-- Only the Falcons Were More Disappointed: On Super Bowl Sunday, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times profiled local resident Joffre Leggett, 80, as he prepared for the Publishers Clearing House prize patrol that would later that day, he was certain, be arriving at his house with $31 million. He proudly displayed the roomfuls of magazines he had bought over the last two years ($5,000 worth, though he complained to the reporter about his lack of food and heat and his broken-down car) and pointed to the latest PCH mailings, which Leggett says "(read) like I'm gonna win. They've sent me plenty of (literature) that says I will (win)." He didn't.

-- Edward L. Bodkin, 56, was arrested in February in Huntington, Ind., and charged with performing surgery without a license. Police said Bodkin removed the testicles of at least five consenting men and was ready to perform again when a patient got cold feet and handed over to police a videotape Bodkin had loaned him, of some of the surgeries. Allegedly, some of the testicles were in jars in Bodkin's apartment. As to the patients' motives, prosecutor John Branham said, "I can't sit here as a reasonable human being and give you an intelligent answer to that."

In January, the Toronto Sun published office photos of surgeon William G. Middleton's nurse, inexplicably straddling an unconscious female patient, who subsequently filed a complaint against the doctor. On the same day, in Tulsa, Okla., dentist Donald C. Johnson pleaded guilty to sexual molestation of young girls, behavior that came to light when lewd Polaroid photos of apparently anesthetized girls were discovered in Johnson's office. And in December, a Waynesboro, Va., woman filed a $350,000 lawsuit against physician Dale A. Stinespring for allegedly tricking her into posing topless for photographs under the guise of producing evidence in her car-crash lawsuit.

-- German retiree Jost-Burkhard Anderhub, 59, who spent several days in the Newport, Ky., jail last year before pleading guilty to a federal gun charge, was so impressed with the service that in October, he sent the jailer (elected official Greg Buckler) $200 as a tip. Wrote Anderhub, "The treatment by the officers was absolutely flawless."

-- An October Chicago Sun-Times story revealed that local attorney David G. Harding, executor of the estate of his office co-tenant D. Rex McBride, discovered that McBride for 18 years right up to his death had been leasing his two rotary-dial telephones from AT&T for $110 a year (vs. about $15 each to buy the phones).

-- Sports News: In November, Japanese billiards player Junuske Inoue, 58, was suspended from competition for two years for testing positive for a muscle-building hormone. And in September, Torquay, England, lawn bowler Griff Sanders, 25, was banned from outdoor competition for 10 years for excessive obscene language. (Sanders reportedly considers himself "the John McEnroe of lawn bowling.")

-- According to a September San Francisco Chronicle report, New Orleans T-shirt printer Ricky Lewis, 42, says 95 percent of his business comes from relatives and friends of men who have been slain in gang violence and who want the victims' faces commemorated on T-shirts. The city has such a high homicide rate, Lewis says, that several of his customers have later been murdered and memorialized with their own T-shirts.

-- New Product Delivery Systems: In December in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Wendy Cashaback opened what she believed was Canada's first drive-thru shop selling only sex toys and lingerie. Also in December, the New York company Joe Boxer placed 10 vending machines in the city to sell men's underwear in pop-top cans and said it hoped to roll out 100 more in 1999.

-- New Products: In December in Overijse, Belgium, horticulturalist Luc Mertes introduced a line of skirts and dresses made of live grass, still growing as long as the material stays damp. And in January, Heather Joy of Glenpool, Okla., showed an Associated Press reporter her handcrafted bags made from bull scrotums, priced at $110 and up. And in January, a Melbourne, Australia, company called Liquor Pops drew criticism when it announced its intention to market Popsicle-type products with 6 percent alcohol, in melon, pineapple and orange flavors.

-- Kenneth Adams, 37, was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in November and charged with soliciting an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute. The officer said Adams offered her a stolen shower head and a stolen water purifier if she would have sex with him.

