-- Researchers at a large Russian biological and medical center told New Scientist magazine in December that they had begun work on breeding a combination of bacteria that not only will decompose the human waste accumulated on space shuttles, but will even decompose cosmonauts' cotton underwear and produce enough methane in the process to help power the spacecraft. One of the space station Mir's 1997 catastrophes was caused by the weight of the capsule carrying dirty laundry.

-- In November, thousands of normally tranquil monks of the Chogye Buddhist order in Seoul, South Korea, began weeks of vicious internal brawling with rocks, clubs and firebombs over who will lead the order. In late December, police finally stormed a downtown temple, but the occupying monks had welded the doors shut, and supporters pelted the cops with firebombs and bottles. Eventually, about 100 monks were arrested, but sporadic fighting continues over the order's $9 million budget and authority to appoint 1,700 monks to various jobs.

Police in Manila were called to a hospital in October to separate employees from rival, financially embattled funeral homes, who were in a gunfight over custody of a recently expired corpse. And urologist Roberto Trullii told reporters in Rio de Janeiro in October that the average flaccid Brazilian penis shrank by two centimeters in the past year, due largely to unemployment fears.

Quadriplegic Louis Berrios, 32, filed a lawsuit in December in New York City against Our Lady of Mercy Hospital for a June incident in which doctors turned him over to police because they thought his X-ray revealed bags of heroin in his stomach instead of what they were: bladder stones. And Vermont social activist George Singleton, 49 and black, with hip-length dreadlocks, was acquitted in October of DUI in Vinita, Okla., where he had been arrested because of the bag of suspicious herbs found in his car. (Rather than charge him with mere careless driving, police kept him in jail for 15 days even after two blood tests showed him clean and the herb was found by the lab to be rosemary.)

Stanley Elton Fulcher, 46, was arrested in Hemet, Calif., in October, after allegedly trying to molest a neighborhood boy. In a subsequent search of his house, police found walls papered with photos of the actress Shirley Temple as a child. Said the prosecutor, "(Fulcher) gets very upset if anyone tries to explain that she's (now) a grown-up."

-- Graham W. Davis, 34, was indicted in Soldotna, Alaska, in September for murdering his cousin, Gregory M. Wilkison. The grand jury rejected Davis' version of events: that he awoke to find Wilkison on the floor, twitching from a self-inflicted gunshot, and rather than call 911, decided that the humane thing to do was to finish him off.

-- A man whose name was not published was denied a gun-carry permit by the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, according to an October report in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He told a department panel that he needed the gun to protect himself from "dwarf drug dealers" who are "beaming radio waves" onto him by satellite and thus reading his mind. (The man had an earlier permit revoked when he showed up at a hospital covered in aluminum foil and complaining about pain from the radio waves.) The man's lawyer, George E. Walker, argued vigorously for the permit: "There's been no evidence adduced before this panel that (my client) in any way is not of sound mind."

-- Greg Kelly, 31, was found guilty of DUI in Ontario in October based on a Breathalyzer test administered at 2:32 a.m. on April 6, 1997. His argument: That day was daylight savings time changeover, and thus 2:32 a.m. never occurred, in that at 2 a.m., all clocks moved ahead to 3 a.m. (Said the judge: Correct, but still guilty.)

-- Clemson University animal researchers announced in October that they have reduced the odor at some large poultry houses in South Carolina by adding garlic to chickens' diet. Said Prof. Glenn Birrenkott: "It makes the poultry house smell like a pizzeria instead of manure."

-- Timothy Dale Crockett, 34, was arrested in Spartanburg, S.C., in September and charged with holding up the Palmetto Bank. Crockett said in court that he did the job because he had just been charged $600 in overdraft fees because of a mixup with his student loans. However, Crockett's bank is the First Federal Bank; he said he had wanted to rob First Federal in retaliation, but that Palmetto was the only one open on the Saturday that he got his urge.

-- In November, a federal judge tossed out a Georgia law prohibiting casket sales by anyone other than a funeral home, calling the law a blatant restraint of trade. Among the government's arguments to the judge to retain the law was that having independent casket dealers in a price war would "promote the criminal element" in that murder would be encouraged by the easy availability of caskets.

