-- Officials in Suwon, South Korea, showing off their 580 plush public restrooms to reporters in November, hinted that the toilets were one sure way toward greater world respect. "In this era of globalization," said a government cultural official, "it is important to become the leader in the world in the cleanest bathrooms." Toilet seats are heated, violin music plays, and tasteful paintings and flower arrangements adorn the rooms. There are weekly guided tours, and according to the official, some people arrange to meet inside to have tea.

Cuckold Jimmy Watkins, 34, got only four months in jail for killing his wife, whom he caught in the act with her lover; the jury accepted his defense of "sudden passion" even though he fired one shot, then went out for a few minutes before returning to finish her off (Fort Worth, Texas, October). Michael Nikkanen got only probation for rape, in part so he could keep attending his son's hockey games (Ontario Court of Appeal, October). Karine Gaelle Epailly, 25, got a suspended sentence in the death of her infant daughter, whom she abandoned outside in near-freezing rain (Alexandria, Va., October).

-- In July, Athens, Greece, dentist Theodoros Vassiliadis was sentenced to four years in prison based on the testimony of seven former patients. Though Vassiliadis termed his techniques "pioneering," the patients described odd-looking dental plates that were inserted with screws that were more than an inch long (allegedly taken from Vassiliadis' television set) and that pierced their sinus cavities.

-- After a $20 million school cutback in Ontario earlier in the year that limited funding for special education, three parents of disabled children wrote Premier Mike Harris offering to donate their kidneys to raise enough money to restore the budget.

-- Bill Webb won the annual Rio Vista (Calif.) Bass Derby in October, and his 33-pound catch was so convincing that derby sponsors declined to call private investigator Charley Johnson, who was on standby to administer lie detector tests in suspicious cases. (Increasingly, fishing contest organizers use at least the threat of the polygraph.)

-- In September, Sheriff Charlie Logan (Pickett County, Tenn.) resigned, telling the public that he needed to fight the charges that he had been having sex with a 15-year-old girl. However, according to some observers, that was a distraction for another charge: The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was inquiring into whether Logan cheated on his GED (high school equivalency test). (Tennessee sheriffs must be high school graduates.)

-- The Loneliest Number: Randy Phillips graduated from Riverside Christian School in Andalusia, Iowa, in May, the only member of his class. (For his senior trip, he invited two juniors along.) And an Associated Press report in August on Granby, Vt. (population 90), noted that the town had only one reported crime the previous year: Someone wrote a farmer a $300 check for six piglets, but it bounced, and no one can find the man. (The same farmer said that earlier in 1999, a woman paid cash for more piglets but shorted him, and that that might be the only crime this year, but it won't be counted because he didn't report it.)

-- Celebrity mother Jacqueline Stallone, previously known as a mere astrologer, recently began specializing in "rumpology," the study of a person's character and future, based on the contour of his or her butt. Stallone does not conduct hands-on examinations, but rather gets subjects to sit on sheets of inked paper and make impressions ("maps"). The left cheek supposedly indicates natural talents and personality; the right cheek shows reality vs. potential.

-- Medium Suzane Northrop announced that she will lead a week-long, contact-the-dead cruise out of Miami in March, "NowAge 2000," with guests getting free channeling, plus seminars and workshops on psychic powers. Asked about whether the channeling guests will bother the recreational cruisers on board, organizer Cindy Clifford said: "Tough luck. There are people who go on cruises and wind up with the entire Iowa state bowling league."

Bruce Edward Hall, 48 and blind, was arrested in December and charged with robbing a First Tennessee Bank in Memphis. Hall had pretended to be a customer and was escorted to a teller's window by a guard as a courtesy before presenting the teller with the holdup note. And Leon Grigsby Martin, 33, blind and carrying a white cane, was arrested in Muskegon, Mich., in September and charged with robbing two stores of a total of $340. (He got only $20 from one clerk, who might have tricked Martin into believing he was giving him higher-denomination bills.)

In News of the Weird earlier this year was the report on Virginian Anthony M. Rizzo Jr., who had been granted permanent disability retirement (unable to do his job as school principal) for his "psychosexual disorder," which was that it was impossible for him to supervise females without trying to force sex on them. In October 1999, Paducah, Ky., gynecologist Harold D. Crall filed a lawsuit against Provident Life & Accident Insurance Co., demanding $8,700 a month disability for what he calls a sexual addiction; because of complaints from women, the state licensing board had revoked Crall's ability to practice ob-gyn.

