-- The Des Moines Register reported in July that among the treasures turned up at the excavation site of the steamboat Bertrand, which sank on the Missouri River near Omaha, Neb., in 1865, were four pocketknives with glass rivets that contained explicit, pornographic photos. They are evidence, said conservator Jeanne Harold, that people have not changed much in 131 years.

-- A coroner's inquest in Bexley, England, in September revealed the dominance that the late Karen Morgan, 29, apparently held over her parents and younger brother. Morgan was long bedridden with a brain tumor and pneumonia but so comprehensively dictated the family's eating, bathing and television-viewing habits that the three survivors did not think they could function without her. Police found notes showing all three intended to kill themselves as soon as they had enough money to buy sleeping pills.

-- The California Style in Crime: According to police in Toronto, Ontario, in August, two men who had just executed a well-planned jewelry store robbery made a successful getaway but only after stealing a car in front of the store in order to drive to their getaway car, which was parked a half a block away.

-- Six Edmonton, Alberta, police cruisers chased and stopped a Loomis armored car in May after a report that it was weaving erratically on the road and that a guard appeared to be signaling by repeatedly swinging a door open. There was no holdup, according to police spokesman Kelly Gordon; rather, one of the guards had passed gas, and the other guard was attempting to air out the cab.

-- A burglar raided an impotence clinic in Melbourne, Australia, in June and made off with dozens of bottles of drugs, including some powerful enough to induce five-day erections. Police were not certain whether the burglary was a prank or was committed by someone with a serious need.

-- Steve Tsoukalis, 59, manager of the Raintree Super Foodtown in Freehold Township, N.J., was charged with a hunting law violation in March when he fired his .410-gauge shotgun at some sparrows, which were inside his store at the time. Foodtown employees said wild birds flying into the store had been a problem for a while and that this was Tsoukalis' preferred method for dealing with them.

-- According to police in Huntington Beach, Calif., in June, it was the incessant chatter of Karen Pedersen, 52, that caused the man who was stealing her truck to give up and flee. She had intercepted the man before he could drive it away, and despite his having a gun, she just began talking nonstop. Said Pedersen later, "He sounded irritated. He said, 'I can't believe how this is going. This is like something out of the movies.'" After she gave him a T-shirt to wipe his fingerprints off the truck, he fled.

-- In March, the police department in Nagasaki, Japan, began an investigation of several officers for allegedly helping a suspect get a gun while in custody. According to a witness, the police promised the man a lighter sentence if he would buy a gun from a friend over the phone, have it delivered to the police station, and then have it confiscated from him so that the arresting officers could claim a prized weapons-charge arrest for their records.

-- Marine Cpl. Corban Backstrand, 24, stationed near Hiroshima, Japan, won a dare in June while out with friends. He stuck his head in front of a moving cargo train and was knocked unconscious.

-- In July, according to Gardner, Kan., Sheriff's Lt. Bill Garrett, a woman was treated at Olathe Medical Center for a scalp wound after her husband shot her while the two were playing hide-and-seek in the woods. According to Garrett, the husband said the couple had played hide-and-seek with handguns before.

-- In July, Owensboro, Ky., Road Department driver Sam Holinde, driving his 20-ton dump truck across a bridge with a "limit 3-ton" sign, got about halfway across before the bridge collapsed. The fall was short, and Holinde suffered only minor injuries.

-- In March, "Slim Jim" James Schmedding was hospitalized in fair condition with a serious head injury after a stunt by deejays at radio station KQCC-FM of Rock Island, Ill. Schmedding had volunteered to be packed in a 55-gallon drum and rolled down a flight of stairs. When he did not fit inside initially, he agreed to remove all the padding from the barrel to make room.

-- In June, the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs ordered Harold P. Weingold to provide $500,000 in restitution to customers who knew him as the "lottery doctor." During 1992 and 1993, Weingold somehow persuaded 2,000 people to buy an average of $250 worth of good-luck key chains and baubles, and "cosmic protectors" that were merely solar-powered calculators, to guarantee them a "93 percent" chance of winning lotteries.

