-- Open Season: Three weeks before a U.S. Marine Corps pilot clipped a ski gondola in the Dolomite mountains in Italy, killing 20 people, a British air force Harrier jet accidentally dropped two half-ton, unarmed bombs on a farm in southern Italy near the town of Pizziferro, narrowly missing the house of Tommaso Giannico.

-- In February, the Hawaii House Agriculture committee approved a bill to legalize the "sport" of cockfighting, provided the roosters wear tiny padded gloves on their feet instead of the traditional metal leg spurs.

-- In September in Des Moines, Iowa, federal prosecutor Kevin Query, 40, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for fondling a 12-year-old girl and taking nude photographs of her, owing, he said, to his obsession with females' hair, which he said exuded perfection and beauty. He took showers with the girl, he said, to make sure her hair got washed without tangling, and he photographed her nude to document her beauty in case she later cut her hair. (He said his own marriage ended when his wife cut her hair.)

-- Wells Fargo and MasterCard announced in January that they have installed an automatic teller machine at McMurdo Station in Antarctica (whose winter population is 200). And in November, army engineers in India installed a pay phone atop the Siachen Glacier, on the Pakistan border and home to a recurring Indian-Pakistani battlefield, where the temperature hovers around minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit with winds around 70 mph.

-- In September in Center Point, near Birmingham, Ala., Tim and Maxine Smith were convicted of promoting prostitution in their massage parlor, but the women who work for them were not charged because the legislature in that Bible Belt state never got around to making prostitution illegal in Center Point or in several other areas of the state.

-- In August, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning against an electrical cattle-prod-type device called The Stimulator, sold by at least six companies to be self-applied as relief for headaches, back pain, arthritis, stress, menstrual cramps, earaches, sinus, nosebleeds and the flu. Wrote the FDA, "The Stimulator is essentially an electric gas barbecue grill igniter with finger grips."

-- Doctors at the Center for Impotence and Fertility in Rome, Italy, reported in the Dec. 6 issue of The Lancet medical journal that the experimental virility drug alprostadil increased penis size in almost all men who injected it into their urethras but that the rigidity usually subsided within a couple of minutes. Measurements for their work were obtained via a Rigicompt, which shows the pressure exerted by the erection, and by patients' hanging a 750-gram weight to see if their penises could hold it. (A few can support a 1-kilogram weight, which Dr. Ermanno Greco says is "peak virility.")

-- In December in Fort Pierce, Fla., William Alfred Hitt, 71, was sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding the federal government of about $450,000 by claiming disability benefits from a World War II hand injury while working full-time as a house painter. Once a month for 22 years, Hitt put on an arm brace, got into a wheelchair, and reported to the local federal building to pick up his "paycheck." (The jury deliberated 12 minutes before finding him guilty.)

-- In order to get around local ordinances that shut down their stripper bars, entrepreneurs in Eureka, Calif., and Ladson, S.C., converted their businesses. Tom Razooly's Tip Top Club became a recreational vehicle promotion facility in November, and now customers sitting under the flashing lights are handed numerous brochures for RVs while they watch women do pole dances. In January, Ladson's Jerry Colombo converted his Club 2010 into the "Church of the Fuzzy Bunny's," (sic) featuring Bible-reading followed by a procession of pastie-wearing dancers.

-- Christina Mack, 35, was arrested for attempted murder in Peoria, Ill., in December, based on a neighbor's statement that Mack had told her she planned to cover a floor with oil or grease so that her boyfriend, who lost his right leg in 1992, would fall down the stairs to his death. He fell, all right, and hit his head, but declined medical assistance. Mack, however, also fell, knocking herself out, but firefighters revived her so the police could take her away.

-- Recent Sympathy Hoaxes: Schoolteacher Jody Sue Stein allegedly accepted thousands of dollars in gifts and disability payments based on an elaborate, false claim that she had a brain tumor (St. Louis, June 1997). Valerie Jones allegedly accepted thousands of dollars in gifts for her nonexistent leukemia-stricken infant daughter (Yorktown Crossing, Va., October). Police officer Allen Blunk, 30, and his wife allegedly raised $43,000 from neighbors for a bone marrow transplant for their 7-year-old daughter (who did not need one) and spent it on themselves (Tulsa, Okla., January).

