-- In December, nationally known Emory University business school professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, 43, abruptly resigned, and according to several news reports, it was because the school had discovered him on a video surveillance tape vandalizing a wall in a school corridor and suspected him to be the one who previously had gouged doors, woodwork and furniture in the building. Sonnenfeld had recently been passed over for the position of business school dean at Emory. Following that setback, Georgia Tech offered him a deanship but withdrew it after reports of the videotape emerged.

-- Mayors Out of Control: In December, Mayor Daniel F. Devlin, 51, of Upper Darby, Pa., defeated for re-election the month before, was charged with robbing a local bank of $1,500 by claiming to have a bomb. Three days earlier, Mayor Craig Johnson, 41, of Snow Hill, Md., was arrested and charged with malfeasance in office for permitting one of the town's police cars to be used in pornographic photos that were distributed on the Internet. According to police investigators, Johnson had also promised the pornographers access to a NASA facility on nearby Wallops Island, Va., but no photos from that site were found.

-- In August, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Perry A. Lang, a white man, was entitled to worker compensation damages, despite the fact that his on-the-job injury came from being punched in the face by a black co-worker whom Lang had just racially insulted. The court said a sensitive colleague is just one of the "myriad of risks" workers face. And in July, the Hawaii Supreme Court took a similar position in upholding a law defining on-the-job illness to include stress that is caused by being disciplined for poor work.

-- In September, Brother Eric Metivier, 28, was charged with aggravated assault for allegedly stabbing Brother Fernard Bremaud, 71, several times in a dispute at the Trappist Fathers monastery near Holland, Manitoba.

-- According to interviews conducted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the last deathbed utterance of tavern owner Anthony J. Golembiewski, 83, in August was "one, six, nine, five." Family members were puzzled, but one decided to buy a lottery ticket with the numbers. The ticket won $23,500. Said Golembiewski's widow, "Andy, you son of a bitch, you even paid for your own funeral."

-- During a televised visit to a nursing home in Tokyo in September, Japan's Emperor Akihito, trying to pick up the game of paper-scissors-rock, lost to resident Toshiko Arai, who showed scissors. Thus, by house custom, the emperor was obliged to give the woman a shoulder massage.

-- In November, the University of Nebraska, whose football team was on its way to becoming national co-champions, announced it was awarding its first-ever, full athletic scholarship to Jennifer Daugherty, of Bloomington, Ill., for its women's bowling team.

-- The president of Poland's baseball industry association, defending baseball bats in June against calls that they be made illegal since they were being used in so many street muggings: "No baseball player in Poland would use a bat for any purpose other than playing the game. The relationship between a baseball player and his bat is something sacred."

-- George Shea, of Nathan's Famous in Brooklyn, N.Y., acknowledging in July the continuing Japanese superiority in hot-dog eating contests, but pointing out American hopeful Joey Serrano of Philadelphia, who had just eaten 17 in 12 minutes: "This kid has the excitement you see only in a young athlete who is just becoming aware of the miracles his body can perform on the field of combat."

-- Awni Hasham, 58, a furniture company owner in Gaza City, explaining to The Washington Post in July why he takes seriously the rumors that Israel had introduced chewing gum that had been laced with hormones to make people so horny that Palestinian society would be disrupted: "If they can put a spaceship on Mars, they can make sex chewing gum."

-- Serge Engambe, a previously unemployed college graduate who signed on with former Congolese military dictator Denis Sassou-Nguesso, explaining in July why he accepted a militia job with an organization widely thought to butcher its enemies: "This is a unique chance in my life, in a country where young (college) graduates are not a priority of the government."

-- New Porterville, Calif., mother Shellie Lee, 20, who claimed she was unaware she was pregnant, describing the surprise birth of her son in July: "I was sitting there (on a toilet) when all of a sudden, a head came out. It just came out, bam! It slid right out and was hanging on my leg."

-- New Zealand researcher Ingrid Visser's two-year study of killer whales, released in October in New Scientist magazine, revealed that orcas eat stingrays but only after tossing them around among themselves, Frisbee-like, apparently so they can position them in such a way as to avoid the stingers when they bite down. She said she once witnessed two whales binge on 18 stingrays in a six-hour period.

-- At the Santiago, Chile, zoo in September, it took four hours' work with a crane to lift Protea, 9, a three-ton female elephant, out of a moat following a mating accident caused by a frisky but incompetent male named Jumbo, 10.

(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 November, ecology activists in Chile issued an alert that 2-foot-long mutant rats were attacking livestock in Santiago. At about the same time, residents of Brooksville, Fla., were complaining about the sudden public appearances of 3-foot-long, 14-pound nutria rats (vegetarian rodents once imported from South America for their fur). And two weeks later, The New York Times reported on the recent work of Louisiana professor Robert A. Thomas, hired with a $2 million federal grant to contain that state's nutria rat population, largely by trying to convince the public that nutrias are tasty.

