In 1998, according to a report on the Agence France Presse wire, Cairo lawyer Mustafa Raslan filed a $1 billion lawsuit in Damanhur, Egypt, against President Clinton, alleging that Clinton's alleged sexual antics made it more difficult for him to raise his own children with good moral standards. "I don't know what to tell (them)," he said. (And in December 1997, Sheik Buddy Rasheed, who was the mayor of Bassilya, Jordan, told reporters he wanted to sue Clinton for naming his dog Buddy, which has caused Rasheed a loss of prestige locally, but that he was having trouble finding a lawyer to take the case.)

Minneapolis firefighter Gerald Brown, 55, who was fired in 1995 for abuse of sick leave, but who won a contentious grievance hearing and was reinstated with 18 months' back pay, was scheduled to return to work on June 2, 1997. When that day arrived, he called in sick.

-- American Ingenuity at Work: From a 1999 police report in The Messenger (Madisonville, Ky.), concerning two trucks being driven strangely on a rural road: A man would drive one truck 100 yards, stop, walk back to a second truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the first truck, stop, walk back to the first truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the second truck, and so on. According to police, the man's brother had passed out drunk in one of the trucks, so the man decided to drive both trucks home. (Not surprisingly, a blood-alcohol test showed that he, too, was impaired.)

-- Ms. Courtney Mann, the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, who worked as a tax preparer and was a single mother, was rebuffed in an attempt to join a Ku Klux Klan-sponsored march in Pittsburgh in April 1997. Though she had been in the NAAWP for at least four years, the Klan turned her down because she is black. Said the Grand Dragon, incredulously: "She wanted to stay at my house (during rally weekend). She's all confused, man. I don't think she knows she's black.

-- According to a 1999 Boston Globe story, Mr. Wai Y. Tye, a retired Raytheon Corp. chemist, had lived without complaint in the same 200-square-foot room in the downtown Boston YMCA continuously to that point since 1949. "When you're busy working and playing tennis," he told a reporter, "when you come home, you don't have much time to take care of an apartment." The bathroom is down the hall to the left, and he said he did not mind the exposed pipes or the linoleum floor or having to use a hotplate.

-- Surgeon John Ronald Brown, 77, whose medical license was revoked in 1977 but who continued to practice on the dark side, was convicted in San Diego in 1999 of second-degree murder for a botched operation that brought to light the rare malady of apotemnophilia. Those afflicted - - said to be fewer than 200 people worldwide - - get sexual gratification by having an arm or leg removed. The Internet underground had spread word of Brown's willingness to perform the surgery without asking embarrassing questions (such as "why?").

Within a six-week period in the summer of 1998, these events occurred: A juror in Judge Esmond Faulks' court in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, eagerly asked the judge for the defendant's date of birth so he could draw up an astrology chart to help him decide the case. (He was removed.) Then a 31-year-old woman in Oakley, Calif., felt a mysterious bump as she was pulling out of her driveway, and to help determine what it was, she said, she drove over it again, and then a third time. (It was her 3-year-old son, who suffered a broken leg.) And then, Wall Street Journal reporter James S. Hirsch, writing a story on the Boston Globe's recent troubles with columnists making up things, noted in his story that the Globe's corporate spokespersons had no comment on the matter, a fact which he later admitted he made up. (He was fired.)

Through the years, it appears that Oklahoma is certainly one of the least friendly states for criminals. For example, in 1996, convicted rapists Allan Wayne McLaurin and Darron Bennalford Anderson were re-sentenced by a jury in Tulsa, after an appeals court said their original sentences totaling 6,475 years were based on faulty jury instructions. Armed with the proper instructions, the jury then tacked an additional 260 centuries onto the sentences: a total of 21,250 years for McLaurin and 11,250 for Anderson.

The Iowa Supreme Court in 1996 turned down inmate Kirk Livingood's attempt to sue Philip Negrete based on the state's domestic abuse law. Negrete was Livingood's cellmate, and, according to Livingood, beat and tormented him.

-- Just outside a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., courtroom in 1997, defendant Mark Gusow, age 36 and 140 pounds, told his court-appointed attorney, Laura Morrison, age 52 and 150 pounds, that he was about to tell the judge he wanted a new lawyer. Morrison tried persuade him to stay outside and talk about it some more, but Gusow broke away and headed through the doors, at which point Morrison allegedly leaped at him, clamped on a headlock, and raked his face with her fingernails.