As recently as September 1998, News of the Weird reported on Milwaukee's Gary Arthur Medrow, the man who has had more than 50 charges filed against him in 30 years for his peculiar fetish of telephoning women and convincing them to lift other people who might be in the room so that he can hear the event on the phone. However, Medrow was not a suspect for what happened in December 1998, as someone impersonating a police officer called a Milwaukee McDonald's and convinced the female manager to strip-search a male employee to look for stolen money, while holding the telephone to the man's genitals so the caller could "hear" the search.

An unidentified 30-ish man jumped joyously into the Aratama River in Yokohama, Japan, in October, celebrating the home team's win over Osaka for its first baseball league pennant in 38 years. He did not surface and thus missed his team's winning the Japanese World Series two weeks later. And in November, Katsutoshi Miwata, 53, the chief scout for the Orix Blue Wave baseball team, leaped to his death from the 11th floor of an apartment building in Naha, Japan, after learning that his star recruit would probably sign with another team.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- In November, to improve lagging sales, the Liko-L tourism company in Kiev, Ukraine, announced a new attraction: a daylong visit to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which has been closed to the public since its 1986 catastrophic accident. Liko-L said the government, in need of tax revenue, had given it special permission for the tours, claiming the radiation count is low and "not dangerous."

-- The journal Animal Reproduction Science reported in October that Purdue University researchers had grown a microscopic elephant egg inside a specially bred mouse and that the team, after a little more tinkering, could breed such eggs for pregnancy. The primary use of the technique, they said, would be to breed endangered species eggs inside nonendangered animals.

In November, several teachers at Lindsay Thurber High School in Red Deer, Alberta, reacted to a bomb-threat note found in a classroom by sending students out to search lockers to try to find the bomb, with one teacher allegedly offering a prize to the one who brought it in. And in November at William S. Hart High School near Los Angeles, science teacher Thomas Magee led students in making a tennis-ball-firing cannon propelled by methanol, but something went wrong, and the resulting explosion left two students severely burned. A school official said it was a "common" physics experiment, but a retired college chemistry professor quoted in the Los Angeles Times called it "strange."

In November, Frank Biondi Jr., fired as chief executive of Universal Studios, received a severance package worth $30 million, which is on top of the $15 million severance package he received in 1995 when he was fired as chief executive of Viacom. Also in November, former BankAmerica chief executive David Coulter, 51, was dismissed by new owner NationsBank and began drawing a pension of $5 million a year for the rest of his life. Months before buying BankAmerica, NationsBank bought Barnett Banks of Florida, whose chief executive Charlie Rice received a severance package of $150 million.

In November, a team of doctors from the main Russian health inspection agency announced coming crackdowns on newspapers and publishers, not because of the stress of that country's relentlessly bad news but because of the quality of paper (thin and porous could lead readers to headaches) and ink (which gets on fingers and might contaminate food). The agency said it planned to issue "certificates of hygiene" to publishers who comply with the law.

The 1,300-student Lourdes College, near Toledo, Ohio, announced in December that it would offer two courses for the spring term (in chemistry and psychology) that meet once a week from midnight to 2:30 a.m.

-- Indianapolis graduate student Lael Desmond, 27, filed a complaint against the Ameritrade discount brokerage in November, claiming that the company should indemnify him for his $40,000 medical-school nest-egg that he lost in self-service Internet trading just before the July stock market plunge. Desmond eagerly borrowed money to buy stocks "on margin," admittedly without reading Ameritrade's special margin-trading instructions, and said he "never dreamt I had any possibility of losing all my money."

-- In December, a judge in British Columbia declared Ronald Brown, 56, an "irredeemable drunk," thus certifying him to the Canada Pension Plan as eligible for monthly disability benefits, citing as evidence that Brown has been continually fired from jobs for drunkenness, including two jobs working for his brother. In his recent divorce, Brown received about $18,000 (U.S.) in lump-sum alimony from his ex-wife but withdrew a request for an additional $440 (U.S.) monthly expressly for booze.

-- Olakunle A. Osoba, 50, was convicted of heroin trafficking in Columbus, Ohio, in December and sentenced to 30 months in prison, but not before he tried to persuade federal judge John D. Holschuh that he lapsed into crime only because he had been powerless to fight off a voodoo hex placed on him by a former lover in New York. Osoba said he was plagued by dreams in which the woman demanded such large sums of money that drug-dealing was his only way out.

