-- Rev. John Wayne "Punkin" Brown Jr., 34, died on Oct. 3 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), 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 ago at a church in Middlesboro, Ky.

-- In September, Norway's prime minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, took three weeks' paid sick leave for depression, reportedly caused by then-imminent budget negotiations he would have to conduct from a minority position, controlling just 42 of the 165-seat Parliament. He pronounced himself well late in the month and returned to work. And in August, Finland's prime minister, Paavo Lipponen, took six days' partly compensated paternity leave after his wife gave birth to a baby girl. The law allows up to 12 days for fathers.

In Toronto in August, a circus performer was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting his estranged wife, and also charged was a circus dwarf who allegedly helped the man and took pictures of the attack. And in Edwardsville, Ill., in September, former circus performer ("bearded lady") Vivian Wheeler filed a lawsuit against a former colleague, a dwarf named Steven Carter, accusing him of attacking her after a night of drinking.

The German television network ARD reported in July that for the last 15 years, the KEG waste disposal company has been turning the remains of incinerated miscarried fetuses, along with other hospital waste, into granules for use in road construction. When informed of the practice, the regional health minister said she thought that was "morally incorrect."

Seattle, July: After a night of drinking, Donald R. Wood III, 27, fell six floors down an elevator shaft and was not discovered for five days. (He survived.) Breezewood, Pa., August: Michael Giovanetti went over an embankment in a one-car accident and was not able to crawl out of his mangled car for four days, but then finally made it up a 75-foot slope where a passing motorist stopped to help him. Tokyo, August: A 23-year-old Chinese stowaway survived a three-hour airline flight by clinging to the landing gear in sub-zero temperatures at an altitude of up to six miles. (Upon landing, he was immediately deported.)

In West Hartford, Conn., in August, renowned lawyer Johnnie Cochran, defending two Rottweilers accused of barking too much, lost the case. Cochran represented his friend Flora Allen (mother of basketball player and actor Ray Allen), whose dogs were the subject of numerous barking complaints, but he failed to persuade a judge to lift a 9 p.m. outdoor curfew on the dogs. Final disposition of the case was set for March.

-- At a London trade show in September, NCR Corp. unveiled the MicroWeb, a combination microwave oven/TV/computer with Internet access, which it hopes to consumer-test soon and offer for sale at about $700. Said a spokesman, "(A)s the pizza is happily spinning around, you can ... check your bank balance, send an e-mail, or even watch the last five minutes of 'Friends.'"

-- In May, the president of Create Corp., a Japanese "alibi" telephone answering service, said he had started acquiring as clients people who were so ashamed of having been laid off from work that they pay the answering service to create an illusory job and title for them so that callers will think they are still working. (Most of the firm's previous clients were prostitutes who needed to convince their friends and parents that they work for a fictitious but respectable company.)

-- In August, the British biotech company Kiotech began test-marketing a disposable wipe containing human sexual pheromones that would, as a company executive said, "boost the wearer's sexual-smell signature." Xcite! packets are now being sold in men's room vending machines in nightclubs in three cities in England. (The substance itself smells awful so the wipes also contain cologne.)

-- In May, Avon Silversmiths of London introduced a $280 crucifix containing a built-in screeching alarm, designed for clergy who are apprehensive about violence at work. A recent survey revealed one in three British clergy have at some point been attacked on church grounds.

William Lee Beck, 41, was arrested in August and charged with robbing Starvin' Steve's market in Lake Havasu City, Ariz. According to police, Beck entered the store with a large rock in his hand, grabbed a 12-pack of beer, and said he'd pay for it the next day. When the clerk objected, Beck raised the rock, said, "How about I crush your skull with this rock?" and left. A half-hour later, a woman went to the store and timidly handed the clerk a check to pay for the beer. Sheriff's deputies went to the woman's home, and after considerable difficulty succeeded in waking Beck up and taking him away.

