-- After marathon partisan sessions in March, the Alabama senate reached agreement to permit Lt. Gov. Steve Windom to retain his traditional presiding powers. However, during the fierce debates, Windom was forced to remain continually at the presiding officer's podium, and things got so tense on March 28 that he had to urinate into a pitcher because opponents would have won votes if he had taken a restroom break. Afterward, the director of the state archives asked for the pitcher, but Windom said it had been discarded.

-- Berkeley, Calif., Councilman Kriss Worthington announced in April that he would propose that the City Council pass a reparations package to heal sociopolitical wounds dating back to the 1960s. Included were proposals for official apologies to anti-Vietnam war protesters and to Patricia Hearst Shaw, who was kidnapped by (and later joined) the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. Worthington also proposed that the city erect a statue of Hearst Shaw in her notorious gun-toting pose and declare the abduction house in Worthington's district a historic site.

In January, a pair of popular dolls was introduced in Japan from the firm Mataro, consisting of a female with her hands out asking for a loan and a male banker in a business suit rejecting her. And in Mompos, Colombia, in March, local teachers stole about 50 Easter figurines from a church and vowed not to return them until the city issued their six-months-overdue paychecks. And Nike announced in March to great fanfare that it was raising the minimum wage for its Indonesian workers, to about $37 per month, which in the U.S. buys one-fourth of a pair of Air Jordans.

-- Unitel Corp. announced in March it was relocating its 100-job telemarketing office from small-town Frostburg, Md., to Florida. Unitel said Frostburg workers' telephone manner is too polite for the telemarketing business.

-- According to a February Science News profile of University of South Florida pollution microbiologist Joan B. Rose, her career is devoted to flushing fecal-germlike "phages" down toilets and then sending monitoring crews into local waterways to track down where they end up. She has found, for example, that some bacteria flushed into septic tanks can seep into nearby canals within 11 hours.

-- Another germ ranger is University of Arizona environmental microbiologist Charles Gerba, whose specialty, according to a February New York Times article, is discovering germ patterns in kitchens, bathrooms and laundries. In random home visits, Gerba found that 25 percent of washing machines are contaminated with fecal matter and that hepatitis A and salmonella survive even a very hot dryer and remain on clothes. He is noted for developing the "commodograph," a visual display of where droplets of water land after they are sprayed into the air when a toilet is flushed. (Hint: Gerba keeps his toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.)

-- Janice Peck, 50, filed a lawsuit last year in Salt Lake City against the state Division of Wildlife for alienation of affection. The agency had assigned Janice's then-husband, Randal, to partner up with agent Jodi Becker, now 33, as a married, outdoor couple in order to infiltrate a poaching operation. Apparently, the couple was so good at portraying a couple that Randal divorced Janice after 23 years' marriage and married Becker. Randal and Jodi said they initially slept together in their government-supplied trailer only to give their relationship greater authenticity.

-- News of the Weird reported in 1994 on a Nassau County, N.Y., cell block bragging contest and fight over pay-telephone privileges between notorious murderers Colin Ferguson (race-motivated, commuter-train killer) and Joel Rifkin (serial prostitute killer). Better spirited, according to news reports in March 1999, are the twice-a-week bull sessions at the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colo., of bombers Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City), Ramzi Yousef (World Trade Center) and Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber). Said one former prosecutor, "This is the oddest kaffeeklatsch in the history of Western civilization."

-- The late Bennie Casson's unsuccessful lawsuit against a Sauget, Ill., stripper's club for neck injuries caused by a dancer's swinging her breasts at him was all over the news in 1997. In February 1999, Mark Kent, 28, filed assault charges against the Kappa Kabana club, Kappa, Ill., after a dancer tried to wrap her legs around his neck while holding onto a pole on stage, causing Kent to fall off a bar stool and hit his head and elbow.

-- News of the Weird reported in 1993 that a Santa Monica, Calif., cafe was selling $130/pound Kopi Luwak coffee, produced from choice beans that have been run through the digestive tract of a Sumatran marsupial before being processed for sale. A March 1999 Wall Street Journal story from Vietnam reported on a similarly made "caphe cut chon" (fox dung coffee), employing a mongoose-related civet cat, whose taste in finding the finest coffee beans in a field is said to be uncanny. (The coffee is in shorter supply lately because Vietnamese diners are finding the civet cat, itself, tasty.)