]

-- In August, the three murder convictions against Michael Pardue, 41, which sent him to prison 24 years ago, were dismissed by the Alabama Supreme Court as the product of a coerced confession (and a sister of one of the victims said she accepts that Pardue is innocent). However, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles said in November that it will not release Pardue, because of three subsequent convictions during those 24 years, for attempting to escape from the prison that was wrongfully holding him.

-- Right Place, Right Time: In October, a federal judge in Albuquerque refused to send convicted casino robber Loretta Martinez, 61, to prison for stealing $7,000 in an April 1997 holdup. The judge noted that, in the interim, that particular casino was found to be without proper state authority and thus was operating illegally at the time of the heist. Martinez was not required to make restitution because, the judge said, that would be like reimbursing a drug dealer for his losses.

-- In February, prosecutors in Boston finally dismissed two counts of arson against Boston University junior Keven Ackerman, despite overwhelming evidence several days after his arrest in June that it was a simple case of mistaken identity. Though he slightly resembles the arsonist (yet is 6 inches taller), Ackerman had no fire-type evidence on his skin or clothes, no motive, no criminal record, and 15 alibi witnesses who were at a party with him all evening long. Also, the only witness against him has a long criminal record himself, and reportedly sometimes falsely accuses people of crimes.

(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.)

-- Slam-Dunkers at Risk: Peter Martin Vella, 18, filed a lawsuit against the city of Milford, Conn., in December, claiming that he ripped his nose open during a city playground basketball game. He said his nostril caught on a protruding hook (on which the net hangs) on the basket rim. And a 20-year-old man was killed in Melbourne, Australia, in January when the brick wall of a garage collapsed; the wall had a basketball backboard attached, and the man had held onto the rim after a slam-dunk, bringing the backboard and the wall down on top of him.

-- In January, the executor of the estate of the late Larry Lee Hillblom agreed to pay out at least $90 million each to four Pacific Islands teen-agers whose DNA showed Hillblom was their father. Hillblom, who founded the DHL international courier firm and died in a 1995 plane crash, was described by one lawyer in the case as a pedophile who obsessively pursued teen-age virgin bargirls in the Philippines and the Micronesian islands. At least one of the children will see quite an income bump this year, from the $125 a month he and his grandmother now earn in Palau.

-- The Washington Post reported in November on the unusual cat obsession of Kristin Kierig in Fairfax County, Va., unusual because the 114 cats that live with her are well-fed, and her townhouse is clean and orderly. More typical stories were of foul-smelling houses in Oshawa, Ontario, in August (120 cats), Edmonton, Alberta, in September (59 cats), and Piedmont, Calif., in October (150 cats, most of them diseased, plus another 250 dead cats in the freezer). Said Piedmont police Capt. Fred Gouveia: "One litter box and 150 cats. You have a problem."

-- In October, the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy, which provides defense attorneys on capital punishment cases, briefly suspended lawyer Timothy T. Riddell and a colleague for an inept last-minute appeal in June to spare the life of convicted killer Harold McQueen Jr. Riddell had been lightly punished for another indiscretion the year before, having acknowledged in a child-custody case that he several times had recorded his own solo sexual activity over state-owned videotapes that contain official-record sessions of capital punishment trials. According to newspaper reports, the tapes show Riddell dressed in women's underwear and engaging in, among other things, various activities with his own urine.

-- Latest Indoor Landfill: In November, a 27-year-old woman in Swansea, R.I., was so distraught when she took a peek at the inside of her stepmother's home that she called 911. In most rooms, garbage was piled to the ceiling, and some rooms couldn't be entered because of trash blocking the doors. Apparently, the stepmother and her two sons lived in the house uneventfully, although the boys told police that they didn't like it that the house had been so dirty for a couple of years now. The stepmother was said to have become distraught when some relatives died.

-- Speaking to an audience at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., in October, novelist Kathryn Harrison (who previously had written about her four-year affair with her father) read a letter she had written to her dead grandmother, in which she confessed to sticking her finger into the woman's cremated ashes and licking it off, then doing the same thing with her whole hand. According to the New York Post, "The crowd responded with polite applause."

