-- Campaign 2000: In September, Robert Salzberg finished a strong second (26 percent) in the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat from Sarasota, Fla., despite revealing that he would soon plead insanity (that a robot was attacking him) to a charge that he beat up a police lieutenant inside a station house in March. In Maryland, the estranged wife of U.S. Rep. Albert Wynn (husband and wife are black) is contributing a political telephone ad for his opponent, charging that Wynn "does not respect black women (because) he left me for a white woman." And Lanett, Ala., city councilman Barry Waites was defeated in August, largely through the effort of candidate Rod Spraggins, who finished fourth but whose only issue was to accuse Waites of murdering his own wife two years earlier (but Waites was never charged).

-- Among recent news reports of stupefyingly high real estate prices in the San Francisco area: a plain three-bedroom house in a nice Palo Alto neighborhood, offered for $3.5 million (renting for $12,000 a month), and a 1,000-square-foot house in San Francisco that "needs everything done to it," according to an agent, offered at $279,000 but which will sell for much more because as of the first of September, 48 people had bid on it.

Newsstand clerk Mike Redina, 44, who is blind, was fired in July because an underage boy illegally bought cigarettes from him (Hauppauge, N.Y.). Chevron lost an employment discrimination case in May because its doctor recommended rejecting an application from a man with a liver disorder because the work site was a highly toxic part of a refinery, and the company would almost certainly have been liable if the man had gotten sicker (El Segundo, Calif.). Parents Michael and Jill Carroll were forced by a court to give their son, 7, his prescribed Ritalin to regulate his school behavior despite the boy's loss of sleep and appetite (Albany, N.Y.).

-- Never Laid a Hand on Him: Otto Benjamin II, 39, was arrested in May in Fayetteville, Ark., and charged with second-degree battery after police found that he had been disciplining his 15-year-old son by biting him, including several recent incidents that had left permanent scars (on the ear, upper nose area, lip, finger, left thigh, shoulder and right forearm).

-- Teachers as Role Models: Columbia University literature professor Edward Said, 65, visiting Lebanon on July 3, was photographed throwing stones at Israeli soldiers at the border. (He later explained, "The spirit of the place infected everyone with the same impulse, to make a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation had ended.") And two weeks later, New York City high school teacher Ryan Ward, 30, was charged with grand larceny after he allegedly rode his bike past a woman on East 26th Street in Manhattan and swiped her purse.

-- Des Moines, Iowa, anesthesiologist Eric Meek filed a lawsuit in July against surgeon Scott Neff over a February incident that Meek felt took their ongoing professional feud too far. Meek said that when he walked into the operating room to work with Neff on a routine hip replacement at Mercy Medical Center, Neff grabbed the hose attached to a fluid-draining machine and banished Meek from the room by spraying him with a "blood-laden" liquid.

-- Jeff Schmidt was fired in May after 19 years as a staff writer for the magazine Physics Today just after the publication of his book "Disciplined Minds," which argues that a hierarchical organization's structure almost guarantees that its workers cannot devote their full energy to the job. He was canned after a supervisor came across a publicity interview by Schmidt, admitting playfully that he had sometimes worked on the book during office hours at Physics Today.

-- In July, Genevieve Simenon, a great niece of the late French mystery writer Georges Simenon, confessed to killing her husband and expressed dismay that, but for one detail, she would have gotten away with it, just as the perpetrators in Georges Simenon's stories believe they will. Genevieve had injected her husband with Valium, then beat him to death, scrubbed the crime scene, and convinced the family physician that her husband had merely suffered a heart attack and that the bruises on his face came when he hit his head on a table. However, the funeral director looked under the husband's long hair and noticed that his ear had been beaten off in the attack.

-- Additional Recent Ironies: An arsonist burned down the Heart of Fire Church (Fern Creek, Ky., June). The founder of an alcoholics' self-help group that advocated allowing recovery through moderate drinking pled guilty to DUI that caused the deaths of two people (Ellensburg, Wash., June). A very abled executive with the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind was fined $100 for issuing himself a handicapped parking card (Boston, August).

In July, the Law Society of Alberta, Canada, announced it had begun an inquiry into whether lawyer John M. Grindley should lose his license to practice because he had harmed the reputation of the profession. Grindley had been convicted in June of drunk driving, but the Law Society filed charges against him only later, after a residential eviction order had been upheld against him based on an inspector's having declared Grindley's home so grungy and putrid-smelling that it was a hazard to public health. Grindley admitted that his apartment is "messy" but said he would fight the charge.

