-- Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz, whose best-selling 1991 book "Chutzpah" celebrated the virtues of impudence, asked a team of Florida lawyers in July for a cut of the $3.4 billion judgment they had just won against the cigarette industry on behalf of smokers. Dershowitz, who said it was his strategy that won the case, admitted that "promises" the team made to him were "not in writing," but nevertheless claimed they owed him "1 percent," or $34 million, for his advice, which according to time sheets, he had dispensed over the course of 118 hours, which works out to $288,000 an hour, or $80 a second.

-- Despite televised professional wrestling's on-screen admonitions against trying such stunts at home, the New York Daily News reported in July that as many as 40 amateur (mostly teen-age) "backyard wrestling" clubs are operating in the New York City area, practicing moves nearly as dangerous as the pros'. A Daily News reporter witnessed 14-year-old boys smashing each other with wooden poles until they splintered, landing "chair shots" to the head, diving from platforms or rooftops onto their opponents, slamming each other through plywood tables, and even engaging in "barbed-wire" and "fire" matches. Said one "wrestler's" mother, who watched nervously as her son and his opponent went through their paces: "Easy ... easy...."

Denise Thomas was sentenced to a year's probation by a Littleton, Colo., judge in August for offering her 9-year-old daughter for sale on the Internet for $4,000. Two weeks earlier, Helen Chase had been arrested in Vacaville, Calif., and charged with child endangerment for allegedly giving away for free her 10-year-old son to a couple in St. Petersburg, Fla., whom she had met on the Internet. (Police said the latter kid had been rambunctious and incorrigible despite her threats to give him away, and was apparently thriving in his new home.)

-- John Murphy, 64, was arrested in Toms River, N.J., after a May 10 spree in which he vandalized 12 doctors' offices because they had refused his request to perform prostate biopsies on him without a medical reason for doing so. According to police, an enraged Murphy went from office to office, breaking windows and spraying black paint over the urologists' signs. One doctor, expressing prevailing medical practice, told a reporter that he wouldn't do the procedure unless some alarming sign surfaced because the procedure "is pretty invasive."

-- Firefighters and police called to an apartment in Fargo, N.D., in June encountered thick smoke pouring out of a window, an odor one described as "noxious and terrible," and the tenant standing in the corner with his fists up as if ready to fight. The tenant finally revealed that once a year, he piles into a skillet all the hair he has saved from his haircuts and burns it. He was arrested when he threatened the firefighters, claiming that he worked for the FBI.

-- In July, according to police, John Hawk, 43, the town eccentric of Celina, Ohio, took it to the next level. While communing with his just-deceased uncle's body at the Ketcham-Ripley Funeral Home in nearby Rockford, Hawk allegedly decapitated it with a hacksaw and carried the head away, presumably to fulfill a religious belief that he could bring the uncle back to life by eating the brain (a belief that was the subject of one of Hawk's periodic rants delivered in handbills around town over the years).

-- Brian Ellingwood had a briefcase stolen from his car in Washington, D.C., in February and reported it, but six weeks later, according to a Washington Post story, he was notified that the D.C. Department of Public Works had levied a $1,000 fine against him for littering because the abandoned briefcase, with contents strewn about, had been found in an alley about six blocks from his home. After what he estimated as "hundreds" of calls to various government offices, Ellingwood could not clear the matter up and was forced to go trial in June to have the charge removed.

-- According to a June Chicago Sun-Times report, Illinois Republican activist Connie Peters has virtually no other duty in her $23,000-a-year state job except to be an "observer" at two state water-management meetings a month. The newspaper estimates that she has collected $185,000 in the 15 years she has been in this arrangement, primarily because the legislature inexplicably kept raising her compensation, which in 1985 was $150 a year.

-- The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged in July that it knew as far back as 1982 that asbestos fibers from a W.R. Grace Co. mill in Libby, Mont., were implicated in the deaths of residents (casualties now number as many as 200) but did not notify the town. The agency had dismissed its own toxicology study and squelched follow-up studies, relying instead on company assurances that asbestos levels were minimal in its building-insulation materials.

Krystin Nicely, 14, in a July St. Petersburg Times story about the closing of the 28th Street Drive-In theater (which her mother, now 30, and father had frequented on dates): "If it wasn't for that place, I wouldn't be here." And Maryland legislator Van T. Mitchell, during a March debate in the House of Delegates on a bill banning marriages between first cousins: "If this law was in effect in 1918, I (wouldn't) be (here).