In January, three young men broke into a house in St. Paul, Minn., with a shotgun and beat a man who they say owed them money. They left after firing a shot over the man's head to scare him, but on the way out, the shotgun accidentally discharged again, hitting one of the three in the buttocks, and all were arrested when a police officer saw the distinctly wounded man later on the street. Three days later, in Newark, N.J., Andre Gordon, 27, was arrested when, after pistol-whipping a 25-year-old man, his gun accidentally discharged, firing a bullet through his own arm and into his leg.

News of the Weird has reported several times on the phenomenon of houses that are inexplicably, almost pathologically, cluttered, but tragedy struck twice around Columbus, Ohio, recently. A 70-year-old man in the Clintonville neighborhood shot himself to death in February rather than face the consequences of a health department order to clean up his house and yard. Said the man's wife, "I'm not a good housekeeper, I grant you that." Six weeks earlier, a 60-year-old man in nearby Whitehall, Ohio, had died of a heart problem after his wife declined to call 911 for him because she was afraid authorities would discover the couple's too-cluttered house and arrest her.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (31) The discovery of gobs of undelivered mail at the home of a postal worker (usually after he got behind on his deliveries and needed to hide it), such as the 10-year-old, unopened mail found at retired postal worker Ralph Horvath's home after he was killed in a fire in Chicago in January. And (32) the bank robber who wants a worry-free getaway (no parking problem, no driving while jittery, no forgetting the keys or to have the car gassed up, etc.) and decides to hail a taxicab (much higher profile than a getaway car) outside the bank, as police say Mary Barrera did after robbing a NationsBank branch in Kansas City, Mo., in November.

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

-- After a two-week hearing in January in Washington, D.C., outraged federal judge Royce Lamberth threatened to hold two Cabinet secretaries, Interior's Bruce Babbitt and Treasury's Robert Rubin, in contempt of court for failing to turn over records of federal trust funds held for Native Americans -- records that Lamberth originally ordered released in November 1996. Among the excuses offered by the two departments is that a federal records depository in the Southwest is contaminated with rat droppings, and researchers will not enter it because of the fear of the deadly hantavirus.

-- In December, workers for an AIDS awareness campaign constructed and inflated a condom as long as 10 football fields and large enough inside to allow dance celebrations. The condom was part of a parade in Cali, Colombia.

-- In December in St. Paul, Minn., John O. Sexton, 43, was sentenced to 45 days in jail for cutting off 50 strands of a woman's ponytail on a busy street in August (after being rebuffed in his offer to purchase the locks). He apologized for his "urges about hair" and vowed to get counseling.

-- In Medina, Ohio, in December, David Donathon was sentenced to a year in jail for telephone harassment, specifically, calling people up and asking them if their feet stink. According to his lawyer, Donathon "realizes what he does is wrong, but he is unable to stop himself." And two weeks earlier in Belleville, Ill., James Dowdy, 27, was sentenced to six years in prison for his second offense of entering women's homes and stealing their socks. And in Boulder, Colo., in May, a 28-year-old man was charged with harassment and assault of four women with whom he struck up conversations on the street and whose feet he eventually forcibly fondled. According to one victim, "(The man's) eyes rolled back in his head like he was really excited."

-- In July in Telford, England, in the first court case of what prosecutors called "crush videos," Keith Twogood, 44, was fined about $3,000 for importing two tapes from the United States featuring nearly nude women in stiletto heels, stepping on mice and frogs. A British animal-protection advocate said he "just can't imagine the market for this," but a New York animal-rights spokesperson said he thought the motive was a "foot-fetish type of thing" rather than deliberate cruelty to animals.

-- Worm Rage: Rawle Trotman, 21, Simcoe, Ontario, August, charged with stabbing a fellow angler in an argument over a worm. Sissy Rage: Brian Hertzog, 18, Reading, Pa., December, charged with shooting his sister (leaving her paralyzed below the waist) because she beat him in a wrestling match. Teacher's Rage: Deena Murdoch, 52, Carrollton, Texas, December, was charged with choking a fourth-grade boy because he sneaked a peak at her grade book.

-- Price-Check Rage: An unidentified "big blond" female customer was sought by Oakland, Mich., police in December for allegedly punching out a 55-year-old female clerk at a Hudson's department store when the clerk rolled her eyes at the customer's request for a price check on a dress. "Don't you ever roll your eyes at me," were the last words the clerk recalled before being decked. Yuletide Rage: William Fagyas, 82, was charged with stabbing his wife, Eleanor, 84, in the chest in Crown Point, Ind., in December because, according to police, she "was not in the Christmas spirit."

