-- The Times of London reported in December that Cheltenham, England, shopkeeper Samantha Munns punctured her thigh two weeks earlier when she fell on the nozzle of a balloon-inflating canister and that within seconds, enough helium gas (inert, nonpoisonous) had entered the subcutaneous tissue in her leg and abdomen to cause them to swell painfully to twice their normal size. Munns was treated at Cheltenham General Hospital by physician Alison Moon, who said she could find only one similar case in medical textbooks and prescribed rest in order to let the gas dissipate.

Robert Fyfe, 44, fell into a silt and mud pit at a gravel company and could not free himself for 60 hours (Olean, N.Y., July). Magazine editor Nicholas White slipped out for a Friday night smoke break but was stuck 40 hours in an elevator before a guard noticed (New York City, October). Jim Kahlke, 36, was locked in an ATM vestibule on Thanksgiving evening, until a bank employee arrived for work the next morning (Raritan Township, N.J.). A 13-year-old car-theft suspect was left alone all weekend in a courthouse holding cell when a bailiff forgot about him (Indianapolis, November).

-- Pumpkin farmer Hugh Mommsen of Rice Lake, Wis., told a reporter on the Halloween beat that he was ready to step up from his pumpkin catapult (the medieval "trebuchet" device), which can achieve massive splatter by sending a 30-pound pumpkin 150 feet up and 400 feet out, to the even more powerfully splattering pumpkin cannon. Mommsen noted, however, that the awesomeness of the splat depends not only on the force of impact but also on the variety of pumpkin.

-- On July 17, Michael Adams, 13, got his arm caught in an irrigation machine while working alone on his family's alfalfa farm near Crane, Ore., and watched as the arm was severed just above the elbow. He picked up the arm, walked 100 yards to a vehicle, and drove for help. Unable to steer well, he crashed, but walked to another vehicle, which he drove to a friend's home, and still comforted his distraught parents when they arrived. The arm was reattached, and Michael is doing fine.

-- Inmate Timothy Marshall, 39, petitioned a Florida Court of Appeal judge recently to release him early in 2000, as per the terms of his 1985 15-year cocaine-trafficking sentence. The only problem, said the judge, was that Marshall had escaped in 1987 and was recaptured only two years ago and now accuses the state of "wrongfully refusing to give him credit" for time served while on the run. (Petition denied.)

-- In September, Alexander J. Blastos, 34, was arrested in Florida and charged with writing a bad check for $9,600 to cover the cost of a private jet flight back to Keene, N.H., to his court date on federal wire-fraud charges. (However, when New Orleans check-forgery defendant Keefe Anderson, 34, tried to post bail in October with a forged check, it worked; Judge Charles Elloie fell for it and also accepted without investigation Anderson's bail petition with bogus addresses. Anderson, who police said is also a suspect in a murder investigation, immediately skipped town.)

-- Russia's venerable National Philharmonic Orchestra, touring Great Britain in November with almost no financial support from the homeland, was forced to play for spare change outside a McDonald's restaurant in Swansea, Wales, taking in about $32.

-- Authorities in Tokyo began investigating the giant finance company Nichiei in November after two debtors reported being pressured by Nichiei loan managers to sell their kidneys and other body parts to meet payment schedules. According to a separate lawsuit, another Nichiei employee demanded a debtor sell his daughter into prostitution. Nichiei is the country's leading lender to small businesses.

-- Twenty-eight of Warsaw (Poland)'s 42 prime-location public restrooms were leased in early 1999 to private companies on the condition that they renovate and maintain the toilets. The result, according to an August Associated Press dispatch, has been a variety of small shops operating out of the facilities (e.g., taverns, a veterinary clinic, and even the Lunch Time restaurant featuring a salad bar).

