-- In October, Miriam Flores, serving six years for robbery in Mexico City, was selected Miss Mexico Jailhouse in a pageant that featured 14 of the city's foxiest female inmates. A week later, Ms. Pham Ngoc Tam won first place in a nationwide beauty contest of female jail guards held near Hanoi, Vietnam. (A press report said Pham is "probably best described as 'handsome.'")

-- In October, Richard Evans, a member of the Australian Parliament, proposed that the country eliminate all cats within 25 years. Evans offered evidence that cats have killed off nine native species of wildlife and proposed that a fatal virus to be released on feral cats. He said also that domestic cats should be neutered until they die out and that in the interim, cat curfews and a registry should be put in place.

-- Construction worker Sidney de Queiroz was hospitalized in Sorocaba, Brazil, in October when a barroom fight left a 5-inch-long knife blade partway inside his brain after he was stabbed close to his right eye. The blade remained in his head for a week while doctors pondered how to get it out without causing more damage. Finally, in nine hours of surgery on Nov. 2, the knife was removed.

-- In Huntsville, Ala., in November, Justin Lee McKinney, 24, whose truck rammed a chain-link fence, was impaled on a 3-inch-wide, 20-foot-long steel pipe, which went completely through his chest. Surgeons successfully removed it, but, said Dr. Russ Jaicks, "If anyone (at the accident site) had pulled that pipe out, he would've died (of blood loss)."

-- In November, a Calgary, Alberta, man collapsed and fell face-first in his office while brushing his teeth. The bristles end of the toothbrush penetrated about an inch into his eye socket below the eyeball, but ophthalmologist Rob Mitchell said the man would suffer no permanent injury.

-- In July, in Denver, a machine that packs explosive devices into car air-bag detonators blew up in the face of Nicolas Villarruel, 29, leaving one explosive lodged in his nose, sending him to the hospital. The device was removed by surgeons in lead-lined gowns and with Villarruel's head under water because the explosive is activated by air.

-- In July, Jesse James Taylor, 32, drove himself to the Pikeville, (Ky.) Methodist Hospital emergency room with a meat cleaver stuck in his head and part of a butcher knife in his back, as the result of a fight with his girlfriend's 16-year-old son over rent money. After surgery, he was released the following day.

-- Paul Stiller, 47, was hospitalized in Andover Township, N.J., in September, and his wife, Bonnie, was also injured, by a quarter-stick of dynamite that blew up in their car. While driving around at 2 a.m., the bored couple lit the dynamite and tried to toss it out the window to see what would happen, but they apparently failed to notice that the window was closed.

-- Among the latest highway truck spills: a load of frozen french fries on I-70 in Columbia, Mo., in July; a pickup truck full of ricotta cheese in Providence, R.I., in July; 21 tons of large plates of glass in Davenport, Iowa, in July; 30,000 cans of Milwaukee's Best beer in Belpre, Ohio, in August; 12,000 roofing nails (that punctured tires of about 50 cars) in Baton Rouge, La., in September; and 103,000 eggs on Highway 92 near Winterset, Iowa, in July.

-- Jimmy "Jim Dog" Williams Jr. was arrested in New Haven, Conn., in October and charged with taking the life of a 19-year-old man in a brawl. Police were drawn to Williams when they found a set of gold-plated teeth inscribed "Jim Dog" at the scene of the fight.

-- To assure that she would not be disqualified in last summer's Olympic Games, Brazil's female heavyweight judo champion Edinanci Fernandes da Silva, 19, underwent surgery in May to remove partially formed testicles that were responsible for her abnormally high levels of testosterone. "I'm a normal woman," said da Silva.

-- A company called Polo International, from Switzerland, announced in October that it would introduce "snow polo" to the U.S. on Dec. 28, in Aspen, Colo. It is regular polo, played on a frozen lake, on horses outfitted with shoes with 2-inch spikes.

Perhaps America's most dysfunctional family, the Sextons of Ohio and Florida, made News of the Weird in May 1994, when sex abuse charges were filed against Mom Estella in Canton, Ohio, alleging that she sexually assaulted one or more of her kids, either acting alone or with husband, Eddie, who is now on death row in Florida. Son Jamie Sexton, 20, was charged in November 1996 with aggravated murder in Canton after allegedly setting a fire to kill a former friend. The month before, Jamie had testified against Estella, helping to convict her on those 13 sex-abuse counts. Eddie is still on death row, convicted of killing a son-in-law who knew that Eddie had smothered the man's baby for excessive crying. (However, the paternity of the deceased baby is in dispute, in that one or more of the Sexton kids say that their sister's baby was actually fathered either by Eddie or by one of the kids.)

Benjamin Arley Ortega suffocated in October in Napa, Calif., when his head got stuck between a wall and the ceiling of a storage shed he was burglarizing. And Rafael Miettunen drowned near Cleveland, Tenn., in April as he was making a getaway on a Jet-Ski he had stolen. And Rex C. Stark, 36, drowned in a pond near New Castle, Ky., in November where he had sought refuge from a state trooper, who had chased him after a car accident.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- People Getting Too Much Sleep: Michele G. Phebus, 27, and Tony A. Phebus, 29, were arrested in Lafayette, Ind., in August after they fell asleep in their car between the microphone and pick-up window at a White Castle drive-thru; police found numerous marijuana butts in the car and a brick of it in the trunk. And Brian K. Costa, 27, was found asleep in his car in the middle of an on-ramp to the Henderson Bridge in East Providence, R.I., in September, with five bags of cocaine in his lap.