One of the most widely circulated offbeat stories of 1999 was the Michigan conviction of canoeist Timothy Boomer under a seldom-used state law banning public cussing. (He used the F word at least 25 times, in an area occupied by recreational boaters, including many kids.) In May 2000, Sioux Falls (S.D.) high school senior Oakly Haines, who had just won the gold medal in the 400-meter dash at the state track tournament, was disqualified when two volunteer officials overheard him cuss at himself ("damn it" and "son of a bitch") that he had failed to beat the record time of his older brother. Said one of the tattling officials, "When you have children, you want them to be exposed (only) to wonderful, good things."

In June, a 16-year-old boy accidentally fatally shot himself in the head while fleeing a sheriff's deputy who had tried to question him; according to the deputy, the boy had clumsily attempted to shoot back by firing over his shoulder on the run. And in August, during a workplace scuffle in Irvine, Calif., one man grabbed another in a headlock, pulled his gun, and shot him in the face, but the bullet passed through the target's cheek and into the shooter's own chest, killing him.

Federal prison officials, angered at a recent bribery convict's boast that he planned a lot of golf at a minimum-security facility, shipped him instead to the same New York lockup as John Gotti's son (Lake Placid, N.Y.). A veteran skydiver got his foot caught outside the airplane door two miles up and dangled for 30 minutes, and was still hanging during the landing, but was not seriously hurt (Pittsburgh). An ex-Marine gunrunner and minor figure in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair was arrested for masturbating in a Kmart parking lot (Brookfield, Wis.). A 36-year-old driver was shot in the abdomen during a one-vehicle collision when a handgun in the glove compartment fired as it was jarred by the impact (Eastford, Conn.).

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

-- Muslim-dominated Pakistan allows a large, prosperous brewery to operate, even though its product is off-limits to 97 percent of the population and is regularly denounced by the nation's leaders, according to a July dispatch in the San Francisco Chronicle. Non-Muslims can purchase Murree Beer by applying for a consumption permit (stating religion, profession, income, drinking history, and for females, the name of her husband). Muslims are allowed to work at the factory, and apparently many Muslims pay consumption-permit holders to purchase beer for them.

-- Ms. Ezola Foster, who is Pat Buchanan's Reform Party running mate and a longtime conservative skeptical of most government social programs, admitted in August that she had submitted a false document in 1996 in order to get California worker compensation benefits. According to a Los Angeles Times report, she claims now that she never had the "mental illness" that entitled her to draw money for about a year before her retirement as a schoolteacher in 1997. Rather, she now says: "I (had) two choices to survive. Since (my condition) wasn't physical, they make it mental, don't they? If I don't have a broken leg or they don't see blood, or I'm not dead, they said I have to be crazy." Her "mental illness" was worked out "between my doctor and my attorney. It's whatever the doctor said that, after working with my attorney, was best to help me."

Arrested in Bologna, Italy, in July and charged with burglarizing a pasta shop: Mr. Stefano Spaghetti. Scratched, as an inappropriately named horse, by Saratoga racetrack officials from the opening-day races in July: a 2-year-old colt named Mufahker (which means "glory" in Arabic). The arresting officer, in an undercover sting operation that charged two 46-year-old men with soliciting sex with other men at Hugh MacRae Park in Wilmington, N.C., in July: Sgt. Bud LaCock. Charged with allowing underage teen-agers to have a keg party in her home near Pittsburgh in March: Susan Beer, 50.

-- Rancher Marvin Edison Hale, 72, was arrested in August in Hays County, Texas (near Austin), after allegedly shooting to death a Department of Public Safety trooper who had tried to pull Hale over for violating the state's seat-belt law. Hale has been feuding with the government since 1982, when his ranch increased in value and property taxes were raised, and a 1999 seat-belt ticket apparently set him off. DPS had advised troopers to be cautious, especially on seat-belt violations, because Hale appeared ready to fight to the death.

-- Fred Craig continues with his intensive, 14-month campaign against a Fashion Bug store in Fulton, N.Y., according to an August Syracuse Herald-Journal report, which started over a pair of $3 panties for his wife that the store would not take back, even though the panties had shredded during their first washing. Craig picketed the mall store, picketed the mall owner's headquarters, picketed the home of a mall executive, and drove around with a large trailer-sign denouncing Fashion Bug. Finally, Craig won a $36 judgment in Small Claims Court but is still picketing because the mall has now barred him from the premises altogether.

-- Donna Harris-Lewis (widow of basketball player Reggie Lewis) announced in August that she would appeal her May lawsuit defeat and thus continue her quest to pin her husband's death on Boston cardiologist Gilbert Mudge. Mr. Lewis, with his wife's blessing, had continued to play basketball despite 12 cardiologists' opinions that his heart was too weak, and when he had a second attack, Harris-Lewis had him transferred surreptitiously to Mudge's hospital because Mudge had given a more favorable basketball prognosis. After Mr. Lewis died anyway, Harris-Lewis (who collected about $12 million on her husband's contract with the Boston Celtics) sued Mudge because, as she told a Boston Magazine reporter, "I need to be taken care of, too. Everybody has to say I'm greedy, but I do want my money back this time around. Why should I lose?"