A vigorously protesting Enrique Salinas, 37, was arrested in Detroit in September on a New Mexico shoplifting warrant, held there 38 days, then returned to a Santa Fe jail; authorities have now decided they had the wrong Enrique Salinas, although the one they had was born on the same day in 1962 as the one they wanted and had a similar facial scar. And Los Angeles County agreed in December to pay Ray Nugent $150,000 for wrongly jailing him in 1988 (and again on the same warrant in 1993) on armed robbery charges; authorities have since concluded that the robbery was committed by Ray's evil twin brother, Jay Nugent, who is believed to be hiding in Canada.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (39) Amateur videographers who ingeniously hide cameras to capture their subjects nude and/or intimate, such as the Skokie, Ill., landlord in July and whoever installed the two video cameras in a men's shower room at Yosemite National Park in July. And (40) (alas, sadly, for it has been a News of the Weird staple) animal hoarders, usually women with dozens or hundreds of cats who stun the neighbors with the smell and health inspectors with the massive feces buildup, such as the three women in separate instances this year in Edmonton, Alberta, another in Pittsburgh in December (feces stored in animal carriers), and another in St. Anthony, Minn., in August (270 rabbits and "knee deep" feces).

Shoplifters Malcolm Sloan, 27 ($68 designer shirt), and Ryan M. Keyes, 18 (loot unreported), had dashed out of stores in, respectively, Warwick, R.I., in September, and Pittsburgh in June, and led police in foot chases. The Sloan chase ended when he drowned in the Allegheny River; the Keyes chase ended when he was fatally hit by a truck crossing a street.

A practice bomb accidentally fell off an F-16 flying over a golf course, making divots over a 300-yard swath (Phoenix). A depressed 16-year-old boy who said he didn't want to talk to anyone showed up at school with his lips stitched together (Twentynine Palms, Calif.). A 48-year-old ex-cop who played "Officer Friendly" teaching kids to avoid strangers was convicted of indecent exposure in a shopping mall (St. Paul, Minn.). Two inmates who escaped from a prison in Tanzania soon gave up after being forced up a tree by lions. The $30,000 Presidents Pace horse race in Edmonton, Alberta, was won by the favorite, Clintons (sic) Cigar.

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

It's time to rejoice. You head to a new millennium with falling crime, low unemployment, a prosperous economy, no serious Y2K problems, and an imminent vigorous presidential campaign. Mostly, though, you rejoice that you have lived your life well enough that once again, you do not appear in our roundup of the most disturbing, yet underreported news stories from the past 12 months. Congratulations. Here are the people who were not so lucky:

Inattention to Detail on the West Bank

When Israel rolled back clocks one hour in September to support Orthodox Jewish prayer schedules, the Palestinian West Bank remained on summer time, and Israeli security sources said the time change cost three Palestinian terrorist bombers their lives. At 5 p.m. on Sept. 5, as terrorists were en route to targets in Haifa and Tiberius, their bombs exploded in their cars. The security sources said bomb-makers in the West Bank had set the timers for 6 p.m. but that the bomb-carriers incorrectly assumed that the hour's difference had been factored in.

Only-in-California Rage

Ms. Cathomas Starbird, a member of the Sausalito, Calif., school board, was sentenced to 15 days in jail for assaulting a female friend who had joined Ms. Starbird and her husband to celebrate his birthday. At the couple's houseboat after dinner, Ms. Starbird became furious at her friend, jumped on her, and bit her on the face for refusing to perform oral sex on the husband.

Take Your Granddaughters to Work Day

Police in Paducah, Ky., arresting Gloria Schoffner, 55, for prostitution, discovered that she had temporarily placed her 2-year-old granddaughter in the back seat of the man's car while she conducted business up front.

Leading Economic Indicators (I)

In June, Richard Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, went to the remote village of La Machaca, Colombia, to meet with a top commander of the reportedly terrorist Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and wound up inviting the leader, Raul Reyes, to New York to learn more about international markets.

Leading Economic Indicators (II)

Cal State-Long Beach engineering professor Elena Zagustin sold her exceptionally odoriferous and messy home in Huntington Beach, Calif., for which she had been convicted in 1998 of massive health code violations (buckets instead of indoor plumbing, trash two feet high, maggots and flies everywhere, garbage-topped beds). On the California real estate market, the house, little improved since the 1998 raid, sold for $301,500.

Can't Possibly Be True (I)

The Nebraska Bar Association rejected Paul Converse's application, concluding, based on his law school record, that he is too obnoxious ("disruptive," "abusive," "intemperate," "irresponsible") even to be a lawyer.