-- Nude Gardeners: In August Robert Norton, 73, was arrested for at least the 13th time since 1981 on public nudity charges while out working in his yard in Pekin, Ill. And in Brooksville, Fla., in August, Carolyn Sparks, 48, received a citation for raking topless in her front yard. (In November, a jury said her behavior did not amount to disorderly conduct.)

-- An October Associated Press story reported on the formaldehyde-saturated museum housing works of Mr. Honore Fragonard, an 18th-century French anatomist who sculpted in cadavers, carefully skinned, preserved and posed. Visitors to the Maisons-Alfort, France, structure (just down the river from the Charenton insane asylum, which is where some say Fragonard belonged) nowadays are struck by how much his works resemble the "Alien" and other creatures from modern horror films.

-- Fred Sandback's works at the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis in April consisted only of string or wire laid out to the walls and floors of the gallery. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch critic, Sandback's tying string in a triangle shape "brings with it the illusion of weight" and is the "most dramatic" of four new pieces done specially for the show. Finishing a close second in the critic's mind was tying two parallel lengths of string from the floor to the ceiling, a "work" "that can be experienced as columns or as a restatement, in the air, of notions [of canvas-based artists]" and which provided "succor."

-- A show by the feminist sculptor Louise Bourgeois in Toronto in May included a retrospective of her works featuring bizarre, severed penises and huge testicles hanging singly or in pairs or in bunches, including "No Exit" (a stairway with two huge testicles restricting egress at the bottom) and "Untitled (With Foot)," in which an innocent baby is crushed by a large, pink testicle.

-- In August, Boyd and Barbara Miller, working for 30 hours with 1,500 pounds of colored gravel, completed a life-sized mosaic of the car of racer Dale Earnhardt in their yard, complete with all Earnhardt's various product endorsements legible on the body.

-- Among the works displayed at the premiere of the Hugo Boss Gallery at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in November was Janine Antoni's "Slumber," consisting of a bed, a loom and an electroencephalograph (EEG) unit. Antoni sleeps in the bed at night, hooked up to the EEG, and during the day weaves a blanket with patterns in the shapes of her EEG readings. The New York Times critic called it a "deft mix of public and private, dream and reality" with a "fine poetic spin."

-- Unknown painter Victor Ruiz Roizo, 39, obtained space in the famed Prado museum in Madrid, Spain, in October by sticking his canvas on the wall with super glue when no one was looking. It stayed for four days until a visitor inquired about it. Roizo said later that he just thought it would be good to show his work, called "Afterwards," featuring a human skull with worms, along "with Rembrandt and all those guys."

-- In August, Texas A&M graduate Michael Kelly filed a request under the state's Public Information Act for a copy of the 1996 confidential football playbook of the Aggies' arch-rival University of Texas. (The request was denied, and in November, of course, A&M lost to UT.)

-- From a paper delivered in August at the Second Annual International Conference on Elvis Presley by Professor Joel Williamson of the University of North Carolina, claiming that the screaming girls who tried to rip Elvis' clothes off in the 1950s were an early part of the women's movement: "[A]n Elvis performance provided a venue in which young women could publicly and all together claim ownership of their bodies, declare themselves loudly, clearly and explicitly to be sexual as well as spiritual characters."

-- Two New York dermatologists told The Wall Street Journal in September that five to 10 of their face-lift patients a month opt also to tighten what they believe are their droopy ear lobes, at about $750 a pair. Said Dr. Bruce Katz, some patients tell him they want lobes similar to those of Demi Moore, Kathie Lee Gifford and Sting. Said one extremely satisfied, 52-year-old Katz patient, "I have the ear lobes of a teen-ager."

-- According to a New York Times article in August, the student handbook at The Citadel requires first-year cadets to memorize standard, quirky responses to traditional questions posed during shakedowns by upperclassmen. For instance, the answer to the question, how much milk is left in the carton (which is expressed by the upperclassman as "How is the cow?"), must be answered, "Sir, she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk, the lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the X degree, sir! (with X representing the number of glassfuls left)." (Any other answer by a cadet would be punishable.)

