-- Rosamaria Machado-Wilson, formerly a manager at BSG, a Panama City, Fla., audio lab doing product development for the gambling industry, filed a lawsuit against the company in July, claiming she was fired for not embracing the company's workplace Christianity. The lawsuit claims the company forced her to be baptized and to attend prayer meetings and that Machado-Wilson sometimes encountered prostrate employees in the office, praying in tongues. She claims the experience caused her to compulsively read the Bible and to refuse conjugal sex.

-- Tourists driving a pickup truck with California plates camped out in a Peruvian historical-landmark area in July and defaced the thin, 1,000-year-old Indian etchings (called the Nazca Lines) with their tire marks. The stretch of desert 250 miles south of Lima is not well-guarded but is ringed with concrete markers, and some observers believe that it will take decades for blowing sand to cover the tire tracks. The tourists also left garbage behind.

A 41-year-old man in a pickup truck was arrested in Conneaut, Ohio, in May and charged with shooting two volunteer firefighters. The victims were assisting an ambulance crew to tend to an elderly woman; apparently, the ambulance driver, with traffic stopped in both directions, was taking too much time backing out of a driveway and thus needed to be shot. And in April on the side of I-395 in Alexandria, Va., during rush hour, Army Maj. Odie Butler stood for 45 minutes protecting a critically wounded woman whose van had just overturned. During the wait, Butler said he had to endure many refusals to call for help, plus epithets and middle fingers, because the accident had blocked a lane of traffic.

In May, when New York City sixth-grade teacher Ms. Aishah Ahmad, 44, declined to switch the classroom TV set from educational programming to "The Jerry Springer Show," four girls aged 11 and 12 pounced on her and beat her up, sending her to the hospital. However, a month before that, Stratford (Conn.) High student Joseph Calore filed a lawsuit against the school because it kept the Springer show on in the classroom during an exam. According to Calore, a fight on the show provoked another student to punch Calore and break his jaw.

In July, while a religious organization was running a controversial national advertising campaign offering help to gays to "change" into heterosexuals, Ronald Anacelteo, 38, was ordered by a court in Los Angeles to stay away from singer Stevie Nicks, whom Anacelteo thought could change him from gay to straight. According to a law enforcement officer, Anacelteo (who is not affiliated with the ad campaign) "is a self-proclaimed homosexual" who believes that Nicks can "heal" his homosexuality and "find (him) a woman to marry."

-- In June, retired Missouri Highway Patrol investigator Jack Merritt told reporters he had since destroyed the 1994 photograph he admitted playfully taking of Christian County sheriff Steve Whitney touching a murder victim's breast during an autopsy. (The man charged with the murder is in court, questioning autopsy procedures.) And Mark Calebs, 31, was arrested in July in London, Ky., and charged with breaking into the House-Rawlings Funeral Home and stealing the underpants from the body of a 9-year-old girl who had died of cancer.

-- In July, a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., rejected a prosecutor's request to stop Latin Kings gang leader Antonio Fernandez from selling Amway products. Fernandez, out on bail on drug charges, is restricted to his home except under certain conditions, and the prosecutor believes a sales route would allow Fernandez a way to conduct Latin Kings business. Fernandez's lawyer, chiding the prosecutors, said the Amway business was a good thing and could lead Fernandez into Tupperware, Mary Kay and Avon.

-- The French company Neyret announced plans earlier this year to market "exciting" underwear, beginning with an aromatic bra that will go on sale sometime this year. While stretched taut, and even more so when it is caressed, the bra will give off scents of pink grapefruit, apple, watermelon, black currant or apricot.

-- In February, the Kloser brewery in Nuezelle, Germany, announced it would soon begin selling dark beer concentrate for foam baths and eczema treatment. The new product differs from beer only in that the yeast is left in, creating its skin-soothing quality. Said owner Helmut Fritsche, "You can bathe in it or drink it. Whoever wants to, can do both."

-- For People With Way Too Much Money: The New York Times reported in April that Burberrys had just introduced six new styles of trench coats for dogs at prices ranging from $65 to $575. A July New York Times feature pictured the Gucci Dog Bowl at $750, black or clear. In late 1997, Gucci introduced its nipple ring attached to the larger "G," at $790 for crystal and $6,300 for diamond.

-- San Diego businessman Denis Braun told the Union-Tribune newspaper in June of his proposal to finance a new downtown baseball stadium for the Padres by selling space inside the outfield wall for about 70,000 urns with ashes of baseball fans, at about $2,500 a slot. According to Braun, the boring alternative would be to "deep-six (the ashes) in a pine box in the back 40 of some anonymous cemetery."

