-- On July 4 at Coney Island in New York, Japan's Kazutoyo "The Rabbit" Arai (who weighs 101 pounds) beat defending champ Steve Keiner (400 pounds) in the annual Nathan's international hot-dog-eating championship. Arai gobbled up 25 in 12 minutes, to Keiner's 16. Slim Japanese eaters have frequently won the contest, which struck Keiner as "one of God's mysteries," but another bulbous former U.S. champ, Ed Krachie (who ate 15 this year), once postulated the "Belt of Fat" theory, that surrounding fat limits stomachs' expansion.

-- Researcher Peter Cochrane of British Telecommunications continues development of his "Soul Catcher" brain-implanted microchip that he believes some day will be capable of recording all of a person's chemical reactions in all senses so as to capture "a lifetime's worth of experience and feeling," according to a June New York Times report. (Already, doctors at a Veterans Administration hospital believe they have trained a patient whose ability to communicate was shut down by a brain-stem trauma; after an implant, he can order a cursor around merely by thinking of where he wants it to go.)

In June, a British housewife held an appliance repairer hostage in her home for three hours until the company agreed to replace the faulty washing machine it had sold her and been unable to fix (Somerset, England). In April near Milan, Italy, about 30 voters showed up at the polls wearing only underwear, somehow in protest of excessive airport noise. In May, an unidentified man burst into a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., armed with jagged-edged soda bottles and threatened to kill himself if someone didn't stop Pepsi from selling sodas to eastern European countries.

-- In May, the Maricopa County (Ariz.) District Library announced that it had received a 15,000-book donation from a drive sponsored by the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain, a campaign that all together distributed more than 1 million donated books. However, the Maricopa County gift consisted of 1,000 pasta cookbooks, 200 copies of a book on Windows 95 software, and 11,796 copies of the same children's book, "What Would Happen If ..."

-- In April, the New Hampshire legislature voted to correct its law on penalties for sex abuse of children. Adults convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child in New Hampshire can receive up to 20 years in prison, but until the new bill actually becomes law, molesting one's own child still draws a maximum of only seven years.

-- In May, a judge in Tampa, Fla., sentenced teen-ager Valessa Robinson to 18 years in prison for the confessed-to brutal beating death of her mother at the hands of Valessa and her boyfriend. Four days earlier, two other Florida judges had sentenced statutory-rape defendants (whose victims only reluctantly testified against them) to 71 years and 105 years in prison. (The first was a 25-year-old South Dakota man who clumsily romanced a 13-year-old Largo girl with a diamond ring; the second was a Miami college professor who had smuggled a somewhat-eager Honduran teen-age boy into the United States as a housemate and had occasional sex with him.)

-- Queens College (New York City) professor Harvey Baker told The New York Times in May that he had a dynamic new method for helping people overcome even intense fears of tarantulas. However, he had fallen far short of the 100 volunteers he needed to demonstrate the method because few people who have extreme tarantula phobia would participate in his study.

-- In February, Patrick Lee Harned, 17, who is jailed in Astoria, Ore., on charges that he killed a 7-year-old girl at the command of the voices in his head, turned to convicted serial killer Keith "Happy Face" Jesperson, serving a life term at the Oregon State Penitentiary, for advice on prison life, girls and, of course, defense strategy. Wrote Harned, "I just want to get my time done and do good and get married and have a kid and have a better life and walk on the beach with my wife, kid, family, and have a better life with help, amen. What can I do?"

-- An April New England Journal of Medicine article reporting the results of automobile whiplash claims in Saskatchewan before and after the province switched to no-fault insurance revealed that whiplash was much more common under the "fault" system. According to a commentator, part of the result might be due to victims gaming the system, but the results might also show that "if you have to prove you are ill, you can't get well."

Pittsburgh anti-circumcision activist Ron Miller, 58, speaking to a meeting of men to encourage foreskin-restoration in order to enhance penile sensitivity, quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in April: "(The pleasure) you're going to get back is so different, don't expect your brain to understand it." He also admonished men not to delay, as he did: "I'm pissed off about the 40 years of wasted sex I had."

A genre given up in this column four years ago as No Longer Weird has been resurrected by advances in science. It has been known for years that production of heat-trapping methane by livestock flatulence was a major contributor to global warming, but the 1997 Kyoto protocol created technology incentives to reduce the problem, such as the development in Scotland recently of special bacteria for animal feed that converts the methane to less-noxious carbon dioxide in cows' digestive systems, and an industrial Beano-type supplement developed by a Canadian firm to ease cows' belches and other emissions.