-- A California District Court of Appeal ruled in November that John M. Van Dyke's 1994 lawsuit against the operator of the Bear Mountain ski slope could proceed in spite of a state law barring most skier lawsuits. Van Dyke was permanently paralyzed from the waist down after smashing into a steel post holding up the sign "Be Aware -- Ski With Care."

-- Shawn Ervin, 36, filed a lawsuit during the summer in Waterbury, Conn., against Red Roof Inns over a 1996 injury that fractured his finger and ultimately led to the removal of part of it. He injured it at a Hartford Inn when a bed's headboard, which he said was flimsily nailed to the wall, came down on his finger while he was having sex with his girlfriend.

-- In September in Albuquerque, N.M., in response to his ex-girlfriend's child-support petition, Peter Wallis, 36, filed a lawsuit accusing her of, in essence, stealing his sperm, by falsely assuring him that she was using birth control pills. The woman's lawyer had a different legal theory, saying that in the couple's sexual relations, Wallis presented the woman with his sperm as a "gift."

The French performance artist Orlan made News of the Weird in 1993 when she underwent surgery in a New York City art gallery as part of a multiple-surgery transformation of her face according to five icons of beauty (at that time, implanting small horns to simulate the bumpy forehead of Mona Lisa). During a Chicago show in December 1998, Orlan raised money for further operations by selling posters and videos of her surgeries; digitally enhanced portraits of her face incorporating features that ancient Mayans found attractive but which are ugly in this society (huge noses, crossed-eyes); and tubes of her own liposuctioned fat.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

A Police Officer's Dream Come True

Vincent Morrissey's police brutality lawsuit went to trial in New Haven, Conn., last December, and West Haven police officer Ralph Angelo was on the witness stand, claiming that Morrissey himself had provoked the encounter by swinging at him first. Morrissey's attorney, who was standing near the witness stand and who was skeptical of the testimony, asked Officer Angelo to "demonstrate" just how hard Morrissey had swung at him. Before the lawyer could define "demonstrate," Officer Angelo popped the lawyer on the chin, staggering him and forcing an immediate recess.

In May, India's defense minister George Fernandes ordered three bureaucrats from his finance office to spend a week on the notorious Siachen Glacier in Kashmir, where temperatures are usually way below zero, with wind speeds averaging 60 mph. Reason: The bureaucrats had taken three years to process the paperwork to procure snowmobiles for the glacier, and the minister said the men needed to understand why they should have worked faster.

John Kricfalusi, creator of TV's "The Ren & Stimpy Show," threatened legal action last December against the producers of the Comedy Central show "South Park" for ripping off a cartoon character. According to Kricfalusi, his character Nutty the Friendly Dump, an animated piece of excrement, must have been the basis for "South Park's" Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, a holiday-dressed, singing, dancing piece of excrement.

The Los Angeles Times reported in January on the unusual, sustained success, in turbulent economic times, of the Cat Theater of Moscow, whose 300-seat shows remain sold out weeks in advance. Despite conventional wisdom that cats are untrainable, proprietor Yuri Kuklachev has them climbing poles, walking tightropes, pushing toy trains, leapfrogging over human backs and balancing atop tiny platforms.

In February, authorities had a drug house in the northwest Florida town of Callaway under surveillance, and when four men emerged and drove off in a rental car, deputies decided to stop them and make the arrests. Several squad cars surrounded the rental car, and by the time officers went to open the door, the four men were conveniently covered in white powder. A bag of cocaine they had hidden under the hood had been sliced open by the air-conditioner fan blade.

In February, Cambridge (England) University researcher Fiona Hunter, who studied penguins' mating habits for five years, reported that some females apparently allow male strangers to mate with them in exchange for a few nest-building stones, thus providing what Hunter believes is the first observed animal prostitution. According to Dr. Hunter, all activity was done behind the back of the female's regular mate, and in a few instances, after the sex act, johns gave the females additional stones as sort of a tip.