News of the Weird reported in March 2000 that the stretch of I-95 between West Palm Beach, Fla., and Miami (and connector freeways) was the "impalement capital" of the country because of the frequency with which unsecured objects fly off of speeding trucks. In May, Yanier Torres escaped decapitation by moving his head a couple of inches, avoiding a sheet of 3/4-inch-thick iron that had flown off of a flatbed truck, through his windshield, and which sliced his headrest in two. As is typical, the truck's driver did not stop, and, said a Highway Patrol spokesman, "was (probably) not even aware that this object fell off his truck."

"Higher Education": A Ferris State University (Big Rapids, Mich.) freshman died in March of excessive alcohol consumption (0.42 level) during a drinking game. An intoxicated Keene (N.H.) State College student was killed in May while celebrating his 21st birthday when he jumped into a dangerous waterfall despite the pleadings of eight friends not to do it. A University of California at Davis senior choked to death on his own vomit in April (0.54 blood-alcohol level) after downing 21 drinks at a bar on the day he turned 21.

An Ohio law went into effect imposing a five-day waiting period for a person to buy five or more kegs of beer at the same time. A 34-year-old woman, "Queen Shahmia" (God's only daughter), was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering her servants/disciples to commit five robberies while she lounged at resort hotels (Fort Myers, Fla.). Seven nudists had their feet badly seared in a mesquite-wood firewalking ceremony at a naturists' convention (Jacumba, Calif.). United Kingdom coast guard ships off Wales rescued boater Eric Abbott, 56, for the 11th time this year (cumulative cost: about $90,000), owing to Abbott's habit of "navigating" mainly by an automobile club atlas.

(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 U.S. Department of Agriculture is actively proposing that animal carcasses with cancers, tumors or open sores be regarded merely as unaesthetic but safe for human consumption as long as the offending part is cut away. The proposal is part of a general loosening of slaughterhouse inspection standards, whose public comment period ends Aug. 29. One critic already weighed in, saying she did not want to "eat pus from a chicken that has pneumonia," but also included as benign by the proposal are glandular swellings, infectious arthritis and diseases caused by intestinal worms.

-- Devotees of the late, widely discredited psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) convened in upstate Maine in July to exchange papers on his most famous work, his "discovery" of the cosmic life force produced by sexual orgasm. The highlights of the conference were the presentations of more than a dozen variations of Reich's "orgone accumulator," which is a series of partially metal blankets or boxes in which a person wraps himself to attract the excess sexuality out of the body so as to prevent the neuroses caused by the energy that wells up from the lack of orgasm.

David W. Bolton, 45, was charged in July with assault for hitting a fellow boardinghouse resident in Clarkstown, N.Y., after trying at first to drive a sharpened wooden stake through the man's heart with a hammer. (Police said Bolton told them he was acting on "instructions from a higher authority.") Two weeks later, in San Francisco, hitchhiker Eric David Knight was arrested for assaulting a 28-year-old driver who had picked him up; Knight had allegedly bit the driver in the neck and sucked his blood after thanking him for the ride, and had later told police, "I need the cure. I need blood." (San Francisco's 1998 "vampire killer" Joshua Rudiger had an alibi this time: He's in prison, serving 23 years to life.)

-- After a Schneiders Hot Dog promotion machine (the Blaster, intended to shoot free wieners into the stands at Toronto's SkyDome during baseball games) went awry in April, pulverizing the franks and spraying fragments on fans, a vegetarian Blue Jays' fan told the National Post newspaper she would sue if she got spritzed. "What if I had my mouth open and a piece of hot dog landed in my mouth?"

-- Homeless man Dennis Downey, 42, complained to a Chicago Tribune reporter in March that the sprinkler system at a building on Lower Michigan Avenue was drenching him and some colleagues as they had settled in for the night. "They're trying to get rid of the homeless," said Downey. (The building manager said the sprinklers are necessary to clean the feces and urine left by the homeless who camp alongside the building at night.)

-- In March, to bolster his client's defense that a surreptitious police station videotape (which caught Constable Graham Hunt taking something from a room) violated his right of privacy, Ontario lawyer Clayton Ruby pointed out that later in the tape was another officer, caught receiving oral sex in the room from a female police employee. Obviously, reasoned Ruby, police officers who used that particular room had a legitimate "expectation of privacy" (beyond the reach of a surreptitious video) because, otherwise, why would the other two employees have gone in there for oral sex?

