-- Prescription drugs suitable for both humans and animals usually carry different price tags, even though they may be exactly the same product, and are usually much more expensive for humans, according to a February report by the U.S. House of Representatives Government Reform Committee. For example, Medrol, an arthritis remedy for humans and an anti-inflammatory for dogs, is about one-fifth the price when intended for dogs. Critics say the pharmaceutical houses charge more for humans because most sales are at least partially reimbursed by insurance.

At his booking on drug charges in December, Norman Hardy Jr. was asked by Brattleboro, Vt., police what his occupation was and answered defiantly, "Selling drugs." And at his booking in connection with a carjacking in November, Rafael A. Jackson, 28, was asked his occupation by East St. Louis, Ill., police and responded, "Homicide and robbery."

-- After a 35-year-old man reported to a Brunswick, Ga., emergency room in January complaining of abdominal cramps, doctors removed 55 thin glass cocaine pipes (one of them 4 1/2 inches long) from his stomach; the man said he did not realize they were there because he was always high when he accidentally ingested them. (In September, according to a New Delhi, India, newspaper, veterinary surgeons removed 100 pounds' worth of plastic bags and other litter from the stomach of a cow during a four-hour operation.)

-- The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in October that Pennsylvania's lawsuit settlement with the tobacco companies included a $42 million windfall for the two law firms chosen by the governor to represent the state (about $1,300 an hour per lawyer), even though the case's research and arguments were largely copied from other states' lawsuits and the negotiations were streamlined because the tobacco companies had begun settling those cases. Among the expense-padding: $62 to one lawyer for 12 minutes' work (reading The Wall Street Journal) and $290 to another for an hour he spent ordering books.

-- In December, a court in Lusaka, Zambia, approved Dorothy Mapani's strategy to settle the dispute with her husband, Effas Ondya, over which of the two is more responsible for the couple's lack of a sex life. Ondya said he is uninterested because he believes Mapani is infertile, and Mapani has accepted Ondya's challenge to get pregnant, with any man, within 90 days. The $300 bet, said the court's two justices, seemed a reasonable way to resolve the issue.

-- Gay adult club owner Keneth McKeigan was convicted in Toronto in December of running a bawdy house and sentenced to 100 hours of community service. McKeigan's crime was running a three-month promotion at the club during 1995 and 1996 called "Sperm Attack Mondays," in which male dancers would masturbate on stage and for which some front-row customers donned raincoats.

-- An October New York Times report referred to the 75-mile stretch of I-95 between West Palm Beach and Miami (plus its connector freeways) as the "impalement capital" of the country because of the frequency with which unsecured cargo flies off of speeding trucks and cars, including the three times recently when metal rods skewered motorists' bodies, tacking them to the insides of their cars (though all survived). Drivers complain also of having to dodge, among other things, flying car parts, surfboards, lawn mowers and washing machines.

-- In December, the publisher Benedikt Taschen debuted a 480-page, 70-pound "coffee-table" book by renowned photographer Helmut Newton that is only available with its own coffee table, designed by Philippe Starck, for about $1,700.

-- In March, the venerable San Francisco Art Institute disciplined student Jonathan Yegge, 24, for his 10-minute performance-art piece, which he said "explores Hegel's master-slave dialectic" and Kant's theories on freedom of thought and action. However, what 20 observers and two instructors saw was Yegge and a blindfolded volunteer engaging in oral sex, then Yegge administering an enema, then the two men exchanging excreta. Complained Yegge, "They say you can do whatever you want as long as you can justify it artistically. I was given no chance to do that (before being disciplined)."

In February, Dawn Marie Sprinkle, 29, was ordered by a judge in Helena, Mont., not to get pregnant for the next 10 years; she had failed several drug tests after her conviction for giving birth to a girl with amphetamines in her system. And in February, Kathy Looney, 29, was ordered by a judge in Monroe, La., to choose between sterilization and 10 years in prison, following her conviction for the extension-cord beatings of three of her eight children (all of whom she has now been denied custody).

In June 1999, News of the Weird reported that Palestinian researcher (and 15-year U.S. resident) Mazen Al-Najjar had just completed his second year of federal incarceration in Bradenton, Fla., having never been charged with a crime and never told of the "evidence" against him. In February 2000, the FBI's General Counsel told a House immigration subcommittee that four other men are similarly incarcerated with no chance to present favorable evidence or to cross-examine witnesses against them. These exceptions to fundamental American rights are apparently permitted under a 1996 anti-terrorism law even though the "terrorism" evidence is known only to a few people in the U.S. government.

