-- Life Imitates "The Truman Show": In November, a Japanese TV show assigned a contestant (an aspiring comedian nicknamed Nasubi) to a small apartment equipped with little else besides a video camera, where he agreed to remain until he entered enough giveaway contests to win about $8,500 worth of prizes, and a further catch was that he had to subsist only on his winnings (so that, although he won lots of rice as a prize, he had to use ingenuity to cook it in the sparsely equipped apartment). Furthermore, unknown to Nasubi, the video surveillance was not simply to make a record of his ordeal but was broadcast live every Sunday night, even though he was usually nude in his apartment (in that he has not yet won any clothing).

-- In November, South African inventor Charl Fourie introduced a $1,000, Batmobile-like flame-throwing apparatus for automobiles, designed so that drivers could thwart carjackers. A liquefied gas canister in the trunk of the car feeds tubes that run under the forward doors, and a spark ignites a flame that shoots out about seven feet. Such a device might not be legal in many countries but is in South Africa, which has one of the world's highest crime rates.

-- Sentenced to two life terms for murder in Forsyth, Wyo., in November: Mr. Vernon Kills On Top (whose brother, Mr. Lester Kills On Top, received the same sentence in August). Seriously wounded by police in Denver in September after allegedly stabbing an officer with a knife: Mr. Keith F. Firstintrouble.

-- In September in Chicago, Lauryn K. Valentine, 21, was granted a legal name change by Cook County Judge Michael B. Getty. Valentine is now known as Carol Moseley-Braun, which is also the name of the Illinois U. S. senator who was defeated for re-election in November. Valentine said she wanted the new name as a tribute to Moseley-Braun, who once successfully encouraged Valentine to remain in school when she was considering dropping out. In December, the new Moseley-Braun filed official papers to run for city alderman, which provoked legal challenges from one opponent and the ex-senator. More to the story: Judge Getty temporarily changed his own name to a more Irish-sounding one to win election as a judge in 1988.

-- According to police in Boca Raton, Fla., pedestrian Kenneth DeLeon was accidentally hit by a curb-jumping car in August, driven by Adam Blumhof, 22, and fell through the windshield, landing headfirst in the passenger seat. According to the police report, Blumhof drove on for about a mile, alternately punching DeLeon and screaming at him to get out of his car. He eventually stopped, opened the passenger door, and rolled DeLeon out, even though DeLeon was suffering from two broken legs and a broken arm. (Blumhof pleaded no-contest in January.)

-- Former Philippines' first lady Imelda Marcos told reporters in December that she would soon file lawsuits to reclaim about $25 billion in assets once held by her late husband Ferdinand (but which his critics claim he stole), which he had given to some now-wealthy cronies but which she says was only for safekeeping. Imelda said that if all assets were returned to her, she would own about 150 of the country's major corporations and control about half the Philippines' economy. Since her return from exile in 1991, Imelda actually ran for office twice as an impoverished champion of the downtrodden.

In November, police in Twin Valley, Minn., reported the latest in a five-year-long spree of thefts of expensive brassieres from the Schep's Clothing store. All of the bras taken were size 44-D.

-- Over the last few months of 1998, artist Amy Greving created a life-size Virgin and Child sculpture for Christmas display at the First Reformed Church in Grandville, Mich., using the medium of lint from clothes dryers. Fellow parishioners supplied her the materials after Greving's husband accidentally tossed out two large bags of lint that she had been saving. The lint was treated with a liquid solution, wrapped around chicken wire and painted.

-- In November, Northwestern University ordered sophomore music major Ryan Du Val to whitewash his dorm-room ceiling after he had painstakingly painted on it three of Michelangelo's best-known works from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. After the press reported the incident, several people came to Du Val's aid, and the university said the ceiling can stay until the end of the school year. A local businessman offered to pay for the removal of the ceiling intact so that it can be exhibited.

-- Among recent performance art in the news: Lisa Levy's July show at Webster Hall in New York City, which consisted of items she had recently shoplifted (and in one case, half of a liverwurst sandwich she snatched from an elderly man at a deli). Also shown was videotape actually capturing some of the acquisitions. And the Nottingham "NOW ninety8" art festival in England in October featured a seven-hour-long video, "Filthy Words and Phrases," in which a woman merely writes 2,000 sexual and slang terms on a blackboard. The video project was made with a government grant of about $12,000.

-- A November Times of London report identified at least 50 fine artists in Iraq whose principal work is painting huge portraits (one is 30 feet high) of Saddam Hussein, which are in heavy demand by merchants and community leaders who display them by the hundreds around Baghdad to demonstrate their support for the nation's president. A leading painter, Muhammad Ali Karim, says that the work is not monotonous but challenging, in that there are so many facets of Saddam that can be captured, and that he and others work quickly because they are so inspired by such a great leader. A similar market exists for the nation's sculptors and ceramic artists, for huge statues and busts of Saddam.

In December, police in Loudon County, Va., acting on telephone records, finally caught up to the man they believe committed a string of burglaries dating back to 1996, arresting Michael Anthony Silver, 34. According to police, during one of the first burglaries, Silver paused to call a psychic hot line and ran up a $250 bill on the homeowner's phone, and for some reason gave his own name to the psychic.

Beginning an occasional reader-advisory series of recent stories that were reported elsewhere as real news but which were probably just made up: Time magazine in its December 28, 1998, issue characterized as real a story that ran in March 1998 on one of the wire services of a guy in Japan whose inflatable underwear (he was worried about drowning in a tidal wave) was accidentally triggered on a subway car, creating a huge balloon around him, battering riders against the inside of the car. Weird, but not true.

-- 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.)