-- Among the new dog designer fashions unveiled at the 12th Pat Pet Friend Festival in November in Bangkok: a red-and-black, Michael Jackson-style military coat; a yellow-and-black bike racing jacket with bike-style helmet; a silver space suit-like cape; and a blue silk gown. According to designer Vasinee Apornpanit, the biggest market by far for dressing up dogs is Japan, where pet owners are now asking for cell phones and other high-tech gadgets to be sewn onto the dogs' outfits.

In October, a first-grade teacher in Rialto, Calif., taped a disruptive student's head to the wall of the classroom. And seventh-grade teacher Carrie White was accused in October of flinging a dictionary and a calculator at two disruptive students in Lodi, Ohio. And in June, high school substitute teacher Steven M. Catena was fired in Keansburg, N.J., after reports that he wrapped one student in masking tape and butcher paper in class and implored students to give another classmate a "swirly" (dunking in a toilet). And in Durban, South Africa, in May, a high school teacher and a principal pulled guns and opened fire on students who were protesting higher fees.

-- In an August dispatch from Katy, Texas (near Houston), the San Francisco Chronicle featured "Forbidden Gardens," P.H. Poon's 80-acre, $20 million, 1/20th replica of the Forbidden City in Beijing (shown as life-size in the 1987 film "The Last Emperor"), "what must be," according to the Chronicle, "one of the world's least known theme parks." The reporter noted only one vehicle in the parking lot and only a group tour of 16 kids in attendance.

-- After arresting Teri Harrington, 31, and Deana Watson, 28, in September, Sacramento, Calif., police told reporters that the women had apparently stolen large numbers of items from local stores at least 14 times in the previous two weeks, casually walking out each time with 20-gallon bins filled with clothes, videos, CDs, games and cosmetics.

-- In Windsor, Ontario, in August, the small wheel of a man's wheelchair got stuck on railroad tracks as a train was heard in the distance, and a female passerby in a wheelchair rolled out to help him, but her small wheel got stuck in the same rut. Both suffered minor injuries when the oncoming train could not completely stop.

-- In October, Argentina exiled former Paraguayan military leader Luis Oviedo to remote Tierra del Fuego for violating the rules of his political asylum, which it had given him six months earlier. Oviedo had unsuccessfully requested a stay of his banishment, arguing that he had recently undergone a hair transplant and felt the windy, sunny weather in Tierra del Fuego would disrupt his new plugs.

-- In November, Robert Horton, 52, walked into a Phoenix courthouse carrying his wife, Belinda, who was bound at the legs, arms and mouth with gray duct tape. He told a security officer that she was due in court that day on a charge of assaulting a police officer, that he had posted bail for her, that she had threatened to skip the court hearing, and that he had taped and lugged her downtown to make sure he got his bail money back. Unknown to the Hortons, the charge against Belinda had been dismissed earlier that day, but prosecutors are still deciding whether to file charges against Robert for kidnapping his wife.

-- Convicted killer Kenneth D. Williams escaped from prison in Arkansas in October by hiding in a 500-gallon barrel of hog slop being towed to a prison farm; he was apprehended 36 hours later. And two weeks later, robbery suspect Roderick King, 19, was found in a Dumpster full of fetid garbage in Knoxville, Tenn., where he had been hiding from police who chased him after he had gone to the home of the victim's aunt to convince her he was innocent.

-- Diana Thorneycroft's government-supported art exhibit, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in September, consisted of 12 dead rabbits, hung from trees and rotting, in the woods outside town; said the artist, "I'm celebrating the gloriousness of putrefaction." And in November, an unnamed male artist, submitting a project for an Accrington, England, show aiming to revitalize the local village, acceded to sponsors' wishes and redesigned his live-maggot exhibit, which was opposed by environmental officials.

Elderly Margaret Barrs filed a lawsuit in Houston in November against Jack in the Box restaurants because she lost a fingertip when a heavy restroom door slammed on her hand in 1998. And Toronto lawyer Edward Skwarek, 37, filed a $1.5 million lawsuit in November against Starbucks for his restroom injury in one of the chain's New York City restaurants; Skwarek said he was seated on the commode, and when he turned to reach for toilet paper, the seat slipped and trapped his penis between it and the top of the bowl, mangling it.

-- News of the Weird has reported several times on successful surgeries to remove unusually large benign tumors, most recently in February 1999 in women in Baltimore (80-pound tumor) and Lancaster, Pa. (75 pounds). In December 1999, doctors at the University of Chicago hospital, working for 18 hours, removed a 200-pound tumor from a 40-year-old woman who weighed 120 pounds just 12 months earlier when the tumor's growth began. The largest tumor-removal on record, 303 pounds, occurred at Stanford Medical Center in 1991.

Insufficient Reasons to Kill Someone: Resisted taking a shower (Joseph Meehan, charged with strangling his son, 8, Toronto, November). Violated chess etiquette by moving a knight to a new square but then moving it back, even though he did not lift his hand (Mr. Buth Ratha, charged with clubbing his opponent to death with a wooden pestle, Prey Veng, Cambodia, July). Got accepted to kindergarten while her playmate did not (Mitsuko Yamada, 35, mother of the rejected, charged with strangling the accepted child, Tokyo, November).

A black man defended a bank robbery charge by claiming a 44-year history of brain damage owing to racism (Pittsburgh). A 23-year-old woman climbed down after two years high atop an ancient redwood tree where she had prevented a logging company from clearcutting the site (Stafford, Calif.). A Filipino man received 75 lashes for having two liquor-flavored chocolate bars at an airport in alcohol-dry Saudi Arabia. A man was arrested with a stolen TV and VCR, having called attention to himself by hauling them on the street in an obviously stolen U.S. Postal Service cart (York, Pa.). A Wicca-store owner at a mall sued a psychic-store owner at the mall for slander in their heated business rivalry. (Cape Cod, Mass.).