In Edwardsville, Ill., in October, a 48-year-old woman was accidentally shot to death by her husband as the couple posed in an Old West-style wedding photo with him holding a rifle. And in Willingboro, N.J., in November, as two partners in a record store were rehearsing what they would do if they ever got robbed, the partner acting as the clerk accidentally shot to death the partner acting as the robber.

Shopper Bryan Cote parked his $2,000 bicycle in the wrong spot at the Salvation Army store in Concord, N.H., and a clerk sold it for $15. A group of Albanians demanded that the U.N. Mission in Kosovo put its mascot stray dog, Unmik, to sleep because he is "Serbian." A fastidious fingerprint-wiping burglar was caught in Pittsburgh when he slipped up and left a print on the foil wrapper of a stick of gum. The founder of Cliffs Notes, the aid for the reading-averse, funded an endowed chair in English at the University of Nebraska. A Barbados pet-shop owner was arrested by Customs in Miami trying to smuggle in 55 tortoises (value $75 each) in his pants.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- A November feature in Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper recounted the exhibits in Philadelphia's Mutter Museum of medical oddities, including the preserved corpse of a woman with a condition that turned her fatty tissue, upon her death, into a soap-like mass that halted decomposition; the "Muniz collection" of circular-sawed Peruvian human skulls; the extensive, 70-year-old Chevalier Jackson Collection of Objects Swallowed and Inhaled; and the huge colon (described as "about the size of a large basset hound") that caused fatal constipation.

Parishioners at Saint Andrew's Church in south London, England, overpowered a naked, sword-wielding man after he had attacked nine people during a children's service (November). Two former Rutgers male basketball players filed a lawsuit against the school and its coach for making them run laps naked during a practice two years ago (November). A naked University of California at Santa Cruz student was hit by a car, commandeered it, drove off, and promptly crashed into a tree (October). A judge released often-nude gardener Robert Norton, 76, of Pekin, Ill., after his 19th arrest, but said he will go to jail if he is seen naked again (August). ("I can't (promise) anything," Norton said.)

-- Douglas Alan Feldman, 41, was sentenced to death in Dallas in August for two road-rage murders, based in part on letters he had sent to a former girlfriend after his arrest. Wrote Feldman: "I found it quite pleasurable to kill those two men. If you are an angry person and someone provokes you to violence, (it) feels wonderful to cause their death and to watch their pain."

-- When Lawrence Russell Brewer Jr., the second defendant to go to trial in the 1998 Jasper, Texas, racial dragging death, showed up in a Bryan, Texas, courtroom in September 1999, the arresting sheriff had trouble recognizing him because Brewer was so much heavier (having gone from a 30-inch waist to a 40). Brewer's explanation was that he so feared that a Y2K computer crash would wipe out his prison commissary account that he had decided to spend down all his money right away on junk food.

-- In August, an 87-year-old woman, pursued for 30 miles along southern California's Pacific Coast Highway by siren-blaring sheriff's deputies who wanted to stop her for a traffic violation, said when she finally pulled over that she had kept driving because the deputies never did what cops do in the movies: overtake her and force her over. And one month later a jury in Frederick, Md., acquitted motorist Ester Maria Pena, 59, who said she failed to stop for a pursuing officer's siren-wailing car because he didn't do what cops do "in the movies": overtake her and block the road.

-- In August, The Sunday Oklahoman newspaper revealed that the charity Feed the Children, through poignant TV appeals, took in an extra $6 million in the 45 days after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing but gave only half of that to bombing victims, putting most of the rest into its investments because, according to president Larry Jones, there was no proof that the donors intended the money for bombing victims. The newspaper also reported that "almost none" of the $47 million raised last year by Feed the Children actually went toward feeding children.

-- In August, a Portland, Ore., jury acquitted drunk-driving defendant Robert Lee Buskirk after a judge accepted his argument that incriminating statements he made at the scene not be used against him because he was so drunk he didn't know what he was doing when he waived his "Miranda" right.

