgun.

-- In September elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina, dictated by the 1995 Dayton peace accords, a Muslim slate won control of the city council of Srebrenica, a city that Serbs had ethnically cleansed of Muslims during the war in what human rights agencies call the worst European atrocities since World War II. However, still not a single Muslim resides in Srebrenica. Under the Dayton agreement, Bosnians, wherever they reside, could elect governments in their former municipalities.

-- One Man, Two Votes: Prosecutors in Madisonville, Tenn., announced in October they would send newspaper publisher Dan Hicks Jr., 76, to trial for voting twice in the 1996 presidential election. Of his second ballot, he said he had taken pain pills and martinis on Election Day for his recent knee surgery, had fallen asleep, had awakened abruptly to a radio warning that the polls would soon close, and had thus rushed to the polling place, completely forgetting that he had voted by early ballot two weeks before. And St. Paul (Minn.) City Council candidate Mark Roosevelt voted twice in the September primary, once based on residing at his current home in St. Paul and again a couple of hours later based on his old residence in Minneapolis, under his former name Mark Hatcher. "It was total ignorance," he said. "I didn't know you couldn't do it."

-- Winston Salem, N.C., mayoral candidate Rick Newton, who had recently stopped taking his manic-depression medicine, was tossed out of court by bailiffs in July after he walked in in a curly black wig and carrying a guitar and a red pillow shaped like lips, claiming he was Jesus. He was there to answer charges that he violated a court order by harassing his estranged wife on the telephone.

-- Striking Fear in the Hearts of Rival Gangs: Among the six members of the Latin Kings gang in Providence, R.I., who pleaded no contest in October to breaking into an apartment: "Tu-Tu" Vasquez, age 19, and "Hecky-Heck" Heredia, 24.

-- The University of Missouri women's cross country team won both the Illinois Invitational and Loyola Invitational meets in September, earning accolades for its three freshmen stars, Katie Meyer, Angela McBride and Justa Dahl.

-- In Washington, D.C., in October, Mr. Alexander Alexander gave away his daughter Stacy in marriage to Mr. John Roberts Stacey.

(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.)

-- Sports Highlight Reel: In September, Susie Nelson, who lived across the street from Wrigley Field in Chicago, filed a lawsuit against the Cubs because she says a ballpark security camera was aimed at her bedroom window at times over the 18 months she lived there. And electrician Randal Jay Palmer, 37, was charged with trespass in October after he allegedly set up a video camera feed in an overhead light fixture in the Kingdome dressing room of the Seattle Seahawks cheerleaders. (According to police, the accident-prone Palmer not only hit a button that disabled the remote control, he turned the recorder on during installation, while he was looking into the lens, and police have the tape.)

-- In September the city of Kansas City, Kan., joined four Indian tribes in court to protest an economic development plan by a fifth tribe, the 3,800-member Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma. The Wyandottes plan to build a casino on pillars above a 150-year-old tribal burial ground the tribe owns in downtown Kansas City. Said one dissident: "Imagine our relatives lying here, looking up at the floor of a casino."

-- In July, Baptist minister Larry Roach decided to leave Clover, S.C., and move his New Life Christian Fellowship (motto: "A Church on Fire") to Springfield, Mo., and he was able to convince almost all of his parishioners to give him the church's assets to take with him, including $65,000 in cash. A few days later, five or six parishioners objected, but Roach dismissed them: "They're idiots. If they mess with me, I'll have their homes and cars. It's a good thing I'm a Christian. They're gonna owe me (even more money) by the time I get done with their butts."

-- Accuser Frank Martinelli, 50, testifying in August against the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., for alleged sexual abuse in 1964 by Father Laurence Brett: "He told me (fellatio) was OK because it was just another way of taking Holy Communion."

-- On New York City's list of unpaid parking tickets issued to United Nations missions, incurred during the first three months of the year, the Holy See (diplomatic arm of the Vatican) incurred eight tickets, totaling $500 in fines.

-- Police chief (and, in fact, the only paid officer on the force) Katie Holmboe of Gold Hill, Ore. (population 1,000), was fired in August based on complaints about her excessively Christian law enforcement. Holmboe once reported that a man jumped into a squad car, acting strange. Said she, "Being a former Bible student, I knew what I was up against. I prayed, and I said, 'I denounce you in the name of Jesus.' It hit the floor. It looked up at me and (hissed)." (The Town Council was also displeased that she sold Mary Kay cosmetics while on duty.)