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

-- Erik Sprague, 27, a doctoral student in philosophy in Albany, N.Y., has undergone several body modifications (teeth sharpened, tongue forked, forehead bumps implanted, "scales" tattooed) in order to appear like a reptile, according to December wire service reports. Sprague, described as an "excellent" student by a professor, told reporters that he knows of four other people who have made such "single-theme conversions" (as a zebra, tiger, leopard and a giant puzzle called "The Enigma"). He will appear on the TBS show "Ripley's Believe It or Not" in January.

After resisting for five years, Missouri was forced by a federal judge in November to allow the Ku Klux Klan into its Adopt-a-Highway program, publicly recognizing the organization for keeping clean a one-mile segment of Interstate 55. And the Army revealed in September that its new lead-free combat bullet will not be ready before 2003 (although some local police departments already use a less-powerful model); the Army needs the bullet because 1,000 indoor military firing ranges are currently shut because of lead contamination. And in June, researchers at Ontario's University of Guelph reported genetically engineering a pig that produces manure 20 to 50 percent lower in the pollutant phosphorous than ordinary pig manure.

-- Latest from Weird Japan: Nonordained "pastors" in Tokyo are exploiting the Japanese fascination with Christian weddings (1 percent of Japanese are Christian, but 70 percent of all weddings are), according to a September Reuters news service report; the fake ministers' justification: The Bible condemns holy marriages of a believer to a nonbeliever, but does not mention marriages of two nonbelievers. And in May, a Times of London story reported the frequent installation in Nagasaki and other cities of "unwanted-dog postboxes" into which pets can be directly placed for pickup if the owners tire of them.

-- As with weddings in Japan, Christmas shopping in Singapore is a huge national pastime despite the fact that only 13 percent of the people are Christians. Half of the country's annual retail sales come during the season; shopping malls turn into extravagant theme parks; traditional hymns saturate cities. Explained an interdenominational leader: Singaporeans merely use the Christmas season as a long year-end celebration leading up to the Chinese New Year in January.

-- Among those caught up in the consequences of Florida's Marriage Preparation and Preservation Act of 1998 (which requires license applicants to read a 16-page booklet heavy on parenting techniques and responsibilities and gives a $32.50 license discount for taking a four-hour course): Max Gordon and his bride, Mollie Levy, who planned to marry in Delray Beach last September until Max had trouble reading the book because of his cataracts. Max is 90, Mollie 82, and between them they have six children and 31 grand- and great-grandchildren.

-- When government minister Yuksel Yalova attended the grand-opening ceremonies at a veterinary hospital in Izmir, Turkey, on the symbolic World Animal Day in October, he was treated to the traditional tribute to a visiting dignitary: the ritual slaughter of a healthy sheep.

-- After protests in October, Grand Canyon University, a small Christian college in Phoenix, canceled its scheduled "Assassins" fund-raising game, in which gun-carrying players pay for the privilege of shooting colleagues with Nerf darts, with the last one standing getting a restaurant certificate. Many students originally failed to connect the game to recent school violence, such as the freshman woman who told a reporter, "This is a Christian university, so we know the difference between right and wrong."

-- In June at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, a tarantula the size of a salad plate underwent two CAT scans to save her from an infection from a coin-sized abscess and survived in fine shape, expected to live another 10 years to age 20. According to the aquarium's senior herpetologist, the tarantula's only problems now are her bad habits of showing her fangs and ejecting barbed hairs from her posterior.

-- In July, police in Dhaka, Bangladesh, rescued two spider monkeys that were chained up in a drug seller's house. To reduce human intervention in drug sales, said police, signs ordered customers to pay the monkeys in either of two denominations, which the monkeys could distinguish by color, after which the monkeys would fetch the appropriate quantity of drugs from their hiding places.

New Jersey entrepreneurs recently proposed a series of memorial theme parks ("The Final Curtain") in which creative people's self-designed tombs, urns and sculptures will house their remains in world venues attractive enough or spectacular enough to compete for the public's entertainment dollar. One proposal: A man wants to be buried with a camera that will televise his decomposition to spectators.

News of the Weird reported in 1996 on the then-brand-new testicle implants for dogs ("Neuticles," invented by Gregg Miller of Independence, Mo.), thought to be helpful to neutered dogs that somehow would feel embarrassed after castration. In November, Miller said he had scheduled his first human for an FDA-approved Neuticle implant: Californian Jim Webb, who had had a testicle removed to relieve chronic swelling.

Ski-mask-wearing Floyd Brown, 24, was charged with robbing a Holiday Inn in Anchorage, Alaska, in November, apparently oblivious of the 40 police officers just off the lobby in a law-enforcement training conference (advertised on the marquee out front). And in December in Las Vegas, robber Emilio Rodriguez, 19, was shot to death as he rushed into Mr. D's bar, which is a favorite haunt of (and was filled with) off-duty police officers.

Hormel Foods announced it would open a 16,550-square-foot Spam Museum and Visitor Center next year (Austin, Minn.). Miss America of 1998 took a job waiting tables at Artie's deli in New York City. A 41-year-old man carrying his unwrapped shotgun to a pawn shop innocently stopped by a bank to make an inquiry, provoking a major police response (Athens, Tenn.). Two sociology professors announced a new "Journal of Mundane Behavior" for rigorous study of the inconsequential (Fullerton, Calif.). Robert Wald obtained a patent for boxer shorts with built-in briefs, sewn inside in a shared waistband (Toluca Lake, Calif.).

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

-- 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.)