-- Tax Protests: Voters of Castlewood, Va., fed up with a local tax increase, voted 749-622 in November to disband the town and return $88,000 in taxes to residents. And in October in Phoenix, Larry Naman was bound over for a psychiatric hearing after he shot and wounded County Supervisor Mary Wilcox, allegedly because she supported a tax to build a new ballpark.

-- In November, Mayor Elcio Berti of the southern Brazilian town of Bocaiuva do Sul banned the sale of condoms and birth-control pills, for the sole purpose, he said, of increasing the population so the town would qualify for more government-funded programs.

-- From an interview by a Russian weekly magazine in September with the chairman of Chechnya's Islamic Supreme Court, as reported in The Economist: Interviewer: "(Chechnya's president) has said that touching a woman is, for Chechens, the worst crime of all. Even when doing traditional dancing, the Chechen male must not touch his female partner. But under sharia (Muslim) law, (as punishment) you beat young girls and cut their hair off." Supreme Court chairman: "We don't beat them with our bare hands. We use sticks."

-- In October, on the tourist-haven island of Phuket, Thailand, the puzzlingly named Vegetarian Festival is held each year as the scene of spectacular demonstrations of self-mutilation as tributes to Chinese gods and spirits. This year, the typical piercer took a quarter-inch steel rod through one cheek; others were pierced through the cheek and other parts of the body with such objects as a samurai sword, an umbrella and a lamp. Participants usually abstain from meat, alcohol and sex for nine days before the piercing, then try to put themselves into trances to block out the pain.

-- In October, a justice of the Northern Territory (Australia) Supreme Court refused to release Aborigine Steven Barnes, 28, for tribal justice, instead holding him under Australian law for the murder of a 23-year-old nephew. Tribal elders had secured Barnes' consent to the traditional punishment for his crime, including having members of his own family punch him in the face, then club him with heavy hunting boomerangs, then sling the boomerangs at him, and finally spear him in both thighs four or five times.

-- A celebration of Saint Efigenica in the small town of Canete, Peru, in September was to include the "Great Gastronomic Kitty Festival" (a cat-tasting event), but animal-lover organizations won a successful last-minute appeal. Cats remain a delicacy in town, though; as one citizen told a reporter, "The street cats are the best. They have more flavor."

-- According to a survey published in an Italian psychology journal in July, 70 percent of people in that country admitted telling between five and 10 lies a day. The most common lie was, "Don't worry; it's all been taken care of," but the traditional, "I'll always love you," and "How nice to see you," ran close behind.

-- In a feature article in June, Bangkok's largest English-language newspaper, The Nation, lamented how far Thailand is behind the West in performance art, owing to Thais' cultural inhibitions. Nonetheless, given brief mentions in the article were a woman named Mink who coats the floor with toothpaste and wallows in it, to signify, she said, that we all have to wriggle out of difficult situations in order to survive, and the father of Thai performance art, Inson Wongsam, who in the 1960s sculpted an elephant out of a block of ice by precision urination.

-- According to Francine Patterson, president of the Gorilla Foundation, quoted in a November New York Times story, ape-painted art of the 1950s mostly resembled the Abstract Expressionist genre (e.g., bold splotches), but 1990s ape art, exemplified by the works of Woodside, Calif., apes Koko and Michael (also largely bold splotches), "represent things in the real world," such as birds or balls. Patterson says she knows this because the gorillas tell her in the modified sign language that they know. Said noted chimpanzee-art expert Roger Fouts, "It is part of ape nature to paint." (Koko's and Michael's work can be viewed at www.gorilla.org.)

-- In June, to dramatize the dwindling amount of middle-income housing on prestigious Cape Cod, Provincetown, Mass., artist Jay Critchley outfitted an old septic tank in his yard (six feet in diameter, five feet high) with carpeting, table, chair and television set, with entry through a narrow hole in the ground. His point was that this is just about the only kind of housing the non-rich can afford. According to a Boston Globe reporter, "Burning incense almost masked the telltale aroma."

