-- In March, the Seattle Police Department ordered the 26 employees in its fingerprint unit to attend a mandatory, half-hour safety class in how to sit down. Recently, three of the unit's employees had filed worker compensation claims for injuries that occurred as they were attempting to sit in chairs with rollers. The proper technique, according to an internal memo, is, "Take hold of the arms and get control of the chair before sitting down."

-- Only in California: In March, the Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto began offering sushi (a vegetarian version, wrapped in seaweed) in its lunchroom on Wednesdays.

Constable Carol Hashimoto told the Edmonton Journal in January that she had recently ministered to, over the phone, a man who was severely guilt-racked that he had driven home to Valleyview, Alberta, four hours away, without his driver's license, which he had accidentally left in an Edmonton hotel room. And in Charlotte, N.C., at his February sentencing for laundering money others had taken in a robbery, John Calvin Hodge Sr., 69, revealed that indeed he had declared his $40,000 laundering fee on his IRS return and had paid the tax on it.

William L. Straiter, 26, was arrested in Durham, N.C., in December and charged with robbing the Centura Bank. The robber had presented a teller with a note demanding money and containing a finely detailed drawing of a gun, but Straiter did not actually have a gun and was not charged with armed robbery. However, Terry Williams, 23, was arrested in Oakland, Calif., in March after a road-rage collision in which he allegedly clasped his empty hands as if he had a gun, pointed at the other driver and yelled "Bang!" The prosecutor charged Williams with making a terroristic threat, in that his gesture would likely "provoke a retaliatory response from someone with a weapon."

-- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced in February that it would scale back its terrorist-combating safety inspections of nuclear power plants, despite the fact that the companies fail inspections about half the time and that in 14 of 57 inspections since 1991, the breaches have been so severe that terrorists could have caused a core meltdown. (Furthermore, in each inspection, the power company even knew the exact date of the "surprise" inspection, although it did not know exactly what area or tactic the NRC would use to test the plant's security.)

-- In November, the mayor of South Gate, Calif., adjacent to Los Angeles, proposed an ordinance banning the colors "wild orange, rose, lavender and turquoise" on houses. One resident said he'd paint over his colorful house only if the mayor had a good reason, "like if cars were crashing into each other because the drivers were looking at (my house). Or if it hurt people's eyes." However, in January, the Joliet (Ill.) City Council passed an ordinance requiring builders to make houses less boring by mixing up their aesthetic features and colors. Said City Councilor Joseph Shetina, who supported the ordinance because too many row houses look alike: "(Y)ou go home drunk, and you'd never know which house was yours."

-- In October, Washington State Ferries, over the protests of left-behind travelers, announced it would cut back the number of walk-on customers it would accept between Vashon Island and Seattle from 250 to 230 because of insufficient bench seating. The benches' 250-capacity was determined by the 50-year-old standard of 18 inches per person, but according to spokeswoman Susan Harris-Heuther, "It's just not realistic. We have all expanded, and 18-inch butts are a thing of the past."

-- A February Associated Press report described the 18-point, government-designed tests that injured Israeli housewives must fail before they can be granted disability payments. A medical exam by itself can prove disability for any other occupation, but married female homemakers (men and single women are not eligible for disabled-homemaker status) must step into a simulated home and, in front of three officials, show that they cannot wash or iron laundry, mop the floor or slice bread, among other tasks.

-- While the IRS Has Become Kinder and Gentler: In December, the Hungarian parliament created a special tax-collection unit to go after recalcitrant citizens and which will be equipped with cattle prods, Mace and handcuffs. And in November, the Agence France-Presse wire service reported the death of Luo Changlong near Chongqing, China, as the result of a beating by eight revenue officials who had gone to his home to collect back taxes of about $60.

-- Recent Proposed Legislation: Missouri state Sen. Sam Gaskill's bill to require hospitals to provide a neck-to-knee "dignity gown" instead of the standard, open-back gown. And a Tennessee Alcohol Beverage Commission's rule to allow retail liquor stores to conduct "consumer education" "seminars," basically consisting of in-store tasting. And Arkansas state Rep. Stephen Simon's bill to allow licensed gun-owners to bring weapons to church. And Vermont state Rep. Robert Kinsey's bill to require CPR training as a condition for a marriage license. (Kinsey said he has no idea why such a law is necessary but that he routinely introduces bills at constituents' request.)

-- In March, the animal control officer of Pickens County, S.C., threatened to enforce a county snake-handling ordinance against collector Roy Cox, proprietor of the Reptiles of the World exhibit of rattlesnakes, boa constrictors and cobras. Cox, said the officer, needs a county license, which he can get only if he has federal and state reptile-handling permits. However, as an Associated Press reporter pointed out to the officer after investigating, no federal or South Carolina agency issues any such thing as a reptile permit.

In February, a 17-year-old, 300-pound girl in Baltimore had a benign ovarian tumor the size of a beach ball and weighing 80 pounds removed at Franklin Square Hospital Center. Four people were needed to carry the tumor out of the operating room. Three weeks later in nearby Lancaster, Pa., a 52-year-old woman had a 75-pound benign tumor removed. The largest ever reported, which made News of the Weird in 1991, was the 303-pound cyst taken from a 34-year-old, 513-pound woman at Stanford University Medical Center.

A 46-year-old bass-baritone for the Cleveland Opera hanged himself in December, reportedly distraught over a bad rehearsal for "Lucia di Lammermoor." And a 53-year-old man shot himself to death in Anderson, Ind., in January because, according to a 911 tape, he thought his wife was having an affair on the Internet. And in November, a 26-year-old man in southern Thailand leaped from a sixth-floor window to his death, reportedly because his wife had refused to let the two additional wives he had just brought home stay with the couple.