Surgeon of the Year

Amateur Edward L. Bodkin, 56, pled guilty in Huntington, Ind., to practicing medicine without a license, specifically the consensual castrations of at least three men, whose operations he had videotaped and the evidence from which he preserved in jars in his apartment. As to the patients' motives, prosecutor John Branham said, "I can't sit here as a reasonable human being and give you an intelligent answer to that."

Same Problem With the "100 Greatest French Generals"

The Great Floridian program to identify the 2,000 most distinguished Sunshine Statespeople of all time had its deadline extended twice because only 170 people have been nominated.

Now We Know Where Kansas School Officials Came From: They Evolved From Georgia School Officials

The school district in Columbus, Ga., assigned aides to alter textbook photos of Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" painting because some grown-ups thought Washington's pocket watch, dangling against his thigh, might appear to fifth-graders to be the Founding Father's manhood. The aides located matching paint and spent two weeks touching up 2,300 textbooks. Officials in Cobb County (Atlanta's northern suburbs) merely snipped the page from its textbooks.

Still, I'd Rather Dine With Her Than With Him

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 "heavy and active" cockroach and mouse infestation and "filth" throughout the kitchen and inside a refrigerator.

Least Competent Criminals (I)

Fort Smith, Ark., police charged James Newsome, 37, with robbing a Gas Well convenience store after identifying him from the surveillance tape and finding the robber's distinctive coat in his car. Also important: The robber wore a hard hat with "James Newsome" on it.

Quality Time

Walt and Kathy Viggiano of Wichita, Kan., asked Judge James Burgess to return their four children from foster care following their removal because of excessive unsanitariness of the Viggianos' mobile home. Unlike many such cases, Burgess admits, the Viggianos love their kids, have not abused them, and have no alcohol or drug problems. Also, according to police who made the initial investigation, Walt and the kids seemed to have warm conversations, even though entirely in Klingon (from "Star Trek").

Schlemiels of the Year

-- An inmate was executed in the Philippines when the president's last-minute-reprieve phone call couldn't get through because of busy signals.

-- David Ibrahim of San Diego, Calif., sued police for erroneously jailing him after finding methamphetamines in the gas tank of a truck he had just bought at auction. Authorities had later concluded that Ibrahim had nothing to do with that meth. However, based on the initial arrest, police got a search warrant for Ibrahim's home and found his own independent stash of 93 grams of meth.

Afterward, the Phoenix Police Sketch Artist Needed Psychological Rehabilitation

Karen Marie Tribby, 33, confessed to 12 Phoenix (Ariz.)-area robberies publicized as the "ugly woman" jobs. A police spokesman justified that description by pointing out that "every victim who has seen her" described her as "very ugly."

Gun Control Is Working

William L. Straiter, 26, was charged with robbing the Centura Bank in Durham, N.C., but avoided armed-robbery charges because he merely showed the teller a finely detailed drawing of a gun. Similarly, Richard Hamilton, 29, avoided an armed-robbery sentence in Ottawa, Ontario, for a $200 heist at a fast-food restaurant because his only weapon was a .32-caliber bullet, which he waved around, saying there were more where that came from.

American Ingenuity at Work

From a police report in The Messenger (Madisonville, Ky.), concerning two trucks being driven strangely on a rural road: A man would drive one truck 100 yards, stop, walk back to a second truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the first truck, stop, walk back to the first truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the second truck, and so on. According to police, the man's brother had passed out drunk in one of the trucks so the man decided to drive both trucks home. (Not surprisingly, a blood-alcohol test showed that he, too, was impaired.)

Least Competent Criminals (II)

Jason L. Miller, 19, with an arrest warrant outstanding, was arrested again in Elgin, Ill., when an officer recognized him as he showed up for a police ride-along program he had signed up for.

Six Alabamians Not Bright Enough to Avoid Jury Duty

A jury in Birmingham ruled in favor of Barbara Carlisle and her parents in their lawsuit against two companies that overcharged them $1,224 for two satellite dishes. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $581 million.

They Binge With Scuba Tanks

A 49-year-old woman in Scotland passed away in September, only the third of the supposedly 5,000 disciples of no-food, no-water, "breatharian"-diet followers of Australian Ellen Greve to have starved in two years. Greve sells her philosophy ("liberation from the drudgery of food and drink") to Westerners in part as conferring a spirituality on Third World hunger.