In June, according to police in Detroit, Dwayne Nolan was to meet his lawyer at a police station so they could fill out the paperwork to get Nolan's car back after it had been impounded in an alleged drug deal. As Nolan awaited the lawyer's arrival, officers noticed that Nolan was in fact the same man currently wanted locally for murder. Said Sgt. Joe O'Leary later: "I've never seen anybody actually walk into a station on another matter, obviously knowing he's wanted on a murder warrant." To make it official, an officer asked the lawyer, matter-of-factly, to identify a photo taken from the warrant, which he did (according to the police), and Nolan was arrested.

A 23-year-old man died from a friend's punch to the chest, delivered only after the man begged to be hit to relieve his hiccups (Ocean City, Md.). A vicious heat wave in Turkey was credited with saving a life when a suicidal woman on a mountainside swooned before she could leap, and was rescued. An America West pilot (who had flown the day before), riding as a passenger on an America West flight, went out of control, screaming, throwing things, and yelling "Get away from me," until he was restrained by the crew (Phoenix). A county judge (who is an opera fan) enlisted 21 jail inmates to be extras in a local production of Verdi's "Aida," earning community-service credits (Cincinnati).

(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 May, a 19-year-old mentally ill patient walked away from the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs, and authorities warned that he was potentially dangerous. Twelve hours later, the patient, Terry Crazy, was picked up along Interstate 90. According to hospital spokeswoman Connie Worl, "Mr. Crazy was brought back ... without incident."

-- Males, Especially, Should Not Read This Item: In June, an 11-year-old boy in Grimsby, England, standing on a chair holding a snooker cue stick as if riding a pogo stick, with the tip at the juncture of his legs, slipped and fell to the floor, incurring perhaps the most serious injury possible under the circumstances (although he is recuperating satisfactorily). Scrotal repair was necessary, as was abdominal surgery, to fix the rupture caused by the protruding tip of the stick.

According to her lawyer, Teren Basel's 2 1/2-year divorce battle with wealthy husband Peter Basel was "a trip to a concentration camp that she survived by the skin of her teeth" (Bolton, Mass., January). And Catholic Cardinal Thomas Winning, describing the "bombard(ment)" of Scotland by gay-rights advocates, likened it to "the dark days of World War II" (Edinburgh, Scotland, January). And San Carlos, Calif., tavern owner Al Tolbert, reluctantly enforcing the state's clean-air-in-bars law, decorated his no-smoking signs with swastikas; said Tolbert, "It appears a bunch of (Adolf Hitler's) adherents are running (the California government)" (January).

-- In February, voters in Holland, Mich., rejected a ballot initiative to restrict Internet access on local public library computers so as to keep pornography from minors. The initiative was led by Irvin Bos, 59, who told reporters that he became a pornography foe at age 12 when he found a sexually explicit book on the side of a road and sneaked looks at it in the family barn, and that within six months, lightning had hit the barn, demolishing it. Said Bos, "I just knew (that my pornography) had caused that barn to burn down."

-- Disabled Springfield, Mass., police officer Charles Peck, 55, asked the city council last year for higher benefits based on his 1982 squad car crash that ended his career. Peck was hurt so severely that he was declared dead at the scene (only to be resuscitated at the hospital), and his latest petition demands benefits equal to his full salary, which is an amount available only to surviving spouses of deceased officers. Thus, Peck appears to be claiming that since he was declared dead in 1982, he actually is his own survivor. At press time, the Springfield city council had not decided.

-- Dennis Ferrer, 56, was arrested in Chalmette, La., in March and charged with stealing from the donation box at Our Lady of Prompt Succor Catholic Church. Ferrer had on him three thin rods with a sticky substance on one end, and $381, but said he was not stealing the money, but rather freeing it because the church was run by communists.

-- Pedophile Pediatricians: Dr. David Mark Stier, 42, pled guilty in Charlotte, N.C., in March to having sex with an underage teen-ager. (Though a pediatrician, said his lawyer, Stier in reality "had no idea the age of this child.") And in Alexandria, Va., in February, Dr. Jonathan L. Weinstein, 32, was sentenced to a year in prison for possession of child pornography. (According to his lawyer, Weinstein got no personal pleasure from the pornography, but was merely a pack rat who accumulated things; said the lawyer, Weinstein still has "Froot Loops that date from 1995," "chocolate pudding from 1983," "guitar strings," and "his teen-aged T-shirts."

-- In April, Ontario Justice Peter Harris dismissed charges against a woman accused of prostitution when she told him that she was just out that night hitchhiking, which Harris thought was too "innocuous" an activity to permit a conviction. However, the woman had been asked "How much?" by an undercover police officer and had answered "Forty dollars," but Judge Harris said she might have meant only how much she would pay for a ride.