-- James Conlon, the music director of the Paris Opera, accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with his baton while he was in Ohio rehearsing Stravinsky's "Nightingale" for the Cincinnati May Festival in 1998. He returned to work shortly afterward.

Michael Guilbault, 19, pleaded guilty in 1997 to robbing a Raleigh, N.C., convenience store. According to the prosecutor, a delayed getaway helped police make the capture. Guilbault and his accomplice were to flee the store and meet their friends Heather Beckwith, 18, and Curtis Johnson, 19, at the nearby getaway car, but when the robbers arrived, they found the doors locked and the couple inside "in the act," as the prosecutor put it. Guilbault and his colleague were forced to wait until the couple had finished before they could get in the car, but by that time witnesses had noticed the two men yelling and making a commotion and had summoned police.

-- A basketball player for Southeastern Oklahoma State University was killed near Paris, Texas, in 1997 when the driver of the car in which he was riding lost control after it was hit by a flying cow. (The cow had been sent airborne when it was hit by another car.)

-- The family of the late Russell U. Shell filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in 1998 against The Other Side nightclub in Fitchburg, Mass., charging that Mr. Shell choked to death on a miniature plastic penis that allegedly had been placed into his drink glass as a prank by an employee. (The club owner said Mr. Shell merely suffered a seizure and that the charm was found on the floor beside Mr. Shell's body.)

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

A Police Officer's Dream Question: Vincent Morrissey's police brutality lawsuit went to trial in New Haven, Conn., in 1997, and the alleged perp, West Haven police officer Ralph Angelo, was on the witness stand, claiming that Morrissey himself had provoked the encounter by swinging at Angelo. Morrissey's attorney, openly skeptical of Angelo's version of the incident, asked Angelo to demonstrate to the jury just how hard Morrissey had swung at him. Before the lawyer could clarify what he meant by "demonstrate," Officer Angelo popped the lawyer on the chin, staggering him and forcing an immediate recess.

-- In Milwaukee in 1997, Gary Arthur Medrow, 53, was charged with 24 counts of impersonating a police officer in connection with his unique obsession. What Medrow does, according to police (who have arrested him various times over the last 30 years for the same thing), is telephone a woman and try to convince her to lift another person in the room and carry her or him a short distance, sometimes telling the woman that he's a police officer and that it's an official request.

-- A 49-year-old woman in Scotland passed away in 1999, only the third starvation death among the world's alleged 5,000 disciples of Australian Ellen Greve who follow a no-food, no-water, "breatharian" diet. Greve sells her philosophy ("liberation from the drudgery of food and drink") to Westerners in part as conferring a spiritual connection with third-world hunger.

-- Only-in-California Rage: Ms. Cathomas Starbird, a member of the Sausalito, Calif., school board, was sentenced to 15 days in jail in 1999 for assaulting a female friend who had joined her and her husband to celebrate the husband's birthday. At the couple's houseboat after dinner, Ms. Starbird became furious at her friend, jumped on her, and bit her on the face because she had refused to engage in oral sex with the husband.

-- Ms. India Scott of Detroit dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon Ventimeglia starting in 1993 and the next year gave birth to a boy. Neither man knew about the other, and she told each he was the father. For two years, Scott managed to juggle the men's visitation rights, but in March 1997 when she announced she was marrying a new boyfriend and leaving the area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of "his" son. Only then did the men find out about each other. In May 1997, they took blood tests to settle the paternity once and for all. (Of course, the test revealed that the actual father was yet another man.)

-- Featured at the Donn Roll Contemporary Museum in Sarasota, Fla., in 1996 was Ms. Charon Luebbers' Menstrual Hut, a 6-by-6-by-5-foot isolation booth to symbolize the loneliness that society has forced upon menstruating women. Accompanying it were 28 canvasses created by Luebbers' pressing her face into whatever discharge was present in each of the 28 days of her cycle for one month, to show the contrast.

-- A 1998 Los Angeles Times report described the unusual, sustained success, in turbulent economic times, of the Cat Theater of Moscow, Russia, whose 300-seat shows remained sold out weeks in advance. Despite conventional wisdom that cats are untrainable, proprietor Yuri Kuklachev had them climbing poles, walking tightropes, pushing toy trains, leapfrogging over human backs, and balancing atop tiny platforms.