-- In 1994, psychologist Kenneth Olson of Phoenix, already on probation with the state's licensing board for a 1988 exorcism, filed a lawsuit against the board, asserting that he had a constitutional right to perform a 1993 exorcism on an 8-year-old foster child (and to be paid $180 for it by the state's Child Protective Services). (In July 1999, a federal appeals court ruled against him.)

-- Milwaukee's Thomas Rollo, 53, chopped off his arm at the elbow with a homemade guillotine in October, but authorities found the arm in his refrigerator and made plans for reattachment surgery. However, Rollo refused the surgery, threatened to sue, and promised to chop the arm right back off if it were reattached. However, a week earlier, a judge in Norwalk, Conn., acting on an emergency request from Norwalk Hospital, ordered a 42-year-old man who had severed his penis to submit to reattachment surgery.

Canadian military officials told reporters in September that 23 of their 32 Hercules transport aircraft require expensive structural repairs to replace a main aluminum beam; the beams were corroded by urea acid from urinators who splash (or miss the mark altogether) in the planes' crude cargo hold toilets. And later that month, an official of the upscale University of Toronto Athletic Centre health club told the National Post newspaper that the reason its automatic-flush toilets weren't working is that men were too fast on the draw; because the members were often naked when using the urinals and thus did not take time to unzip and zip, some spent less than the minimum nine seconds needed to reset the flushing trigger.

In September, authorities in Lincoln, Ill., said the "Sock Man" (reported in News of the Weird earlier this year) from nearby Springfield had finally slipped up and committed a crime when he tried to abduct three kids. In Springfield, he had offered female strangers $100 for their socks, and in nearby Auburn in August, he allegedly offered young girls $5 to chew some gum and give it to him. Springfield and Auburn police said neither of those incidents was illegal (or, as a Springfield officer said, "It's no crime to be weird").

One month before the Texas A&M bonfire tragedy, a 17-year-old University of Oklahoma football fan in Kingfisher, Okla., accidentally shot himself to death while celebrating the team's victory over Texas A&M. And in September, a 21-year-old Bryant College (Smithfield, R.I.) student, trying to slide down a banister in a residence hall, was killed when he fell three stories onto his head.

A man and his son, ages 54 and 17, were arrested in Columbus, Miss., for burglarizing a home, both dressed in ninja costumes, armed with swords and star-shaped throwing blades. An armed-robbery suspect, hiding from police in a tree at 4 a.m., was arrested when his wristwatch alarm sounded (Reno, Nev.). Officials at a landmine museum adjacent to two schools finally acceded to demands to defuse its 463 live mines (Zendajan, Afghanistan). A 37-year-old woman was cited for driving on a major freeway while reading a book (Ottawa, Ontario). An ultra-Orthodox religious court in Jerusalem banned women from using cell phones in public, ruling that it makes them look like prostitutes.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- According to a November Boston Globe story, upper-crust restaurants in New York and Boston have taken to adding genuine gold flakes to some dishes, not merely as garnish but with the expectation that they be eaten. Boston's Riba restaurant recently offered "risotto of summer's golden squashes with leaf of 24-carat gold." Said the owner, "It's so thin and weightless that by the time you eat it, it's gonzo." She added, "There's a feeling of plenty around. People are feeling rich."

In July, London art student Kursty Groves told reporters she had developed a prototype "Techno Bra," which houses in its lining a Global Positioning Satellite locator, heart-rate monitor and cell phone transmitter, to be activated if the wearer is attacked (which supposedly produces a heartbeat distinct from that produced by exercising or passion). Also in July, a report of an American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery study indicated success with the battery-operated vacuum bra that removes air from its two domes so that breasts are sucked forward; 15 women testers grew by an average of one cup size after 10 weeks.

-- Tensions grow daily in rural Eatonton, Ga. (60 miles southeast of Atlanta), between the Putnam County sheriff intent on enforcing agricultural zoning laws and the 80 African-American disciples of Chief Black Eagle Malachi York, who has built a religious retreat, with shops and 40-foot-high pyramids, called Tama-Re: Egypt of the West. York, a convicted felon who says he was born in the galaxy Illyuwn and who invented the group's Arabic-English-blend language, Nuwabic, teaches that a spaceship will land in 2003 and take away only 144,000 chosen people.

