-- In April, the Orange County (Calif.) Register revealed that human tissue banks, which are widely believed by the donating public to be either government- or non-profit-operated, are highly profitable commercial concerns, with annual revenues of $500 million and rising. Today, a cadaver "donated to science" actually brings up to $200,000 for tissue banks and their contractors. The companies argue that if they paid for cadavers, the costs would rise to tissue recipients (who range from blind people receiving corneas to makeup models who want fuller lips).

The I Am Hurt Corp. lawyer-referral company filed a lawsuit in Edmonton, Alberta, in March against a competing lawyer who advertises his phone number, 428-HURT. And in November, a New York grand jury indicted three principals in a Maryland distributing company for fraudulently substituting common fish eggs for caviar. And in March, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against four Georgetown University law students, accusing them of recommending an obscure stock on an Internet bulletin board and then exploiting people who bought that stock, even though the buyers put their money down apparently knowing nothing about the stock except that these anonymous strangers recommended it.

-- Exciting New Products: the Vast-ity Belt, which contains a microchip that flashes and beeps when the wearer has eaten too much at a meal (from Piero De Giacomo of Bari, Italy); The Gooser, a computer program that automatically inflates lawyers' billed hours (according to a November federal indictment against the developer, a Wayne, Pa, consultant); and sliced peanut butter, packaged like single slices of cheese, from researchers at Oklahoma State University.

-- Latest from the Restaurant Industry: A Nazi-themed restaurant called The Third Reich (with Gestapo-clad waiters) has been open for about a year in downtown Seoul, to little criticism, perhaps because of South Korea's minuscule Jewish population. However, an unaffiliated eatery called Jail (with a prison motif) in Taipei, Taiwan, was forced to apologize in January for including Holocaust prison scenes on its walls. Yet another Taipei theme restaurant opened in January, built on a smokestack at the city's biggest garbage incinerator, with picturesque views of trucks bringing in the trash.

-- In London, England, in December, a completely automated tavern, Cynthia's Cyberbar, opened, featuring a robot that mixes drinks perfectly and carries on recorded conversations to simulate a friendly bartender.

-- New York City psychotherapist Marilyn Graman recently offered a $9,600-per-person set of classes that she describes as "a step-by-step intensive program designed to lead (a woman) down the aisle." According to a December Philadelphia Inquirer report, the course covers 276 hours over six months, full of such tips as how a woman can visualize herself as a wife and how to make your closet "man ready," but she offers no nuptial guarantee.

-- Wilhelm Krumwiede asked the Nebraska Supreme Court in December to rule that his estranged (and possibly dead) wife is also liable for the $120,000 in legal fees he has amassed defending the charge that he murdered her. (She has been missing since 1995, but in two trials, Krumwiede has not been convicted.) And in December, after estranged wife Cora Caro was arrested in Ventura County, Calif., and charged with murdering three of her four children, she demanded $550,000 from her husband (the kids' father) as a "loan" from the future division of the community property in order to fund her expectedly elaborate defense.

-- In November, testifying before the state gaming commission in Indianapolis, principals of Caesars Indiana apologized for falling far short of the commission rule requiring that 10 percent of casino contracts go to minority businesses. Caesars said it had greatly improved over 1998's dismal one-half of 1 percent, but then revealed that that improvement was produced by counting its major engineering firm as minority-owned because its owner claims to be 1/16th American Indian.

-- Ronald Bell Jr., 18, was convicted of murder in Shalimar, Fla., in March; part of the evidence against him was a surveillance video from a Target store showing Bell and two accomplices returning the murder weapon (a $9.99 meat cleaver) for a refund.

A brand-new, $1 million fire station in Charleston, W.Va., as well as the Southampton Street headquarters of the Boston Fire Department, were closed (in January and November, respectively) because of fire-code violations. And fires demolished a fire station in Allentown, Fla. (in January), the Mercury Candle Co. factory in Newark, N.J. (in January), and the Argo Co.'s fire-extinguisher plant in Detroit (in November).

-- In 1992, News of the Weird reported the onstage death of a nightclub comedian in Tempe, Ariz., who keeled over from a heart aneurysm while emceeing a show. In March 2000, a performer who worked as Uncle Ron the Magician collapsed and died during a show in Hamilton, New Zealand, and as with the 1992 incident, some in the audience applauded, thinking the collapse was a pratfall that was part of the show.