Ronnie Darnell Bell, 30, was arrested in Dallas in 1998 and charged with attempting, all alone, to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. (In the movie "Die Hard With a Vengeance," knocking off the New York Federal Reserve Bank required a small army of men and truckloads of weapons.) According to police, Bell was initially confused because there were no tellers, so he handed a security guard his note, reading, "This is a bank robbery of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, of Dallas, Texas, give me all the money. Thank you, Ronnie Darnell Bell." The guard pushed a silent alarm while an oblivious Bell chatted amiably, revealing to the guard that only minutes earlier he had tried to rob a nearby Postal Service office but that "they threw me out."

-- Author-athlete Sri Chinmoy sponsored an endurance race for runners in New York City in 1998, won by Istvan Sipos of Hungary, who finished the 3,100-mile course in 47 days (running from 6 a.m. until midnight). Four other runners competed on the concrete grounds of a Queens school, circling the facility about 115 times every day (only prizes: a trophy and a photo album). Said one runner, "To me, what the race is all about is the blossoming of the human spirit," but according to the wife of another, the runners are "nuts."

-- In January, Fort Worth, Texas, murder defendant Robert William Greer Jr. agreed to plead guilty to a 1988 killing provided that the judge kept him in the local jail for two more weeks before sending him to the penitentiary - - so that he could be assured of seeing the Super Bowl on TV. (Greer thought TV privileges in prison were less certain.) Greer was excited about the prospects that his favorite team, the Minnesota Vikings, would go all the way. Two days after his guilty plea, the Atlanta Falcons beat the Vikings to knock them out of the playoffs, but the guilty plea stood.

-- Scripps Howard News Service profiled former lawyer James Kelley of Washington, D.C., in 1997, one of a small group at his local church who are enthusiastic Episcopalians but who do not believe in God. Said Kelley, "We all love the incense, the stained glass windows, the organ music, the vestments, and all of that. It's drama. It's aesthetics. It's the ritual. That's neat stuff. I don't want to give all that up just because I don't believe in God."

-- As of May 1999, the city-supported Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik was closing in on its goal of housing at least one sample penis from every mammal native to Iceland. Only "man" and one species of whale were missing, and curator Sigurdur Hjartarson had solved the first problem with a letter from an 83-year-old former Lothario promising his organ upon his death (in an erect state if doctors can act quickly enough). Some whale species, though, have only the tips displayed because the entire organs are too long (10 feet) or too heavy (over 100 pounds).

Obituaries from the Tyler (Texas) Morning Telegraph during the first week in August 1998: Aug. 2, Mr. Charles E. "Catfish" Loving, 69. Aug. 4, Mr. W.S. "Bull" Barber, 79. Aug. 6, Mrs. Ada L. "Turtle" Jowell, 83.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Autobiography of the Least Interesting Man in America: According to a 1996 Seattle Times feature, Robert Shields, 77, of Dayton, Wash., is the author of perhaps the longest personal diary in history, nearly 38 million words on paper stored in 81 cardboard boxes covering the previous 24 years, in five-minute segments. Example: July 25, 1993, 7 a.m.: "I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin." 7:05 a.m.: "Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used 5 sheets of paper."

-- Joseph Kubic Sr., 93, was hospitalized in Stratford, Conn., in 1999 after he tried to punch an additional hole in his belt by hammering a pointy-nosed bullet through it. The bullet fired, ricocheted off a table and hit him in the neck. And four months after that, a 19-year-old man was hospitalized in Salt Lake City after undertaking a personal investigation into the question of whether it is possible to "fire" a .22-caliber bullet by placing it inside a straw and striking it with a hammer. Answer: sometimes (including this time; it went off and hit him in the stomach).

-- Tim Ekelman, 33, was hospitalized in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1998 with a collapsed lung, a sliced throat and voice-box damage after he, believing there was nothing to it, attempted to swallow a friend's 40-inch-long sword. (A professional sword swallower interviewed by the Hamilton Spectator said he would never stick a sword down his throat without first dulling the edges.) Said Ekelman's girlfriend, "I love him with all my heart, but what a jerk."

From time to time News of the Weird has reported on the fluctuating value of the late Italian artist Piero Manzoni's personal feces, which he canned in 1961, 30 grams at a time in 90 tins, as art objects (though, over the years, 45 have reportedly exploded). Their price to collectors has varied from about $28,000 for a tin in 1998 to $75,000 in 1993. In June 2002, the Tate Gallery in London excitedly announced it had purchased tin number 004 for about $38,000. (The price of 30 grams of gold at that time was a little over $300.)