Jailed drug-dealer suspect Dwayne Brown, 24, in Cambridge (Mass.) Jail in February, allegedly hatched an escape plot with two friends. Brown was to lower a rope-blanket out an 18th-floor jail window; the friends would tie a gun to it; Brown would hoist it up; and Brown could use it to threaten a judge at his next court date. Problems: (1) Despite casing the joint, the friends did not notice a ledge that prevented the rope-blanket from even reaching the street. (2) Jail and court searches still would have uncovered the gun. (3) Most important, guards overheard the whole plan when the friends visited Brown in jail to plot it out and thus had heavy surveillance on the street that night. (Apparently it failed to strike the friends as eerie that no other traffic was present on the sealed-off street.)

News of the Weird has reported several times on husbands who Super Glued their wives' genitals in retaliation for alleged extramarital affairs, most recently in a Newport, Tenn., case in 1997. In April 1998, Richard McDonald, 32, was arrested in Rock Island, Ill., for Super Gluing his girlfriend's genitals. And in Easthampton, Mass., in July, Ms. Kim M. Bonafilia, 34, was charged with assaulting her ex-boyfriend with a baseball bat and attempting to Super Glue his penis to his leg after he allegedly admitted he was interested in her only for sex.

Jerome Covington, 43, identified by a woman as the man who broke into her car in Chicago in June and stole her computer, collapsed and died of a heart attack in the police cruiser as he was being taken to the station. The following week, Terrence C. O'Neal, 48, who police say had just robbed a Kroger pharmacy in Westerville, Ohio, collapsed and died in his getaway car (driven by an accomplice) during a 10-minute police chase.

(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 BBC reported in June that despite recent Pakistani government crackdowns, gangs operating around the shrine of Sha Dola in the city of Gujrat have been deliberately deforming infants handed over to the shrine for religious purposes so that they can be used by the gangs as high-sympathy, and unusually effective, beggars. The so-called "rat children" have distinctively smaller heads, which shrine personnel say is due to genetic defects, but which critics say are the result of clamping medieval iron rings on their heads to retard growth and brain function.

-- NASA revealed in May that it had inadvertently allowed an astronaut impostor to sit at the Mission Control console at Alabama's Marshall Space Center during a shuttle flight in which actual astronauts were preparing to rescue a satellite from space. Jerry Allen Whittredge was arrested in Houston and charged with lying to NASA officials, but his lawyer said he is mentally incompetent to stand trial. Asked how NASA could not correctly identify its real astronauts, an official said merely that Whittredge made a credible impression.

Sometime between March and May, thieves stole an 18-ton steel bridge that connected an isolated cottage to a main road near Bytow, Poland. And in May, in Liverpool, England, thieves stole about 250 feet worth of an entire street (5,000 cobblestones). And in May, thieves stole the entire left field fence of the Capitola-Soquel (Calif.) Little League field.

The Sunday Times of London reported in April that former prominent London male fashion model Chris Reid had just officially been accepted in the South African town of Port St. Johns as the first-ever white witch doctor. Reid, currently known as Ntombhe Mhlophe and whose "fashion" now consists of animal skins, had just finished a four-month apprenticeship in the art, which is said to retain importance for nearly 90 percent of black South Africans.

In February, Timothy Devine, 37, thought he had merely been struck in the ear while in a Boston park trying to purchase marijuana and that he could walk off the pain, but he decided to go to Quincy Hospital, whose attendants confirmed his emerging suspicion that he might have been shot in the head. And in May in Sacramento, Calif., a 19-year-old man was convicted of four counts of attempted murder, based in part on the testimony of one victim who said he was not aware for several days afterward that he had been shot in the stomach and another who said he thought at first he had been hit in the nose by a rock until a doctor told him a bullet had entered through an ear and exited through a nostril.

On the witness stand in March in Albuquerque, N.M., car salesman Sean Gene Druktenis, 28, denied the charge that he had fondled the daughter of the woman he was dating. However, during cross-examination, prosecutor Robert Rambo challenged Druktenis' truthfulness by asking, "As a top car salesman, did you ever lie to a customer?" That question drew what an Albuquerque Journal reporter termed "a long pause," followed by the ambiguous, "I would have to say no to that." (Four days later, a mistrial was declared on an unrelated issue.)

-- In March, a 20-year-old man was charged with attempted murder in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, for stabbing a 29-year-old man, an acquaintance, in the head. The victim walked out of his apartment after the stabbing, fully conscious and speaking, despite the fact that the butcher knife was still embedded in his skull. He survived.