Easy IDs: Four men escaped in March after robbing a Mellon-PSFS Bank in downtown Philadelphia, but police got a clear photo of one of the men, who had inadvertently stood on the sidewalk directly facing the bank's surveillance camera while getting up the nerve to put on his mask. And Cedrick Washington, 33, was arrested in November and charged with robbing a Kenner, La., sandwich shop; according to police, he had stood in front of the shop (again, inadvertently facing the surveillance camera), repeatedly practicing pulling his shirt over his head as a disguise.

Four kindergartners were suspended for three days for pretending to shoot each other with their fingers (Sayreville, N.J.). The real name of a man charged with attempting via the Internet to lure an underage girl into a sexual tryst: Mr. Dirk Lust (Merrimack, N.H.). A 38-year-old inmate, who might have been released next month, was sentenced to 50 more years for assaulting a guard (Huntsville, Texas). Clyde Charles, 47, was freed from the Angola prison in Louisiana (after serving nearly 20 years for rape) when a DNA test implicated his brother Marlo, instead. A Tucson, Ariz., schoolteacher who claimed an Hispanic student shot her confessed that she had shot herself to draw attention to school security problems.

(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 chief justice of oil-rich Brunei ruled in March that Prince Jefri, the 46-year-old brother of the Sultan of Brunei, was entitled to an allowance of about $300,000 a month while awaiting trial on the Sultan's lawsuit that Jefri misspent $15 billion while in charge of the country's investments. A preliminary audit showed that playboy Jefri had bought himself $2.7 billion worth of toys in 10 years, including 17 airplanes, 2,000 cars, and a huge yacht that he named "Tits," and whose two dinghies he named "Nipple 1" and "Nipple 2."

Two years ago, in a bogus Internet news story, a South African hospital with a high fatality rate had discovered that a cleaning lady had been plugging her floor polisher in each night by briefly unplugging an appliance that was, unknown to her, a life-support machine. In November 1999, Chicago's TV Channel 7 lost sound for 25 minutes on the final night of the crucial ratings "sweeps" week when cleaning-service personnel plugged a floor buffer into the station's master control outlet, overpowering an audio circuit and driving away 40 percent of the prime-time audience.

-- After Ivory Coast's soccer team was eliminated from the African Nations Cup in January, the country's military ruler, Gen. Robert Guei, had the team arrested and put in a military prison for two days. Addressing the players, Guei said, "I asked that you be taken there so you reflect awhile. Next time (if you play badly) you will stay there for military service ... until a sense of civic pride gets into your heads."

-- In January, a Philadelphia city-funded community organization published a pamphlet on health and safety tips for prostitutes, which recommended always getting on top, negotiating price before getting into a car, and getting the money in advance. Also in January, a member of the Canadian Parliament released a list of recent pamphlets directly funded by the government, including "How to Communicate With the Dead," "How to Stimulate the G-spot," and "How to Understand and Enjoy an Orgasm."

-- Despite many anti-smoking programs sponsored by the U.S. government, a Senate subcommittee found last year that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had spent $4.2 million since 1996 to help American Indians build discount cigarette stores as part of the federal community block-grant program. (In April 2000, legislation was introduced in the Senate to end the practice.)

-- In January, a New York state administrative law judge ruled after four hearings in three years that Krystyna Maliszewska, 51, of Brooklyn was not eligible for worker compensation because she had not provided the proper "medical evidence" that her leg had been amputated (even though voluminous hospital records were in her file). Maliszewska attended each hearing and could have shown her artificial leg and the stump that ends at her right knee but was never asked even to speak. (After a February New York Daily News story, the state quickly reopened the case.)

-- Wynema Faye Shumate, 65, was arrested in Ladson, S.C., in March on two charges of mishandling a dead body. The case came to light when a 27-year-old Englishman flew to America to marry Shumate after a hot Internet romance but discovered that Shumate was not the age-30ish woman she had portrayed online. According to police, when the man asked Shumate if she had other surprises, she told him about the carved-up body in the freezer, which was that of her male former housemate, who Shumate said had died the year before of natural causes. Shumate was cleared of causing the death, but, according to the Englishman, the wedding is off.

