-- Punch-Drunk From Litigation: The Brown & Williamson Tobacco company recently added another quixotic 800-number telephone message, this time featuring a male chorus serenading callers with "Oooh, the tobacco plant is a lovely plant / Its leaves so broad and green / But you shouldn't think about the tobacco plant / If you're still a teen." A 1999 message featured a sexy male voice intoning, "Brown & Williamson Tobacco is in love. We're a giant corporation, and you make us feel like a little kitten." "Thank you, lover."

At a January hearing in LaCrosse, Wis., child-molester Ellef J. Ellefson, 95, was ordered to remain confined beyond his sentence because experts said he was still incorrigible. Mr. Deo Dubbs, 88, was sentenced to probation-only in April in Sarasota, Fla., for buying crack cocaine, which he said gives him "pep." In April, first-time arrestee Ruth A. Goelz, 81, was charged in Hollywood, Fla., with running a $200,000 Ponzi scheme. Retiree Charles John Swanson, 71, was arrested in January for two armed bank robberies, allegedly committed because he was having trouble affording his rent in Palo Alto, Calif.

-- Camel Mania: A January New York Times report from Selcuk, Turkey, described the massively popular sport of camel-fighting (in which one-ton camels in mating season simply push against each other until one falls over), which brings fame to the winning owner. And in a March New York Times profile, well-to-do Istanbul builder Ethem Erkoc revealed that he has constructed 10 swimming pools for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who permits his favorite camels to frolic in them.

-- Henk Otte, 43, lives most of the year as an unemployed construction worker in an Amsterdam, Netherlands, housing project, but he is also the chief of about 40 villages (100,000 people) in a region of Ghana about 45 miles from the capital of Accra. According to a January Associated Press dispatch, Otte was visiting with his Ghanan-born wife in 1995 when suddenly natives concluded he was their reincarnated king. At that time, Otte's reaction was that the villagers were "insane," but now says that being king "is my destiny."

-- The Hanoi (Vietnam) Institute of Social Sciences reported in February that many men, fearful toward the end of the lunar new year, had apparently turned to sex with pregnant prostitutes as a way of releasing evil spirits.

-- Male Stereotypes Come to Life: In January, Quebec researcher Jim Pfaus told the Montreal Gazette that the rat is the "ultimate example" of the male mammal always on the lookout to copulate with new females and that when given alcohol, male rats notoriously re-attempt sex with females who had just rejected them. And schoolbus driver Alexandre Belvu, 31, was arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y., in January for taking three kids on a ride that lasted eight hours because he couldn't find their school and apparently would not stop to ask directions.

-- Unfair Ethnic Stereotypes Come to Life: In March, police chasing an escaped circus tiger in a suburb of Warsaw, Poland, accidentally shot and killed the veterinarian trying to tranquilize it. And according to a February New York Times story, the textile company Francital has developed a fabric specially treated to absorb perspiration and body odors for people who can't bathe for up to 30 days at a time; the company is headquartered in France.

-- Jose Chavarria, 37, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Adel, Iowa, in February. He had killed his friend Jorge Villalobos only minutes after lamenting to friends that a psychic had told him that Villalobos was planning to kill him first.

Sang Lee, the owner of a custom slaughterhouse near Minneapolis-St. Paul that serves the Hmong-American community (and speaking to a St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter in January concerning complaints about heavy slaughterhouse traffic): "We (Hmongs, natives of Laos and Thailand) have a complex culture, and we have to sacrifice animals a lot."

In February, an 8-year-old boy, coming to his mother's aid, stabbed her abusive boyfriend to death in Coker Creek, Tenn. And in an Islamic public execution in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in February, a 10-year-old boy, now the eldest male in the family, took a rifle and did the honors to the man who had killed his father. And in Dover Township, N.J., in March, a 10-year-old boy argued with his father over missing chocolate icing and then, when the father sarcastically suggested the kid just take a knife and kill him, the kid complied.

In the five years since Bill Davis made News of the Weird by settling his 20-year dispute with Rhode Island over the pile of 10 million used tires (he says it's 30 million) on his property in Smithfield, contractors have gradually removed 4 million tires, at 79 cents each, and sold them as fuel. Federal and state officials still believe that a fire on the land would cause catastrophic environmental damage to Narragansett Bay, in that each melted tire would release about a quart and a half of oil. (A similar fire in Westley, Calif., in September burned for a month.)

Ill-Conceived Crimes: In Biloxi, Miss., in January, Ronald Dean Cherry, 52, was arrested after he called the Treasure Bay Casino and threatened to start shooting their customers unless the company delivered $100,000 within two hours to his home (address helpfully provided by Cherry). And Ronald Keith Graham, 45, was arrested in Des Moines, Iowa, in February and charged with burglary; according to police, he had stolen a TV set but rather than try to sell it to one of Des Moines' other 200,000 residents, he invited its former owners to his apartment, where he offered to sell it back to them for $150 and even suggested an easy payment plan.

A 26-year-old woman started an agency to say prayers for people too busy to say their own (at $1.50 a day and up) (Milan, Italy). A woman was convicted of arranging for her lover to get a penile implant using her estranged husband's health insurance (New York City). A 20-year-old, brand-new mother was arrested in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; she had allegedly dealt $650 worth of cocaine from her room in the maternity ward. An Israeli rabbinical council authorized three tons of bread for starving Ethiopians but, because it was Passover week, was forced to send only religiously correct but notoriously hard-to-digest unleavened bread. The Centers for Disease Control estimated that a 20-cent tax increase on a six-pack of beer would reduce gonorrhea in young adults by 9 percent.