Two men were convicted of murder in Seattle in September based on DNA markers in the blood of the victim's dog (which also was killed at the scene). News accounts said this was the first use of animal DNA in a U.S. criminal trial, which may be true, but News of the Weird reported that calf DNA was used in 1994 in cattle-rustling charges against two Florida men. Authorities matched the calf's DNA with that in an uncooked slab of pot roast (i.e., the mother) sold by the rustlers. A database search revealed an even earlier cattle-rustling DNA case, in Brownstown, Ill., in 1993. (A cat's DNA was used at a 1996 trial to help convict a man of murder in Canada.)

A 22-year-old man in Newark, N.J. (August), and a 58-year-old woman in Apopka, Fla. (October), were killed in disputes over what to watch on television. It was not reported in either case which programs were being contested, but according to Apopka police, the suspect (the woman's 17-year-old son) generally objected to soap operas.

(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.)

-- Latest Jesus Sightings: Hundreds of people began arriving in the town of Bras D'Or, Nova Scotia, in September, when residents spotted a likeness of Jesus Christ on an outside wall of the Tim Horton's donut shop. The clearest image is said to be under the floodlights of a nearby chicken restaurant, called the Lick-a-Chick. And in Rio de Janeiro, designer Patrizia D'Angello and boutique owner David Azulay made plans to introduce men's swim trunks, modestly cut by Rio's beach standards, that feature a picture of Jesus on the seat.

-- In September, Customs officials at Port Hueneme, Calif., went into a tizzy when a fully operational (except for the warhead), 20-ton, 186-mile-range Scud missile was off-loaded from a British vessel, destined for a local address. Said a Customs agent, "All you needed to do was strap on a garbage can full of C-4 (explosive), and you had a weapon." After an investigation, Customs officials said the buyer was not a terrorist but just a collector and that the British seller had merely failed to disable the missile as required by U.S. law.

-- In July, the Los Angeles Times profiled Dan Taylor, 58-year-old retired entrepreneur in Hardeeville, S.C., who is close to finishing the $1 million, 40-foot-long submarine he will take next June to Scotland in order to hunt the Loch Ness monster, which he says he first encountered 30 years ago but in a flimsier submarine that couldn't keep up with the critter. According to his wife, almost all of Taylor's waking hours in the last three years have been spent thinking about "Nessie."

-- A July profile of paralegal Michael Levin, 57, of Santa Monica, Calif., in Los Angeles's weekly Westside News focuses on his 30-year fixation with clipping and saving, and cataloging and cross-indexing, thousands of newspaper articles that for some reason drew his attention. His clippings fill three 5-foot-high file cabinets. "What strikes me," he said, "is the zany, the quirky, or a magnum opus of a piece in the newspaper, such as a solid overview of Albania."

-- Much of the homes of John Livingston of Cleburne, Texas, and Gayle Brennan and Mike Drysdale in Duarte, Calif., have been taken over as shrines to their personal icons: baseball pitcher Nolan Ryan (Livingston) and Garfield the cat (Brennan and Drysdale). Livingston's most prized possession among several hundred items is a 1991 chest X-ray of Ryan. Brennan and Drysdale have 3,000 Garfield items, including 20 pairs of Garfield bedroom slippers, and plan to move to a bigger house so they can display everything.

-- A September New York Times story described some of the hundreds of people who are so taken with the Broadway show "Jekyll and Hyde" that they have seen it dozens of times (in one case, 100), at prices of $20 to $75, and refer to themselves as Jekkies since their obsession resembles that of hard-core "Star Trek" fans. Said one Jekkie, "Instead of going to a therapist, we talk to each other about it, since others truly don't understand."