-- In a case unique among women who keep too many cats at home, a judge in Fairfax County, Va., told U.S. Navy program analyst Kristin Kierig in November that she could keep the 104 cats that share her Annandale, Va., townhouse because the house is apparently clean and the cats groomed and in good health. Kierig produced medical records on the cats, showed that she cleans the 101 litter boxes twice a day and keeps the 15 water bowls and 20 food bowls stocked, and said she can recognize each cat by name (but she did confess that her house might have an "odor").

-- In March, Benjamin Thomas Douglas, 34, was sentenced to 180 days in jail for the latest in what police call serial public masturbation incidents in the middle of department stores in Dallas and its suburbs of Plano and Mesquite. And the month before that, Philadelphia police were hunting a man in his early 20s for seven incidents of public masturbation at area fast-food outlets over a four-month period; in each case, according to the police reports, the man reached a climax quickly and then left without his order.

-- News of the Weird has regularly reported highway truck spills over the years, but a December spill in Providence, R.I., interwove another News of the Weird theme: the tacky, wayward public official. Rhode Island Department of Transportation maintenance supervisor Thomas E. Jackvony Jr. was charged with larceny because, according to police, when he was supervising the cleanup of grocery-store items from an 18-wheeler's spill, he also grabbed whatever items he could and put them into his car. Police recovered 15 packages of cookies, 15 home electronic scales and 20 cassette tapes.

-- More Divine Dentistry: A News of the Weird roundup in July 1999 listed several cities in which worshipers recently have claimed that, following prayer, gold teeth and fillings appeared in their mouths in place of the previous porcelain and silver. Later that year, similar divine outbreaks occurred, at a New Life Community Church revival in Weatherford, Texas, and with Pentecostals in Orangevale, Calif. As with the earlier instances, some of the faithful stuck to their claims even when their own dental records showed they had gold fillings all along.

A 57-year-old Halifax, England, man, distraught at his wife's death, decapitated himself with his homemade guillotine (December). A 30-year-old man attempting suicide in Rustenberg, South Africa, put a firecracker in his mouth and lit it; the explosion shook his house and mangled his face, but he survived (January). A 29-year-old man, driving to work at rush hour near Washington, D.C., and arguing with his fiancee on his cell phone, shot himself to death, with the resulting collision tying up traffic for hours (February).

A man in a wheelchair and wearing a beanie robbed a Wells Fargo Bank, instructing the tellers to fill the beanie with cash (Pleasant Hill, Calif.). A woman won $171,000 from a jury for slipping on a piece of broccoli in a Grand Union supermarket (Bennington, Vt.). A Washington, D.C., police officer was found guilty of sexual assault, becoming the 16th officer on the force in 15 months to be convicted of a crime. The Ohio liquor control agency banned as offensive the Belgian ale Manneken Pis because its label features a boy urinating. At least two viewers smashed their TV picture tubes trying to kill the high-definition cockroach crawling across the screen as part of a recent Orkin commercial.

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

-- Police called to a Giant supermarket in Yardley, Pa., in January arrested Samuel Feldman, 37, and charged him with one count of criminal mischief but suspected he is the person responsible for a three-year spree of squeezing, smashing and poking packages of bread and cookies in various area supermarkets, ruining more than $8,000 worth of goods. After the squeezer had struck more than 100 times in the area, Giant installed a hidden camera and, according to police, when Feldman was seen squeezing bread on the third separate occasion, he was arrested.

In December, Graham Gund started a third version of his new multimillion-dollar house in Cambridge, Mass., tearing out the foundation for the second time after deciding that he really wanted the house to look like the first version, which he had bulldozed down eight months earlier after it was nearly completed. And in January, a Newfoundland company announced it was taking reservations, at $35,000 (U.S.) a seat, for a 12-hour sightseeing tour in three-person submarines, 2 1/2 miles down to the sunken Titanic.

-- Among the February reform recommendations submitted to the Home Office by the British gay rights organization OutRage (in its effort to end different treatment of heterosexuals and homosexuals) was a proposal urging that the government legalize sex in public restroom cubicles.

-- In March, the New Haven Register reported on Tufts University student Carl Sciortino Jr.'s recent campaign to persuade the school to allow gays and lesbians to have roommates of the opposite sex. According to Sciortino, forcing same-sex roommates on gays could lead them to develop romantic feelings toward their roommates, which would interfere with their schoolwork. Some local gay and lesbian leaders do not support Sciortino, fearing that his argument undermines the cause of gays' serving openly in the military.