-- In October, librarians at several Ohio colleges reported that hundreds of their books had been vandalized by someone's clipping photographs from them, all of young boys. Targets included children's books, fine arts books, and health and medical books, and pictures of Anglo, Middle Eastern and Asian boys were taken. The vandal or vandals are still at large.

-- The Weirdo-German Community: In a November letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, three physicians describe the case of a German female hospital-lab technician, age 45, who was treated for 13 episodes of malaria during 1994-1996. Because of the frequency and the fact that the underlying parasite genotypes were different in several of the attacks, the physicians quizzed the patient, who immediately broke down and admitted she had been deliberately injecting herself with malaria-infected blood.

-- In July, the Lomsko Pivo brewery in Lom, Bulgaria, announced that brewmaster Yordan Platikanov has developed a beer that could neutralize any lingering amounts of uranium 134 and strontium in the body after exposure to nuclear radiation. Platikanov said the new beer should be urged on nuclear power plant workers relaxing at the end of a shift.

-- In December, Clearwater, Fla., entrepreneur Victoria Morton announced that she has developed a brassiere that can increase cup size during wear by repositioning fat near the breasts. "If a woman has extra tissue anywhere above her waist, even on her back, she can use this bra to create bigger, firmer breasts," said Morton, 62, in a press release. Morton is the person credited with inventing the "mineral body wrap" weight-loss technique in the 1960s.

-- In November, Abuja, Nigeria, entrepreneur Bawa Garba began marketing Abacha-brand television sets in his country, emblazoned with the image of Nigeria's military ruler, Gen. Sani Abacha. Most of the sets will be sold to government agencies, but the public can buy the 21-inch models for about $490, which the average Nigerian would need to work 22 months to earn.

-- In December, veterinary student Beate Broese-Quinn filed a lawsuit against Foothill College in San Jose, Calif., which had flunked her after she declined to do a class assignment to dissect a fetal pig. Said her lawyer, "(Forcing) her to (dissect) is antithetical to everything this country is founded on" because her love of animals is the equivalent to other people's belief in God.

-- According to The Times of London in December, the latest group to take offense at the workings of the world is a federation of meat-shop owners in France, who say they're hurt that reporters routinely refer to vicious murderers as "butchers." Butchers, said the association, are "gentle, peace-loving" "artisans."

-- In November, Oakland (Calif.) Community College student Anita S. Lee filed a sexual harassment complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against psychology professor Joel M. Cohen. She was offended not at the actual content of his Introduction to Psychology class, whose opening session she left after about 10 minutes, deciding it was not for her, but at the warning that Cohen had put on the syllabus, alerting students that "adult themes and topics" would be explored in an "open, frank" and "controversial" way. A member of the National Association for Women in Education, supporting Lee, said, "I read (the warning), and said, 'If I was a student, I'd be scared stiff.'"

(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 Blessed Family Unit: In December, a judge in Montgomery County, Md., awarded custody of a 2-year-old boy to his biological mother, Latrena D. Pixley, 23, despite the fact that she murdered an infant daughter in 1992 for crying too much. (She was given a suspended sentence for the murder and found a job, during which she engaged in credit-card fraud, to which she later pleaded guilty. The judge sent her to prison for that but changed his mind and let her out a few months later.) And the month before, Bertha Bromley, 34, was sentenced to probation in Edwardsville, Ill., for attempting to strangle her 9-month-old boy, and social workers say they are working toward eventually reuniting mother and son.

-- The Times of London reported in January that 10,000 current or former Irish soldiers have filed claims that they suffered hearing loss while in the military, either on firing ranges or playing in army bands, and judges have been rewarding them to the tune of about $33,000 per claim, on average. In addition, reported the Times, just recently the first claim was filed against the army for compensation for skin cancer, by an Irish soldier on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon who said he should have been issued sunscreen.

-- In December, Iowa Wesleyan College announced it would award an honorary degree in business to Cambodian tycoon Teng Bunma, who is a close adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen and who has long been suspected of cocaine trafficking. Teng Bunma recently made international headlines when he shot out a Royal Air Cambodge airliner's tires in retaliation for lost luggage and a short time later for pulling a gun on the crew of an Orient Thai Airlines flight so they wouldn't take off before his companions arrived. (In January, when it was pointed out that Teng Bunma had been denied a U.S. visa because of the drug allegations, the college withdrew the degree.)