-- News of the Weird has reported several times on capital punishment in China for crimes somewhat less serious than murder. Among the latest: Gao Yunliao, executed in January in Henan province, for stealing a statue. Executive Tang Mihong and his employee Zhao Jian, executed in December in Beijing, for smuggling computers. And Jie Hua Huang, 34, granted asylum in Canada in November because he faced a certain death penalty in China for tax fraud.

-- Stories demonstrating different smell tolerances have once again been in the news. In February, a 52-year-old woman in Hong Kong gave in to the smell after a week and turned her dead husband's body over to authorities; she had held on to the body in the hope that he would revive. And in January, authorities in Thunder Bay, Ontario, recovered the body of an 85-year-old man, dead for four years, which had to be extricated from a house that one officer called "a tremendous biological soup of garbage and debris"; the neighbors had noticed a smell a few years ago but did not think it was bad enough to report.

A 22-year-old woman in an automobile collision in Pendleton, Ore., in January was placed in an ambulance, but seconds later a tractor-trailer skidded into it, crushing it and killing the woman. And a 36-year-old man survived a head-on crash into a utility pole in Miami Beach, Fla., in January, and was waiting to be picked up when the pole fell on top of him, killing him. And a 72-year-old man was slightly injured when his car went off the road near Penicton, British Columbia, in December, resting on a ledge; when a rescuer attempted to reach him, the car slipped off and fell 30 feet, killing the man.

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

-- The school board of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., voted in April to approve in principle a new, 600-pupil secondary school that would cater to students of average academic abilities and who avoid extracurricular activities. The board believes such students lose motivation when schooled alongside higher achievers. Said a school district official, "This is going to require strong marketing."

-- Recently retired Air Force Sgt. Charles O. Hamilton Jr. was arrested in Upper Marlboro, Md., in March allegedly attempting to enter a toddler's bedroom at night. Police believe Hamilton is the serial burglar who sneaks into houses at night, sometimes wearing a diaper under his pants, to observe and photograph young boys sleeping, sometimes after deftly removing their shorts and dressing them in diapers. A storage locker belonging to Hamilton was found to contain photos of his peeping handiwork, along with about a thousand diapers, some of them soiled, many with boys' names on them with photographs inside showing the named boy wearing the diaper.

-- Lucia Kaiser filed a lawsuit in February against the Ohm restaurant in New York City, claiming that her 400-guest birthday party there in December (among the guests, Harry Belafonte and Quincy Jones) did not meet her expectations. The restaurant owner said it was a lovely party and that he fully complied with the contract, but Kaiser said she was so unfulfilled that she wants $30 million in damages.

-- In Belleville, Ill., Rochelle Chouinard sued booking agent Patricia Neuf for $227 for failing to supply a satisfactory stripper for her husband's 50th birthday party. Chouinard said she specifically asked for a woman with at least a 40-inch chest and who would do a nurse-like act, but received what she estimated to be a 36A woman who merely did a traditional striptease. In February, a judge tossed out Chouinard's lawsuit.

-- In Edwardsville, Ill., in February, Joseph Schrage filed a lawsuit against a local Pizza Hut for the "mental anguish" caused when he got a bad pizza one night in 1997. He said the pizza made him sick, but he offered no proof when he made his initial claim against the company. The Pizza Hut manager said Schrage's experience hasn't driven him away: "He's still a current, regular customer. He comes in about twice a week."

-- In February, a jury in New Britain, Conn., awarded convicted rapist-murderer Kevin King, 27, more than $2 million in damages for injuries suffered when he tried to escape from prison in 1996. In that attempt, King had attacked a female guard with a homemade knife, but a little while later, two other guards subdued King, causing some bruises and a cut below one eye, but also, according to his lawyer, causing him "anxiety" and "terror" that he would be further roughed up by the guards. King's lawyer had sought to settle for $20,000, but the six jurors saw fit to award him 100 times that amount.

-- In November, inmate Luis Romero, 38, filed a lawsuit against jailers in Farmington, N.M., for injuries he suffered when he fell out of his bunk and hit his head while trying to change a light bulb in his cell. And two months earlier, inmate Guadalupe Mendoya was turned down by a Wisconsin Court of Appeals in his lawsuit against Green Bay jailers for injuries he suffered when he fell out of bed while still inebriated from the 25 drinks he had had earlier that night.