-- George B. Rich and Gary L. Jewel, law partners for six years in Memphis, Tenn., ended their joint practice in 1996, but neither wanted to give up the offices. Since then, according to Rich, Jewel has been purposely annoying him in order to drive him out, and he filed a lawsuit in November to get Jewel to stop and to erect a soundproof partition. According to Rich, Jewel bounces a basketball, drums the walls with his hands, eats smelly lunches, barks like a dog, and oinks like a pig, in addition to making many other animal noises "which are unrecognizable." Said Jewel to a Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter, "I can see the headline now: 'Lawyer sues lawyer for oinking like a pig,'" a quote which indeed did appear the next day in the Commercial Appeal under the headline, "Lawyer sues lawyer for oinking like a pig."

-- In Singapore in October, Tan Ah-bah, 49, was sentenced to three months in jail for assaulting a 37-year-old man at a popular lover's lane. The men are both admitted peeping toms and had fought over control of the choicest spot to watch a certain couple making out in a car.

-- According to a September Boston Globe story, an intense bitterness has developed between two organizations that advocate different remedies to battle pervasive head lice. The National Pediculosis Association of Needham, Mass., argues for removal of lice by hand, along with pesticide shampoos. Sawyer Mac Productions of Weston, Mass., prefers smothering the lice with olive oil and says the NPA is beholden to pharmaceutical firms.

-- In June, a judge in Tulsa, Okla., ordered the Covey family and the Rosencutter family jointly to operate the 357-grave cemetery that bears both their names and to which both families have legitimate claims. The decision follows a May 25 fistfight and hair-pulling wrestling match engaged in by as many as 150 from both sides at the graveyard.

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

-- Where's Barry Scheck When You Need Him? Malvin Marshall, 27, was finally released from jail in North Charleston, S.C., on Oct. 29 after being locked up for six weeks because a police field test had found that he had heroin in his pocket. The state lab had finally gotten around to analyzing the substance, which was determined to be vitamin pills that had gone through a wash cycle while in his pants pocket. Said a police lieutenant, "The field test (is) not foolproof."

-- The New York Daily News reported in November that 71-year-old twin sisters Ynette Sapp and Olvette Mahan had just gotten plastic surgery (mole and wrinkles removed) on their faces purely so they would continue to look exactly alike. Said the doctor, the situation is not that unusual; for example, another identical pair was scheduled the next day.

-- Recent European Unity Feuds: Farmers in Sweden are still upset, according to a report by the country's Bureau of Statistics in June, at their inability to sell straight cucumbers in Europe; EU regulations require prime cukes to bend 1 cm for every 20 cm in length. And Belgium and France were victorious in October in a European Parliament vote to require that chocolate be made only with cocoa butter and not with substitute vegetable fats; a British Parliament member complained that British chocolate has always been made with little or no cocoa butter.

-- In September, an official government wristwatch with the face of the prime minister of Malaysia went on sale at the main parliament building in Kuala Lumpur, retailing for about $470. And in June, in an announcement on the first year of operation, the state of Louisiana reported selling 100,000 of its own Royal brand condoms. State health officials claim that it is more economical to make their own than to subsidize higher-priced, brand-name condoms for high-disease-risk clients.

-- According to Chicago Sun-Times reports in June and November, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services since 1995 has doled out $22.5 million in cash and gifts to the most dysfunctional 1,370 families on their rolls, including almost $75,000 to one mother of six. DCFS's "wraparound plans" are designed to simulate middle-class environments so that children can be raised by a natural parent, but critics call the program a jackpot for precisely the worst parents in the city, in that many have been charged with abusing and neglecting their kids. Among the goods included in a typical wraparound plan are: electronic gear and "entertainment center," YMCA membership, and aikido, basketball and drama classes.

-- U.S. Rep. Sam Farr of California introduced a bill this year to end a loophole in the federal Unemployment Tax Act that made it possible for a Santa Cruz, Calif., voting monitor, who was a retired county worker, to grind out one grueling day at the polls in November, claim the next day that he was "laid off," and thereby collect about $12,000 in benefits over a two-year period.

-- According to an Associated Press dispatch in May, scientists at the Department of Agriculture's meat science research lab in Beltsville, Md., have developed an explosion system to tenderize meat by sending supersonic shock waves through it. The shock waves literally rip the muscle tissue apart on a microscopic scale, without any loss of taste. One researcher said the process could be used commercially within a year.

-- In their divorce hearing in September in Edwardsville, Ill., Karon Watt and Greg Watt were arguing over ownership of the couple's cellular phone. Suddenly, Greg's beeper went off, and he reached for the phone to return a call, which infuriated Karon, who snatched the phone out of his hand and fled the courtroom. Greg caught up with her outside, where a brief tussle ensued, which ended when Karon bit Greg's arm, and Judge Randall Bono threatened to jail both people for contempt of court. Bono awarded custody to Karon.