-- On the heels of reports that Sweden forcibly sterilized 60,000 people with inferior genes between 1935 and 1976, Stockholm's second-largest newspaper Aftonbladet reported in September that government-supported dentists had force-fed candy to mentally handicapped people in 10-year experiments to help determine whether sugar facilitates tooth decay. (It does.)

-- Charles Keating Is a Lucky Man: In October, Mr. Cen Huanreng, mayor of a village in Guangdong province, China, was convicted of selling about $2.1 million worth of public property and then gambling away the money at a Macau casino. He was sentenced to death. (The report did not say when he would die, but execution usually comes swiftly after sentencing and is rarely announced in the press.)

-- Marijuana festivals were held in October in Spain (first time) and in November in Amsterdam (10th annual Cannabis Cup, sponsored by High Times magazine). In Madrid, 50 growers competed for plant quality awards by blind-sampling each other's work. In Amsterdam, 2,000 people taste-tested the products of many vendors. (Publicist Jody Miller, who said she had been high for three days solely on second-hand smoke, tried to explain how it is possible to taste-test so much dope: "You have to pace yourself.")

-- Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, who visited Scotland for the British Commonwealth summit in October, left without accepting the invitation of British gay rights leaders to be hooked up to an erotic arousal machine to determine whether his rabid anti-gay bias is really a shield for homosexual feelings. Mugabe has called gays "lower than dogs and pigs." Erection-measuring research by a University of Georgia professor indicates that as many as 80 percent of gay-hating men become aroused at gay erotic videos.

-- The New England Journal of Medicine reported in December that at least half the drugs donated to Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war (perhaps many of them from U.S. companies, though no company or country was identified in the article) were useless and even dangerous, apparently donated largely for the benefit of the company and not the recipients. Not only were 17,000 tons of drugs out of date (or spoiled, or with untranslated instructions), and not only did most or all of the companies get charitable tax deductions in their own countries, but disposal costs of about $2,000 a ton fell to the World Health Organization.

-- In August, two cities debated plans to reduce the amount of dog poop in municipal parks and on sidewalks. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was contemplating installing a series of anonymous "poopcams" around town to catch dog owners who neglect their scooping duty. And Tel Aviv, Israel, announced that squads of plainclothes police officers armed with cameras and night-vision equipment were on duty around the clock photographing violators of its ordinance.

-- In July, long-haired defensive end Brent Burnstein walked out of the Tennessee Oilers' training camp, thus putting his lucrative career in jeopardy, rather than submit to the traditional rookie haircut at the hands of veteran players. And in November, five football players from Leguna-Acona (N.M.) High School quit the team just before the first playoff game, in order to go deer hunting.

-- Vanity Fair magazine reported in its January issue that when the warden at the Huntsville, Texas, prison was trying to accommodate the last requests of death-row inmate Larry Wayne White (who appeared in News of the Weird before, for an obvious reason) last May, he got his preferred last meal but not a last cigarette. The prison is a nonsmoking facility.

-- In August, after an investigation, police in Compton, Calif., announced that they no longer believed that high school English teacher Shannan Barron, who is black, was the victim of a racist feces-dumping attack, as she had claimed. Their most helpful evidence was the crime lab's finding that the feces on her pants came from the inside and thus that it was probable that Barron had, as the police chief put it, a "personal accident."

-- An August letter to the New England Journal of Medicine from Dr. Rachel L. Chin described a U.S. woman's infection from botfly larvae that she picked up in Peru. The patient was looking at spots on her legs when she saw things start to wiggle out. Eventually, seven maturing bugs, which had been gestating in the infection, emerged before she got medical help.

-- In 1988, Iranian Merhan Nasseri, then 46, landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris after being denied entry into England because his passport, and United Nations refugee certificate, had been stolen. French authorities would not let him leave the airport, and there he has been ever since, in Terminal One, luggage at his side, reading, writing in his diary, studying economics, receiving food and newspapers from airport employees. News of the Weird (which gave status reports on Nasseri in 1991 and 1995) has also been around since 1988, and with this column begins its 11th year. Charles de Gaulle spokeswoman Danielle Yzerman said, of Nasseri, "An airport is kind of a place between heaven and earth; he has found a home here." So is a newspaper, and so has "News of the Weird."

(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.)