-- In April, alleged Mafia boss Vincenzo Curcio broke out of the high-security Vallette prison in Turin, Italy, by patiently sawing through the bars with dental floss. (The prison, built in the 1970s, had installed bars of abnormally soft iron.) And the month before, Texas inmate Antonio Lara used a makeshift dental-floss-like substance to saw his way out of his cell at the Coffield facility near Palestine, Texas, allegedly in order to kill rival Roland Rios in another cell.

-- Prospective bride and groom Dorrell Mainer, 38, and Kevin Rainey, 41, were arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y., and charged with attempting on June 7 to rob a Chase Manhattan Bank (a robbery they had to abort when a teller delayed getting the money). The couple had scheduled a huge wedding for June 10 with out-of-town guests, intending to pay for it with a tax refund, but when IRS denied the refund, according to police, the bank robbery was the best way the couple knew to pay the caterers and avoid disappointing their relatives.

According to a University of Cologne archaeologist, addressing a meeting in Cairo, Egypt, in April, nearly all prehistoric sites along the Nile valley have been spoiled by land and building projects, and now tourists are destroying Egypt's Western Desert sites. One of the most ruinous tactics, he said, is tourists' pouring water over 9,000-year-old paintings so they can see the features more clearly.

In 1993, News of the Weird reported on a Redmond, Wash., judge who, when his defendant broke free of bailiffs and fled, leaped off the bench himself and, robe flapping, pursued the man out of the courthouse and down the street. In April 2000, Philadelphia Judge Peter Rogers showed a similar impatience with his own bailiffs and dashed after escaping suspect John Jordan, who was making a run for it after having simply failed to appear for his previous 24 court hearings. Unlike the Redmond judge, Rogers came back empty-handed.

Dennis Sullivan, 23, was arrested in January for the robbery of what he thought was an armored car, according to Manassas, Va., police. In reality, it was a laundry truck delivering towels and mops to a Bowl America. Said a police officer, "(Sullivan, holding a sawed-off shotgun), ran up to the (driver) and said, 'Give it up.' The (driver) said, 'What?'" Sullivan grabbed a bag and ran but soon realized he had a bag of mopheads. By the time police spotted him running for his getaway car, he was no longer dangerous because his shotgun, which was snug against his arm underneath his long-sleeved shirt, had become tangled in the shirt and could not be aimed.

The government insultingly said Harold Gaulding's 1.25 acres that it confiscated for road-widening was worth $525, but a jury said it is worth $50,000 (Colbert, Ga.). A police sergeant who is also a youth league baseball coach was demoted to patrolman after traffic-ticketing an umpire who had just ejected him for arguing a call at first base (Alvin, Texas). A 29-year-old murder suspect was arrested outside the house he had been sharing with an overtrusting executive for the TV show "Cops" (Los Angeles). A rapist was sentenced to only seven years for his crime because, noted the judge, when the victim started choking, he loosened her gag and gave her a glass of water (Pontevedra, Spain). A 21-year-old woman dumped her infant off with friends on false pretenses so she could fulfill her dream by joining a traveling carnival (Buffalo, N.Y.)

(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 ritzy Barra da Tijuca suburb of Rio de Janeiro is preparing for the October high-society wedding of Pepezinha and Winner, which will be extravagant even though the bride and groom are dogs (shih tzu and cairn terrier). The estate of Pepezinha's owner, Vera Loyola, is just down the road from the notorious Rocinha slum, symbol of Rio's nauseating poverty. Said Loyola (who always serves her pooch on silver platters), "I believe my little Pepezinha is worth every cent."

-- According to the Massachusetts speaker of the House, the legislature's all-night session on April 13, to vote on the state budget, was more a giant "keg party" than serious deliberation, with members drifting into the chamber from various receptions and some falling asleep at their desks. At one point, according to a Boston Herald story, when the presiding officer asked the members, "Are you leaders or followers?" the members chanted "We lead!" which segued into "Toga! Toga!" One result was the giggling joy with which members voted to fund their favorite obscure projects.

In April, in the woods near Tampa, Fla., tourist Gemini Wink went off to photograph alligators, got lost, climbed a tree for safety as night approached, and decided to protect himself against falling out of the tree by duct-taping himself to a branch; rescuers found him several hours later. In March, Massachusetts officials shut down a day-care center in the town of Hudson following reports that a caretaker duct-taped an infant to a wall for amusement. And a February Associated Press report touted Harrisburg, Ill., artist Keith Drone's line of duct-tape clothing, including baseball caps, wallets, pants, belts and a bikini; said Drone, the products are "really cool looking," and, he adds, "If it breaks, just put a piece of duct tape on it."