A 24-year-old man accidentally shot himself to death in London, Ohio, in February while doing a scene with two friends in a rap music video. In other horseplay tragedies, a 22-year-old man fell to his death after sliding backward down a banister at America West Arena during the Phoenix Suns' basketball game on Dec. 20, and a 26-year-old standout amateur wrestler fell to his death from a Las Vegas light pole he had climbed in order to celebrate New Year's Eve better.

A land developer filed a lawsuit against a former city councilman for the return of the $25,000 bribe he paid (and for which both had gone to prison) (Kansas City, Mo.). A sixth-grader won a $1,500 judgment in small claims court against his school, which lost his 161 Pokemon cards after confiscating them (Pittsburg, Calif.). Twenty-one mayors and more than 100 other officials lost their jobs when a new provincial law in Newfoundland took effect, tossing out any officeholder who owes back taxes. A couple on a Valentine's Day holiday lit romantic candles, accidentally setting a major fire in their hotel (Hull, Quebec). Two teen-age boys fled police rather than stop for a minor equipment violation but were caught when they accidentally crashed their car into a police station (Modesto, 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/.)

-- Mr. Kamla Jaan, 50, was elected mayor of Katni in central India in December, and Mr. Shabnam Mausi was elected to the legislature in the state of Madhya Pradesh in February, in political breakthroughs for eunuchs, who have run for office in large numbers recently as a reaction to perceived widespread corruption among India's traditional politicians. Until now, the genitalless "hijras" have been relegated to being either prostitutes or professional pests who trespass and then demand fees to leave the premises.

In October, high school teacher Edward R. Kotwica committed suicide by walking in front of a train in Bergen County hours after he was charged with fondling a 17-year-old female student. Two weeks later, piano teacher Samuel S. Aster, 59, hanged himself in Teaneck; he had been charged with molesting seven of his young students. Less than a month later, Adam Victor Reed, 53, a former board of education member in Monmouth County, was arrested and charged with possession of 12 boxes of child pornography.

-- A 45-year-old man was identified by police in February as the one who had recently taped as many as 100 vials of water to trees in Milwaukee and suburbs (though at press time, he had not been charged with a crime). He told police that he was testing the frequencies of radio stations because one of them had been bombarding him with signals. Though he did not explain the role of the vials, he vowed to send the test results to the FCC. The man's son, 17, said he was a good father but that sometimes he neglects his medication.

-- Joseph Sherer, 41, was arraigned in Bozeman, Mont., in January on 11 felony charges, including aggravated assault and impersonating a physician, stemming from what police believe were from 40 to 200 phone calls he made from his Sunrise, Fla., home to women in Montana, advising them to perform harmful procedures on themselves (such as persuading one woman to cut off a nipple and flush it down the toilet). According to police, Sherer had episodes of similar, but not as dangerous, phone calls in other cities in the 1980s.

-- E.H. Dennis, 77, was convicted in Greensboro, N.C., in January of scaring attendees at a 1998 Guilford County Commission meeting by making an explicit bomb threat against commissioners if he didn't get his way in a land-use dispute. According to a videotape of the meeting, Dennis calmly described how commissioners' body parts would be strewn around the area after the bomb went off. During a break in testimony at his trial, Dennis left the courtroom and stepped over to the elections office, where he left a $147 cashier's check as filing fee to run for a seat on the commission.

-- New York City firefighter Albert Hohmann was arrested in February after being identified by police as the man who, naked, sneaked into a restaurant at night and snacked on expensive food and wine. Hohmann's lawyer denied the charge despite the fact that the restaurant's surveillance camera was running and that the intruder sported an easily identifiable tattoo of "Mr. Peanut" on his derriere.

-- Trauma therapist Karen Frogley complained in January to Reverse Bungy New Zealand about the company's installation of a 130-foot-high tower with a bungee-attached capsule in downtown Wellington, outside Frogley's office building. Frogley says the jumpers' blood-curdling screams make her rape and car-crash patients anxious during their sessions.