-- In September, murder defendant Hosie Grant, 72, seated on a bench in a courtroom in Little Rock, Ark., with other defendants at the daily arraignment hearing, fell into a sound sleep as he awaited his case to be announced. He was still asleep later when his two daughters and a public defender entered a not-guilty plea for him, but just then, a benchmate shook him awake. Aroused from his slumber but not yet aware of the proceedings, he impulsively arose and shouted, "I plead guilty." He is charged with stabbing a close friend to death, and the judge permitted the not-guilty plea to stand.

-- In October, Italy's highest appeal court, the Court of Cessation, ruled that the breakup of a marriage was not the wife's fault even though she abandoned the husband. The wife was able to demonstrate that after two years of battling, and a fistfight, she was no longer able to indulge her mother-in-law's presence in the home, and the judges agreed the constant interference was intolerable. Rome's largest newspaper, La Repubblica, sympathized, calling the typical Italian mother-in-law "unstoppable as a panzer, omnipresent, overbearing, meddlesome and mischief-making." And in August, a Tokyo district court, citing changing times, rejected a $38,000 claim by a man who said his ex-wife, who worked full-time outside the home, nonetheless had an obligation to do all the housework.

-- In July, Gary and Marlene Johnston pleaded guilty in Halton, Ontario, to cheating the government out of $11,000 (Canadian) in welfare benefits. They had posed in 1995 as a destitute couple with two kids and assets of only a 15-year-old car. However, in September 1996, they purchased a house in a well-to-do neighborhood and proceeded to park their two late-model cars and a boat in the driveway. The new house was just down the street from the house of their welfare caseworker, who spotted them in the yard.

-- In October, James T. Hilton, who police said had just carjacked a van in Bloomfield, N.J., was chased by police in West Orange into the neighborhood of Our Lady of the Valley Roman Catholic Church. Hilton slowed down and was captured after accidentally banging into two unmarked police cars driving slowly down the street and leading a 5,000-officer funeral procession for state trooper Scott M. Gonzalez.

-- In October, Tulsa, Okla., firefighters were called to a church during a birthday party for Mabel McCullough. The alarm had been triggered by smoke from the candles on the cake of the 95-year-old woman.

-- In July, Missouri's new vehicle safety law took effect, prohibiting people from riding in the open bed of a pickup truck. However, an exception was provided for a family transporting their kids where there are too many to ride in the cab and where the truck is the family's only vehicle. The sponsor called the exception "the Jed Clampett amendment."

-- In November, Paul Z. Singer, head of Singer Financial Corp. in Philadelphia, was sentenced to nine months in prison for an extreme reaction to what he called business pressures. One night in 1996, an extremely depressed Singer decided to deal with his tension by loading a backpack full of spray paint cans into his BMW. When he was arrested, said police, he had written graffiti all over 31 walls, windows and automobiles.

-- Kenneth Curtis, 32, was arrested in November in Hartford, Conn., and state prosecutors will again attempt to bring him to trial for the 1987 murder of a former girlfriend. Curtis had avoided trial earlier because of mental incompetence due to a brain injury caused by his shooting himself in the head in a suicide attempt. A judge had released him in 1989, saying Curtis had almost no chance of ever regaining his faculties, and an appeals court removed an order that he be retested every year. He was freed simply because Connecticut has no law to require him to be detained. WTNH-TV, New Haven, found that Curtis is currently enrolled in a pre-med curriculum at Southern Connecticut State University, with 48 credits and a 3.3 (B) average, and that a state agency had given him almost $1,000 in tuition assistance.

-- In Springfield, Mo., in June, Vernon Wayne Richmond, 18, stood up in court to give the details of his crime as part of a plea bargain to cocaine possession. Richmond said he found cocaine, put it in his pocket, and then was arrested by police after a Wal-Mart guard detained him. Unfortunately, Richmond had misunderstood which of his cases the plea was for. Actually, the district attorney was prosecuting him for an earlier arrest for having cocaine in his car and was unaware of the Wal-Mart arrest.

