-- In January, North Dakota legislators decided against a proposal to crack down on impatient motorists who relieve themselves while driving and then toss their urine- (and even feces-) filled plastic containers to the side of the road. The containers create hazards when cleanup crews accidentally smash them with vehicles and mowers. Said Rep. John Mahoney, "(W)e want to promote tourism, and (such a new law) might be offensive."

-- Installation of the first escalators ever in Nicaragua, in a shopping mall in Managua in December, has terrorized many shoppers who have encountered them, according to a February Miami Herald report. Among the incidents: A frightened middle-aged woman who, fearing her departure at a second-floor landing, leaped from the escalator onto the floor, lost her balance, and staggered through the food court, knocking over tables and landing against a wall.

In December, Chung Kyu-chil, 52, reportedly confessed to a scheme to collect on his disability insurance policy by having both feet severed at the ankles by an acquaintance to whom he promised about $40,000. And in September, Mr. Kang Chong-ryol, 42, was arrested and charged with trying to cheat an insurance company out of about $7,500 by cutting off his 10-year-old son's finger and claiming that a robber did it.

-- Ryan Goodhart, 16, was arrested and charged with roughing up his mother in January in Sarasota, Fla., because she and her boyfriend refused to share their marijuana stash with him. And Nathan Ricketts, 26, was arrested and charged with choking his mother almost into unconsciousness in December in Glendora, Calif., because she had failed to remember to buy food for his two 7-inch-long piranha fish (which are illegal to own, anyway).

-- After a report of her lifestyle was shown on MTV in November, April Divilbiss, 21, of Memphis, Tenn., found herself in a custody fight over her 3-year-old daughter. She is married to Shane Divilbiss, 24, but the couple shares a sex life with Mr. Chris Littrell, 22, and April spoke on MTV of bringing another female into the home because having sex with two men was tiring her out. Her daughter was fathered by yet another man, whose parents filed the custody petition against April, who also argued that her freedom of religion (as a self-described pagan) was being abridged.

-- According to a December Denver Post story, Katy Emery, 27, agreed to a second straight pregnancy for her sister, Judi Conaghan of Chicago, who has been advised against carrying a fetus because of a heart condition. Previously, family black sheep Katy and super-responsible Judi had been estranged, but Katy, trying to shed the image of "the bad kid I'd been through my teen years," agreed to carry Judi's twins to term and enjoyed the experience of pregnancy so much that she signed on again.

-- In October in the Dent de Crolles region in France, sheepherder Christian Raymond, 23, was rescued from a cliff from which he had been hanging by his fingers for about 20 minutes. He had called the emergency rescue operator on his cell phone earlier in the day and managed to make another call from the cliff by pressing "redial" with his nose against the phone, which had fallen down the mountain with him but had landed right beside him.

-- Shirley Lawson, 59, of Marysville, Tenn., survived her Jeep's overturning in Whitley County, Ky., in September, even though the vehicle came to rest on top of her with the 3-inch-diameter drive shaft sticking through her abdomen and both legs.

-- Recent Episodes of Car Surfboarding: Hampton, Va. (November): William Vaughn, 29, jumped onto a car's roof during a dispute to prevent his friend from leaving, but the friend drove off anyway (distance surfed: 25 miles, at speeds up to 60 mph). Chicago (November): Charles Gardner jumped onto his SUV's roof to prevent its carjacking, but the suspect drove off anyway (time surfed: 20 minutes). Ship Bottom, N.J. (January): Gas station attendant Matt Thomas jumped onto the hood of a car to try to prevent the customer from leaving without paying, but she drove off anyway (time surfed: a few minutes, at speeds up to 80 mph).

-- Mathematics professor David Liu of the University of Alberta was named Canadian Professor of the Year in January. The award was based partly on the math clubs he has established for disadvantaged youth, but also partly on his having taught himself to work out equations upside down so that students could follow his explanations from across his desk.