-- Bobbittization News: In December, Alan Hall, 48, reported to police in Fairfield, Calif., that he had been Bobbittized by a woman in revenge for Hall's having killed a friend of hers 14 years ago. (Hall served time for voluntary manslaughter.) Then, two days later, Hall admitted that there was no other woman and that he had done it himself for unstated reasons. The incident took place only three weeks after Danish surgeon Joern Ege Siana reported outfitting a world-record 5.7-inch penis extension on a 42-year-old man, and only two days after the former Lorena Bobbitt, herself, was charged in Manassas, Va., with punching her mother in a family squabble.

-- In November, dentist W. Stephen Randall, 41, was charged with 26 drug-related counts in Bristol, Conn. According to the prosecutor, Randall had a drug habit and in various ways managed to appropriate patients' prescriptions. In one instance he made a rare house call on a patient, but while in the house, he raided the patient's medicine chest of valium and other drugs, and in another case, he copped a root-canal patient's painkiller and left her instead over-the-counter acetaminophen.

-- In June, Lake Zurich High School teacher Douglas Petrovitch, 28, was indicted in Waukegan, Ill., on six counts related to a scheme of awarding some students good grades if they would allow him to shoplift at stores in which they worked after school. In two instances, said the grand jury, Petrovitch arranged with students to pay about $100 for merchandise worth about $1,000.

-- Police in Edmond, Okla., issued an arrest warrant in July for Edward M. Jennings, 37, as the man who toured flea markets, pawn shops and swap meets over the last two years attempting to sell his homemade box, rigged with computer parts, as an "atomic bomb" for $1 million. Because Jennings was on the lam, he was unavailable to tell why he thought someone at a flea market might have $1 million to spend on an atomic bomb.

-- In December, an industrial tribunal in Bristol, England, took under consideration the case of whether the 1996 firing of Gavin Rogers-Ball, 30, a member of the Wells Cathedral Choir, was justified. The chief complaint against him was that he had bribed a schoolboy in the choir to feign illness on a long bus ride during a tour of Germany -- so that the driver would have to stop, which would enable Rogers-Ball to take a cigarette break. A 10-year-old boy induced himself to vomit in the back of the bus and thus collected the award, and his mother says she does not want the boy to grow up thinking this behavior is acceptable.

-- Thomas Tillman pleaded guilty in September in Tampa, Fla., for whipping his son and stepson with a water-soaked leather strap and videotaping the beating. Tillman said he made the tape so that the boys could one day show it to their own kids as an aid in disciplining them.

-- Brian Cook, 29, was charged with aggravated burglary in Springfield, Tenn., in November after trying to rob his grandmother, Sue Denning, 64. Denning grabbed an antique clothes iron and hit Cook in the head, sending him staggering from the home.

-- The New York Times reported in October on the secret life of a 25-year-old British-born daughter of Pakistani immigrants living in Bradford, England, who has changed residences 19 times in the last five years just to avoid death threats from her own father and brother, who are angry that she refused at age 16 to accept a family-arranged marriage. The woman said that in her last conversation with her brother, he had promised to track her down and kill her "slowly."

-- In November, John Michael Harris, 17, escaped from a Wetherby, England, correctional institution, and police warned he might be dangerous, though his mother, June, called him a "good boy" and blamed "the system (for letting) him down." Harris is known in the press as "Blip Boy," because his 17-page criminal record, with 103 convictions since age 9, has by itself noticeably increased the juvenile crime rate.

-- In September in Cormierville, New Brunswick, Kevin Bastarache peeled an orange and saw an inch-long, orange-colored Pacific tree frog leap out at him. A local zoo official, familiar with the species, said the frog must have entered the orange through a tiny hole and then survived on the juices. The frogs are found from California to Canada and are harmless, and in fact are sometimes kept as pets.

-- The Times of London reported in July that a telephone had gone on sale in England with a built-in stress-linked lie detector and a retail price of about $4,500. The manufacturer said the most promising sales market is executives, who would use the device to gather business information. In a test, a Times reporter called a used-car dealer, who consistently registered a high (probably lying) reading but also phoned a notorious London nightclub owner to talk about his public claim that he had had sex with more than 2,000 woman -- and found the man scored low (probably truthful).

-- In November, two professors from Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., announced that, based on their study of 10 journalists at the local Times Leader newspaper, having Muzak on in the background at work not only reduced stress but slightly improved the journalists' immune systems.

-- In August, just after a Hudson Foods processing plant in Nebraska was closed down based on a highly publicized federal investigation that found e-coli bacteria contamination in ground beef, the company suffered another crisis. Hudson's Noel, Mo., poultry-processing plant became the first U.S. firm to be fined ($300,000) by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for causing workers anxiety by providing insufficient restroom breaks.

(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 Miami, Fla., on Dec. 4 at 10:30 p.m., Edna Benson, in curlers and ready for bed, grabbed her Taurus 85 handgun and prepared to see who was knocking on her door at that hour. To her great surprise, it was Mayor Xavier Suarez, who "looked mad, really, really mad," said Benson, and was clutching the four-page letter she had written criticizing the mayor for firing the police chief. After she turned out the lights and shouted at him, Suarez finally walked away. Later, Suarez said he tries to call everyone who writes him but that he didn't have Benson's phone number.