-- In May, the Quebec Superior Court and Quebec's Administrative Tribunal ruled that Alain Desbiens had the right to have his tattoo removed at government expense in that the tattoo adversely affects his psychological well-being. The estimated cost of erasing the blue and gray caricature of a death's head above his right bicep was estimated at $2,000 to $3,000.

-- Felicia Vitale, 41, told reporters in February that she would sue the New York Police Department for wrongly arresting her after she walked away from a sting operation at Staten Island Mall carrying a planted purse containing $2. She admitted that the purse did not belong to her but denied she intended to steal it and pointed out that she suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and thus must go through a list of tasks in rigid order every day and that she simply had many other things to do before she got around to returning the purse.

-- According to an April Seattle Times report, the Great Ape Legal Project, headed by a Seattle lawyer, is moving toward a goal of demonstrating, within the next decade, that chimpanzees should have some of the same legal rights as humans (beyond being mere property, according to the Times, "to (becoming) people with rights to life and liberty and perhaps even the pursuit of happiness"). Though it would be possible for a chimp to sue his guardian, a reassuring spokesperson said animals such as cockroaches and ants "will never be eligible for any kind of rights."

Just three months ago, in mentioning dental-office abuses, News of the Weird reported on the Australian dentist hauled before the licensing board for the unauthorized practice of relieving facial pain by administering ozone through the patient's rectum. The practice apparently is known in the United States, as well. Two weeks after that issue of News of the Weird appeared, a jury in Scranton, Pa., convicted Richard Harley and his wife, Jacqueline Kube, for defrauding investors in their company that offered to treat AIDS patients by pumping a mixture of ozone and oxygen into the rectum, at $250 per session, sometimes prescribed for 30 days at a time.

Inman, S.C., police arrested Donald W. Melton, 29, in July and charged him with robbing a CCB Bank. He was easily tracked down on his getaway because he had failed to ask for a bag at the bank to carry the money away in and thus was left to stuff it all into his pants and socks. The result was that enough of the currency came loose during his run that residents along his escape route called police every few minutes to report that another bill had been spotted, and within 40 minutes of the robbery, Melton was in handcuffs.

-- An Iranian judge jailed a man for ogling the judge's wife, but hundreds rioted in support of the man, who they said is merely cross-eyed (Ghir, Iran). Centers for Disease Control found that people who go online to look for sex partners are more likely to have sexually transmitted diseases than those who do not look for sex online. The governor of Arkansas (where 12 percent of the population live in mobile homes) and his wife moved into a triple-wide manufactured home next to the Governor's Mansion, which will be undergoing repairs for the next year. A holdup man saved his own life by forgetting to load his gun before robbing a pawnshop; the clerk wrestled it away from him and pulled the trigger, but the crook escaped (Miami, Fla.).

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

-- William Draheim was fired from his job in St. Louis Park, Minn., in May, for sexual harassment for talking excessively about his pierced penis at work (almost exclusively, he said, in response to questions from co-workers). His workplace was Video Age Inc., whose only line of business is distributing hardcore pornographic videos and sex accessories, large inventories of which fill the offices, which are staffed with telephone operators to take catalog orders from customers, some of whom inevitably talk dirty to the operators. (In fact, each employment applicant is required to certify that he or she understands the nature of the workplace.)

-- According to police and health department authorities in Huntsville, Ala., in July, a father apparently purchased several poisonous snakes for his 13-year-old son to keep around the house as pets, but after the boy was bitten by one, he may have hidden the snakes for fear that they would be confiscated. Included are a black mamba (generally regarded as the world's deadliest) and a gaboon viper (only somewhat less deadly), and at press time, authorities could not rule out that the snakes had simply been released into the countryside, which would significantly lower the quality of life around Huntsville. Said a city health control officer, "It's a macho thing to have venomous snakes. I guess stupid supersedes macho."

A June Wall Street Journal dispatch from Tokyo reported the trend of "serial divorce": Young married women desiring to keep their maiden names on official documents circumvent Japanese law by momentarily divorcing when a government document is needed, and then usually remarrying their husbands immediately afterward. And cosmetics firms' sales of products to reduce or mask the odor of "noneal" are booming, according to a March New York Times report; noneal is a chemical released in greater quantity as people age and in super-hygienic Japan creates the unpopular "old man's smell."