Steve and Michelle Chambers pled guilty in August in Charlotte, N.C., to stealing $17 million from the Loomis, Fargo & Co. armored car firm in 1997, a caper which hit the headlines again in February 1999 when the Chambers' post-theft purchases were auctioned off to help Loomis recover its money. While on the lam from the heist, the couple called attention to themselves when Michelle walked in to a Belmont, N.C., bank with a suitcase containing $200,000 in Loomis, Fargo currency wrappers and asked the manager, "How much can I deposit without the bank reporting the transaction?" The couple had also moved directly from a rural mobile home into a $600,000 mansion and made many other equally exhibitionistic purchases. Said one federal marshal, "It was very much 'The Beverly Hillbillies.'"

Continuing an occasional reader-advisory series of recent stories that were reported elsewhere as real news but which were probably just made up: A late-1998 story in the Internet pipeline, attributed to the "Associated Press," described a current craze in Japan of breweries' replacing carbon dioxide in beer with hydrogen, which leads to such side effects as being able to sing soprano parts in karaoke bars and (with a cigarette) being able to blow flames from one's mouth. As the story goes, stockbroker Toshira Otoma lost a barroom fireball-blowing contest and retaliated by fireballing one of the judges, singing her hair. Apparently, the episode got Otoma fired, and he reportedly is suing the Asaka Beer Co. and the Tike-Take bar. Weird, but not true.

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

-- News of the Weird last year ran the announcement that an Australian scientist was working on growing human sperm cells inside mouse testicles, and in February 1999 a team at Tottori University in Japan announced it had actually grown some that way. But just when science was making men obsolete, prominent British fertility researcher Lord Robert Winston told reporters that his book (due in April) would show how an embryo could be planted in a man's abdomen, develop to full term by massive infusion of female hormones and attachment to certain organs for nourishment, and be born by Caesarian section.

-- Despite his high-profile job, Tarrant County (Fort Worth, Texas) Sheriff David Williams has apparently stopped meeting with the Fort Worth police chief and county commissioners and even his own administrators, and rarely goes to his office, according to a February Houston Chronicle report. His defenders say he is merely extremely shy, but critics say he hasn't taken criticism well (his too-close ties to the Christian political right, his eccentric new projects such as a helicopter fleet, and his earlier attempt to acquire sovereign powers from the county under the law of the Republic of Texas as it was in 1836).

In December, a telephone company in Ukraine cut off service to the Russian naval fleet patrolling the Black Sea because of unpaid bills of about $150,000. Additionally, the fleet owes about $3 million for heat and electricity to the port city of Sevastopol. And in December, the chief surgeon at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn Hospital told reporters that Thailand is now the pre-eminent country in the world for sex-change operations, which could, if exploited, help the nation's anemic economy, considering that more than 35,000 transsexuals worldwide are now on Thai surgeons' waiting lists.

From recent police reports: Fort Lupton, Colo., December, woman tried to rob a Bank of Colorado wearing a large garbage bag over her body. Huntsville, Ala., December, man robbed a Circle C convenience store with his face swathed in toilet paper. Bexley, Ohio, January, man robbed a National City Bank while wearing checkered pajamas and bedroom slippers.

A top Columbia University law student, Zolton Williams, 29, was convicted in December of running a cocaine-smuggling operation to help finance his studies. And in January, University of California at Santa Cruz National Merit Scholar Emma Rose Freeman, 18, was charged with robbing a beauty salon and a Costco store at gunpoint (along with her philosophy-major boyfriend). And Berkley, Mich., honor student and athlete Sarah Plumb, 16, was charged with the armed robbery of a gas station in December (on her way to gymnastics practice), allegedly to feed a 2-year-old heroin habit.

-- Carmel Valley, Calif., grocery cashier Sandi Lewtschuk was fired in October after 20 years at Safeway because, though she had no customer complaints, she was deemed deficient by management in executing the company's "smile" policy. (Lewtschuk and other Safeway employees have criticized required smiling as phony, and some female employees in San Francisco said the policy encouraged male customers to believe the women were flirting.) And in January, flight attendants for Cathay Pacific Airways (Hong Kong), feuding with management over automatic pay hikes, threatened to violate that company's smile policy by frowning for one hour per flight.