In June, Rev. Pat Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Fla. (which was sponsoring the local Gay Days festival), that the city was "right in the way of some serious hurricanes," and that "I don't think I'd be waving those (Gay Days logo) flags in God's face if I were you." Two months later, the season's first hurricane to hit land, Bonnie, missed Florida but raked the Carolina coast up through Virginia Beach, Va., the home of the Christian Broadcasting Network (Pat Robertson, proprietor).

In March, a Hamilton, Ontario, hospital settled the $1.7 million lawsuit brought by Lesli Szabo for not making her 1993 childbirth pain-free. Physicians said that painless childbirth cannot be achieved without the anesthesia's endangering the child, but Szabo said she expected to be comfortable enough to be able to read or knit while the child was being delivered.

According to authorities at the Hampton, Va., jail in March, a civilian attendant from the jail's canteen was pushing a cart full of snacks past the locked cell of Anthony Tyrone Darden, 21, when Darden reached through the bars, hit the man on the head with a broom handle, and took two packs of peanut butter crackers. Darden was apprehended.

On the day before Good Friday, reported the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Ernesto A. Moshe Montgomery consecrated the Shrine of the Weeping Shirley MacLaine in a room in his Beta (NOTE: NOT Beth) Israel Temple in Los Angeles. Inspired by an image he said he had while riding in the actress's private jet, Montgomery said a subsequent, large photograph of him with MacLaine was "observed shedding tears," which had inspired prayers and testimony of miraculous healings.

And Hawaii Republican Crystal Young, 57, who beat eight challengers in the primary before losing to U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye in November, explained during the campaign why she has to rely on Social Security disability payments as her primary source of income: She is in too much pain to work because of the electromagnetic needles implanted in her body by, of course, Shirley MacLaine.

In Phoenix in March, a defiant James Joseph Zanzot, 37, was ordered to prison for four years for repeatedly video- and audiotaping women in restrooms. Zanzot called the sentence "unjust," asserting a now-familiar claim that his behavior was only "immoral" and "repulsive," not "illegal." Zanzot pointed out that state law prohibits only intercepting "oral communication" and that he was not interested in the conversation but only in the sound of urination.

A police report in the Martinez (Calif.) Record on April 9 described a one-car accident in town. According to police, a man was playing "What's That Color?" with his young son while driving and held his breath to make his face red. However, he held his breath too long and passed out, and the car ran off the road. Neither he nor his son required medical attention.

Ronnie Darnell Bell, 30, was arrested in Dallas in February and charged with attempting to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. (In the movie "Die Hard With a Vengeance," knocking off the New York FRB required a small army of men and truckloads of weapons.) According to police, Bell was initially confused because there are no tellers, so he handed a security guard his note, reading: "This is a bank robbery of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, of Dallas, Texas, give me all the money. Thank you, Ronnie Darnell Bell." The guard pushed a silent alarm while an oblivious Bell chatted amiably, revealing to the guard that only minutes earlier he had tried to rob a nearby Postal Service facility but that "they threw me out."

Cafe Ke'ilu ("Cafe Make Believe") opened in a trendy section of Tel Aviv in April, with tables, chairs, plates, silverware, menus and servers, but no food or drink. Explained manager Nir Caspi (who calls the experience "conceptual dining"), people come to be seen and to meet people but not for the actual food. The menu, designed by top-rated chef (and owner) Phillipe Kaufman, lets diners order some of the world's most exquisite dishes (eel mousse, salad of pomegranates, if in season), "served" on elegant (but empty) platters.

The Department of Energy announced in May, after reviewing project records from the 1950s, that some inspectors at a uranium processing plant near Cincinnati used the somewhat-unscientific method of measuring the substance's metallic strength by sprinkling some on their tongues to see if tasted right. The inspectors feared that if they did not submit high-enough-grade samples, the government would regard their uranium as useless and shut down the plant.

Rev. John Wayne "Punkin" Brown Jr., 34, died on Oct. 3 of a rattlesnake bite while ministering at the Rock House Holiness Church in northeast Alabama near Scottsboro. In a landmark book on snake-handling preachers in the South ("Salvation on Sand Mountain" by Dennis Covington), Brown was called the "mad monk," the one most "mired in the ... blood lust of the patriarchs." His wife, Melinda, had met the same fate three years earlier at a church in Middlesboro, Ky., and relatives are divided whether to permit the Browns' three children to carry on the legacy.