-- In May, Italian female basketball star Fabiana Benedettini, 30, surprised her family and the sports world by abruptly taking vows as a nun and joining the Santa Margherita of Cortona sanctuary. Also recently becoming nuns in Italy: a marchesa, Ginevra Rossi di Montelera; a hotel heiress, Maria Luisa De Angelis (who abandoned her husband and children in the process); an industrial heiress, Idina Ferruzzi; a volleyball all-star, Maria Teresa Ciancio; and, at least joining a convent temporarily, a porn star, Luana Borgia.

-- In June, the Civil Status Court in Alexandria, Egypt, ruled that the Islamic requirement for divorce (after certain preconditions are met, the husband tells the wife three times, "I divorce you") must be spoken in person and not delivered by e-mail. At press time, a similar question was at issue in a divorce case in United Arab Emirates.

-- An April New York Times dispatch from Zhdanovo, Russia (just north of Mongolia), reported on the cultural use of vodka as holy water in that Buryat region, whose predominant religion is shamanism. Mongol devotees sometimes sip vodka during the entire 90-minute services, which brings, according to one shaman, "moral calmness" and the improved ability to "talk to god" (although shamanism includes more than 100 gods).

-- First Things First: Catholic priest Charles Mentrup, 41, was stabbed by a parishioner during confession in May; he survived but refused to identify the man who did it because of his vow of confidentiality. And at Christmastime 1999, a drunken guest disturbed the Cistercian monks of Caldey Island (Wales) by singing Welsh hymns and carols while they were celebrating their 12 hours of "Great Silence," but no one moved to quiet the guest because, after all, the monks could not speak.

-- In March, according to a Dallas police report, pro hockey goaltender Ed Belfour, desperately trying to avoid a public intoxication arrest, offered two patrolmen $100,000 to forget the whole thing, and by the time they were set to haul him to the station, Belfour had vomited all over himself and upped the offer to $1 billion.

-- Thieves With Identity Crises: Three gangs of cross-dressing male thieves were operating in three cities during May. Two of the three gangs cross-dressed as a distraction, in that the four black males working Annapolis, Md., stores were "very unattractive and obviously males," according to a police spokesperson, and the crew of four that hit stores in Calgary, Alberta, had been spotted parked in their car at a mall, donning dresses to resemble elderly women. However, a cast of about a dozen drag queens operating in Fort Lauderdale and Miami stores used their stolen credit cards mostly for female fashions and cosmetics.

According to an official in the regional government of Madrid, Spain, a public-financed guidebook for hikers was erroneously distributed despite the agency's dissatisfaction with some of the contract writer's geographical descriptions. In the book, the mountains of the Cuerda de las Cabrillas range near Madrid "are just like women -- the desire that they inspire is inversely proportional to the number of times one gets on top of them," and La Maliciosa mountain "has a pair of highly suggestive protuberances" that are "black, svelte, (hard) and slippy, like Naomi Campbell's loins."

News of the Weird reported in 1988 on an Indianapolis substitute teacher's suspension for arranging for the well-behaved kids in her fifth-grade class to line up and spit on the ones that had been bad, as they walked the line. Among this year's classroom line-up-and-punish incidents: A sixth-grade teacher allegedly assigned good kids to line up and punch a bad one (Somerset County, N.J., May); a preschool principal allegedly urged good 4-year-olds to line up and bite a bad one (Boston, June); and, in fact, second-grade teacher Madeline Raven, 27, allegedly had good kids line up and spit on a bad one, which forced the teacher to find the boy another shirt since the one he wore to school was thus covered with saliva (Sugar Land, Texas, April).

A 22-year-old bungee jumper was killed in the Swiss Alps in May when guides for the tour company Adventure World, according to local police, failed to change cords after people had finished their earlier, much-longer jump. Two weeks earlier, at a regional track and field meet in Turnov, Czech Republic, an 18-year-old female athlete was hit on the head and killed by an errant toss by the country's best hammer thrower.

A 3-foot-long iguana escaped from captivity, prompting a police alert, given its propensity for aggression toward menstruating women (St. Austell, England). A soiled diaper, in a plastic bag left in a 100-degree sun for three days, combusted, setting afire the walls of two apartments, causing $3,000 damage (Ennis, Texas). A disabled man had his motorized wheelchair stolen at gunpoint in a routine street mugging (Milwaukee). One of Rio de Janeiro's notorious bus thieves, who had just snatched about $800 from passengers, escaped by leaping out a door but landed in the midst of a 400-officer police force guarding the municipal governor during a downtown ceremony.

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