-- Despite its endearment as a pet in the United States, guinea pigs continue to serve many needs in their native Peru, according to a June Associated Press report. Almost all rural households raise the animals, which are a major source of protein, but folk healers ("curanderos") also use guinea pigs to diagnose illnesses and remove bad luck. The guinea pig acts as kind of a CT scan; the "doctor" rubs the animal over a patient's body and then cuts it open to check for discoloration because the guinea pig is believed to pick up sympathetic illnesses in the same part of the body as the patient's illness.

-- As Russia's economy and drive toward democracy falter, consumption of vodka increases, but drinking habits long ago created a public health crisis for the country, according to a June Boston Globe story. Life expectancy is down to 59; average vodka consumption is three bottles a week; and two-thirds of all adult men are in fact drunk when they die.

-- The bond between mother and son in Italy (called "mammismo") appears to be growing even stronger, according to a May dispatch from Rome by the Chicago Tribune. According to Italy's premier sociology research organization, 70 percent of Italian men reach the age of 30 while still living at home, and 43 percent of married men live within a half-mile of their mothers. Of the Italian men not living at home, 70 percent call Mamma every single day. In explaining her relationship with her son, Guiseppa Liuzzo, 88, could be speaking for many mothers: "He's very attached to me because I spoiled him."

In July, the two owners of Hi-Po Inc., which had won a state environmental contract to clean up diesel fuel from two Ann Arbor, Mich., bodies of water, were indicted in Detroit for secretly having dumped the diesel fuel in the water in the first place, in order to create the need for the cleanup contract.

News of the Weird has occasionally reported technological and architectural advances in bathrooms, from full-service toilets (1988) to Singapore's (1996) and South Korea's (1999) national pride in having the world's cleanest or fanciest public restrooms. A July 2000 Wall Street Journal survey on the state of restroom design mentioned the one at the China Grill (Miami), inside which users can order drinks, and the one at the Mandalay Bay casino (Las Vegas), where patrons can use 11 glass cabanas that house televisions playing music videos. At a Royalton Hotel (New York City) restroom, a lavish waterfall is triggered when a patron enters, and at Bar 89 (New York City), the stalls have clear glass doors that become liquid-crystal-activated, non-see-through only when the door is tightly closed.

Life Imitates the World Wrestling Federation: Bank robberies in Worthington, Ohio (July), and Oshawa, Ontario (December 1999), were foiled when the robbers managed to get clobbered by chair shots to the head delivered by, respectively, the president of the Guernsey Bank in Worthington and a 64-year-old man, who was selling raffle tickets next door to the Bank of Montreal branch, heard gunshots, and went to investigate.

Anti-child-abuse vigilantes vandalized a pediatrician's home, apparently confusing her occupation with the word "pedophile" (Newport, Wales). Workers at a seafood plant found a human head inside a 5-foot-long cod and tentatively identified it as that of a former crew member on the boat that caught the fish (Cairns, Australia). A 26-year-old man charged with driving a stolen Mercedes, asked the judge if he could use the car as collateral for bail (Port Washington, Wis.). A candidate for sheriff left town mysteriously after having been caught spreading sugar on the ground (to draw ants) the day before his opponent's fund-raising picnic (Macclenny, Fla.).

-- An August Wall Street Journal dispatch from Nuoro, Sardinia (Italy), described locals' love for "casu marzu" ("rotten cheese"), brown lumps of sheep dairy, crawling with maggots, a "viscous, pungent goo that burns the tongue" and whose "wiggling worms (often) jump straight toward the eyes with ballistic precision." Though the cheese is banned by the government, a black market has pushed the price to double that for ordinary cheese. Some locals believe the maggots provide authentication, in that it is only when the maggots die that the cheese is inedible.

-- Damanhur, a 23-year-old, largely self-sufficient commune in northern Italy, features an underground, five-story-deep temple (an expansion of 10 times the space is under way); 500 full-time residents; its own currency, schools and tax code; and renowned workmanship that produces Tiffany-style glasswork and silk and cashmere fabrics for European designer labels. According to a July New York Times report, Damanhur was a secret until 1992, when an expatriate sued to get his money back, causing the tax collector to take an interest. Among the passions of the New-Age group are active experiments with time travel and an absolute ban (Damanhur's only "rule") on smoking.

In an interview in May in the trade journal of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's safety standards program, Marthe Kent, said she loves her job: "I absolutely love it. I was born to regulate. I don't know why, but that's very true. So as long as I'm regulating, I'm happy." Kent, who heads the agency's controversial ergonomics program (which oversees the effects of, for example, furniture design on back stress), said, "If you put out a reg, it matters. I think that's really where the thrill comes from. And it is a thrill; it's a high."