-- According to an October report in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, a national Christian "lighthouse movement" seeks to pray for every single person in the United States by the end of next year. Among the techniques suggested: praying for the 10 households to your left and right and to the five in front; praying for people listed in telephone directories; and, in rough neighborhoods, "drive-by praying." In late August, a convention of related groups met near Dallas to assess how they could best spend the remaining months on their particular goal of exposing every single person on Earth to Christianity by the end of next year.

-- The Wall Street Journal reported in September on efforts by the United Society of Believers (better known as the Shakers, named for the way they tremble while worshipping) to recruit new members. By the mid-1800s, there were 6,000 members, but since part of their philosophy is celibacy, there are now only seven, living near New Gloucester, Maine. Though their original philosophy was built on "separation from the world," the Shakers now have a Web site, give musical concerts and sell CDs.

-- Police in Stockton, Calif., arrested Tina Watts, 28, in June and charged her with cruelty to an animal after she shot a neighbor's dog. She claimed the dog had just bitten her 4-year-old son, but she later admitted that wasn't true after police discovered that the bloody dog-bite wound was just a bandage she had saturated with ketchup.

-- Thieves Living Large: In July, thieves stole more than a mile of natural-gas pipeline, weighing 250 tons, near Kotovskoye, Russia. And in August, thieves stole an entire neighborhood garden in London's West End. And in March, thieves stole an 11-prefabricated-building high school, along with its security fence, in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. And in July, thieves stole every single thing (except a few clothes) out of a townhouse in Montreal, including toilet paper on the holder.

-- Two thieves abandoned their rental car in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in May and escaped, leaving a sheep and three goats in the car, allegedly rustled from a farmer. The sheep was wearing a dress, and the goats wore shirts, pants and hats. Police guessed the thieves had dressed the animals to avert suspicion, but with nightfall approaching, the driver actually created suspicion when he failed to turn on his headlights.

-- Problems of Postmodern Policework: Flamboyant cross-dresser Donald Ray Johnson was arrested in Baton Rouge, La., in September on theft charges after police found him hiding in a closet. According to an Associated Press report, Johnson did not resist arrest, but he did ask police if they could wait a couple of minutes for him to fix his hair.

Paul Faglin, 87, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for strangling his wife (age 83) out of jealousy (Rouen, France, in June). Brose Gearheart, 90, was sentenced to four years in prison for trafficking in crack cocaine (Saugerties, N.Y., April). J.L. Hunter Roundtree, 88, was arrested and charged with bank robbery (Pensacola, Fla., October). Driver Warren Collins, 83, critically injured his wife and himself by plunging over an embankment into the Pacific Ocean after doing "doughnuts" with his car showing it off to a prospective buyer (Long Beach, Calif., October).

News of the Weird reported in 1996 on a hospital in Kinshasa, Zaire, that was detaining newborn babies and their mothers until they paid their bills. In September 1999, Reuters reported that the government's Sina hospital in Tehran, Iran, earlier in the year created a detention cell in the building, staffed by three guards, that has housed about two dozen patients a month who had not paid their bills. Said the hospital's director, "We had no other choice."

In September, Roland Tough, 22, and five colleagues, convicted of theft in Greater Manchester, England, were given prison sentences of from three to six years. The men had burglarized a Tesco's department store in Walkden, with Tough commemorating the heist as the gang's official photographer. However, Tough later dropped off the roll of film for processing at the very same Tesco's, and employees recognized some of the stolen items.

A jail warden accidentally fell to his death from the ceiling on top of a conjugal-visit couple he was spying on (Tapachula, Mexico). The year-old investigation of a used-car salesman's murder was stalled when police discovered that the man was hated by so many people (Edmonton, Alberta). A 40-year-old suicide, rigging a gun to shoot himself in the head, missed, sending a round into his groin (Glendale, Ariz.). A woman serving a life sentence for stomping another woman to death broke down in tears as she told prison authorities how a fellow inmate had killed her two pet fish (Kingston, Ontario). A 270-pound University of Kansas football player got stuck in a Taco Bell drive-thru window when he climbed in after a clerk who had screwed up his chalupa order.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)