-- According to a December Orange County Register story, Mark W. Dziga of Long Beach, Calif., had just filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against his former company, Boeing, for firing him because he chose to work in the nude at the office on Thanksgiving Day 1998 when he thought he was alone. A security guard turned him in for violating the company's dress code, and Dziga charged that his subsequent termination was illegal in that Boeing should have provided "reasonable accommodation" to his religion of shamanism.

-- The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in October that workers have the right to express themselves on public issues but that Sikorsky Aircraft was justified in firing employee Gonzalo Cotto, who had objected to Sikorsky's pro-Gulf War stance by stomping on a workplace U.S. flag and blowing his nose on it. And Liz Anderson filed a federal discrimination complaint against employer USF Logistics in Indianapolis in November after the company ordered her to stop telling co-workers to "have a blessed day."

-- Jealousy With a Flair: In December, the wife of a Cambodian undersecretary of state was accused of dumping five liters of acid on top of the 18-year-old girlfriend of her husband. And in October, a 43-year-old woman in Lake Ronkonkoma, N.Y., was charged with assault for allegedly taking a samurai sword and slashing off two fingertips of a woman she found in bed with her husband.

-- Latest Rages: Elevator-Etiquette Rage: Engineering student knocked a lecturer unconscious after she objected to his pushing elevator buttons with his feet (Sriracha, Thailand, January). Cigarette-Ash Rage: 100 people were arrested for stoning police during a religious protest started when one man's ash accidentally landed on another man (Raver, India, November). Anglophobe Rage: One Quebec man was fined about $700 (U.S.) for punching another because he addressed a postal clerk in English rather than French (Hull, Quebec, March).

-- In December, a 36-year-old, 280-pound man in Pontiac, Mich., originally questioned by police because his stereo was too loud but then arrested on an outstanding DUI warrant, snapped his handcuffs off, creating a jagged edge, which he used to cut a hole in his stomach so he could pull his organs out to throw at rescue workers. "Reaching in and then tugging on stuff, and I mean tugging," is how Sheriff's Sgt. Matt Norman described the man's attempts.

In February, prominent French chef Jean Bardet had his restaurant in the city of Tours eliminated from the prominent Michelin Guide 2000 based on charges that his superior regional vintages were just cheap supermarket wine and that he had vastly inflated the uniqueness of his sea bass, veal, cheese and asparagus. Also in February, Quebec inspectors shut down the Comme Chez Soi restaurant in Granby temporarily after it was caught re-serving customers' discarded tartar sauce, coleslaw, bread and fondue, and not just from its own restaurant but from take-out food left behind in a motel owned by the restaurateur.

British artist Tracey Emin, 37, first made News of the Weird in 1996 with a show in Minneapolis featuring a tent with the embroidered names of "Everybody I've Ever Slept With," which included not only lovers but relatives and pajama-party bedmates she had as a child. In December 1999, she nearly won the prestigious British Turner Prize with "My Bed," which was an actual unmade bed, stained with urine and littered with panties, condoms, pillboxes and empty vodka bottles, supposedly set during a suicidal period. (One fussy observer at London's Tate Gallery, apparently believing that a vandal had struck, tried to make the bed and tidy up.)

A 13-year-old boy was sentenced to 25 years in prison in December for killing his parents in retaliation for their not letting him go on a church field trip (Canton, Texas). And a 23-year-old man obsessed with the film "The Blair Witch Project" pled guilty in January to strangling his girlfriend because she insisted the movie was fiction (Grand Haven, Mich.).

A town council in Oslo, Norway, OK'd Muslim loudspeakered prayers on Fridays provided atheists had a separate chance to shout "God does not exist." Protesting women formed "Menstrual Avengers" to challenge a tax that covers feminine hygiene products but not condoms, sunscreen or incontinence pads (Sydney, Australia). A police officer who hurt himself punching a wall while arguing with his boss was ruled eligible for worker compensation (Hayward, Calif.). A baby was born with a bullet wound on her bottom hours after her mother was shot in the abdomen during a carjacking (Johannesburg, South Africa). A British woman with 6 pounds of heroin strapped to her chest was arrested at an airport after her body piercing (in an unidentified but "intimate" location) tripped a metal detector (Istanbul, Turkey).

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