In April, the Los Angeles City Council agreed to pay $9 million to five surviving victims of a drunk driver whose car wandered across a center line and hit the van in which they were riding, unbuckled. A court in 1997 had awarded the victims $29 million and said the city had to pay 57 percent of that because the yellow line in the center of the road was too dim.

In March, San Francisco sculptor Joe Mangrum, sitting on $1,480 worth of outstanding parking tickets accumulated by his 1986 Mazda, persuaded the city Art Commission (which was not aware of the tickets) to let him disassemble the car into a pile in the middle of Justin Herman Plaza and call the sculpture "Transmission 98," for which he collected a $2,000 artist's fee from the city.

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, and the prosecutor believes a sales route would allow him to conduct Latin Kings business. On the other hand, Fernandez's lawyer said the Amway business was an encouraging sign and might lead other gang members into Tupperware or Mary Kay.

In August, Ukrainian Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko began a crackdown on tax delinquents to collect the $3.5 billion the government is owed. The centerpiece of the campaign is to call the top 1,500 tax scofflaws, mostly business executives, to a military base near Kiev, to live for an undetermined time in tents, to listen to lectures on civil defense preparedness for natural disasters, until apparently out of sheer boredom they decide to pay up.

In August, Deborah Gaines, 31, filed a lawsuit against the Brookline, Mass., abortion clinic shot up by John Salvi in 1994, asking it to pay the cost of raising her kid, now age 3. She was queuing up for an abortion that day when Salvi started firing and said she was so traumatized that she could not bring herself to go to another clinic, and eight months later, little Vivian was born. Gaines said she loves her daughter but that her daughter shouldn't be here.

When authorities raided a cockfighting operation near Gadsden, Ala., in July, they found not only a restaurant and 250-seat theater for patrons, but two air-conditioned trailers in which the roosters hung out before their matches, one of which featured piped-in country music.

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

And cockfighting was banned by referendum in Arizona in November but not without a battle led by actor Wilford Brimley, who said he used to drive regularly across the border from his Utah home to watch matches. Said Brimley, of the roosters, "They're magnificent." "It's always thrilling to watch."

In August, lobbyists in Bonn, Germany, called the Working Group for the Unemployed, held a series of rallies to demand six weeks' annual paid vacation for people out of work, pointing out that those looking for work often are under greater stress than those with jobs and thus need a longer holiday.

In August, residents of a West Hartford, Conn., neighborhood handed the renowned Johnnie Cochran a stunning defeat. Cochran, defending two Rottweilers accused of barking too much, failed to persuade a judge to lift a 9 p.m. outdoor curfew on the dogs, which belong to his friend Flora Allen (mother of basketball player and actor Ray Allen).

According to a Times of London report in October, 45 people (celebrities and prominent executives) have had low-power microchips surgically implanted in their bodies in order to make it easier for police to track them by global satellite in the event they are kidnapped. The Sky-Eye chip, made by the Gen-Etics company, consists of organic and synthetic fibers that are powered by the body's own neurophysiological energy.

Executed for murder in 1998: Dennis Wayne Eaton (Virginia). Found guilty of murder: Bobby Wayne Woods (Texas), Coy Wayne Wesbrook (Texas). Charged with murder: Monty Wayne Lamb (Texas), Morris Wayne Givens (Alabama), Michael Wayne Hall (Texas), Michael Wayne Gallatin (Washington), John Wayne Stockdall (Missouri). Accused of murder and still on the lam: Jason Wayne McVean (Colorado). Died while under suspicion for murder: Donald Wayne Martin (Texas), Robert Wayne Shelton (Missouri).

Distrust of modern medicine has led to the increasing popularity of therapeutic self-trepanation (drilling a hole in the head to "unseal" the skull), according to a June Chicago Tribune story. Trepanation activist Peter Halvorson recalled that drilling into his own skull 25 years ago ("Smoke was coming out of the hole," he said) brought him "a heightened, childlike sense of awareness" and a permanent state of higher consciousness. Neurosurgeons contacted by the Tribune used words like "amazed" and "stunned" at the craze, but according to the report, trepanists are so confident about what they do that criticism just doesn't sink in.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)