-- Brian Mills, 20, was charged with malicious destruction of property in December after he returned to a fast-food restaurant in Lincoln Township, Mich., where he used to work and urinated into the deep-fat fryer. (Local health officials said the risk to the public was minimal because the frying temperature is so high.)

-- In January, a union filed a complaint on behalf of a male civilian employee at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida who was recently barred from wearing earrings, makeup and a bra to work as an airfield management specialist. On the other hand, the Canadian armed forces last year approved the application of a 35-year-old male combat leadership instructor to continue his career as Sgt. Sylvia Durand by undergoing hormone treatment and surgery.

-- Inmate George Davis, 58, filed a lawsuit in February against the federal correctional center at Fort Dix, N.J., for its failure to treat his sleep apnea, a condition that causes loud snoring. He said he needs treatment especially because he is vulnerable to getting beaten up by inmates whom his snoring keeps up at night. (At his last facility, he says, he was knocked from his bunk, had water dumped on him, and once had his bed set on fire.)

-- The lawyer for suspected Dayton, Ohio, Bank One robber Donnie D. Tunstall said she might challenge a police search that turned up a shotgun. Tunstall and the gun were found in January in a downtown Dempsey Dumpster, which the lawyer said is actually Tunstall's home (and which contained bedding and other personal items), and police need a judicial warrant to search someone's home.

-- Mr. Wim de Nijs had his piloting privileges restored by the airport in Groningen, Netherlands, in August after a court ruled the airport had gone too far in punishing him for abusing radio frequencies. De Nijs was notorious for tying up air traffic controllers' channels by singing the theme song to "The Flintstones" in English for up to 20 minutes at a time.

Fort Smith, Ark., police arrested James Newsome, 37, in January and charged him with taking money at gunpoint from the Gas Well convenience store. The robber was easily identified from the surveillance tape, plus, the coat worn by the robber was found in Newsome's car. Also, Newsome's wife said the family car had a radiator leak, and a puddle of antifreeze was found beside the store where the robber parked. Also, the robber wore a hard hat with "James Newsome" on it.

News of the Weird has reported several times on people who have swallowed large quantities of metal objects for various reasons (suicide, mental illness, showing off). In Ankara, Turkey, in February, Mr. Omer Faruk Cetinkaya reported to a hospital with abdominal pains, which turned out to have been caused by the screwdriver, 20 nails, six magnets, and several lengths of wire in his stomach, which were removed by surgeons. The patient's father said his son had recently undergone counseling but that it had not been successful.

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

-- The Louisville Courier-Journal reported in February that the Louisville Free Public Library is tied up in probate with the family of the late Audrey Jean Knauer over a $290,000 bequest and that the outcome might depend on whether the actor Charles Bronson wants the money. Ms. Knauer died in 1997 and inexplicably willed her money to Bronson, whom she labeled a "talented character actor" but whom in all likelihood she had never met. Ms. Knauer's mother wants the money; the library says it could buy 20,000 books; and Bronson has not yet responded.

-- Rev. Henry Lyons, head of the nation's largest organization of black Baptists, went to trial in St. Petersburg, Fla., in January, accused of defrauding two firms that thought they were purchasing an 8.5-million-member mailing list from Lyons' National Baptist Convention. Prosecutors insist the number was wildly inflated, and Lyons' former administrative assistant testified that after one such deal was made, Lyons instructed her to use a telephone-book software program to create a membership list by selecting names that sounded black. The assistant said she eliminated last names that began with "z" and also names that ended in "ski." Among the names that wound up on the list was an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

-- In December, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, president Carol Harter moved the offices of most of the school's English composition teachers out of the campus's historic Houssels House and into a group of double-wide trailers in order to make room for a new Consciousness Studies Program, which investigates near-death experiences and other new-age topics. That program was recently created with a large donation from a prominent real estate developer.

