-- Where's Barry Scheck When You Need Him? Malvin Marshall, 27, was finally released from jail in North Charleston, S.C., on Oct. 29 after being locked up for six weeks because a police field test had found that he had heroin in his pocket. The state lab had finally gotten around to analyzing the substance, which was determined to be vitamin pills that had gone through a wash cycle while in his pants pocket. Said a police lieutenant, "The field test (is) not foolproof."

-- The New York Daily News reported in November that 71-year-old twin sisters Ynette Sapp and Olvette Mahan had just gotten plastic surgery (mole and wrinkles removed) on their faces purely so they would continue to look exactly alike. Said the doctor, the situation is not that unusual; for example, another identical pair was scheduled the next day.

-- Recent European Unity Feuds: Farmers in Sweden are still upset, according to a report by the country's Bureau of Statistics in June, at their inability to sell straight cucumbers in Europe; EU regulations require prime cukes to bend 1 cm for every 20 cm in length. And Belgium and France were victorious in October in a European Parliament vote to require that chocolate be made only with cocoa butter and not with substitute vegetable fats; a British Parliament member complained that British chocolate has always been made with little or no cocoa butter.

-- In September, an official government wristwatch with the face of the prime minister of Malaysia went on sale at the main parliament building in Kuala Lumpur, retailing for about $470. And in June, in an announcement on the first year of operation, the state of Louisiana reported selling 100,000 of its own Royal brand condoms. State health officials claim that it is more economical to make their own than to subsidize higher-priced, brand-name condoms for high-disease-risk clients.

-- According to Chicago Sun-Times reports in June and November, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services since 1995 has doled out $22.5 million in cash and gifts to the most dysfunctional 1,370 families on their rolls, including almost $75,000 to one mother of six. DCFS's "wraparound plans" are designed to simulate middle-class environments so that children can be raised by a natural parent, but critics call the program a jackpot for precisely the worst parents in the city, in that many have been charged with abusing and neglecting their kids. Among the goods included in a typical wraparound plan are: electronic gear and "entertainment center," YMCA membership, and aikido, basketball and drama classes.

-- U.S. Rep. Sam Farr of California introduced a bill this year to end a loophole in the federal Unemployment Tax Act that made it possible for a Santa Cruz, Calif., voting monitor, who was a retired county worker, to grind out one grueling day at the polls in November, claim the next day that he was "laid off," and thereby collect about $12,000 in benefits over a two-year period.

-- According to an Associated Press dispatch in May, scientists at the Department of Agriculture's meat science research lab in Beltsville, Md., have developed an explosion system to tenderize meat by sending supersonic shock waves through it. The shock waves literally rip the muscle tissue apart on a microscopic scale, without any loss of taste. One researcher said the process could be used commercially within a year.

-- In their divorce hearing in September in Edwardsville, Ill., Karon Watt and Greg Watt were arguing over ownership of the couple's cellular phone. Suddenly, Greg's beeper went off, and he reached for the phone to return a call, which infuriated Karon, who snatched the phone out of his hand and fled the courtroom. Greg caught up with her outside, where a brief tussle ensued, which ended when Karon bit Greg's arm, and Judge Randall Bono threatened to jail both people for contempt of court. Bono awarded custody to Karon.

-- In September, murder defendant Hosie Grant, 72, seated on a bench in a courtroom in Little Rock, Ark., with other defendants at the daily arraignment hearing, fell into a sound sleep as he awaited his case to be announced. He was still asleep later when his two daughters and a public defender entered a not-guilty plea for him, but just then, a benchmate shook him awake. Aroused from his slumber but not yet aware of the proceedings, he impulsively arose and shouted, "I plead guilty." He is charged with stabbing a close friend to death, and the judge permitted the not-guilty plea to stand.

-- In October, Italy's highest appeal court, the Court of Cessation, ruled that the breakup of a marriage was not the wife's fault even though she abandoned the husband. The wife was able to demonstrate that after two years of battling, and a fistfight, she was no longer able to indulge her mother-in-law's presence in the home, and the judges agreed the constant interference was intolerable. Rome's largest newspaper, La Repubblica, sympathized, calling the typical Italian mother-in-law "unstoppable as a panzer, omnipresent, overbearing, meddlesome and mischief-making." And in August, a Tokyo district court, citing changing times, rejected a $38,000 claim by a man who said his ex-wife, who worked full-time outside the home, nonetheless had an obligation to do all the housework.

-- In July, Gary and Marlene Johnston pleaded guilty in Halton, Ontario, to cheating the government out of $11,000 (Canadian) in welfare benefits. They had posed in 1995 as a destitute couple with two kids and assets of only a 15-year-old car. However, in September 1996, they purchased a house in a well-to-do neighborhood and proceeded to park their two late-model cars and a boat in the driveway. The new house was just down the street from the house of their welfare caseworker, who spotted them in the yard.

-- In October, James T. Hilton, who police said had just carjacked a van in Bloomfield, N.J., was chased by police in West Orange into the neighborhood of Our Lady of the Valley Roman Catholic Church. Hilton slowed down and was captured after accidentally banging into two unmarked police cars driving slowly down the street and leading a 5,000-officer funeral procession for state trooper Scott M. Gonzalez.

-- In October, Tulsa, Okla., firefighters were called to a church during a birthday party for Mabel McCullough. The alarm had been triggered by smoke from the candles on the cake of the 95-year-old woman.

-- In July, Missouri's new vehicle safety law took effect, prohibiting people from riding in the open bed of a pickup truck. However, an exception was provided for a family transporting their kids where there are too many to ride in the cab and where the truck is the family's only vehicle. The sponsor called the exception "the Jed Clampett amendment."

-- 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.)