News of the Weird's first report on the art of butter-sculpting in 1993 covered works at state fairs in Pennsylvania and Minnesota and a Buddhist monk's Tibetan yak butter sculpture loaned to a Chicago museum. In August 1996, Norma "Duffy" Lyon sculpted a life-size butter cow for the 37th straight year at the Iowa State Fair and as her traditional second butter subject at this year's fair chose to portray the stoic "American Gothic" farmers. A few years ago, her second subject was singer Garth Brooks.

In May in Australia, identical twins John and William Bloomfield died of heart attacks minutes apart at age 61; in Madisonville, Ky., in June, twins Welbert and Wesley Cannon, 20, were both hit by a freight train just two miles from the spot where their father was fatally hit by a freight train in 1987; and in July in Los Angeles, Mr. Avi Gesundheit passed away.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com.)

-- Speed Bumps in the News: In July, one or more residents of Wabash Avenue in Medford, Ore., installed their own professional-looking (but illegal) speed bump on a street where residents had long complained unsuccessfully to the government about speeding. And a city official in Culemborg, Netherlands, bought six sheep in July and stationed them on a busy road at rush hour in order to slow down commuter traffic. And in August, a Pennsylvania highway road crew inexplicably repaved state road 895 directly over a dead deer near the town of Andreas.

-- Guns 'n' Genitals: Sterling Heights, Mich., police said in August that a 24-year-old man needed 16 stitches after accidentally shooting himself in the penis while asleep in bed. And in Cincinnati in August, Carolyn Hutchinson, 35, was shot in the leg in a restroom when her gun fell out of her underpants and discharged when hitting the floor. She said she had forgotten that it was there.

-- The Washington Post reported in July that official statistics apparently show that about 5 percent of women in the Army are pregnant at any given time, and that that number held up among women stationed in the Persian Gulf during the war and stationed in Bosnia over the last year.

-- The Associated Press reported in August on the frequent journeys of German graffiti-sprayers ("taggers") to practice their art in New York City. Said "Neon," a 25-year-old man from Cologne, "It's like a pilgrimage to the birthplace. We want to know our roots." And on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, on Aug. 18, a "Pump Up the Volume" battle of car stereos was held.

-- According to St. Paul, Minn., law student Michael Ravnitsky, who began requesting FBI files on famous dead people in 1991, the bureau kept files on Clark Gable, Babe Ruth, Norman Rockwell, Wyatt Earp, the deaf and blind Helen Keller (118 pages -- of which 74 are still protected 28 years after her death) and entertainer Arthur Godfrey, whose divorce Ravnitsky said was intriguing to the bureau: "Mrs. Godfrey was very quiet, shy and reserved," wrote an agent, "whereas [Godfrey] had been an extrovert."

-- In July, a senior surgeon at Bangkok's Siriraj Hospital told reporters that Thailand was probably the pre-eminent country in the world for penis-reattachment surgery. Said Dr. Surasak Maungsombat, whose team has performed 30 such surgeries since 1978, "It seems that some Thai women just can't tolerate extramarital affairs and do this, which is different from women elsewhere who would just divorce their unfaithful husbands."

-- In August, New York City's Village Voice reported that police had identified J. Michael Payte, a senior managing director of the Wall Street firm Bear, Stearns, as the man suspected in dozens of episodes of consensual sex play that he turned into sadistic torture. Victims complained that they were beaten, suffocated, mummified in duct tape, forced to inhale drugs, forcibly given alcohol enemas, suspended on a rack for days, and burned and scarred with candle wax. One victim said Payte told him, "This

is fucked up, but I can't control it" and "I can't believe I'm doing this to you." Payte resigned from the company shortly before he was identified.

-- In July, Jason Harte pleaded guilty to smashing glass doors in a New York City building with a slingshot. He is a principal in the Adam Glass Co. of Yonkers, N.Y., and is suspected by police of breaking hundreds of other windows in order to solicit business. And in August in Miami, Al Rubin and his son Steven were sentenced to prison for arranging the swastika-painting and vandalizing of buses at a Jewish school in order to get business for their repair shop.

