-- According to a recent issue of the Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, a majority of arthritis patients in a study showed a reduction in pain and an increase in hand-grip strength after a regimen of "autohemotherapy." About 3/4 cup of blood was withdrawn from patients' veins, mixed in a copper bowl with 1/4 cup each of honey and lemon juice, stirred for several minutes, and then taken orally.

-- Clergyman James Elrod Ogle, 46, was indicted in March for the counseling he provided a parishioner at his Bull Run Bible Fellowship in Manassas, Va. According to prosecutors, after the parishioner confided his marital difficulties, Pastor Ogle offered to kill the man's wife if the man would help him out by killing Mrs. Ogle. The parishioner reported the conversation to police and wore a wire for several meetings with Ogle before the indictment was obtained.

-- Authorities at National Women's Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, opened an inquiry in February into an unusual treatment of premature babies during 1993 and 1994 that might have been the cause of five deaths and eight cases of brain damage. The practice involved removing congestion from the lungs by striking the babies on the chest for hours at a time, up to 200 blows per treatment, which objecting parents were told was harmless and that in fact most babies enjoyed it.

-- In January, a Chicago company, Baxter International, defended a patient study conducted in 1998 in which nearly half the patients receiving its artificial blood died after treatment. Although a relatively high death rate was expected (since artificial blood was only to be given to patients in critical condition), Baxter revealed that no patient had given consent to the treatment and that instead the company had relied on a not-previously used Food and Drug Administration rule that required "community notification" rather than individual patient consent.

-- In November, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City was fined $30,000 for permitting a medical equipment salesman, dressed in scrubs, to assist in a 1997 surgery by operating a new machine in the OR. The patient had entered for a common, uncomplicated operation (removal of a benign tumor in her uterus) but died when a surgeon was unable to detect that she had retained too much saline.

-- According to a January Chicago Sun-Times report, a 1998 National Institutes of Health surgery trial at the University of Colorado experimented with 40 Parkinson's disease patients, 20 of whom received fetal tissue implanted in their brains and 20 of whom had four holes drilled in their heads as placebos but nothing implanted. Some medical ethicists draw a distinction between giving patients placebo sugar pills and drilling holes in their heads, but apparently none of the 20 was adversely affected. However, the trial was delayed when a couple of the real-implant patients died.

World women's chess champion Zsuzsa Polgar, 29, was scheduled to give birth this month in New York City and so had been permitted to reschedule her required title defense from April to June. However, Polgar said that meant she might have to breastfeed her baby during the match, though she thought it would be more of a distraction to her than to her opponent. And a Hamilton, Ontario, lifeguard ordered Shannon Wray, 25, out of a municipal pool in February when she began to breastfeed her 9-month-old daughter. Wray assumed it was because she was offending swimmers, but the lifeguard pointed to the "no food in the pool" rule.

In February, an upscale housing development north of West Palm Beach, Fla., was denied a restraining order against pig farmer Paul Thompson, who blares country and western music from loudspeakers in order to soothe his hogs and improve their appetites. And an Associated Press report from Fort Lupton, Colo., in March detailed municipal judge Paul Sacco's punishments for violators of the town's boombox noise ordinance: They must report to court weekly to listen to selections ranging from Roger Whitaker standards to bagpipes to Navajo flute music to Judge Sacco's own guitar compositions. (Several violators interviewed by the AP admitted they were scared straight by the music.)

Deputy Sheriff Elbert Fuller of Sand Springs, Okla., shot and killed prisoner Clyde McShan in February after McShan pulled a knife on him in a squad car, causing Fuller to lose control, run up an embankment and flip over. Fuller, who was hanging upside down in the car and seat-belted in, managed to reach his gun and shoot McShan before McShan could stab him, which Fuller was able to do only because the car's airbag failed to inflate.

-- At a routine traffic stop in Horseshoe Bend, Ark., in January, Donnie Todd, 17, presented a driver's license in which Arkansas was spelled "Arkansa" and slightly misprinted, and he was cited for suspicion of forgery. However, after investigating, officials said the license was real, issued by a Sharp County office whose computer was malfunctioning. The big loser was Francis McCabe, 19, who pleaded guilty in February to forging driver's licenses, a crime detected because he had inadvertently used a Sharp County-issued license as a model for his own bogus licenses.

-- Joseph Kubic Sr., 93, was hospitalized in Stratford, Conn., in February after he tried to punch in an additional belt hole by hammering a pointy-nosed bullet through the belt. It fired, ricocheting off a table and hitting him in the neck. (In the last two years, Kubic also accidentally cut through his leg to the bone in a chainsaw mishap and set a small brush fire that raged nearly out of control, threatening neighbors' houses.)

-- In Monson, Maine, William Ranta, 25, and Russell LaBlanc, 31, were hospitalized in January when their private road ritual went bad. The two pals had a tradition, when their vehicles met on two-lane roads, to switch lanes and pass each other on the left. However, this time Ranta spotted a truck following in LaBlanc's lane and tried to call off the pass, but LaBlanc was slow on the uptake, and Ranta hit him.

Arrested for murder after a fight over money, Corpus Christi, Texas, February: William Wayne Wright. Sentenced to 27 years in prison for murder, Portland, Ore., February: Bryant Wayne Howard. Arrested for the murder of his wife, Mount Airy, Md., February: Donald Wayne Holt. Arrested for attempted capital murder for attacking a woman with a hammer and setting her on fire, Arlington, Texas, February: Jimmy Wayne Miller. Arrested for manslaughter in a road-rage death, Portland, Ore., January: Terry Wayne Unruh.