-- In January, Fort Worth, Texas, murder defendant Robert William Greer Jr. agreed to plead guilty to a 1988 killing if the judge would keep him in the local jail for two more weeks before sending him to the penitentiary so that he could be assured of seeing the Super Bowl on TV. (Greer thought TV privileges in prison were less certain.) Greer said much of his enthusiasm for the game would be to see his favorite team, the Minnesota Vikings, win it all. Two days later, the Atlanta Falcons beat the Vikings to deny them a Super Bowl appearance, but Greer's guilty plea stands.

-- The New York Times reported in November on the recent but growing competitive sport of "musical canine freestyle" (dancing with dogs) in which costumed owners and their matching-collared pooches exhibit choreography to such tunes as "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Get Happy." (Holding dogs' paws, as in at-home dog-dancing, is forbidden.) The World Canine Freestyle Organization has a mailing list of 8,000 aficionados.

-- The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in October that LuLu, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, saved the life of her owner, Jo Ann Altsman of Beaver Falls, Pa., by alerting a passing driver that Altsman was in trouble. Altsman was groaning with a heart attack and said later that LuLu first whimpered in sympathy, then squeezed through a very small doggy door, pushed open a gate that she had never opened before, walked to the road, and according to a witness, lay down in the middle only when a car approached. The driver stopped and then heard Altsman's cries.

-- In November, the Westchester County (N.Y.) Feline Club voted its Cat of the Year award, from among 300 entrants, to Ginny, a dog. Ginny was honored for befriending numerous stray cats, bringing them home and sharing her food with them.

-- Recent Surgeries: A Caesarian section delivery of six eggs by a turtle in Thunder Bay, Ontario (June), after veterinarians used a dentist's drill on her shell, later patching it with epoxy. And root canals performed on several Kodiak bears appearing in the movie "Grizzly Falls," shot in Toronto (November), after anesthesia delivered by a blow gun.

-- In August, the family of the late Russell U. Shell filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against The Other Side nightclub in Fitchburg, Mass., charging that Mr. Shell choked to death on a miniature plastic penis that allegedly had been placed into his drink glass as a prank by an employee. (The club owner said Mr. Shell merely suffered a seizure and that the charm was found on the floor beside Mr. Shell's body.)

-- In January, Minnesota computer component manufacturer Innovex Inc. agreed to pay former executive Mary E. Curtin $750,000 to settle her sex discrimination lawsuit. During the time Curtin faced the alleged bias and sexist epithets, her husband, Thomas W. Haley, was Innovex's chairman and CEO and presumably had the power to put an end to the practices of which Curtin complained, but he did not.

-- The Chicago Sun-Times reported in November that local businessman David Israel, 51, filed a defamation lawsuit against his mother, Miriam, 77, who had allegedly told his brother and sister-in-law that David "is a thief and stole us blind." Said David, "It's not fun suing your mother."

In January in Modesto, Calif., Bernardo Arroyo, 26, was convicted of distributing methamphetamine and faces a minimum 10 years in prison at his sentencing in April. Before the trial, Arroyo rejected a plea bargain that would have given him two years in prison because a psychic he consulted had assured him that he would be acquitted. (In fairness to the psychic, however, Arroyo had an opportunity to purchase an additional curse upon the prosecutor, for $8,000, but declined.)

Bennie Casson made News of the Weird in 1997 when he filed a $100,000 lawsuit against PT's Show Club in Sauget, Ill., for its negligence in allowing stripper Susan Sykes (a.k.a. Busty Heart) to repeatedly "slam" her allegedly 88-inch bust into his neck and head during her performance, thus aggravating an old neck injury. In January 1999, a judge dismissed the lawsuit because Mr. Casson still couldn't find a lawyer to take the case, and a few days later, Mr. Casson died of a self-inflicted gunshot.

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