Bottom of the Gene Pool

Joseph Kubic Sr., 93, was hospitalized in Stratford, Conn., after he tried to punch an additional hole in his belt by hammering a pointy-nosed bullet through it. It fired, ricocheted off the table, and hit him in the neck. Four months later, a 19-year-old man was hospitalized in Salt Lake City after personally investigating whether a .22-caliber bullet inside a straw could be expelled by hitting it with a hammer. Answer: sometimes (including this time); it fired and hit him in the stomach.

Can't Possibly Be True (II)

The Seattle Police Department ordered the 26 employees in its fingerprint unit to attend a mandatory safety class on how to sit down because three employees had filed worker compensation claims after injuring themselves on 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."

God Asked to Postpone It Until After All This Millennium Stuff

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 additionally sued "God ... the sovereign ruler of the universe" for taking "no corrective action" against any of Drusky's enemies, and demanded that God compensate him with professional guitar-playing skills and the resurrection of his mother.

A Lot of Governors Don't Believe It's Wrong, Either

Ambivalent St. Paul, Minn., police raided bookie Max Weisberg's home in February and impounded $127,000, bringing the total seized from him in 10 years to about $600,000, but he was not prosecuted. Weisberg, 75, is a genius with numbers but has a reported IQ of 80 and, prosecutors believe, sincerely cannot comprehend why gambling should be illegal. (A jury agreed in 1990, acquitting him despite abundant evidence.)

At Last! A Job That Actually Requires Algebra

County commissioners in Florida's Seminole County (near Orlando) and Manatee County (Bradenton) passed anti-public-nudity ordinances requiring women to cover at least 25 percent of the area of their breasts and at least 33 percent of the buttocks, with highly detailed instructions as to the points from which each coverage must be measured. (Hints for law enforcement: Area of a spherical surface is 4(pi)(radius squared); for a cone, pi(radius)(square root of the sum of height squared plus radius squared); and, alas, for a flat surface, L times W.)

Most Disturbing Sports News

In November, at a chess tournament on Spain's Menorca Island, the country's governing sports organization ordered urine samples from all contestants. And a few days earlier, Japanese billiards player Junuske Inoue, 58, was suspended for two years for testing positive for a muscle-building hormone.

Super-Forgetful People

A judge in Tampa, Fla., denied tobacco-litigation lawyer Henry Valenzuela his $20 million share (out of $200 million in legal fees from the state's 1997 settlement with cigarette companies) because he was late in paying his $2,500 share of a litigation expense. Darlene Bourk, 31, was charged with murdering her husband after his body turned up when the contents of her Upland, Calif., storage locker were auctioned off; she had forgotten to make the $25 monthly payment.

End of the Time Clock

Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading (England) University told The Times of London in May that "several" firms had approached him about surgically implanting transponder microchips into their workers as a way of keeping track of their hours and whereabouts. Warwick last year had put a chip into his own forearm to demonstrate the technology, which will be used in England beginning in 2001 to track down pets.

Leading Economic Indicators (III)

The Unique Recoveries collection agency in Bombay, India, hired six eunuchs, and took applications from many more, to go to the homes and offices of obstinate debtors to embarrass them into paying up by dancing around and threatening to lift their saris to expose their genitallessness. Other eunuchs earn money by crashing weddings and hanging around until they are paid to leave.

Religion Hurts

On Jan. 31 in Singapore at the annual Hindu festival honoring Lord Murugan, worshipers again proved their faith by sticking skewers through their skin, with the amount of pain endured taken as the measure of devotion. The apparently super-pious Kalai Arivalagan let relatives push 6-inch stakes through his cheek and tongue, pins into his forehead, and hooks into his chest and back, attached to a frame containing religious symbols. Believers say their pre-festival rituals, including abstaining from sex, help them to create pain-ignoring trances.