-- In December, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offered 350 homeless shelters in the U.S. and 34 more in Canada holiday "tofurkeys" -- tofu shaped to resemble turkey parts. Said the PETA coordinator, of the campaign to save hapless turkeys, "Homeless people especially can empathize with those who are oppressed."

-- In December, the Education Ministry in Turkey asked a math publisher not to use the letters "p" and "k" in algebra equations because they could form the acronym for the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party ("PKK"). The ministry suggested instead the letters e, f, g and h.

Because of an inexplicable rash in mid-1999 of newborn babies being abandoned on the street, Child Protective Services in Houston bought 75 billboard ads in December to beg reluctant mothers to take unwanted babies to hospitals or social services agencies. And at the Berea Baptist Church in Johannesburg, South Africa, at least four newborns have been deposited recently through its oversized mail drop for unwanted babies. South African authorities are equally baffled at the sudden upsurge in abandoned babies.

Barely six months after the murder conviction of San Diego surgeon John Ronald Brown (whose patient died while voluntarily having a healthy leg removed), a hospital in Scotland announced that it has been the site of two similar but successful surgeries in the last three years, on patients so dissatisfied with their bodies that they have a psychological need ("apotemnophilia") to have a healthy limb removed. Surgeon Robert Smith said he was troubled by his patients' (one British, one German) needs but ultimately performed the operations at no charge because the patients were so distraught, one having earlier shot himself in the leg to improve the chances a surgeon would agree to amputate.

A 37-year-old man who tried to get out while backing up his van fell to the ground and was run over (Silver Spring, Md., December). And a 22-year-old man who decided to push his asphalt-filled truck up an off-ramp as it was sputtering to a halt after running out of gas, slipped as the truck started to roll backward (Jacksonville, Ill., January). And a 30-year-old man who got underneath his truck at a service station to adjust the starter was crushed when the truck lurched forward on top of him (Sugar Land, Texas, December).

A 58-year-old man got 12 months in jail for forgery; it was his 151st criminal conviction since 1961 (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario). The publisher of the "For Dummies" book series donated $350 million to MIT for brain research. "Mountain man," the escaped murderer from Bulgaria who spent 12 years burglarizing houses in Washington state, received $412,500 from Snohomish County because a police dog bit off part of his foot during the arrest. A furniture store floor collapsed, injuring 161 shoppers (13 seriously) in a frenzy to buy one of 36 $229 armchairs marked down to $18 (Dos Hermanas, Spain). A 51-year-old man, out of work 14 weeks with broken ribs after being hit by a bus, was billed $850 for damage to the bus (London, England).

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

-- State-of-the-art veterinary care was described in a January New York magazine story on Manhattan's Animal Medical Center, including kidney dialysis (at $55,000 a year), cataract removals, hip replacements, anterior-cruciate ligament repairs, root canals and brain surgery. CPR on small animals (such as, witnessed by the reporter, a pet rat) consists of placing the animal's head inside a doctor's mouth. The New York Times reported in January that veterinary care flourishes in Canada because the private sector runs it, unlike human health care; one man, long wait-listed for an MRI at Ontario hospitals, quickly booked time at an animal hospital.

"Who wants old ugly Kevin Green, anyway?" (uttered by a 17-year-old Atlanta woman who was then shot to death by Kevin's other girlfriend, who was convicted in December). "Make me (stop humming Christmas carols)" (uttered in December by a 78-year-old Menlo Park, Calif., man who was then strangled by his roommate). "I killed your dog" (uttered tauntingly by a 37-year-old Whitelaw, Alberta, woman to her rifle-holding husband, who then shot her to death, according to his December confession; she had already admitted having an affair with an old boyfriend).

-- In December, after a four-year legal battle, the Texas Supreme Court invalidated the VitaPro soybean meat substitute contract with the state prison system because of evidence that prisoners had become demoralized with their VitaPro diets, which had "led to adverse health effects, including rampant flatulence."

-- Former pastor Eric Daniel Harris, 37, pled guilty in November to the 1996 arson that burned down the Kentucky Missionary Baptist Church in Saline County, Ark. According to a federal prosecutor, Harris said he did it because "there was a division among church members, and they needed a project to unify them."