-- In 1987 in Newark, N.J., Eastern Air Lines baggage handler James Henry Lisk was accused in a theft of $650,000 from an airliner but drew sympathy by claiming that an accident just before his arraignment left him mute and unable to care for himself. Local prosecutors wanted to drop the case out of compassion, but the FBI persisted. In April 1996, a jury rejected Lisk's hoax and convicted him, rendering useless the nine electroshock treatments he had voluntarily endured to further his ruse.

-- In a federal court in Boston in July, Phillip W. Cappella, 34, was sentenced to two years' probation for tax fraud. After winning the Massachusetts Megabucks lottery, Cappella attempted to evade income tax on the first of his $135,000 annual payments by falsely claiming gambling losses of $65,000 to offset much of the income. When faced with an IRS audit, Cappella paid a lottery-ticket collector $500 to rent him a pickup-truckload of 200,000 old, losing tickets that he tried to pass off as his own.

-- The Los Angeles Times reported in April on a pioneering class project at the Claremont, Calif., Harvey Mudd College, in which students aimed to develop an alternative, manure-based fuel supply for peasants in a Guatemalan village where firewood is scarce. In order to produce realistic, village-based waste, one student was designated to eat only beans, rice and tortillas for a week. However, the diet made him constipated, and the project was scrapped when it could not be completed by the due date.

A 32-year-old man was buried under several tons of sand after falling into a sand-washing machine in Volant, Pa., in June. And a 50-year-old construction worker died after being hit on the head by a three-ton jackhammer in the Bronx, N.Y., in July. And a recycling center worker was crushed to death in the aluminum can crushing machine in Sewanee, Tenn., in August.

In July Robert Meier, 55, was arrested for fraud and theft in Tampa, Fla., for a sham marriage to a comatose woman and for his subsequent purchases of almost $20,000 on her credit cards. According to a sheriff's detective, Meier said the woman's dog told him that the woman would want him to use her credit cards to live a better life after she died.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (5) The bank robber making his getaway who hails a passing car, only to discover that the driver is a plainclothes police officer, who arrests him, as happened to a bank robber in Etobicoke, Ontario, in July; and (6) The political candidate who dies during the campaign but still wins, as did the late Don Gnirk, who turned back challenger Bert Olson in a South Dakota state senate primary in June.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com.)

-- Pushing the Envelope in Police Sex Stings: In April, a sheriff's spokesman in Fort Collins, Colo., admitted that police officers actually engaged in sex with prostitutes during a January sting instead of making the arrest at the point at which the women agreed to have sex for money. Said the spokesman, "[T]he officers thought they needed to do what they did to make the case." And in June, North Carolina's Alcohol Law Enforcement agents in Jacksonville made similar admissions. One agent testified that he put his fingers on a woman's genitals in order to "feel it occurring." Said ALE's lawyer, "If this wasn't the proper role of law enforcement, I don't know what is."

-- Contest Mania: In July, Pepsi Cola was sued by a Lynnwood, Wash., man who took seriously the company's light-hearted offer to redeem 7 million premium points for a Harrier fighter jet in a "Pepsi Stuff" promotion. And in August, a federal appeals court in St. Louis forced Nationwide Insurance Co. to award a slogan-contest-winning ex-employee "his-and-hers" Mercedes-Benzes despite the company's claim that it was just kidding. And in July, David Lee filed a lawsuit against the Cafe Santa Fe in Rogers, Ark., after it denied him a Kawasaki Jet Ski because he failed to write a reason why he liked a certain menu item on his prize-winning entry form. Lee contends that the required "25 words or less" includes "zero words."

-- Amid howls of protest, John Crutchley, 49, Florida's "vampire rapist" and a beneficiary of the state's early-release prison program, was let out on 50 years' probation in August after serving only 10 years in prison for a heinous, blood-drinking rape in 1985. However, Crutchley violated probation by testing positive for marijuana use on the day of his release. Thus, he lost the benefit of early release, and for drug use during probation, he was returned to serve the 50 years behind bars.