Person in 1999 Least Likely to Be Emulated

Thomas Hendry, 23, won the "How Far Will You Go?" contest at Trader McKendry's Tavern, Christchurch, New Zealand (prize: about $300 (U.S.)), by stapling his penis to a crucifix and setting it on fire. Hendry said he needed to pay some bills and was inspired by an earlier contestant who merely pierced his foreskin with a safety pin: "I thought I could do better than that." Hendry's mother was in the bar that night and said, "I'm just very relieved that he won. I would have hated for someone to go through all that and (lose)."

Fighting for Tourist Dollars

-- The Cape Town, South Africa, tourist manager said in October her office was planning to recommend top-echelon brothels (even though prostitution is illegal) to help reduce crime and HIV. Earlier, a Cape Town man said national tourism officials had approved his marketing plans to draw European swingers to visit South Africa to sample his country's spouse-swappers. And in July, a South African rancher said he planned to stock his wild-game farm with prostitutes and charge visitors about $45 each to try to hunt them with paintball guns.

-- Russian nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky was a little more explicit in his January-released book "ABCs of Sex": He wrote that exporting virgin Russian women to men in other countries could bring the treasury $750 million a year.

Can't Possibly Be True (III)

Former Fairfax County, Va., school principal Anthony M. Rizzo Jr., 62, escaped with a hung jury in March 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, worth three times ordinary retirement benefits, with the "disability" being a "psychosexual disorder" that makes him unable to supervise females without trying to force sex on them. (Rizzo won the disability despite simultaneously denying the claims of eight female former co-workers who said they were victims of his "disorder.")

The Year's Most Ineffectual CEO

Minnesota computer component manufacturer Innovex Inc. agreed to pay former executive Mary E. Curtin $750,000 to settle her sex discrimination lawsuit. During the time Curtin faced the alleged bias and sexist epithets, her husband, Thomas W. Haley, was Innovex's chairman and CEO, but was apparently unable to discourage the practices.

Hard Times Call for Aggressive Tactics

Flight attendants for Cathay Pacific Airways (Hong Kong), feuding with management over automatic pay hikes in January, threatened to violate that company's smile policy by frowning for one hour per flight.

The Latest Incomprehensible Thing out of Japan

The purchase price in Japan of giant stag beetles has dropped recently to about $300 from a typical price in the early 1990s of about $6,000. The beetles, which resemble 4-inch-long cockroaches, are traditional Japanese pets that, according to insect salesman Katsutoshi Misaki, "have (unique) personalities." Added Misaki, "When I hold it in my hand, I feel real affection for it." One breeder said a rare pet beetle sold in 1993 for about $30,000.

Making the U.S. Penal System Look Good

Scottish psychopathic murderer Noel Ruddle, who has been in the Carstairs mental hospital in Glasgow for eight years, was released in August because no treatment is currently available for his paranoid schizophrenia, and British law prevents a prisoner's hospitalization if it cannot result in the improvement, however slight, of his condition. Nearly 2,000 seriously disturbed prisoners are in situations similar to Ruddle's.

Fun With DNA Tests

Cox News Service reported in August that Florida state-agency DNA paternity tests on child-support-resisting men found that 36 percent of 1,025 "fathers" in four counties were not the fathers after all. However, Florida courts are split on whether even a negative DNA test will relieve men of support responsibilities once they voluntarily begin paying.

Just Another Decadent, Consumerist Pig

Mr. Wai Y. Tye, a retired Raytheon Corp. chemist, has lived without complaint in the same 200-square-foot room in the downtown Boston YMCA continuously since 1949, according to a January Boston Globe story. "When you're busy working and playing tennis," he told a reporter, "when you come home, you don't have much time to take care of an apartment." The bathroom is down the hall to the left, and he said he does not mind the exposed pipes or the linoleum floor or having to use a hotplate.

Still Better Than the Boston Y

Iranian Merhan Nasseri, then 46, landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris in 1988 after being denied entry into England because his passport and U.N. refugee certificate were stolen. No country would take him without papers, including France, and there he has been ever since, in Terminal One, luggage at his side, reading, writing in his diary, receiving food and newspapers from airport employees. Reporters have periodically checked on him over the years and found him in remarkably good health. Finally, on July 2, Nasseri was granted refugee status (by Belgium), but he has not yet decided whether he wants to leave the airport.