According to a July New York Times report on adventurers needing assistance, a man who had sent an SOS refused to be airlifted out by an Alaska Air National Guard rescue team because the team had too much of a federal government presence. He relented later that day when the team added two state troopers and returned. And at a recent state visit to Australia, China's premier-in-waiting, Zhu Rongji, held up a procession by lingering in the rest room. When apprehensive guards broke in, they found that Zhu, an engineer, had disassembled the fancy two-button, dual-flush toilet and was studying it. Said Zhu, "We must introduce this to China."

Morton, Ill., June: Two days after he thought he had died from the hatchet his wife had slammed into the back of his neck, Thomas Deas, 53, told reporters, "I still love her. I'd have her back in a minute." And St. Louis, April: Andrea Caldwell Murray begged a judge not to jail Bobby Murray for shooting her in the head last year, sending her into a coma and killing her fetus; said Andrea, "I don't want to lose my Bobby." (Between the shooting and the sentencing, Andrea had married Bobby and is now pregnant with their child.)

Daniel Sneed, 22, spent a week in Los Angeles County jails in June when prosecutors in the city of La Mirada erred in charging him with having ignored a $100 loitering fine from 1996. After several days, Sneed's bank produced the canceled checks, but even then he was not released until the next day. Apparently useless in overcoming these errors and red tape was Sneed's father, who is a police lieutenant in Compton, Calif.

Tweety Bird Rage: In Pleasanton, Calif., in July, after two men brawled over which one deserved the last stuffed toy bird prize at the Alameda County Fair, one of them pulled out a handgun and started firing wildly, wounding eight people. Shrinking-Genitals Rage: At July retirement ceremonies for an army general in Canberra, Australia, former soldier Darryl Hanel, 36, ran screaming at the general and tackled him before guards pulled him off. Hanel claims the general was responsible for giving him a sex-inhibiting drug years ago and that since then (documented in Hanel's charts and graphs), his penis has shrunk.

When Pigs Fly: In Corbeil, Canada, in August, Lucette St. Louis, 66, suffered a broken leg and other injuries when a 180-pound pig, owned by her son, came flying through the air and hit her broadside. It had been knocked airborne by a passing car.

Christopher Grant, 21, was arrested in Danville, Ill., in September and charged with a series of burglaries. Officers had stopped Grant's car as resembling one used by a burglar, but their optimism increased when they saw that the inside of the car was littered with gum balls. A gum ball machine had been stolen earlier that day.

In September, according to police in Trotwood, Ohio, Rev. Andrew Lofton was shot to death just as he was explaining the Book of Revelation to Bible students by a parishioner who had frequently quarreled with Lofton over Biblical interpretations. And in Jacksonville, Fla., nine days later, Rev. Melvyn Nurse, 35, accidentally killed himself by firing a defective round of blank ammunition at his head while demonstrating for parishioners that committing certain sins was the equivalent of playing Russian roulette.

(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.)

-- According to a Chicago Tribune report in September, some parents in Oak Park, Ill., are objecting to what they believe is an implicit anti-Americanism in a "Pledge to the Planet" that some Hatch Elementary School teachers require students to recite along with the "Pledge of Allegiance." (The controversial oath: "I pledge allegiance to the Earth, this unique blue-water planet, graced by life, our only home. I promise to respect all living things, and to protect to the best of my abilities all parts of our planet's environment, and to promote peace among the human family, with liberty and justice for all.")

-- Five people were indicted in Brenham, Texas, in August for a scheme to kidnap a pig, which had just lost a livestock show judging in Houston, and spirit it away to another show in San Angelo, Texas (where, by the way, it won first place, worth $4,000). The pig had belonged to one of the five people accused, but under the rules of the Houston contest, all losing pigs automatically became the property of a slaughterhouse.

In May, a judge in Red Deer, Alberta, sentenced Nelson Dicks, 32, to 21 days in jail for making a false claim on an unemployment insurance form. Jail time is not usually given on first offenses, but Dicks got in additional trouble by volunteering that life was tough for him and that he might be forced to apply for benefits again even though he was working, provoking the judge to ask him, point-blank, "So you'll lie again?" Responded Dicks, "You're damn right."