-- In November in Lake St. Croix Beach, Minn., firefighters assisted a 13-year-old boy who had gotten his lip stuck in an eggbeater. And in Taipei, Taiwan, in February, doctors removed a chopstick from the eye socket of Japanese tourist Satoshi Kinoshida; it had penetrated more than an inch. And in December, firefighters in Gosport, England, were called to a home to extricate teacher John Gueran, 42, who had become stuck headfirst with, according to London's Daily Telegraph, his "backside in the air," behind a pantry trying to retrieve his son's Christmas gift.

-- Latest Highway Truck Spills: 36 tons of Tootsie Rolls, Blow Pops and other candy, near downtown Nashville, Tenn., January; thousands of surgical scalpels, scattered over a half-mile stretch of Route 10 near Walton, N.Y., January (puncturing the tires of a dozen motorists); and 8 million dimes near Gore, Okla., en route from the Denver Mint to the Federal Reserve Bank in Little Rock, Ark., March.

-- In January, a jury in Ringgold, Ga., acquitted Alvin Ridley, 56, of murdering his wife. Because most neighbors and relatives of the couple had not seen Virginia Ridley in 25 years, and because Alvin was an eccentric loner living in a dilapidated, roach-infested house in the Appalachian mountains, rumors long had it that Alvin had enslaved Virginia shortly after their wedding and eventually killed her. However, Alvin said Virginia died of an epileptic seizure and persuaded the jury of the couple's love by showing Virginia's prolific diaries, which describe her simple lifestyle, passion for privacy, and intense, almost high school crush-like obsession with her husband.

-- After decades of failed or meaningless "studies" by advocates of the medical effectiveness of relieving pain by attaching magnets to various parts of the body, a New York Medical College researcher announced one in January that some authorities believe actually passes muster. In a report on 24 patients with diabetes, Dr. Michael I. Weintraub wrote in the American Journal of Pain Management, those with magnets enclosed in foot pads reported less pain than those with simulated magnets in the pad. Weintraub theorized that a certain nerve in the foot might be responsive to the electrical energy created by the magnetic waves.

Last year News of the Weird reported on a Missouri woman's begging a judge not to imprison the man who had shot her in the head (and thus sent her into a coma and killed her fetus) because she nevertheless loved him and had since married him (and produced a replacement child). In San Francisco in January 1999, Anthony Tyrone Davis, 42, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for smashing a woman with a hammer, so severely that he left a skull indentation in the shape of the head of the hammer. The victim subsequently married Davis and refused to testify against him, but he was convicted on a doctor's testimony and the 911 tape of the incident.

A 54-year-old woman was run over and killed in February by an Amtrak train in San Jose, Calif.; she was walking on the tracks wearing headphones listening to the radio. And an unidentified middle-aged man was killed in Nairobi, Kenya, in March when he accidentally ran in front of a bus while escaping from the All Saints Cathedral, where he had just stolen the contents of collection plates. And a 73-year-old man was killed in a fistfight in Las Vegas in February; he had just challenged a 69-year-old man over who was tougher.

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

-- Memo to New York City Mayor Giuliani: In March, more than a thousand police officers in India completed a 10-day retreat at which they practiced traditional Vippasana meditation, with top officers lauding the session as a way to prevent brutality on the job. Said one newly mellow cop, "Today I bear no malice or ill will to anyone." In addition to 12 daily hours of meditation and introspection, the retreat required total silence, no sex and a regimen of fruit and cereals.

-- Still Rather Dine With Her Than With Him: In February, a court in London, England, convicted restaurateur Sarah Kyolaba Amin, 42, the ex-wife of former Ugandan dictator (and, reportedly, sometimes-cannibal) Idi Amin, of several major health code violations in the eatery (named "S") that she owns. Authorities cited "heavy and active" cockroach and mouse infestation and "filth" throughout the kitchen and inside a refrigerator.

In separate incidents over a 48-hour period in March, a fuming Spring Hill, Tenn., man fired about 90 rounds from an AK-47 point-blank into his car alongside a major highway after it died on him, and another man was turned down at the courthouse in Knoxville, Tenn., when he applied for a marriage license to make his 1996 Mustang his bride, following a depressing split with his girlfriend.

In December, the Kirkwood, Mo., home of Dennis and Bonnie Miller suffered extensive fire damage when the turkey they tried to deep-fry on a grill for Christmas burned a hole in the pot and ignited a propane cylinder. And in February, Canadian fugitive Allen Charles Whitequill, 42, on the lam for two years on murder charges, was captured in Carrizozo, N.M., during a burglary when he attempted to cook a frozen turkey in an office microwave oven. (He badly undercooked it and became sick, and when he sought a restroom, he accidentally locked the door behind him and could not get out before police arrived.)