-- In November in Waukesha, Wis., Kenneth J. Nowicki, 34, was formally charged with disorderly conduct following his arrest in August. According to the police complaint, Nowicki targeted three kids in a park, left them candy and a cup, and via typewritten instructions asked them to spit into the cup after consuming the candy. He told police he is preoccupied with saliva and uses it for sexual gratification.

-- In October, the Hotel Nagoya Castle, 170 miles west of Tokyo, began calling its rates "suggested" and allowing customers to pay whatever they thought the rooms were worth (but at least 38 percent of the suggested rate). In trial runs, the hotel found the average discount to be only 10 percent, which management expected to be overcome by higher volume.

-- The Rocky Mountain News disclosed in June that business was brisk for the Denver company DDx Inc., in sales of its HeatWatch system, which detects when one cow attempts to mount another cow (which, though it has no procreation significance, is still a good indication that one or both are in heat) and alerts ranchers and dairy farmers of optimum time for artificial insemination.

-- In September in Hackensack, N.J., pharmaceutical chemist Puzant Torigian introduced the latest "safe" cigarette, Bravo, made of enzyme-treated lettuce leaves. They are sold mostly in health-food stores, at about $3.50 a pack. (Bravos actually appeared on the market briefly 28 years ago, but safe-smoking was not as important then, and they failed to sell.)

-- The German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported the introduction of a "Letter Bomb" toy in stores in the Philippines in October, selling quickly by urging kids to "have fun and become a terrorist." The toy resembles an airmail envelope, and instructions say to write the target's name on it, clap on it heavily, and then present it to the victim within seven seconds so it will "explode" in his hand.

-- A July New York Post article described the rapidly expanding retail market for bullet-resistant clothing (leather jackets, sneakers, mink coats, bras), including denim jeans with 25 percent Kevlar, which the manufacturer believes will sell because of their unique appearance rather than their bullet-retarding properties. And the Village Voice reported in November that a New York City security gadget store sells an ordinary-looking chair with electric plates on the seat and on a shelf extending from an arm; it can detect when someone is hiding a metal object in his rectum or mouth.

-- In June, Netherlands native Imre Somogyi told an audience at a book festival in Chicago that he was the world's first toe reader. In the course of promoting his book, "Reading Toes: Your Feet as Reflections of Your Personality," Somogyi told one New York woman that the inward turn of her right small toe indicated she was likely "to turn away from the subject," according to a Reuters news report. Somogyi said 70 percent of his clients are women: "Women are very open. Men hide their toes."

-- State University College at New Paltz, N.Y., hosted controversial, sex-related academic conferences on the weekends of Oct. 31 and Nov. 7. The first included tips on sadomasochism and the use of sex toys, and the second, on women's bodies in art, featured such exhibits as a female graduate student in a body suit, suspended from a ceiling, being hosed down with water by two men while a woman lying underneath her and wearing only a G-string has hot wax dripped on her body.

-- In November, the Dayton Daily News reported that a vandal operating in local libraries is still on the loose after two years of incidents. The vandal targets books that, as he once wrote, are "an affront to public decency (and that) corrupt young children," such as those on homosexuality or the United Nations, and smears them with human feces.

-- In June trial testimony in Providence, R.I., against retired Roman Catholic Monsignor Louis Ward Dunn, a woman who claimed to have been raped by him in 1965 when she was 18 said she initially did not believe Father Dunn's advances were sexual. She said Father Dunn had asked her to remove her blouse, which she did, and that he had spread talcum powder over her breasts, and that the two of them then killed a bottle of wine, but, she said, "I did not consider that sexual in any way." (Dunn was acquitted of that rape charge. However, the next week, he was found guilty of raping another woman and called by the judge "a sexual predator," but in August the judge granted him a new trial in that case.)

-- In August in Sharnbrook, England, Emma Webster, 15, revealed she was pregnant, due in January, and that the father was Sean Stewart, age 11, whom she had met in school and whom she thought was at least 15. Said Emma to London's Daily Mail, "I think he will be a good father. He may only be 11, but he is quite mature and responsible for his age."

-- A 38-year-old man passed away in Jenkins Township, Pa., in November, a couple of hours after going to the home of a friend to see his snakes. According to the friend, the man had playfully reached into a cobra's tank and picked up the snake, and was bitten. Refusing a ride to the hospital, the man said "I'm a man, I can handle it," and instead went to a bar, where he had three drinks and bragged to patrons that he had just been bitten by a cobra. An hour later, he was dead.

-- On the morning of Nov. 11, two best friends, ages 27 and 41, residents of Whitney, Texas, about 25 miles north of Waco, did what they often did when they encountered each other on the empty farm roads: They drove their pickups directly at each other in a game of chicken. That morning, they collided at about 60 miles an hour. The younger man was saved by his seat belt; the older man was unbelted and died at the scene.

(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.)