-- In March in Granby, Mass., Fernando Morgado, 31, and gunman Antonio Andrade, 39, were preparing to slaughter a pig with a .22 caliber rifle. The pig struggled, causing Andrade to miss and the bullet to go through the tailgate of a trailer and hit Morgado in the stomach, sending him to the hospital in fair condition. In the ensuing chaos, the pig broke free.

-- On Aug. 7, police in Delaware, Ohio, and Thibodaux, La., reported that alleged child molesters had received private justice. According to police in Ohio, the wife and mother-in-law of Rodney Hosler, 27, kidnapped him shortly after he was released from prison on child-molesting charges, tied him up, shaved his body, applied hot ointment to his genitals, inserted a cucumber into his body, scribbled "I am a child molester" on him, and dumped him naked in front of a pizza parlor in his hometown, 70 miles away. In Louisiana, Adam Trahan, 17, was hospitalized with two spine fractures and swollen testicles from a beating allegedly by the father of a boy Trahan was accused of raping.

-- Several news organizations reported in March and April on Japanese men's increasing sexual fascination with high school and junior high school girls. One expert interviewed by The New York Times, Hiroyuki Fukuda, 30, editor of a magazine whose title can be translated Anatomical Illustrations of Junior High School Girls, said, "The age at which the girls seem interesting is clearly dropping. But it's only the maniacs who go for girls below the third grade."

-- An ad, from an Atlanta Journal story in May on the increasing number of Internet Web pages devoted to classified ads from prison inmates seeking romantic relationships: "Aren't you fed up with meeting all the wrong men?" (asked California inmate Ronald E. Mays, who also asked) "(Are you) In search of a truly honest and good man ...?" (Mays is serving life without parole for first-degree murder, second-degree murder, sodomy with force and kidnapping.)

-- Actress Rose Jackson filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles in June against MTM Enterprises for making her originally scripted character in a pilot episode of a UPN TV series "Good News" seem vulgar. She said her character of a church secretary was enhanced to include a romantic relationship with her pastor, which she said offended her moral sensibilities. Jackson's husband is Michael Moye, co-creator of "Married ... With Children."

-- In March in Ogden, Utah, Donna Solomon won a total of $89,500 in damages for injuries she suffered from Thomas and Darda Davis-Greene in an ongoing feud. Thomas Davis-Greene denied he did anything to incur legal liability but admitted going "ballistic" in Solomon's home. Thomas Davis-Greene is, by profession, an anger-management counselor.

-- In August the Johor Baru Religious Affairs Department in Malaysia announced that convicted sexual "deviants" would, in addition to serving prison time as punishment, be bound and whipped.

-- In June 1996, News of the Weird reported that construction worker Thomas W. Passmore, then 32, had filed a lawsuit for $3.35 million against a Norfolk, Va., hospital and four doctors over the loss of his hand. Passmore admitted to having severed the hand with a power saw because he believed it to be possessed by the devil and to having refused twice to allow doctors to reattach it, vowing that if they reattached it, he would just cut it off again. However, he claimed the defendants were negligent because they ought to have persuaded his family to overrule his poor decision. In September 1997, after a 30-minute deliberation, a Norfolk jury ruled against him.

(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.)

-- The University of Minnesota was seeking more "specialists" to work on its three-year, $390,000 program to set an "odor emissions rating system" for regulating the state's 35,000 animal feedlots, according to an August Minneapolis Star Tribune story. Having judges, or government officials, go sniff the feedlots apparently would give insufficient due process of law; rather, a panel of sniffers will develop objective standards on the types of odors and their strength. Already 35 people are employed and have begun sniffing the nearly 200 chemical components of cow and pig manure in order to categorize them for the formal state stench test.

-- In a study released in September and using United Nations statistics, University of Pennsylvania professor Richard J. Estes concluded that the United States enjoys only the 27th most favorable social conditions among 160 nations of the world, ranking behind such paradises as Bulgaria. According to Estes, the social situation in Bulgaria is "miserable," but the country responds to basic human needs (literacy, basic health care, housing, retirement income) better than the United States. (In the U.N.'s own data analysis, the U.S. is fourth in the world.)

-- Bathroom Rights in Alabama: In January, the U.S. Supreme Court put to rest Luverne High School student Jerry Boyett's 1993 lawsuit over whether a public-school student has a right, if he needs it, to a restroom break during class. Answer: No. And in April, a jury in Columbiana, Ala., told Clara Kizer the same thing about her dog. She had filed a lawsuit against her neighbors for complaining about her dogs' poop. She said dogs should have the right to poop within 11 feet of a street because that is public land even if it appears to be private property.