In September 1996, News of the Weird listed an array of vicious criminals who happened to have the middle name Wayne. More: In November, Georgia executed Ellis Wayne Felker for the 1981 murder of a college student. Also in November, the suspected rapist of a 12-year-old girl in Petaluma, Calif. (two miles from where Polly Klaas was abducted in 1993), Larry Wayne Cole, apparently died of natural causes while on the lam. And in October, the Oregon Parole Board turned down the latest bid by Richard Wayne Godwin, serving a life sentence for the 1979 rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (11) Parents who run afoul of laws even in modern democracies that prohibit their giving their children certain names, such as the Guillot family, who lost a 13-year court battle in October in France to name their daughter "Fleur de Marie" (Flower of Mary) because it did not appear on the list of Roman Catholic saints' names and also because forenames cannot have prepositions. And (12) the needy drug user so oblivious of reality that when he comes upon a large-scale, loud, chaotic police raid in progress at his dealer's home, he nonetheless insists on purchasing from one of the officers, as Tomano Summa, 36, was accused of doing in Boston in July.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- Incriminating Fingers: In Amsterdam in August and Miami in June, men were arrested based on fingerprints from their own severed (bitten off and shot off, respectively) fingers that they abandoned at crime scenes. And Victor Arreola, 23, was arrested at the Scripps Hospital in Chula Vista, Calif., in November, where he had gone after losing his finger in a slammed door in what police say was a carjacking. (According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the police asked Arreola if the finger they had was his. When he said yes, they arrested him. Arreola then asked to take another look at the finger and decided, no, come to think of it, it does not look like his finger -- thus allowing the time to expire when the finger could have been grafted back onto his hand.)

-- Los Angeles County authorities decided not to charge Texan Robert Salazar in the death of his employee Sandra Orellana, who fell from the eighth floor balcony at the Industry Hills Sheraton, where the two were staying during a business conference. Salazar said Orellana fell accidentally as the two were having sex braced on a handrail and she changed positions.

-- In October, U.S. Customs agents stopped a Somerton, Ariz., man coming from Mexico at the border town of San Luis, Ariz., because he had an ice chest containing 12,700 dead scorpions. Customs didn't know immediately whether importing dead scorpions was illegal and so turned over the cache to another agency.

-- In August, 12 men were arrested near Szczecin in northern Poland as they were digging up a road because they had heard a rumor that it was built with a large stockpile of police-confiscated hashish. The hashish had been sold to a chemical plant to be incinerated into ash for road construction.

-- In August, three teen-age boys were arrested for allegedly writing vulgar graffiti on several buildings in Hallsville, Mo. Police chief Pete Herring said the crimes were particularly serious because they frightened the elderly, and city attorney John Whiteside agreed, saying that the slurs were "mean-spirited" because one of the targets, Casey's convenience store, was the "psychic center" of Hallsville.

-- In August, Pembroke Pines, Fla., police Det. Earl Feugill foiled a robbery at a fast-food restaurant by disguising himself and his shotgun as a tree (using a camouflage outfit, strips of burlap, and black face paint) alongside the drive-thru window. He had staked out the restaurant because of a string of similar robberies.

-- If Only They Put Their Minds to It: In the 10-week period before the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, federal, state and local police arrested 765 career criminals (including 14 wanted for murder and 57 for bail violations in violent felonies) in that city and the Olympic venues of Macon, Ga., and Birmingham, Ala., and thus created one of the most drastic short-term reductions in crime rate ever reported for major cities.

-- In July, police in Dayton, Ohio, said Janet Denise Hailey, 40, was the one who climbed into a Wells Fargo Armored Services truck and had such excellent sex with driver Aaron McKie that he did not immediately notice that she left clutching a bag containing $80,000.

-- Police in Sanger, Texas, said four kids, including the police chief's son, broke into a funeral home in September intending to steal embalming fluid so they could smoke cigarettes dipped in it, but when they couldn't find any, they cut off the finger of a corpse and took turns trying to smoke that to draw out the absorbed fluid.

-- Paul Carthy, 25, pleaded guilty in Exeter, England, in September to theft subsequent to his original charge of shoplifting from a liquor store. In the second theft, he had stolen the magnetic letters off the name board that was held up to his face when his mug shot was taken.

-- In October, police in Tokyo arrested Ms. Teruko Hamakawa, 52, for illegal interference with a man's business, charging her with calling him on the phone at work and then hanging up -- 16,000 times in a one-year period. She was angry that, after they had exchanged photos seeking a romantic introduction, he failed to call, which she thought was "impolite."

-- In September, according to police in Junction City, Kan., David Bell, 30, just released from jail for car theft, walked out the door and stole another car to get home. And in October, William B. Singleton, 24, just released from jail in Belton, Mo., on a larceny charge, allegedly broke into a vending machine in the lobby of the police station and stole a 60-cent Strawberry Twisteroo while he waited for his ride to arrive.

News of the Weird previously reported in March 1994 and July 1995 on unlucky men who were ordered to continue child-support payments despite DNA tests that revealed the kids were other men's responsibilities. In the latest case, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in July 1996 that because Darryl Littles failed to get a court-ordered blood test in 1982 (he said he was indigent and not represented by a lawyer), he would be permanently regarded as the father of 15-year-old Brandi even though a 1994 test showed he could not be.

In October, a 49-year-old San Francisco stockbroker, who "totally zoned when he ran," according to his wife, accidentally jogged off of a 200-foot-high cliff on his daily run. And in September in Detroit, a 41-year-old man got stuck and drowned in two feet of water after squeezing headfirst through an 18-inch-wide sewer grate to retrieve his car keys. And in September, a 7-year-old boy fell off a 100-foot-high bluff near Ozark, Ark., after he lost his grip swinging on a cross that marked the spot where another person had fallen to his death in 1990.