-- In October, a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court accepted driver John Carlin's argument on appeal that it was impossible for him to comply with the police's Breathalyzer demand because he had to urinate so bad that he could not blow firmly into the device. Said Judge Rochelle Friedman, "The difficulty of such a task is obvious." Officers had denied Carlin a restroom break until he consented to make the standard two blows; the first registered 0.18 (over the legal limit), and he refused to take the second.

-- According to reports of an NCAA investigation published in the Knoxville News-Sentinel in February, an official in the University of Tennessee English department last year claimed that a star football player plagiarized a class paper, but the university concluded that an athletic department tutor had merely misinterpreted the federal Americans With Disabilities Act. The athletic tutor said she thought the act allowed a student with a learning disability to talk to her about a classroom topic and that the tutor could then draft a paper for the student.

-- Jack Ramsay, who is a member of the Canadian Parliament and who was convicted in November of the 1969 attempted rape of a 14-year-old girl while a member of the Mounted Police, said the crime "would never have happened" if she had not let him see her panties. Ramsay admitted recently that while questioning the girl as a crime victim in 1969, he needed to know whether she understood the concept of sexual intercourse and thus asked her to demonstrate it. Ramsay said it was when she unfastened her jeans that he caught the fateful glimpse of her panties. (Ramsay has been ousted from the Reform Party but has not resigned his seat.)

-- In recent months, a New York woman and a Massachusetts woman received huge windfalls to their checking accounts due to data-processing errors, and now both are fighting to keep the money, in both instances citing their banks' incompetence. Susan Madakor, 40, has spent $230,000 of her $700,000 that should have gone to a United Nations environmental agency, and retired Centerville, Mass., schoolteacher Joan L. Phillips has spent most of the $800,000 accumulated since 1990 when her pension checks mysteriously increased from $800 a month to $8,000.

-- The family of 15-year-old Lance Landers said it would appeal a January Alabama court decision barring the diagnosed-"emotionally conflicted" student from public schools. His mother insists he be mainstreamed into the school system under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, even though he has allegedly assaulted his mother, threatened to kill students, punched the driver of a moving school bus, spit in cafeteria food, thrown batteries at students, ranted during classes, and regularly addressed the principal, "Hello, motherfucker!"

Joseph Motyka, 32, was arrested on Jan. 1 in Chicago and charged with child endangerment because he, not content with a firecracker celebration of the New Year, had brought home a quarter-stick of dynamite. Motyka's 3-year-old daughter discovered it and put it into a candle, and the resultant explosion took off her right hand and caused hearing and vision loss.

Matthew Harley, 27, sentenced to prison on weapons charges in 1995, surrendered at a courthouse in Portsmouth, Va., but was sent home, where he continued with his life until September 1999, when authorities finally came for him. And Doris Preston, 74, sentenced to five years' minimum for arson in 1991, went home to Columbus, Ohio, on bail but was not called back until September 1999. And in August, parole-violating rapist Gerald Bennett, 30, tried politely to surrender at the police station in Glenolden, Pa., but was turned away because of a records glitch and remained free for six more days, during which time, according to police, he killed one woman and raped another before being caught.

-- Miguel Avalos-Rivera, 28, was arrested in Fairfax, Va., in November after being found screaming in pain in a car; his hand had gotten stuck in the dashboard as he tried to steal the stereo, and he had broken three of his fingers. And Jimmy Cooksey, 36, also was discovered screaming in pain in October; sheriff's deputies in Dallas said he had tried to steal electricity by connecting powerline wires with a homemade pole, but took 36,000 volts, burning him so badly that he lost both legs and is still hospitalized (though no criminal charge was filed).

A couple parked in a Loudon County, Va., nighttime lovers' lane was so startled by an approaching sheriff's cruiser that the man abruptly drove off, accidentally right into the Potomac River before being rescued. A 7-year-old girl was stabbed 25 times (not life-threateningly) by a playmate emulating Chucky in "Child's Play 2," which he had seen three days earlier (Brasilia, Brazil). A rapist sentenced to two life terms plus 110 years asked the judge for a lethal injection, saying, "I can't do that much time" (Prince George's County, Md.). A drug-dealing couple were arrested for trying to collect a $40 debt by dangling a guy out a window while the woman bit his testicles (Evansville, Ind.). A math teacher was arrested for forcing a 13-year-old boy to take his restroom break in a classroom trashcan (Montgomery, Ala.).

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