-- Only-in-California Rage: In December, Ms. Cathomas Starbird, a member of the school board of Sausalito, Calif., pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault for allegedly punching, jumping on and biting another woman in April 1998. According to police, Ms. Starbird, her husband, and the other woman had gone out for dinner to celebrate the husband's birthday, and upon returning to the couple's houseboat, Ms. Starbird suggested sex and became furious when the other woman refused to perform oral sex on Ms. Starbird's husband.

-- In November, Pope John Paul II announced that the year 2000 would be a special holy year in which Catholics can obtain special "indulgences" for their sins that act, in a sense, as wild cards to speed up their ascension to heaven. According to policy dating back to the 16th century, Catholics who visit the sick or the jailed, or who contribute to charities, or who fast from smoking or drinking for as little as one day, may get special dispensation, as long as the act is accompanied by penitence.

Globe and Mail- Reuters, 11-28-98]

-- Roman Catholic Monsignor Ignatius McDermott, 88, blessed a Dell laptop computer in December at his headquarters in Chicago, which he believed to be a first (though priests have blessed animals, houses, Harley Davidsons and other things). "Maybe this will get (the younger generation's) attention," he said.

-- A November Chicago Sun-Times dispatch described the problems encountered by Anita and Jacob Martin, who moved from Daviess County, Ind., five years ago in an attempt to build an Amish community in Poreby, Poland, about 20 miles east of Warsaw. Jacob told a reporter that the couple had made zero converts and faced imminent local pressure from less-strict Mennonite missionaries from Pennsylvania. The couple's lack of success has made Jacob believe that the Amish rules about dress and socializing might be a little too strict.

-- Number Two in the News: In January, police in New Waterford, Nova Scotia (population 8,000), were investigating a suspected serial defecator who had soiled three nontoilet locations during the holiday season, including the floor of a recreation center. Also in January, Donald S. Spaeth, 36, of Ballwin, Mo., pleaded guilty to breaking into six cars on the lots of dealerships and leaving feces on the leather seats. He was sentenced to probation and ordered to continue his medication.

-- Continuing an occasional reader-advisory series of recent stories that were reported elsewhere as real news but which were probably just made up: A November New York Times report on the difficult job of retitling American movies for the Asian market came with a list of wacky examples. (One of the tamer ones: "Leaving Las Vegas" became, in Chinese in Hong Kong, "I'm Drunk and You're a Prostitute.") However, as was revealed in December by The Washington Post, the list of examples was composed by an Internet humor Web site and had been mistakenly commingled with serious material on the topic and never investigated by America's "newspaper of record."

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

-- According to a January Boston Globe feature, Mr. Wai Y. Tye, 82, who retired a while back after 32 years' service with Raytheon Corp., has lived without complaint in the same 200-square-foot room in the downtown Boston YMCA continuously since 1949. "When you're busy working and playing tennis," he told a reporter, "when you come home, you don't have much time to take care of an apartment." The bathroom is down the hall to the left, and he said he does not mind the exposed pipes, the linoleum floor and having to use a hot plate.

-- Faced with many retirements and a precipitous drop in new blood, U.S. Catholic officials have stepped up priest-recruiting to include irreverent advertisements to appeal to "generation X" men, according to a December Washington Post report. The Providence, R.I., diocese, for example, recently ran an ad campaign on MTV. And in January, a group of British churches, led by the Church of England, began a campaign to draw young parishioners by displaying Jesus Christ as the late Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Said one priest associated with the campaign, "We want to get away from the wimpy Nordic figure in a white nightie."

-- Radio Television Russia was flooded with protest letters and demonstrations in December when it was forced to drop the U.S. soap opera "Santa Barbara," which had built a large following. A batch of 65 episodes had been held up at the border because RTR had no money to pay the import fees. One suggestion for Russia's problems was advanced in the December-released book "ABCs of Sex" by nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who wrote that exporting virgin Russian women to men in other countries could somehow raise $750 million a year and that promoting sex for tourists (for example, having hotel mini-bars stocked with sex toys) would bring in much more.

