-- The animal-food company Ralston Purina introduced earlier this year, from its subsidiary Purina Philippines, power chicken feed designed to build muscles in roosters for the popular "sport" of cockfighting. According to a June Wall Street Journal report, the market for Rooster Booster chow is huge: The Philippines has 5 million "gaming" roosters.

Labor activist Dan Craig, 25, accepted a plea bargain in January in Toronto that will keep him out of jail, despite his having protested layoffs at an aerospace plant by suspending himself from a factory ceiling and playing "Amazing Grace" on his bagpipes for four solid hours. And in West Union, Ohio, last winter, Berry Baker, 54, protested the school district's placing Ten Commandments statues on school lawns by demanding equal space for statues promoting his "Center for Phallic Worship," which he said copies a religion practiced in some countries. (In February, Baker filed a lawsuit against the district; in June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill authorizing the Ten Commandments, but not stone phalluses, to be displayed on public property.)

On May 10, the diversity-seeking Oregon Senate permitted Wiccan high priestess Cleda Johnson to provide the traditional session-opening blessing. And in June, a coalition of Christian organizations, along with U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, demanded that Fort Hood (near Austin, Texas), the Army's largest installation, stop its 2-year-old sanctioning of a Wiccan Open Circle group, whose several dozen members dance through the night at full moons. (Wiccan groups have also been sanctioned for U.S. military bases in Louisiana, Alaska, Florida, Okinawa and Germany.)

-- Sean Barry, 23, was arrested in Chandler, Ariz., in May after summoning police for help when he couldn't unlock the handcuffs he had playfully put on his wrists. When officers arrived, they ran a routine check on Barry and discovered he had an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court on a traffic charge. They decided to leave the cuffs on him until they got him to the station.

-- John Michael Haydt, 34, was arrested in Mountain View, Calif., in April and charged with burglary after he called 911 to rescue him from the Danish Concepts furniture store at 2 a.m. According to police, Haydt had broken in through a window but had cut himself so badly that he didn't think he could climb back out.

-- Easy Collars: Philip Racicot was arrested in Norwich, Conn., in April for carrying an unlicensed gun; he had called attention to himself when, trying to hide the gun in his car, he shot himself in the buttocks. And in May, a 17-year-old boy identified as Lukasz S., was captured by police in Bydgoszcz, Poland, after an assault; Lukasz slowed down considerably after he shot himself in the foot during the chase. And an unidentified 17-year-old boy, fleeing police in San Francisco in February after vandalizing a construction site, accidentally shot himself to death with a sawed-off shotgun he was trying to hide in his car.

-- Gary Patton and two 17-year-olds were arrested in Grand Junction, Colo., in January and charged with robbing a Norwest Bank branch. They were exposed when one of the teen-agers sent a pair of pants to the laundry without checking the pockets, one of which, according to police, contained the trio's holdup note ("Put the money in the bag and don't say a word or I will kill you").

-- Travis Black, 29, went on the lam on June 1 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., just as his trial for aggravated assault was getting started. The trial went on without him, and the next day, despite the empty chair at the defense table, the jury found him not guilty. (He turned himself in on June 4 and at press time was in jail facing a contempt of court charge.)

-- In January, preparing for a joyous festival at the end of Ramadan, the Taliban government in Afghanistan decided to clean up the six trees in Kabul on which had been hanging the amputated left feet of recently convicted robbers, exhibited as crime deterrents.

-- According to a March report in the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Sentinel, cockroach expert David George Gordon (in town for a local exhibition) called the pests "intelligent, hardworking and fastidious groomers" that are responsible, especially in the tropics, for recycling dead animal matter. Gordon has authored a bug-recipe cookbook, which touts crickets for their calcium, termites for iron and grasshoppers for protein.

-- Fecal Ordnance: The director of the sewer system in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, told reporters in June that the city's pipes may burst by winter from the gases released by the backup caused by last year's Hurricane Mitch, thus potentially showering the city with waste. And neither local officials nor the FAA is certain yet who has been causing the dozen or so instances of fecal bombardment of homes in and around Salt Lake City, Utah, since April; owners of the houses hit by the gobs of thick, raw sewage initially blamed airliners but now suspect an airborne vandal in a smaller plane or someone on the ground using a catapult.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (33) The annual student cheating riots in Bangladesh, first reported in News of the Weird in 1988, in which students are so blatant about their right to receive outside help when taking national placement exams that hundreds are injured and thousands are arrested yearly (with 11,000 expelled in this year's riots in May). And (34) the ego-driven bad guy who goes on a national TV talk show while on the lam from criminal charges, thus making it easy for police or parole officers to find him, as Willie Johnson, 22, did in May, appearing as a drag queen on "The Jerry Springer Show" while wanted in Houston for stabbing his sister's husband.

An inmate was executed in the Philippines when the president's last-minute-reprieve phone call couldn't get through because of busy signals. An Israeli man filed for divorce from his wife of 51 years because she had abandoned the hard-liners and voted for moderate Ehud Barak. A Lockheed aeronautics executive said the company lost as much as $70 million because of a misplaced decimal point in a sales contract. A newly arrived British NATO peacekeeper mistakenly turned right instead of left in Salonika, Greece, and wound up in Athens (250 miles away) instead of at his Macedonian border post (50 miles away). A Home and Garden TV channel study revealed that more men would rather tend their lawns than have sex.

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

-- 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.)