-- Army military policeman Daniel Christian Bowden, 20, was arrested in June at the Fort Belvoir (Va.) Federal Credit Union as he attempted to deposit almost $3,000 cash into his account. A teller had called police on Bowden because she recognized him as the very man who had robbed the credit union of nearly $5,000 two weeks earlier.

-- In September in Wichita, Kan., police officers staking out a convenience store inadvertently unnerved two men parked innocently at an adjacent liquor store. According to police, a 19-year-old man in the car had a gun and thought that since police officers were nearby, he ought to get rid of it, but in the process of pulling it out of his pocket, he accidentally fired one round, which hit him in the leg, went through the front seat, and hit the companion, age 20. According to police Capt. Paul Dotson, the officers on stakeout, who had until then ignored the liquor store, had their attention engaged by the gunshot and the gun owner's limping out of the car and throwing the gun over a fence. The shooter was charged with illegal possession of a firearm, and his companion was treated at a hospital and released without charges.

-- Carlos Manuel Perez, 21, was jailed in Anniston, Ala., in October after a series of missteps that almost begged for his arrest. He stopped in front of a local government building in a stolen car, which had no license plate. His intention, he told the first person he saw, was to inquire about getting a nonphoto identification card, since he was not carrying a driver's license. That first person happened to be Sheriff Larry Amerson, in uniform. When pressed for ID, Perez produced a Social Security card with the name Matthew Nowaczewski (though Perez has a dark-skinned Hispanic complexion). He also produced a birth certificate under that name but with some information erased and rewritten in pen, including his birthplace of "MiSSSissippi." Said Amerson later, "I know we're from Alabama, but we're not that stupid."

-- A 17-year-old motorist was cited for driving without a license in Springfield, Ill., in September. When stopped, he gave the name "Johnny Rice," but police got tough with him when he was unable to spell "Johnny" in any of the conventional ways. His real name, he said then, is Dyvon D. Stewart, and after an inquiry of the car's owner, police learned that Stewart had legitimately borrowed it and that despite the false name, he was not wanted by police on any other matter.

-- Tax Reform: In September, Albanian Socialist Party leader Gafur Mazreku and Democratic leader Azem Hajdari got into a fistfight on the floor of the parliament about the wisdom of raising the country's value-added tax from 12.5 percent to 20 percent. Two days later, Mazreku returned to the chamber and seriously wounded Hajdari with four shots from a handgun.

-- In September elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina, dictated by the 1995 Dayton peace accords, a Muslim slate won control of the city council of Srebrenica, a city that Serbs had ethnically cleansed of Muslims during the war in what human rights agencies call the worst European atrocities since World War II. However, still not a single Muslim resides in Srebrenica. Under the Dayton agreement, Bosnians, wherever they reside, could elect governments in their former municipalities.

-- One Man, Two Votes: Prosecutors in Madisonville, Tenn., announced in October they would send newspaper publisher Dan Hicks Jr., 76, to trial for voting twice in the 1996 presidential election. Of his second ballot, he said he had taken pain pills and martinis on Election Day for his recent knee surgery, had fallen asleep, had awakened abruptly to a radio warning that the polls would soon close, and had thus rushed to the polling place, completely forgetting that he had voted by early ballot two weeks before. And St. Paul (Minn.) City Council candidate Mark Roosevelt voted twice in the September primary, once based on residing at his current home in St. Paul and again a couple of hours later based on his old residence in Minneapolis, under his former name Mark Hatcher. "It was total ignorance," he said. "I didn't know you couldn't do it."

-- Winston Salem, N.C., mayoral candidate Rick Newton, who had recently stopped taking his manic-depression medicine, was tossed out of court by bailiffs in July after he walked in in a curly black wig and carrying a guitar and a red pillow shaped like lips, claiming he was Jesus. He was there to answer charges that he violated a court order by harassing his estranged wife on the telephone.

-- Striking Fear in the Hearts of Rival Gangs: Among the six members of the Latin Kings gang in Providence, R.I., who pleaded no contest in October to breaking into an apartment: "Tu-Tu" Vasquez, age 19, and "Hecky-Heck" Heredia, 24.

-- The University of Missouri women's cross country team won both the Illinois Invitational and Loyola Invitational meets in September, earning accolades for its three freshmen stars, Katie Meyer, Angela McBride and Justa Dahl.

-- In Washington, D.C., in October, Mr. Alexander Alexander gave away his daughter Stacy in marriage to Mr. John Roberts Stacey.

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