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

-- More than 500 accidental electrocutions were reported in Russia last year from people stealing power line electrical cables for resale as scrap metal. According to an April New York Times dispatch, more than 15,000 miles of power lines have been pulled down in recent years, rendering millions of households dark for weeks at a time. One recent victim, interviewed in intensive care, said he was confident when he saw a single line left on a pole, believing that thieves had taken the other lines safely; he is now without his left arm, right leg and colon.

According to a January Associated Press report, China has a government-sanctioned UFO research organization with 50,000 members, processing 500 alleged sightings a year, which is to be expected, said the director, because extraterrestrials, too, are interested in the country's rapidly developing markets. And Professor Liu Dalin opened a sex museum last year in Shanghai, with 1,000 exhibits, including a historical, imperial-palace stamp used to mark the derrieres of virgin girls. And according to an April Wall Street Journal story, there has been a recent "explosion" of successful litigation in China by elderly parents suing their children for failing to care for them in old age.

-- The British supermarket chain Tesco announced in January that its film-processing department had collected a total of 24,000 photographs over the years in which customers had accidentally snapped shots with a finger on the lens (the right middle finger being the most popular).

-- Hussen Farah Mohammed, 46, was released from jail in Bloomington, Minn., in January after 16 months' incarceration for entering the U.S. illegally from Canada; he said he had accidentally wandered across the unmarked border while in the woods birdwatching, but after he was captured, Canada refused to take him back. And Houston car mechanic Edgar Garfield Gibbons, 41, returned to the U.S. in March after nine months in jail in Georgetown, Guyana, to which country he had been mistakenly deported when he was confused with a New Jersey man of the same name.

-- In December, former Gastonia, N.C., prison guard Timothy Ramey filed a legal challenge to his dismissal, saying the precipitating incident was merely a minor mistake. Ramey was arguing with his superintendent about something and became so frustrated that, in an effort to "ignore" what his boss was saying, Ramey reached into his briefcase, "pulled the first thing out" that he found, and pretended to concentrate on that. It was a copy of Playboy magazine, which infuriated the superintendent.

-- In December, a joint committee of the Colorado Legislature approved an emergency grant of $75,000 to Morgan Community College in Fort Morgan, Colo., after it dawned on administrators that, because of "an oversight in the plan for the project," the just-finished student center building had no restrooms.

-- Latest Unsuccessful DUI Excuses: John B. Byrnes, Windsor County, Vt. (January): claimed he was in the passenger seat, and that it was his setter ("Becky") that was driving. Ronald McDonald Jr., 40, Norristown, Pa. (November): claimed he drove a short distance only so his girlfriend could clean her hands after changing a diaper so she wouldn't dirty the steering wheel. A 76-year-old man, Milwaukee (February): claimed he was under a doctor's orders, driving or not, to have two drinks a day.

-- In 1996, a federal court in Miami ordered Cuba to pay $187 million to the families of three Cuban-American men on protest flights shot down by Cuban military jets in open waters. In November 1999 (three weeks before Elian Gonzalez was rescued off the Florida coast), in perhaps a retaliatory court proceeding at Havana's Provincial Popular Tribunal, the United States was found to have harmed Cuba through 40 years of "aggressi(on)" and was ordered to pay the Castro government $181 billion.

-- In February in Largo, Fla., James Brian Kuenn, 40, was convicted of killing a teen-age girl, despite his claim that she had accidentally fallen and hit her head; Kuenn said he was so embarrassed at the accident that he made it look like murder to throw police off. And Thomas Storey, 27, was sentenced to 26 years in prison in Santa Ana, Calif., in December for murdering his wife, despite his claim that she had actually killed herself; he said he stabbed her dead body 25 times only to simulate murder to spare their son the shame of his mother's suicide.

Saskatchewan legislator Brad Wall, lamenting in December the invasion of bats at Regina General hospital: "I'm not sure what is more disturbing: the fact that nurses spend part of their day catching bats or that nurses were advised not to catch these particular bats because they could be rabid."

-- Twice in the last five weeks, News of the Weird has reported on dental-office abuses in the U.S. In November, a Melbourne, Australia, dentist was accused by the Victorian Dental Board of professional misconduct for allegedly engaging in the unauthorized (but not unheard of) facial-pain remedy of administering ozone through the patient's rectum, including 15 treatments to one patient in a three-week period. Advocates of the treatment say it can also be administered in the ear.

At a village near Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, police said a Muslim woman beat her 10-day-old son to death in January because he preferred to be breastfed by his father's other wife. And in Tokyo in March, Mitsuko Yamada, 36, pled guilty to killing a 2-year-old girl, apparently solely so that Yamada would no longer have to face the girl's mother, who had allegedly ignored Yamada during the neighborhood playground's social hour when mothers gather while their kids play.

A German shepherd police dog was caught shoplifting a slab of prime rib from a grocery store (Waukesha, Wis.). Police said two arrested drug dealers had been routinely issuing customers receipts but also charging them sales tax (Victoriaville, Quebec). A man pled guilty to burglary and the theft of Big Mama, a 50-pound halibut that was the main attraction at a showcase hatchery (and which the man also ate) (Redondo Beach, Calif.). Police phone taps of computer hacker "Mafiaboy" inadvertently uncovered an unrelated plot by the hacker's father to beat up a business associate (Montreal). Honolulu Heart Program researchers linked consumption of tofu during middle age to subsequent decline in brain function.

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

-- 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/.)