-- In May, according to Pasadena, Calif., Fire Department Chief Joe Nestor, about 1,000 swifts (a small migratory bird similar to a swallow) flew down the chimney of a couple's home and filled their house. There was no authoritative explanation for that, but the explanation in Augusta, Ga., for the thousands of bees that quickly covered Betty Robinson's 1984 Buick in April was the new brand of air freshener she was using in the car. And in May in Weymouth, England, about 20,000 bees covered Jane Clark's house, and furthermore, Clark, trapped inside, could not get the town council to help her because, said a spokesman, bees are a protected species. (After two days, the bees left.)

-- In New York City in March, Adonis Gomez, 2, playing on the sofa in a third-floor apartment, bounced out the window but landed safely in the lap of Barbara Jones, 31, who was sitting in a wheelchair on the sidewalk. And a month earlier, in Brooklyn, Bishme Owens, 2, was thrown out an eighth-floor window by his grandmother (who has a history of mental illness) but was slowed by tree branches and landed in a flower bed so that his only injury was a broken arm.

-- Golf Imitates Miniature Golf: In May at Beaver Brook Golf Course in Haydenville, Mass., Todd Obuchowski was credited with a hole-in-one on a par-3 hole after his tee shot went over the green and onto a highway, hit a passing Toyota driven by Nancy Bachand, ricocheted back to the green, and rolled into the cup. At least eight golfers witnessed the shot.

-- Just Like in the Movies: In Aalesund, Norway, in May, Kristin Nalvik Loendal, 9, riding her bike down a steep hill and failing to stop at an intersection at the bottom, swerved into the path of an oncoming car and was knocked into the air. The driver of the car stopped to help the girl but couldn't find her. As he discovered several hours later, she had landed in the bed of a truck going in the opposite direction and sustained only bumps and bruises.

Justin Clark, 19, was arrested and charged with burglary in Sioux Falls, S.D., in April after a homeowner surprised him. According to police, Clark fled, then led police on a high-speed chase before crashing his car into a tree. As Clark ran through a nearby neighborhood, in which several residents were out in their yards, he kept up a steady chatter, informing them that the reason he was running was that the police were after him and asking whether any of them could help him. Several people tackled Clark and held him for the police.

Another Item Stored in the Rectum: Marijuana pipe, which police in Boardman, Ohio, recovered during a drug bust in June but which seemed to disappear in the squad car as suspect William P. Miller, 35, was being driven to the station. Police finally deduced there was only one place in which they hadn't looked and convinced Miller to remove it. He was charged with tampering with evidence.

In April, a 47-year-old man in Peoria, Ill., finally died of a 1971 gunshot wound that had paralyzed him for 27 years. His assailant would thus have been charged with murder, but he died five years ago. But in Boston, Raul Casanova, who had shot a man in 1991 and left him paralyzed and who had served seven years for that assault, was charged in June with the murder after the man died. In fact, the charge was filed on the day Casanova was to be released from prison.

(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.)

-- According to Pat Rusin and her team of researchers at the University of Arizona, the toilet seat is actually one of the least bacteria-laden surfaces in the home. In results published in a June issue of New Scientist magazine, three times as many bacteria were found on chopping boards and a million times more on dishcloths, and Rusin surmised that the toilet seat's nonporous surface keeps it so dry that bacteria have difficulty surviving.

-- A May San Jose Mercury News story reported on the new fascination among Japanese youth with rap and hip-hop music and with a black American lifestyle that includes curling their hair into Afro-style hairdos, darkening their skin, and drinking new Dunk brand beer, which consumers believe is popular because it is dark and associated with basketball. And in June, members of a New York City workshop of Japanese students studying in the U.S. performed gospel music at Harlem's Memorial Baptist Church, to enthusiastic applause. Said the former Tokyo jazz club owner who started the workshops with the church's cooperation, "The black culture is very important in Japan."

-- The eternal flame under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a sacred memorial to the nation's war dead, was briefly extinguished on June 30 when two inebriated tourists from Mexico urinated on it. French officials and Mexico's ambassador to France lit it again the next day in a joint ceremony. The perpetrators were detained briefly and then released.

In separate incidents in a three-week period in April and May, three people attempted to set fire to their spouses yet botched the jobs and actually lit themselves up: Ms. Solonia Gene, 25, Des Moines, Iowa (intended to punish husband for staying out all night); a Durham, N.C., man (just planned to scare his wife after a fight); and Tarance Love, 37, St. Louis (ordinary domestic fight).