-- In August, Scott and Sonya Rutherford filed a $40,000 lawsuit against a Houston school district because the baseball coaches at Cypress Falls High School failed to use their son enough as a pitcher to give him a chance at a college athletic scholarship. The Rutherfords say, also, that they have been humiliated around town by the coaches' failure to play their son. According to the Rutherfords' lawyer, the coaches' decision violates the U.S. Constitution.

-- "Civilized gentlemen do not wear short-sleeve dress shirts," said Derrill Osborn, director of men's clothing for Neiman Marcus, apparently speaking for many managers in a July Wall Street Journal article. The few who spoke up for the comfort of those shirts, especially in the summer, accused Osborn and others of a brand-new political incorrectness: "sleevism."

-- In February, members of the West Palm Beach, Fla., Pit Bull Terrier Club received notices that some insurance companies would not renew their homeowner policies because that breed of dog was responsible for an increasing number of liability claims. Club officer Linda Kender termed such insurance company stereotyping "dog racism."

-- The Dutch Federation for Military Personnel union (which 20 years ago won the right for soldiers to wear their hair long) announced in April it would back a female recruit's desire to wear a tongue ring. The code of conduct, the union said, bans jewelry "on the head," not "in the head."

-- In May, Kent, Wash., elementary school teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, 35, gave birth to a baby girl, the father of whom is one of her sixth-graders. LeTourneau is the daughter of ex-U.S. Rep. John Schmitz, an intense right-wing Republican who was so notoriously opposed to sex education in schools that he would move little Mary out of any school contemplating such a program. In August, she pleaded guilty to child rape. (Unofficially, though, she admires the boy: "There was a respect, an insight, a spirit, an understanding between us that grew over time." They met when he was in second grade.)

-- Reasons College Men Fight in 1997: In Ithaca, N.Y., in May, a 21-year-old college student was arrested for beating up a guy in a bar fight over who had the better-looking goatee.

-- Life Imitates TV: (1) A Bangkok hotel worker was convicted in July of stealing from guests' safe-deposit boxes by rubbing his nose oil onto the buttons so he could check later to see which buttons had been pushed by the guest to open the safe. He said he learned the trick from watching the TV show "MacGyver." (2) A 27-year-old man driving a stolen truck was caught by sheriff's deputies in Salt Lake City in August but not before he eluded one deputy by vaulting over a backyard swimming pool while the squad car went straight in, lights flashing, reminiscent of "The Dukes of Hazzard."

-- Psychologist Sandy Wolfson told The Times of London in June that her research on fans of "Star Trek" reveals as many as 10 percent meet the clinical definition of addicts, especially when they go through physical withdrawal during their show's absence. Further, like classic drug addicts, they seem to require ever-increasing doses to overcome their tolerance levels.

-- News of the Weird reported in 1994 on the controversy over who owned the world's largest cow hairball, but it now appears that an also-ran at that time, Mike Canchola of Sterling, Colo., is now No. 1. In 1994 a Garden City, Kan., historical society had a 37-incher, but Canchola has since come across one measuring 43.3 inches around. In the course of his work at a local beef plant, Canchola plucks out the non-championship hairballs, dries them, has colleague Frank Alcala paint faces or scenery on them, and sells them for $50 each.

-- United Hospital in St. Paul, Minn., announced in May that it was looking for someone to take over curating its collection of more than 14,000 human hearts, each stored in a plastic bag and the collection featuring specimens of nearly every kind of heart disease. Dr. Jesse Edwards, who started the collection and is now 85 years old, is retiring, and says maintenance of the hearts by a staff of five costs $650,000 a year.

-- In a June Associated Press feature, Dr. Charles Emerick, 67, a retired ear, nose and throat specialist in Portland, Ore., described his 450-item collection of things that he has personally removed from patients. Among the most prominent: a bag of decomposed bees (a kid ran into a swarm of them); an eraser that a kid put up his nose that stayed for 15 years until the boy, then in the Navy, had trouble breathing; and a plastic whistle from a boy ("His parents said he whistled every time he took a breath"). And Dr. James A. Downing's collection of 300 similarly gathered items remains on exhibit through Oct. 27 in Des Moines, Iowa.