-- In Ottawa, Ohio, in May, church secretary Linda Siefer was sentenced to two years in prison for a scheme in which she systematically removed all $20 bills from the collection plates at St. Michael's Catholic Church in Kalida, Ohio, over a four-year period. Ms. Siefer and her husband lived well above their combined $32,000 income, but the scheme did not come to light until a bank employee thought it odd that there were never any $20 bills in the church's deposits.

-- In April in Bedford, Va., John M. Kirby decided to show off to his passengers as he drove by a group of police officers demonstrating drug bust techniques to reporters. Kirby yelled some trash talk, and the officers, seeing Kirby's faulty taillight, chased him. According to police, Kirby had marijuana in the truck and a suspended driver's license.

-- In June, after an investigation, Montreal, Quebec, coroner Teresa Sourour criticized the Fleury Hospital for its judgment in January not to come immediately to the aid of a 75-year-old man who had suffered a heart attack just outside the building. Hospital employees reportedly discussed whether to go out in the minus-20-degree weather to help the man but finally decided just to call an ambulance. The man died a few minutes later.

-- William Keith Fortner, 35, whom a judge put on probation last year for sending three nude photos of himself to a nurse, pleaded guilty in St. Louis in July to sending another one -- to the judge who gave him the probation. After the probation ended in February, Fortner left a message on the female judge's voice mail that said: "I really like you. I hope you don't get upset with the picture I [am sending]. I hope you remember me."

-- After a major riot in April at the Winnipeg, Manitoba, jail, supervisors hired many temporary workers to clean up, and among those who applied and was hired, according to the Winnipeg Sun, was Stephen Lee Gressman, 30, who was at the time on Manitoba's 10 Most Wanted list for extortion and assault. He worked a few days and left town just before being identified.

-- In July, Richard Gallagher was arrested in Mineola, N.Y., and charged with aggravated harassment after making a telephone call to get help in blowing up the high school where he had just lost his job as custodian. The call he made was to a "Peter King," whose number Gallagher had obtained from a friend. Unknown to Gallagher, Peter King is a U.S. congressman. Said Gallagher to police, "I thought he was one of the boys."

-- Albuquerque, N.M., schoolteacher Scott Glasrud failed by two votes (1,170 to 1,168) in the Republican primary for a state senate seat in June, and the next month realized that his father-in-law's and mother-in-law's votes for him had not been counted because a death in the family had delayed their mailing in their write-in ballots.

-- In August, Julian Carlo Fagotti, 30, kicked off his TV ad campaign for a seat on the city council of Curitiba, Brazil, by standing before the camera nude except for one of his brochures held in a strategic spot. Said Fagotti, "[My opponents] are the ones to be ashamed [for how they treat the voters]."

-- In June, the Los Angeles Times profiled California chiropractor and state assemblyman Martin Gallegos, who said he cheerfully offers free chiropractic adjustments to his legislative colleagues and staff members in his office and has treated at least a dozen assembly members of both parties.

News of the Weird reported in 1991 that the Avon, Colo., town council had resorted to a contest to name the new bridge over Eagle River linking I-70 with U.S. Highway 6. Sifting through 84 suggestions (such as "Eagle Crossing"), the council voted, 4-2, to give it the official name "Bob." In August 1996, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported that "Bob" is running in second place in an official contest to rename Canada's Northwest Territories province after Nunavut becomes a separate jurisdiction in 1999.

In July, 58 worshipers, seeking divine protection on an astrologically unlucky day, were crushed to death by other stampeding worshipers at two Hindu shrines in the cities of Haridwar and Ujjain, India. And in August, a 9-year-old boy was crushed to death when a granite tombstone fell over on him at a Bible school in Summerville, Ga. Also in August, according to police in New Orleans, Melvin Hitchens, 66, who had been reading the Bible on his front porch, put it down, fetched his gun, and shot to death a neighbor woman with whom he had been feuding about the cleanliness of their yards.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com.)