A Hollister, Calif., inventor named Wilson Q. Invencion (whose automatic bingo machine received a U.S. patent in May). And the alleged robber of eight New York City Dunkin' Donuts shops named Douglas Duncan (who was apprehended in June, along with his alleged partner, Howard Johnson, who had not attempted a HoJo robbery). And the guy who pleaded guilty to assault named Ned Basher (against singer Bob Seger, in Shreiber, Ontario, in May).

A 34-year-old woman was hospitalized in Nashville, Tenn., in May; a toilet at Nashville Arena had caught on fire after she flushed it, possibly due to fireworks in the building being used by the World Wrestling Federation. And a 29-year-old man was hospitalized in St. Paul, Minn., in June when his bathroom exploded, probably because his burning incense ignited the gasoline he was using to clean his hands. And a 32-year-old camper was killed when a campsite toilet exploded near Montabaur, Germany, in April, probably caused by leaking gas from a septic tank.

In May, the British government's Broadcasting Standards Committee criticized the evening program "TV Dinners" over a February episode that featured a woman preparing a dish based on her own just-born daughter's placenta. (Recipe: Fry the placenta with shallots and garlic, flambee, puree and serve on focaccia bread. The mother, father and 20 guests sampled the dish on camera.) And in June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ruled that salsa can count as a required vegetable in government-reimbursed school meals.

-- Life Imitates a Bad Sitcom Premise: In June, three retired police chiefs from the Syracuse, N.Y., area started a business to supplement their pensions: a doughnut shop, in Lakeland, N.Y. Said one, "We took our ... police experience and put it toward what we know best."

-- From the Police Beat column of the North County Journal in suburban St. Louis, May 24: Police in the town of Bellfontaine Neighbors arrested a man on May 15 driving a stolen automobile. He was released pending a court hearing. Three days later, the alleged thief reported being robbed, himself, of a gold necklace. Policework turned up what the cops believe are both perpetrators. The car thief was the robbery victim, and the robber was the man whose car had been stolen.

-- In March, the Oakland (Calif.) Police Review Board ruled that Officer Anthony Toribio had done nothing improper despite an arrestee's complaint that he had been subjected to "the most degrading and humiliating experience" of his life. The officer admitted the gist of the complaint, that upon learning that the arrestee was a singer, named Julian Aldarondo, Toribio began singing (apparently, very badly) the 1970s song "Escape, The Pina Colada Song," but said he was only trying to defuse the tension of the arrest and to ask Aldarondo if he knew where he could find sheet music to the song.

-- In May, police in Toronto, Ontario, arrested a man they had sought since November for a series of bank robberies. According to Detective Mike Earl, they had an idea who they were after because, according to witnesses, the fugitive looked, in face and body language, like the TV cartoon character Homer Simpson. Arrested was Gary Hammond, 28, of North York.

-- Scott Eric Smith, 32, was arrested in Oakdale, Calif., in June on suspicion that he was the one who had stolen 800 copies of the local Oakdale Leader newspaper. The newspaper contained a report of Smith's recent arrest on drug charges and, according to police, Smith said he didn't want his family to know about it.

Joseph L. Cantey, 22, was arrested in Lindenwold, N.J., in May on several charges. According to police, he had made a clean escape after burglarizing a home on May 5 and stealing a cell phone but had returned to the home on May 10 to confront the victim to get him to reactivate the cell phone service. The victim called his company but was unsuccessful, and Cantey fled, but now armed with a description, police spotted Cantey, and in the ensuing chase, Cantey dropped 15 bags of crack cocaine and eventually led police to his brother and two others, who were charged with possession of even more drugs.

Bobby Wayne Woods, 32, convicted of capital murder, Llano, Texas, May. Coy Wayne Wesbrook, sentenced to death for murdering his ex-wife and four others, Houston, June. Dennis Wayne Eaton, executed for the murder of a Virginia state trooper and three other people, June. Michael Wayne Gallatin, suspected through DNA tests of five rapes and a murder, Vancouver, Wash., May. John Wayne Stockdall, 34, allegedly confessed to police that he killed his girlfriend's ex-husband, Mexico, Mo., March. Jason Wayne McVean, 26, still on the lam after allegedly killing a police officer in the southwestern Colorado manhunt that began in May.

New York divorce and palimony lawyer Raoul Felder, praising the nation's economy to a Washington Post reporter in May: "I can tell you how the economy is doing by how many mistresses come into my office looking for justice. I don't need no Greenspan."

(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.)