-- Motorist Michael Eck, 43, a Teamsters truck driver, endured an ultimate-experience, 12-minute thrill ride in his Chevrolet Impala in August on Interstate 83 near York, Pa. According to police reports, another truck driver, James E. Trimble, 65, felt Eck had cut him off during a lane change and angrily bumped Eck's car with his Peterbilt 18-wheeler at 60 mph, and did not stop bumping him. One hit damaged Eck's fuel pump, disabling the engine, and Trimble continued to ram the Impala at full speed for eight miles ("I counted 24 bumps until I stopped counting," said Eck) until police pulled him over and arrested him. Eck was not injured but was disappointed that police would not let him fistfight Trimble before they took him away.

-- Latest Survivors: Eugene Slocum, 52, walked three miles with a fractured neck to get help after a rural truck collision (Brighton, Colo., May). Leslie Roth, 35, suffered only a minor headache after being struck by two separate bolts of lightning on July 15 while with an Outward Bound wilderness school group (Killarney, Ontario). Jose Rojas Mayarita, 39, was incapacitated in his isolated boat for two days before help arrived, after a 10-foot-long marlin leaped from the water and speared him, penetrating all the way through Mayarita's abdomen (near Acapulco, Mexico, July).

-- To encourage hunting, Canada's Ministry of Environment introduced regulations in August to allow children as young as 12 to learn to shoot ducks and geese. The country has 60 percent fewer hunters than 10 years ago, said the Canadian Wildlife Service, which has led to animal overpopulations. Participating kids must have had a safety class and must be accompanied by a licensed hunter at least 18 years old, but gun-control and children's advocates were nonetheless enraged.

-- Mount Clemens, Mich., attorney Michael L. Steinberg was sentenced to 10 days in jail for contempt of court in May as the result of his repeated refusal to obey Judge Michael Martone's admonitions to turn off his cell phone in the courtroom. The last straw for Judge Martone was when Steinberg chose to interrupt his questioning of a witness to take a call.

-- In June, Darryl Ennis, 34, called 911 in Slidell, La., for the sole reason of getting police assistance to force his mother to cook him some pork chops. When he allegedly verbally abused the emergency operator for declining his request, officers went to his home and arrested him.

-- Very Much Opposed to Becoming a Grandmother: In August, Glenda Dowis was arrested by police in Lake Clarke Shores, Fla., near West Palm Beach, and charged with forcing her 16-year-old pregnant daughter at gunpoint into the Aware Woman Medical Clinic for an abortion. After Dowis allegedly told the staff that she would "blow (her daughter's) brains out" if she refused the abortion, someone called 911. According to a detective, Dowis is a construction worker who had been trying very hard to social climb and thus felt that having a pregnant teen-age daughter would ruin her standing.

The 21-year-old Lower Paxton Township, Pa., man (still unidentified in press reports) whose teen-age girlfriend used Quick Tite glue to bond his penis to his abdomen on July 11 to punish him for cheating on her, to the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News: "She knew I was a dog and she found out I was fooling around on her, but it shouldn't have come down to that. She could've just slapped me or something."

-- During its first year (1988), News of the Weird reported on a Houston fellow named Patrick Johnson, who was not a bus-company employee but who liked nothing better than to dress up in company uniforms, hop into an unoccupied transit bus and drive a route, picking up and discharging passengers to satisfy his love of buses. In June 2000, Pittsburgh Port Authority police arrested a man with the same obsession: Ronald Johnson (no relation, as far as authorities know), 21, who admitted that he had taken three buses out in recent weeks and picked up and discharged riders. A Port Authority executive said Johnson "does have (bus-)driving skills," had a uniform, and apparently "loves buses."

July 4, 2000: A 43-year-old man in Lombard, Ill., and a 34-year-old man on New York's Long Island were killed when their unlicensed fireworks did not immediately ignite and the men peered down the launching tubes as if that would help them detect the problem, only to catch the explosion full-force. Also, a teen-ager was killed in Des Moines, Iowa, when a firecracker tossed out the window of their SUV blew back inside and exploded, igniting other fireworks, which caused the driver to crash into a pole.

City College of New York announced it will provide students, staff and faculty with professional philosophy counseling in its health-care facility. Officials at Cape Canaveral finally learned the origin of the plastic bags of urine found recently in a launch-pad complex; a worker was too lazy to use the rest room, which was an elevator ride away. Police called to an apartment where a man had been dead for a week were held at bay for two hours by the man's 18 cats, aggressively guarding the body (Cairo, Egypt). A 29-year-old man who broke into a house at night and fondled a sleeping woman's thigh was chased by the woman's boyfriend out the door, where the molester tripped and broke his leg (Chambersburg, Pa.).

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