End of Days

In July, the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory near New York City finally got around to forming a committee of physicists to explore whether the lab's experimental replications of the world-forming Big Bang, scheduled to run through early 2000, could possibly backfire and destroy the Earth. Some physicists believe there is a small chance that the machine could create new kinds of matter or form mini-"black holes" and suck in all surrounding matter.

The Classic Middle Name (our all-new yearly update)

Arrested for murder in 1999: William Wayne Wright (Texas), Jimmy Wayne Miller (Texas), Bradley Wayne Cagle (Texas), Daniel Wayne Warfield (Virginia), Jerry Wayne Walker (Kentucky), Percy Wayne Froman (Alabama).

Convicted of murder: Bryant Wayne Howard (Oregon), Bruce Wayne Koenig (Maryland), Rodney Wayne Henry (Kansas), Arthur Wayne Goodman Jr. (Texas), Timothy Wayne Barnett (Alabama), David Wayne McCall (Texas), Donald Wayne Holt (Maryland), Thomas Wayne Akers (North Carolina).

Murder conviction affirmed on appeal: Brandon Wayne Hedrick (Virginia)

Executed for murder: Robert Wayne Vickers (Arizona), Richard Wayne Smith (Texas), Alvin Wayne Crane (Texas).

Execution for murder stayed by U.S. Supreme Court: Michael Wayne Williams (Virginia)

Escaped murderers: Michael Wayne Brown (Oklahoma) (recaptured), Darryl Wayne Claughton (Canada).

The Legacy of 1999: Not One but Two Fetishes Come Out of the Closet

The September second-degree murder conviction in San Diego of de-licensed surgeon John Ronald Brown for a botched operation brought to light the malady of apotemnophilia, said to be suffered by fewer than 200 people worldwide. Those afflicted get sexual gratification by having an arm or leg removed, and the Internet underground had spread word of Brown's willingness to perform the surgery without all those embarrassing questions, such as "Why?"

And authorities in Okeechobee, Fla., discovered Bryan Loudermilk's body in June, beneath a board over a shallow pit. His widow, Stephanie, finally admitted that Bryan would get sexually aroused by rolling the couple's SUV over the board as he lay underneath (until the most recent time, that is, in which he was accidentally killed).

(CHUCK SHEPHERD writes the weekly "News of the Weird," which in February celebrates its 12th anniversary of monitoring the world's newspapers for ridiculous stuff like this.)

-- A two-day, hands-on euthanasia technology conference was held in Seattle in November, in which various techniques and products were presented, with the most promising invention the "debreather" submitted by a Vancouver, British Columbia, man. The device's mask and hose run to a jar containing a substance the man would not identify but which he said made death from lack of oxygen "quick and painless" because it filters out carbon dioxide, thus supposedly preventing the body's natural panic reflex.

In October, Cape Town, South Africa's tourist manager Sheryl Ozinsky said her office was planning to issue a recommended list of top-echelon brothels (even though prostitution is illegal) to help reduce crime and HIV. And in August, Robin Pike of Cape Town said national tourism officials had approved his marketing plans to draw European swingers to South Africa to sample its spouse-swappers. And in July, rancher Johan Maree said he planned to stock his wild-game farm near Ellisras, South Africa, with prostitutes and charge visitors about $45 a head to try to shoot them with paintball guns.

-- Reuters news agency, citing a Hanoi newspaper (Science and Life), reported in October that Ms. Nguyen Thi Tu of southern Ca Mau has not slept, even under doctors' care, since 1967. She tires normally and rests, but cannot sleep. (In a 1986 Reuters dispatch from San Antonio de los Banos, Cuba, with quotes from several of that country's leading neurologists and hospital officials, a man was reported not to have engaged in what is medically regarded as a sleep state in 40 years, though he did rest and close his eyes, especially when administered narcotics.)

-- In October, police in the state of Bihar, India, accused a man of the ritual sacrifice of his two daughters, aged 18 and 13, during the Hindu festival of Dassera. In June, a London Telegraph report from Faridabad, India, cited 1998 police reports of the sacrifices of nine children under age 10 to the bloodthirsty Hindu goddess Kali, mostly by so-called Tantric priests (some of whom are simply con artists) in slums and poor villages in eastern India, who prescribe the child offerings to cure a variety of their parents' misfortunes. And three Satanists were charged in September in Istanbul, Turkey, with killing a 21-year-old woman in a sacrifice to the devil to stop the country's recent earthquakes.