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

-- Prominent Christian conservative psychologist Paul Cameron told Rolling Stone magazine in a March interview that he feared gay sex would supplant heterosexual sex unless a vigilant society repressed it. "Marital sex tends toward the boring," he said. "Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does." If all one seeks is an orgasm, he said, "the evidence is that men do a better job on men, and women on women." "(H)omosexuality," he said, "seems too powerful to resist."

-- In February, based on a prosecutor's complaint that a boy, Ayman Khadari, had roughed up a 2-year-old neighbor girl, a judge in Alexandria, Egypt, declared the boy (who was not in court) guilty of assault. The judge sentenced the boy to six months in jail and instructed the prosecutor to have him arrested. The complaint had not stated the boy's exact age, and only when the father brought him to an appeals court to challenge the ruling was it discovered that the newly convicted hoodlum was only 18 months old. (The girl's parents, who instigated the complaint, had long been feuding with the boy's parents.)

In road-rage incidents in Rochester, N.Y., in February and Delaware, Ohio, in June, the alleged maniacs were judges. Rochester judge William Bristol, reportedly miffed that a confused driver had stopped in the middle of the road, was accused of pounding on her windshield "like a lunatic" and following her home so that he could tell police her address. In the Ohio incident, judge Michael Hoague was convicted of threatening a 24-year-old woman whose car he said he had observed being driven recklessly. According to the woman, Judge Hoague had tailgated her at high speeds while yelling profanities, and he later ordered her to his courtroom despite the fact that no charge had been filed against her.

-- In August, the mother of high school student Justin Burnett filed a lawsuit in Chicago against the school board and shop teacher Philip Rush, who had admitted shocking disruptive students by hooking them up to a spark plug and a current-producing crank, sometimes, according to the lawsuit, for as long as 30 seconds. According to the school superintendent, Rush said the disciplinary stunt was a "teaching tool" for kids to see how electricity worked.

-- In Wichita Falls, Texas, former elementary school principal Terry Hitt said in October he would challenge the state's attempt to revoke his teaching certificate. He said he had a teaching ability that was a "gift from God," despite his having admitted earlier in the year that he had stolen his students' prescription Ritalin, melted it down, and shot up with it.

-- In Lop Buri, Thailand, in November, teacher Sombat Boon-namma was accused of punishing seven students by forcing them to hold their hands over a candle's flame until burned badly enough that they required hospitalization. Ms. Sombat said she was merely trying to narrow down the suspects in a recent theft and thought that an innocent person would have no fear of the flame. And the Cairo, Egypt, daily newspaper al-Akhbar reported in December that a teacher in a suburban elementary school had been accused of punishing a rowdy 10-year-old boy by forcing him to stare at the sun for such a long time that he suffered retina damage.

-- In December, Gina Tiberino, 32, a secretary for the Spokane, Wash., sex-crime prosecutors, was fired, one month after she reported that she had been raped. She attributed a work slowdown to typical post-traumatic effects of the assault, pointing out that she had never received negative job evaluations before the incident. Her superiors, though, said she had become "too focused on (her) personal tragedy."

-- In August at several mink farms in England, animal rights activists surreptitiously "liberated" 6,000 of the aggressive, unruly animals. In the following weeks came dozens of reports of minks killing pets (dogs, cats, hamsters), chickens, birds in a sanctuary and endangered water voles. Many minks themselves were killed, either by people protecting their own animals or in fights with other minks, and some minks were said to have died of the stress of being released into the wild.

-- In December, Texas' Commission for the Blind (which provides workplace support to the visually impaired) was found by the U.S. Department of Justice to have discriminated against two of its own sightless employees and so paid $55,000 to settle the employees' complaints. The commission had previously issued printed employee manuals but had no Braille or large-type versions for its blind or sight-impaired workers.

-- In December, Great West Casualty Co. filed a $2,800 lawsuit against the estate of Ms. Gertie Witherspoon, who was 81 when she was struck and killed near Harrisonville, Mo., by a Vernon County Grain and Supply tractor-trailer insured through the firm. Great West contends that Ms. Witherspoon was negligent in walking in front of the truck and seeks to recover from her heirs the money it had to pay out in front-end damage.

-- In January, a 16-year-old driver and his 20-year-old passenger smashed their car at a high rate of speed through the glass doors of their high school gym in Doylestown, Pa., and into a concrete wall, in what the driver said was a suicide attempt brought on by depression. However, both were wearing seat belts and were not seriously hurt.

News of the Weird reported in January 1998 on a motorist killed by a flying cow (propelled through the air and through the windshield after being hit by another car). In February 1999 the same thing happened to the driver of a pickup truck near Vacaville, Calif., after a car hit a cow on Pleasants Valley Road. (Five days earlier, near Prattville, Ala., a 19-year-old motorist was killed in the same way by a 300-pound flying hog.)

Edmonton, Alberta, February: A 34-year-old man was beaten to death in a fight over whose turn it was at a tavern's pool table. Black Oak, Ark., February: A 65-year-old man was shot to death in an argument over whether the town needs sewer service. Miami Beach, Fla., March: A 66-year-old man was shot to death at a condominium association meeting by a man enraged that someone had stolen his garden hose.

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

-- 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.)