-- Sister Mary Rinaldi, director of development for the Salesian Sisters Roman Catholic order in New Jersey, told television reporters in April that more than 2,500 benefactors have paid $100 and up for nuns to pray for them daily. Rinaldi said the sisters are not selling their prayers; rather, she said, they will pray for anyone, but those who contribute money get special attention from their own designated nun, with proceeds to fund their retirement home. A Pennsylvania order has a similar program, "One on One With a Nazareth Nun."

In April, just as North Carolina Rep. Frank Mitchell was introducing his bill to plug a loophole in state law that did not fully punish schoolteachers who have sex with their students, the chief inspector of schools in Great Britain was still dealing with fallout from his February remarks that teacher-student sex could sometimes be "experiential and educative" and should not necessarily result even in the teacher's firing.

Ms. Suphatra Chumphusri, explaining why she killed her drug-dealing son in December in Chiang Rai, Thailand: "No matter how much I loved him, I had to do it for the sake of the general society." And according to the court-appointed psychiatrist examining last summer's U.S. Capitol shooter Russell Eugene Weston Jr., the two deaths were unavoidable because Weston had to get the "ruby satellite" in a Senate office in order to stop the Capitol Hill cannibalism that had produced rotting corpses, which would otherwise infect everyone with "Black Heva," "the most deadliest disease known to mankind."

-- Latest Highway Truck Spills: Several tons of chocolate bars (Hershey's, Reese's, etc.) on Interstate 80 near Grinnell, Iowa, March (which caught fire and burned out of control because of the chocolate's oil); a truckload of rock salt in Pittsburgh, March (giving great protection against ice to a small patch of East Carson Street); a tanker truck of tequila near Opelousas, La., June; and 20 tons of explosive black powder just before rush hour in Springfield, Va., at the Capital Beltway's busiest interstate interchange.

-- Sounds Like an Urban Legend, But It's Not: In April in Fayetteville, Ark., exploding beans and rice tore a hole in the roof of Steve Tate's home. Tate had packed the food in frozen carbon dioxide in 6-foot-long pipes for later storage at a cabin, but the gas needed some room to expand. Bomb technicians from nearby Springdale exploded the other pipefuls Tate had prepared.

-- Livermore, Calif., whose population includes many smart people who work for two nuclear research labs, organized digging crews in June to search for its time capsule, which was created with great fanfare in 1974 but now cannot be found because no one remembers where it was buried. It is about the size of a beer keg but was interred unceremoniously by a work crew so as not to encourage thieves.

-- In February, Japanese tourist Satoshi Kinoshida, 48, was hospitalized in Taipei, Taiwan, after he tripped at a hotel and fell onto a chopstick he was holding and had it penetrate about an inch into his right eye socket. (It missed his eyeball, and he was not seriously hurt.) And in March, a 20-year-old man in Thisted, Denmark, had to be taken from a bar to a machine shop late at night so a technician could disassemble a condom machine in which his finger had become stuck.

-- In April at the Westchester (N.Y.) Medical Center, surgeons were preparing a patient for a long-awaited kidney transplant when they realized that the kidney -- on ice in a plastic box in the operating room -- was missing. Ninety minutes later, after an all-out search, the box and kidney were found in a trash bin, having been mistakenly set out for recycling. According to Medical Center officials, the kidney was still viable when implanted, but later failed for other reasons.

-- An April Associated Press feature reported on people (mostly rural Southerners) with a fondness (or addiction) for eating kaolin, the smooth clay used in chalk, paint products and ceramics. Small snack bags of kaolin (even though labeled "not for human consumption") are sold at convenience stores in central Georgia, where half the world's kaolin is produced, and even at farmer's markets in Atlanta. Some kaolin eaters say it settles the stomach, but medical authorities say it leads to constipation and serious liver and kidney damage.

-- Among unusual museums recently in the news: Ed's Museum (publicized in a May USA Today story), bequeathed by Edwin Kruger to the town of Wykoff, Minn., in 1989, consisting of Ed's stuff, interesting only because Ed lived alone and saved everything he ever owned. And the renovated William P. Didusch Museum in Baltimore, also known as the museum on the history of urology (subject of a Baltimore Sun story in January), displaying historical kidney-stone-remedying implements, which are not to be viewed by squeamish men.