-- According to a September eyewitness report in the Sunday Oklahoman newspaper, cowboy Pat Ratliff, age 78, won $1,700 from three marks in Ardmore, Okla., by tearing a quarter in half. To erase skepticism, Ratliff also took two quarters from the reporter and tore those in half, each in less than 30 seconds. Among his previous work, Ratliff tutored actor Robert Duvall in toughness as Duvall prepared for his role in "Lonesome Dove."

-- After an unsuccessful appeal to the Nebraska legislature, South Dakota's Oglala Sioux Tribal Court said in August it would have to find other ways to stop beer sales in the nearby border town of Whiteclay, Neb. (population 22). Stores in Whiteclay, far away from any populated area except the Oglala reservation, sell 4 million cans of beer a year (an average of 1,800 six-packs a day).

-- Town officials in Oakville, Ontario, banned Tamara Sanowar-Makhan's "Ultra-Maxi Priest" sculpture from its September Visual Raaga exhibit. The piece is a life-size Catholic vestment composed of more than 200 feminine maxi-pads, to symbolize, said Sanowar-Makhan, "the oppressive control by organized religion over the freedom of girls (and) women."

-- City officials in Recife, Brazil, voted in August to reject Francisco Brennand's proposed 100-foot-high, glowing sculpture intended as a beacon to outer space. Officials and many townspeople said the sculpture too closely resembled a phallus. When they attempted to get Brennand to modify the statue to more resemble a lighthouse, Brennand quit in disgust and smashed another structure on his way out the door.

-- In July, while Windsor, Ontario, school breakfast-program staff members looked on in anger, artist Les Levine and volunteers emptied more than 250 boxes of corn flakes in a waterfront park to commemorate a piece he had done in 1969 (to considerably more success) to support the then-fledgling ecology movement. Seagulls devoured the flakes in less than a minute, provoking a chagrined school official to note that he could have fed everyone at his school for a year with that cereal.

A Taiwan distributing company began an advertising campaign recently for German-made space heaters, using a smiling Adolf Hitler character to "Declare War on the Cold Front"; a company representative said it was important to show the product as being German-made and that he didn't think Taiwanese were very sensitive about Hitler (but the ads were pulled in November). And the Vatican announced in December that it was appalled at the Beretta company's ad campaign for a new series of $7,000 "Jubilee"-model guns, which is also the name of the Roman Catholic millennium celebration; the ads' tagline is "The pope would like them."

Man Vs. Train: In October in Burlingame, Calif., an 18-year-old woman became the latest fatality among people who walk along railroad tracks while listening to music on headphones and don't hear a train coming. And three days later in Kanagawa, Japan, a 61-year-old man was hospitalized in serious condition, the latest injury to someone standing on a passenger platform and leaning over the track (in this case, apparently to spit) just as a train was rumbling by.

People Who Haven't Quite Figured Everything Out: Alexander Nemeth was arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, in September and charged with attempting to extort $14 million from the Nestle food company by poisoning its products on supermarket shelves; the ransom money was to be placed in pouches around the necks of his homing pigeons, but police merely put radio transmitters into the pouches before sending the pigeons on their way. And Donald Mallison, 20, and Robert Mims, 18, were arrested in Irving, Texas, in November and charged with robbing a Blockbuster Video; they were caught outside their getaway car, having accidentally locked the keys inside.

Robbers in Manila stole the entire $50,000 life savings of a recent government retiree who had withdrawn the money from a bank out of fear of Y2K computer problems. The Russian parliament passed a bill making it specifically illegal for people to eat their pets. An Austin, Texas, record label issued "The Charmer," an album of calypso songs recorded by Louis Farrakhan before he became the leader of the Nation of Islam. A half-ton, $60,000, all-chocolate, full-size replica of a Grand Prix racing car, being transported by truck to a London exhibit, arrived smashed to pieces. Ernest Bernard "Rabbit" Eady was convicted of murder in Knoxville, Tenn., based on the testimony of James L. "Chicken" Cannon.

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