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

-- In March stories by Knight-Ridder news service (in Honduras) and The Wall Street Journal (in Russia), the latest U.S. disaster relief efforts were revealed to be rife with ill-conceived aid. Honduran hurricane victims still need cooking utensils and medicine but are receiving old clothes, cans of largely unappreciated foods like artichoke hearts, and items like microwave popcorn, dog food and dental floss. Food commodities donated for starving Russians tend to lower the prices of similar Russian food, angering farmers, and, even so, the American food usually winds up being sold on the street rather than given to the poor.

-- In March, a federal judge in Syracuse, N.Y., rejected the latest lawsuit by Donald Drusky of East McKeesport, Pa., in his 30-year battle against USX Corp. for ruining his life by firing him in 1968. Drusky had sued "God ... the sovereign ruler of the universe" for taking "no corrective action" against Drusky's enemies and demanded that God compensate him with professional guitar-playing skills and the resurrection of his mother. Drusky argued that under the federal rules of civil procedure, he would win a default judgment if God failed to show up in court.

In March, Cairo, Egypt, school superintendent Maryann Maurice, 57, was jailed for illegal street begging; she said she earned about $150 a day, the same amount the school paid her monthly. Also in March, retired Russian army Col. Dmitry Setrakov, 69, was arrested after a brief standoff at a downtown Moscow bank; he had pulled a shotgun in an unsuccessful attempt to withdraw about $22,000 from his own account, which, like nearly everyone else's, is frozen. And the London Daily Telegraph reported in March that Russian soldiers in Chechnya had sold off at least 100 of their colleagues to the other side for as little as $17 each; the Chechens ransom the Russian soldiers back to their families.

-- Among the reasons given by an unidentified Buffalo, N.Y., police officer in February in his request for full disability pay based on psychological injury was his having walked into a stationhouse in 1997 to find other officers celebrating an Easter Sunday mass. According to the officer's lawyer, visualizing the stationhouse now causes him such emotional turmoil that he is not able to perform his duties.

-- After All, He's an Olympic Athlete: According to records released in January by the world track and field organization IAAF, U.S. medal-winning sprinter Dennis Mitchell denied he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, despite a positive test result. Mitchell said his testosterone was high only because he had had sex four times the night before.

-- Bruce Charles Davis, 36, explaining in November to an employee of a U.S. Bank branch in Sacramento, Calif., why he had just robbed the place: "I only wanted to teach you a lesson. I want a job in bank security." Davis would have been more plausible had he not already had five bank robbery convictions and another one pending.

-- Alaskan gubernatorial candidate John Lindauer, during a debate in Ketchikan in October, tried to explain why he had been inconsistent as to when his wife had donated to his campaign. (If given in 1997, the donation would be legal; if given during the campaign, illegal.) According to Lindauer, "I said, and (my opponents) took this shot through a radio station mirror, I believe, and took one sentence I was saying." (Lindauer never explained what a radio station mirror was, lost in November, and as of March was facing an ethics investigation about the gift.)

-- Leo Koskela, 62, was rescued in Gresham, Ore., in November after being trapped underneath a train. According to police, he was standing between two tracks and was hit by a slow-moving westbound train that dragged him 15 feet before he broke free, but then fell into the path of a slow-moving eastbound train that dragged him 18 feet, thus leaving him in just about his original position.

-- In February, David Ibrahim filed a lawsuit in San Diego against several law enforcement agencies for $125,000 to cover the inconvenience and humiliation he suffered when jailed for seven days when police discovered methamphetamines in the gas tank of his Dodge Ram truck. Eventually, authorities came to realize that the meth had been placed in the truck by a drug dealer before the Drug Enforcement Administration seized it in a raid, but that DEA failed to find the stash before Ibrahim bought the truck at auction. (On the other hand, police got a search warrant for Ibrahim's home, based on their truck stash, and in a startling coincidence found 93 grams of methamphetamine that did not come from the truck.)

-- Turf 'n' Surf: Sergio Gutierrez, 22, was rescued by farmers near Santa Rosa, Calif., in December after his tractor-trailer collided with an exceptionally large bear and spun out of control. Gutierrez was thrown from the cab, but the truck slid toward him and a door ripped open, spilling the huge cargo of frozen mackerel on top of him.

In September, Jonesboro, Ga., high school science teacher Doris Walker, 43, proved her innocence of a student's charge that she had had an affair with him, by baring her breasts to show the jury a surgical scar that the student failed to mention when asked if Walker's breasts had any unusual characteristics. And in October, a 12-year-old girl in Phoenix, who said she had been molested by her grandfather for four years, convinced police to arrest him when she handed officers a bottle in which she had gathered his sperm; she said she got the idea from an episode of TV's "NYPD Blue."

-- In a high-profile trial in St. Paul, Minn., reported in News of the Weird in 1997, members of the well-to-do family of Gerald and Judy Dick were charged with hiring a personal shoplifter to steal expensive goods from Dayton's department store (although ultimately only Judy was convicted, and on a lesser charge). In February 1999, the Dicks' son Jim, 34, who had been accused in 1997 of paying a shoplifter $800 for $6,000 worth of Dayton's clothing and who now works as a professional model, was hired for Dayton's new spring fashions advertising campaign, apparently without Dayton's executives realizing it.

-- News of the Weird reported in October 1998 on the on-the-job death by snake bite of serpent-handling preacher John W. (Punkin) Brown Jr. Because Brown's wife died three years earlier (also of a snake bite during services in Kentucky), the Browns' three children were objects of a custody fight between the two sets of grandparents. In February 1999, the wife's parents won primary custody, in a Newport, Tenn., hearing, in part because Mr. Brown's parents had allegedly violated an earlier court order never to take the children to a snake-handling church.

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

-- 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.)