In August, Douglas Illingsworth, 83, had his driver's license suspended for a year by a court in Barnsley, South Yorks, England, after several incidents in which he tied up traffic by driving less than 15 mph on thoroughfares, including a stint at about 1 mph. And in Dale City, Va., in June, a 30-year-old motorist was beaten with a steering-wheel-locking device (which was apparently the closest available weapon) at a traffic light by a 33-year-old woman who was incensed that he had been driving too slowly.

In May, residents of Qiongshan village in Guangdong province, China, blew up a brand-new bridge on a main artery because they believed it had been constructed in violation of the principles of feng shui (spiritual beliefs about the arrangement of objects in a space). And New York feng shui authority Eliza Arekelian told The Independent of London that the July scaffolding collapse in Times Square was caused in part by the Concorde jet's nose on a nearby billboard, pointing the wrong way. And Newsweek reported in May that business was booming for New York City "smudger" Eleni Santoro, who charges real estate agents $200 an hour to erase the negative energy from a property.

Just before an April angling tournament in Appling, Ga., as Verdell James, 70, was tying his line, he sneezed his $300 false teeth into Thurmond Lake and had to fish them out before getting down to business. And in July, near Calgary, Alberta, a 19-year-old man being pursued by police after he hijacked a car dumped the car and hid out in the tall grass in a field but blew his cover when he couldn't suppress a sneeze.

-- Nissan's quality-assurance director at its plant in Sunderland, England, announced in July that the company had developed a substance based on the most destructive forms of bird poop they had found throughout the world, for the purpose of rigorously testing its automobiles' paint jobs. Added the director, John Burke, "It looks like the real thing: It's white, it's viscous and it smells horrible."

-- In July in the remote Australian town of Ravensthorpe, newly arrived family doctor Steve Hindley saved the life of 23-year-old football player Hayden McGlinn, who suffered a rapidly hemorrhaging head injury and would not have survived an airlift to surgery. Dr. Hindley cleaned off a rusting brace-and-bit drill from a woodshed and made a hole in McGlinn's temple to relieve the life-threatening pressure, which allowed time for him to be sent to a hospital in Perth.

-- Physicist Juan Atanasio Carrasco announced in August in Guijuelo, Spain, that he was using CAT scan technology to determine how salt makes its way through delicate Iberian hams in the process known as curing, in order to improve the hams' quality and minimize spoilage.

-- Mrs. Xian's Delight: In March, China's official Xinhua news agency reported that surgeons at a military hospital in Chongqing had successfully removed two of the three tongues of farmer Xian Shihua, 32, enabling him to eat and speak comfortably for the first time in 20 years. His birth tongue, 13 inches long, remains; the other two (about 3 inches each) had grown during adolescence.

News of the Weird reported that in January 1998, the executor of the estate of the late Larry Lee Hillblom (founder of the DHL international courier service) agreed to pay out $90 million to four Pacific Islands teen-agers if they could prove paternity by Hillblom's DNA. At the time, proof seemed imminent, but shortly afterward, the children's lawyers reported that not only had all of Hillblom's belongings disappeared from his house in Northern Mariana Islands but that the house had been sanitized to such a degree that not even a single hair could be found. Also, the site of Hillblom's 1995 plane crash was devoid of even a single speck of blood. In June, a former Hillblom associate was identified as a suspect in the movie-plot-like cleaning.

In September at a bar in Porto Hel, Greece, British vacationer Daniel Littlewood, 23, died showing off to a female companion that he was impervious to pain; he had instructed her to place a Swiss Army knife against his abdomen while he leaned into it with great force, but he miscalculated. And in August, Ivory Coast army Col. Pascal Gbah, 49, shot himself to death while testing a supposedly "magic" belt that the manufacturer (Gbah's cousin) said would protect the user from gunfire.

(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.)