-- From a May New York Times profile of Max McCalman, the cheesemaster ("maitre fromager") at the upscale Picholine restaurant in Manhattan: "You must look at (the cheeses)," said McCalman, "smell them, touch them, taste them. Sometimes, I even listen to them and they talk to me." His "office" is his dank, one-of-a-kind "cheese cave" in which he tends to his inventory for hours. Recently, a doctor diagnosed the pain in McCalman's arm as "cheese elbow," which has limited his personal slicing to the soft cheeses.

Women With Too Many Cats (and very smelly houses): Alice Tyhurst, Watsonville, Calif. (43 cats, discovered by authorities in May); Dixie Bielenberg and husband John, Decatur, Ill. (211 cats, December); Linda Marie Reynolds, age 50, Wilmington, N.C. (12 cats and 28 dogs, February); a 56-year-old woman, Omaha, Neb. (104 cats, along with a bathtub half-filled with cat waste, May); Janice Van Meter, Dale City, Va. (68 cats, April); Julie Harris, age 37, head of the "Feral Cat Project," Portsmouth, N.H. (31 cats, April).

Two grown men robbed a 9-year-old boy of $6 at his curbside lemonade stand (Cincinnati). A Baptist pastor with 24 years in the pulpit was arrested at a mall doing underskirt videotaping (Atlanta). A high school science teacher was forced to resign after showing her class an execution video to demonstrate "electricity" (Savannah, Ga.). A woman who plays bagpipes for tourists' tips withdrew her lawsuit against Swissair for lost income due to last year's crash of Flight 111 (Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia). A sanitation plant computer-system test for Y2K problems was unsuccessful, resulting in a 4 million-gallon spill of untreated sewage into streets and a park (near Los Angeles).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- The devastation of Kosovo this year by Serbian forces also disrupted another part of some Kosovars' lives: their extensive international crime network, which, according to a May report by the San Francisco Chronicle, "dominated" the narcotics business in Europe. The Kosovar network has now been supplanted by more vicious Albanian crime organizations, sometimes in conjunction with Sicilian Mafia families just across the Adriatic Sea, supported by a corrupt Albanian parliament. In March, the Albanian crime "boss of bosses" was arrested in Milan, Italy, en route as an Albanian diplomat to an International Crime Tribunal meeting in France.

-- In April, the Great Floridian Marker Program's deadline was extended again, to September, because it is far short of its millennial goal to officially recognize the 2,000 all-time greatest Floridians. Though the program has been in operation for more than a year, municipalities have nominated so few people (170) that program personnel may finally be realizing that there simply have never been 2,000 great Floridians.

In January, officials in Chelyabinsk, Russia, imposed a 5-ruble (about 20 cents) monthly tax on domestic dogs, based on their use of electricity and water. And in May, the owner of the Letostrui antiques shop in Sofia, Bulgaria, told reporters he hoped for a quick end to the bombing in neighboring Yugoslavia so that his missile debris (from NATO misfires that hit Bulgaria) would retain its high value and not be diluted by further debris from more NATO misfires. And a May Knight-Ridder News Service dispatch reported that Chile has covered for its lagging copper business with such dynamic exports as disposable diapers made from swamp moss and aftershave lotion made from snail slime.

-- More than 2,300 people were reported kidnapped in Colombia in 1998 in what are called "fishing expeditions," in which almost random groups of people are abducted until the captors sort out who is valuable and who isn't, according to a June Chicago Tribune story. Kidnapping is such a fact of life in Colombia that the format of one Bogota radio station is almost exclusively messages for kidnap victims from their relatives.

-- Artists wielded chainsaws in March in Samchok, South Korea, for the traditional anglers' Male Root Carving Competition. Celebratory penises up to 9 feet long are fashioned from pine logs along a waterfront to commemorate the time, 400 years ago, when a sailor died on a fishing trip and left a forlorn virgin on the shore. The phalluses are an attempt to appease her spirit and are dumped in the water after the event. Proclamation was led this year by the current mayor of Samchok, whose actual name is Kim Il Dong.

-- In India, 600,000 "untouchables" continue their miserable existence despite pledges by the government for the last 50 years to improve their lives, according to an April report in the London Observer. Members of the country's lowest caste empty dry latrines for a living, and anyone of a higher caste who even accidentally touches a so-called "scavenger" must undergo a ritual purification. A Delhi organization has liberated 40,000 scavengers over the past decade, mostly upgrading them to janitors.