-- In March, former Fairfax County, Va., school principal Anthony M. Rizzo Jr., 62, escaped with a hung jury on charges that he had repeatedly raped a 10-year-old girl in the 1980s. The jury had not been allowed to know one fact about Rizzo: In 1998 he had won a permanent disability retirement from the state of Virginia, worth three times what ordinary retirement is worth, with the "disability" being a "psychosexual disorder" that makes him unable to supervise females without also trying to force sex on them. (At the time Rizzo was fighting for the disability, he was also denying the claims of eight female former co-workers who said they were victims of Rizzo's "disorder.")

-- Charlie Smith, 45, told authorities in Austin, Texas, in February that he might plead guilty to crimes in connection with a yearlong series of scams that bilked people out of more than $1 million, but that he wanted people to know he wasn't a bad person. He told the Austin American-Statesman that his nearly lifelong urge to rip people off traces back to a day in 1969 when his car slipped off of the jack while he was working on it, landing on him, cracking his skull and changing him morally.

-- Recent Explanations: Richard Davis, 51, defending his bankruptcy filing in London, England, in March, said it was a nasal decongestant by Novartis Pharmaceuticals that made him extravagant and irrational. And Gregory DeLozier, 35, explaining the attempted murder charge against him in Trenton, N.J., said in January that it was the sediment from a bottle of iced tea he drank that produced the weird side effects that made him stab his wife. And in January, inmate (and former gardener) James R. Moore, 64, tried to get his 1962 Rochester, N.Y., murder conviction overturned, pointing out that it was his exposure to the insecticide dieldrin that made him lose his head and commit the murder.

-- The Rhode Island Supreme Court publicly reprimanded lawyer John F. Pellizzari in March for having had a three-month sexual relationship with a divorce client while continuing to represent her in negotiations with her husband. Pellizzari admitted the relationship but blamed it on the client, who he said had a "premeditated plan" to "coerce" him into sex, removed his clothes against his will, and physically forced herself on him.

-- In March, the city of Yenshui, Taiwan, held a fireworks show to commemorate stamping out the plague bacteria by fire more than 100 years ago. Villagers wearing bulky, protective clothing stand in front of the fireworks, which this year consisted of bottle rockets, hoping to be hit by the missiles, which would bring good luck. Apparently, some of the rockets exploded only after being propelled into the bulky clothing, creating serious injuries to about 30 lucky people.

-- A March Los Angeles Times story reported on the royal Siamese cat family (numbering about 50) of Thailand, which is said to be special because they are direct descendants of the cats of the beloved King Rama V. The family is believed to be the last of the pure khao manee breed ("diamond eyes") in the country and generally live in luxury, in teak-paneled quarters with gold and silver dishes, and three specially prepared meals a day. Six years ago, a Thai khao manee was reportedly sold for about $4 million.

-- The Washington Post reported in January that the trendy elective surgery in China now is nose enlargements, by young people seeking to Westernize their faces. Said one young woman in Beijing, "I want to become beautiful," as she was about to undergo surgery that would leave her with a nose twice as large as what she had. Said Mr. Wen Biao, 26: "If I have a bigger nose, I think I will find a wife. I already have a good job."

A supermarket customer was shot to death in New Orleans in December, allegedly by the boyfriend of a cashier; police believe he responded to the cashier's call for help because the rowdy customer was in the express line with more than 10 items. And a 22-year-old Northfield, N.H., man was arrested in January and charged with shooting his 26-year-old brother to death in a fight that began when the older brother objected to the younger's opening a bag of potato chips by cutting it instead of pulling it apart.

News of the Weird reported on St. Paul, Minn., bookie Max Weisberg in 1994, just after he had been picked up for illegal gambling but released because the prosecutor was pessimistic about a conviction due to Weisberg's diminished mental capacity. Though Weisberg is a genius with numbers, he is reported to have an IQ of 80, and in fact, a jury in 1990 had acquitted him of a similar charge, finding that he just could not seem to understand that gambling is illegal. In February 1999, police raided Weisberg's home once again, seizing $127,000 in alleged gambling proceeds, running the total seized from Weisberg in 10 years to about $600,000, and the prosecutor did not rule out trying once more to convict him.

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