-- In 1998, Charles Cornell, 31, won his lawsuit at the High Court in London, England, and was awarded the equivalent of about US$100,000 in damages. Cornell's insurance businesses failed when sales plummeted following his automobile accident. In the crash, he received a head injury that his doctors said left him with a gentler, more amiable personality that Cornell proved in court was unsuited for the insurance business.

-- According to a doctor's experience reported in the December 1997 issue of the journal Biological Therapies in Psychiatry, a 35-year-old female patient receiving a traditional anti-depressant was switched to bupropion, supposedly just as effective but without her regular drug's side effect of inhibiting orgasm. "Within one week, her ability to achieve orgasm and her enjoyment of sex had returned to normal," the doctor wrote. "After six weeks, however, she experienced (spontaneously, without physical stimulation) a three-hour orgasm while shopping."

-- Life Imitates a Rodney Dangerfield Joke: In 1996, Steven Hicks, 38, and his wife, Diana, 35, were sentenced to six months in jail in Cape May, N.J., for child abandonment. They had been having trouble with their unruly son, Christopher, 13, and while he was hospitalized, they had surreptitiously packed up and moved to Inglewood, Calif.

-- The Times of London reported in 1997 that when an employee of the James Beauchamp law firm in Edgbaston, England, recently killed himself, the firm billed his mother the equivalent of US$20,000 for the expense of finishing up his office work. Included in that amount was a bill for about US$2,300 to go to his home to find out why he didn't show up at work (thus finding his body), plus about US$250 to go to his mother's home, knock on her door, and tell her that her son was dead. (After unfavorable publicity, the firm withdrew the bill.)

-- No "Professional Courtesy": Marsha Watt, a graduate of Northwestern University School of Law and formerly an associate at the prestigious Winston and Strawn law firm in Chicago, was disciplined in 1997 by the Illinois Bar over her then-recent conviction for prostitution (i.e., the kind involving sex, for which her published rate, according to a personals ad cited in her conviction, was roughly three times what the law firm was billing for her services).

Commissioners in Florida's Seminole County (near Orlando) and Manatee County (Bradenton) passed ordinances in 1999 prohibiting public nudity by requiring women to cover at least 25 percent of the area of their breasts and at least 33 percent of the buttocks, with highly detailed instructions as to the points from which each coverage must be measured. (News of the Weird includes this refresher for law enforcement personnel: The formula for the lateral area of a cone is pi times radius times slant height; for the surface area of a sphere, it's pi times radius-squared; and, alas, for a flat surface, it's length times width.)

Diane Parker accompanied husband, Richard W. Parker (who had been accused of drug trafficking), to federal court in Los Angeles for a hearing in 1998. According to friends, Diane was such a believer in her husband's innocence that she had come prepared to put up her investment property and her mother's townhouse to make Richard's bail. However, when the prosecutor recited to the judge facts about Richard's double life that included a mistress and a safe house, Diane's expression changed dramatically within the space of a few minutes. According to a Los Angeles Times account, she removed her wedding ring with a flourish, walked out of court, quickly drove to an Orange County office where the mistress worked, and punched her several times before being restrained.

Portland State University library employee Mary Joan Byrd, 61, admitted in 1997 that she had taken more than $200,000 over the years from the school's copy machines. According to the student newspaper The Vanguard, she asked for leniency on the criminal charge against her (i.e., stealing from the state of Oregon) based on the theory that she was just temporarily using the money. That is, according to her, she spent almost the entire amount she took to feed her habit of playing Oregon's government-sponsored video poker machines, and since she never won, the state got all its money back.

In Dadeville, Ala., in 1999, Mr. Gabel Taylor, 38, who had just prevailed in an informal Bible-quoting contest, was shot to death by the angry loser. And in 1998, the Rev. John Wayne "Punkin" Brown Jr., 34, died of a rattlesnake bite while ministering at the Rock House Holiness Church in northeast Alabama near Scottsboro. In a landmark book on snake-handling preachers in the South ("Salvation on Sand Mountain" by Dennis Covington), the legendary Brown was called the "mad monk," the one most "mired in the ... blood lust of the patriarchs." His wife, Melinda, died in the same way three years earlier at a church in Middlesboro, Ky.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)