-- Why We Have the Justice Department Antitrust Division: In January, at an open-air market in Kunming, China, an appliance dealer had a hand chopped off by a competitor who was upset that his rival was underpricing him.

-- Recent CEO Retirement Packages: Douglas Ivester, Coca-Cola, $17.8 million plus $3 million/year, who retired just after laying off 6,000 employees (February), and John B. McCoy, Bank One, $10.3 million plus $3 million/year, who retired after laying off 5,100 employees (March). On the other hand, Sidney H. Kosann, CEO of Shelby Yarn, Shelby, N.C., who reportedly earned a $300,000 salary and lives in a $500,000 home, filed in February for state unemployment compensation just after closing the company and laying off 650 people.

-- According to figures of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, cited by the London Daily Telegraph in March, hundreds of Pakistani women are deliberately burned to death each year by their husbands, either for imagined infidelity or increasingly for economic reasons, in that some Muslim men are finding it harder to maintain a two-wife household during lean times.

-- Eighty-eight orbiting satellites ($5 billion worth) were scheduled to soon be allowed to vaporize by the owners of the Iridium telephone company, which lost hope in April and May to be rescued from bankruptcy. Iridium failed to last even 16 months, due to the rapid and supposedly unanticipated improvements in digital cellular technology that made its bulky and expensive handsets useful only in remote areas. (Among users of Iridium telephones were the Chechen rebels at war with the Russian army.)

-- Brazilian legislator Wilson Lima told reporters in April that he still thought his proposal to require clubs and bars to have three restrooms (male, female and gays/transvestites, for their own protection from homophobic men) was a good idea, even though Brazil's largest gay-rights organization said it was horrified of such a prospect.

-- A police ethics committee in Montreal reprimanded Officer Robert Royal in March after he forced a traffic-stop motorist to follow him on a high-speed chase of another car. Royal had stopped Pierre Boileau for an illegal U-turn when another officer summoned Royal to help him chase another car. Rather than let Boileau go, Royal ordered him to follow the chase, which hit about 70 mph in a 30 mph zone. After Royal caught up to the second car (turns out it was the wrong car), he finished writing Boileau's ticket and sent him on his way.

-- Four years ago, Edward Weslock left his wife and fled New York City for France with the couple's entire $4 million in cash, leaving his wife to support herself with modest jobs and eventually to be evicted from the family apartment. Since then, she has won several court orders against Weslock in the U.S. and his native Canada, but he has avoided the judgments by staying away from both countries. However, when Weslock stealthily returned, briefly, to the United States in April, Ms. Weslock found out and had him arrested. He had come back to have a new hairpiece fitted.

In April, a jury in Tyler, Texas, sentenced, as a habitual criminal (10 convictions, all relatively minor), Kenneth Payne, 29, to 16 years in prison for shoplifting a Snickers bar from a grocery store. (The incarceration cost in Texas is reportedly $13,000 per year per inmate.) And at a high school sex-education rally in Chicago in April, abstinence advocate Pat Socia told the assembled teen-agers that if they feel a sexual urge coming on, "Just eat a Snickers bar. You'll be fine!"

More Sex Crimes You'd Rather Not Know About: James Donald Ray, 39, convicted of molesting sheep (San Diego, May); Daniel Bruce House, 54, arrested for molesting a horse (Malibu, Calif., February); Jason Carl McRoberts, 19, arrested for molesting a lamb (Stewartstown, Pa., April); Roger Powell, 59, arrested for molesting a pig (Enfield, N.C., May), which he explained by pointing out that sex with his human girlfriend is undesirable because she is a "crack whore."

St. Pancras Coroner's Court in London, England, ruled in April that the 38-year-old man who plunged 10 stories to his death in Islington last August had lost his balance while on his balcony searching for a signal on his cell phone. And a 30-year-old marathon runner, who hoped to qualify for the Olympics, was killed in Las Vegas in February when he was hit by a van as he ran to catch a bus.

A 68-year-old man got too much toe while attempting to shoot a corn off his foot (Proberta, Calif.). Immigration and Naturalization Service said drug-sniffing dog purchases would be limited to two European breeds, which officials said were relentless compared to easily exhausted American breeds, such as Labradors. Police arrested a 28-year-old man who had set out to rescue a 7-year-old girl in a lake, but who, when currents increased, snatched her life preserver, saving himself but allowing her to drown (Southaven, Miss.). At a national breast-feeding technique pageant, 270 women competed for a prize of about $2,400 (Bangkok, Thailand). An art gallery visitor sat in and broke a chair, which he did not realize was part of an exhibit dating to the Ming Dynasty and which is valued at around $100,000 (but it was repairable) (Minneapolis).

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