-- Among the more controversial of the recent decrees of the Afghanistan fundamentalist Taliban government was to term a traditional Gurbuz tribe pastime as un-Islamic "gambling." In the game, two men tap eggs together, and the one whose egg breaks is the loser. In January, when Taliban soldiers tried to break up a game in the city of Khost, the tribesmen resisted, and in a standoff, five soldiers and seven tribesmen were killed.

-- In April, William Whitfield, 34, won about $185,000 (U.S.) from a Calgary, Alberta, judge for injuries he suffered when motorist David Calhoun smashed into his brand-new truck in 1990. Among the crash's consequences, according to medical testimony, was Whitfield's acquired desire, still unsubsided to this day despite electroshock therapy, to kill Calhoun in retaliation. According to the judge, Calhoun failed to testify at the trial out of fear of Whitfield, who has told his lawyer that he intends to kill Calhoun and then himself.

-- Ten U.S. representatives this decade gave absolute pledges not to serve more than eight years in office, and six are keeping their promises. Of the other four (including Republicans Scott McInnis of Colorado and George Nethercutt of Washington and Democrat Marty Meehan of Massachusetts), the best promise-voiding explanation was by Republican Tillie Fowler, elected from Jacksonville, Fla., in 1992 under the slogan "Eight (years) Is Enough." Fowler said in December 1998 that she might run in the year 2000 anyway, because "my problem was, I was too honest (when I made the pledge)."

-- Roy Hopkins, 32, speaking to a Toronto Star reporter in March about having recently stepped forward to admit to a 1995 murder for which another man had wrongly been serving a life sentence: "I may be a criminal, and I may be a thief, and I may be a robber, but I ain't a low-life."

-- Charles Ng, who was convicted in February in Orange County, Calif., of 11 torture-murders in a spree during 1984-85, claimed at his sentencing hearing in April that it was really his late buddy Leonard Lake who masterminded the killings and that he, Ng, had what a psychiatrist called a dependent personality disorder that made him too docile and compliant. Ng was so "docile" that he fled to Canada and skillfully fought extradition for six years after the killings and since 1991 has used numerous delay tactics, including firing several of his lawyers and suing three of them, to avoid going to trial.

In 1992 News of the Weird reported that a Cornell University researcher had developed an artificial dog (heated using cows' blood) to breed the 12,000 fleas a day he required for shipping to pharmaceutical companies to test flea and tick remedies. (The dog replaced 25 real dogs, which were probably quite relieved.) A June 1999 New York Times report finds that the now-semi-retired researcher, Dr. Jay Georgi, mainly sells the artificial dogs (whose efficiency is now as great as that of 104 real dogs), but does keep a small population of fleas on hand for small orders and emergencies. Dr. Georgi claims to retain his fascination with fleas: "I'm very fond of them."

In February, the mayor of Carsonville, Mich. (population 583), hanged himself in his tool shed three days before a contentious recall election, provoked by objections to his bill-paying lapses and violations of open-meetings laws. And in March in Tokyo, a 58-year-old executive, upset at Bridgestone Tire Co.'s large-scale (and for Japan, unusual) downsizing, which included a request that he accept early retirement, committed ritual hara-kiri with a 14-inch fish-slicing knife in a company conference room.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- An April Associated Press dispatch extolled the dedication of Sierra Madre, Calif., garbage aficionado Kevin Inciyaki, age 9, who, according to his parents, has been into trash since he was 2 and whose family vacation snapshots (to Sea World, etc.) always feature him inspecting local trash cans. He follows garbage trucks on their routes and has recently begun raising garbage-eating worms, under the supervision of UCLA researcher Eugene Tseng, who apparently is a lot like Kevin, proclaiming that garbage is "one of the most fun things you can possibly imagine."

-- According to a May San Francisco Chronicle report, the 2,000 Transcendental Meditation adherents of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who moved to Fairfield, Iowa, several years ago have recently been clashing with the 8,000 townies over whether homes and businesses need to be rebuilt to face east so that, according to TM principles, the residents will lead more fulfilling, harmonious lives. (Sunrise produces energy; sunset produces lethargy.) TM people hold two of the city council's seven positions.

The latest person to shoot himself for perfectly understandable personal reasons: Henry Shepherd, 27, Cambridgeshire, England, who blasted his knee off with a shotgun in May to end the pain of a workplace injury. Said his brother, Lee: "He told me ... he'd rather have a stump (than the pain). The knee injury was ruining his life."