-- A side effect of the international economic embargo of Iraq is the transfer of much of its supply of medical care from physicians to parapsychologists, who "heal" with electromagnetic therapy at half the price that doctors charge (even so, about 80 cents per visit, which is about one-fourth the monthly salary of a government clerk). According to one healer interviewed by the Associated Press, "extensive reading" was all the training he needed to find "gaps" in a patient's magnetic halo so that he could focus energy to that spot, a process that he said cured the gangrene of his first patient (his uncle).

-- Last year, the state historian of Florida kicked off a millennial project to name the 2,000 all-time greatest Floridians, with the deadline for nominations at Dec. 31, 1998. She recently announced a four-month extension, however, because nominators had been able to come up with only several hundred great Floridians.

-- In January, the Saguaro High School (Scottsdale, Ariz.) newspaper editor, Sam Claiborn, wrote an editorial critical of the culture of violence of football heroes, who he said often turn out to be drunks and spouse-abusers. An unnamed member of the school's football team took offense and beat Claiborn up, for which he was suspended.

-- Brad Davis, 25, of Milledgeville, Ga., was hospitalized in December after a hunting accident. He had chased a raccoon into a tree for his companion to shoot, but when hit, the 15-pound animal fell about 60 feet directly on top of Davis, knocking him out cold and breaking three vertebrae.

-- A 72-year-old man was killed in a robbery attempt in Jonesboro, Ga., in December, and after giving a false cover story, his 76-year-old wife finally admitted how it happened. The couple apparently had a habit of picking up men on the highway and bringing them home for sex with the wife so the husband could watch, but this particular guest wanted money more than he wanted sex. (A suspect is in custody.)

-- According to statistics published in November in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, 53 percent of people in France don't bathe or shower daily, 50 percent of men don't use deodorant daily, and 40 percent of men don't change underwear daily (and 15 percent admit wearing the same pair three days straight). According to an expert on French culture, hygiene is considered merely "the hidden face of beauty" in France, and because it is invisible to others, it isn't a priority.

-- In rural Australia south of Brisbane, near the coastal resort of Byron Bay, reside wild white bushmen known locally as "ferals," who closely resemble the savages from the movie "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome," who reek of stale body odor and "bush herbs," and some of whom carry pet rats in their severely matted hair. While the ferals' occasional forays annoy residents and tourists, other locals are thankful for them for environmental reasons, according to a report in the Times of London in October. Said one local, "Americans come out here and go, 'Yuck, everyone's so dirty (so let's not even think of developing this place).' The ferals have saved a lot of forest."

-- Latest Punishments in Afghanistan: On Jan. 15, six Taliban government soldiers had their right hands and left feet amputated for robbery, and a 60-year-old man had a 15-foot wall knocked over on top of him by a tank, in a death sentence for sexually molesting a boy. (The man was knocked unconscious but came to, and since he survived, under Taliban law, he was set free.) In November, a man was allowed by a judge to lawfully slit the throat of the man who killed his son, even though Taliban officials had recommended mercy.

-- A December Associated Press dispatch reported on Seoul's Korean Air Service Academy, which teaches "international manners" to help make South Korean companies more competitive in the quest for foreign customers. A particular problem, according to the Academy's general manager, is that "Koreans have difficulty smiling. Our ancestors had the philosophy that the serious person is better than the smiling one." As smiling increases in large companies, he said, citizens have begun to demand it from their government servants, such as tax collectors.

Latest Storage News: In December, Erie County (Pa.) inmate Larry Eugene DeFoy, 52, was charged with possessing escape tools when a routine X-ray revealed nail clippers and a bolt stored in a sock inside his rectum. He had been chipping away at a concrete block for about three weeks but had made hardly any progress. And on the same day in Durham, N.C., Freddy Farrington, 23, was charged with drug possession and other crimes after a police doctor administered relaxants that encouraged Farrington to unclench his buttocks (which he had been tensing since his arrest) and pass a chunk of cocaine in a plastic bag from his rectum.

(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.)