In May, former Marla Maples publicist Chuck Jones was convicted in New York City of burglarizing her apartment to get dozens of pairs of her shoes (with many of which he admitted to having a personal sexual relationship). And in March in Singapore, Zainal Mohamed Esa, 43, was jailed for stealing women's shoes, which he would sniff (according to his lawyer) "until the smell runs out."

In Athens, Ala., in May, Freamon Holt Jr., 29, was charged with theft after a lengthy chase that began when Holt fled on foot across a Kroger store parking lot carrying two steaks he did not pay for. Holt then jumped on a bicycle and rode away, but soon crashed into a utility pole, briefly knocking himself unconscious. However, he came to and fled again, and in a move characterized by a local newspaper writer as the final "leg" of his "triathlon" escape, Holt jumped into Town Creek, but a firefighter caught up to him after a short swim.

-- In April, Jay Monfort bowed to an imminent court ruling and took down the 4-foot-high wire fence he had erected on his property to protect his office in the town of Fishkill, N.Y., from a nest of deadly timber rattlesnakes 260 feet away. According to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the timber rattler is endangered, and Monfort's fence "would block the snakes from their usual places to hunt, bask in the sun and reproduce, and would probably cause them 'physiological stress.'"

-- In February, the Virginia House of Delegates voted 95-5 to approve a bill urging federal recognition of the Rappahannock Indian tribe and seven others, but not before several unidentified members of the House began accompanying the debate with imitation tom-tom beats on their desks. Rappahannock representatives were in the gallery and were not amused.

-- Government Seeks Strippers: With an April help-wanted ad in the Palm Beach Post, the Florida labor department sought exotic dancers (7 p.m.-3 a.m., 40 hours a week, $11 per hour) to work at a club in Stuart, Fla. (When faced with work requests by immigrants, states are required by federal law to ascertain whether any domestic workers are available; if there are none, the immigrant qualifies for a federal work visa.) Meanwhile, according to an April report in the Windsor (Ontario) Star, the Canadian government has drastically reduced the number of Eastern European strippers allowed to work in the country, despite a chronic shortage of local strippers.

-- Another Endangered Species: According to a March London Daily Telegraph dispatch, the Brazilian government recently awarded a lone hermit tribesman a 96-square-kilometer personal preserve, off-limits to civilization, in the northwest part of the country near the Bolivian border. Loggers, ranchers and farmers in the area protested because of the impact on their livelihoods. A government team had tracked the hermit down in August 1998 to let him know of the planned preserve, but he resisted and in fact fired an arrow at them.

-- Tacky Officials: In February, prosecutors in Austin, Texas, filed a misdemeanor trespass charge against Judge Steve Mansfield of the state Court of Criminal Appeals, claiming that Judge Mansfield illegally tried to sell two tickets to the Texas-Texas A&M football game in November, was given a warning by Texas campus police, and then tried it again a few minutes later. And in March, a judge in Frederica, Del., fined Mayor Ira R. Glanden III $100 after he admitted in court to taking newspapers several mornings from the front of Greenley's Market before it opened.

-- In March, the federal government's auditor, the General Accounting Office, blasted the financial management of the Internal Revenue Service, with the lead investigator telling a congressional committee, "The IRS cannot do some of the basic accounting and record-keeping tasks that it expects Americans to do," including keeping proper paperwork. On the other hand, among the tax delinquents in the federal government, according to a May IRS report, are 7 percent of the Clinton White House staff (with an almost equal number of White Housers so far behind in tax payments that they have to pay in installments). A White House official said it had just sent out a memo reminding the staff to pay their taxes.

-- In 1997, a car belonging to Michel Emond, 36, was confiscated by the Quebec government's automobile insurance board based on alleged overdue fines, but a mistake had been made, and the board agreed to reimburse Mr. Emond's expenses. However, Emond got tired of waiting for the check, and in March 1999 took advantage of a provision in Quebec law and filed a document that permitted him to legally seize the board's headquarters in Quebec City (value, about $33 million (U.S.)) until the debt was paid. The next day (13 months after agreeing to do so), the board paid up.

Latest Spectacular Industrial Fatalities: A 35-year-old man died when 21 panes of glass crashed on him at a construction site (West Palm Beach, Fla., Feb.). And two railroad workers were killed when a loaded boxcar fell on them (Hamtramck, Mich., March). And two bin cleaners were killed when they were buried under an avalanche of corn in a grain elevator (Juniata, Neb., Apr.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)