-- William Draheim was fired from his job in St. Louis Park, Minn., in May, for sexual harassment for talking excessively about his pierced penis at work (almost exclusively, he said, in response to questions from co-workers). His workplace was Video Age Inc., whose only line of business is distributing hardcore pornographic videos and sex accessories, large inventories of which fill the offices, which are staffed with telephone operators to take catalog orders from customers, some of whom inevitably talk dirty to the operators. (In fact, each employment applicant is required to certify that he or she understands the nature of the workplace.)

-- According to police and health department authorities in Huntsville, Ala., in July, a father apparently purchased several poisonous snakes for his 13-year-old son to keep around the house as pets, but after the boy was bitten by one, he may have hidden the snakes for fear that they would be confiscated. Included are a black mamba (generally regarded as the world's deadliest) and a gaboon viper (only somewhat less deadly), and at press time, authorities could not rule out that the snakes had simply been released into the countryside, which would significantly lower the quality of life around Huntsville. Said a city health control officer, "It's a macho thing to have venomous snakes. I guess stupid supersedes macho."

A June Wall Street Journal dispatch from Tokyo reported the trend of "serial divorce": Young married women desiring to keep their maiden names on official documents circumvent Japanese law by momentarily divorcing when a government document is needed, and then usually remarrying their husbands immediately afterward. And cosmetics firms' sales of products to reduce or mask the odor of "noneal" are booming, according to a March New York Times report; noneal is a chemical released in greater quantity as people age and in super-hygienic Japan creates the unpopular "old man's smell."

-- In May, Italian female basketball star Fabiana Benedettini, 30, surprised her family and the sports world by abruptly taking vows as a nun and joining the Santa Margherita of Cortona sanctuary. Also recently becoming nuns in Italy: a marchesa, Ginevra Rossi di Montelera; a hotel heiress, Maria Luisa De Angelis (who abandoned her husband and children in the process); an industrial heiress, Idina Ferruzzi; a volleyball all-star, Maria Teresa Ciancio; and, at least joining a convent temporarily, a porn star, Luana Borgia.

-- In June, the Civil Status Court in Alexandria, Egypt, ruled that the Islamic requirement for divorce (after certain preconditions are met, the husband tells the wife three times, "I divorce you") must be spoken in person and not delivered by e-mail. At press time, a similar question was at issue in a divorce case in United Arab Emirates.

-- An April New York Times dispatch from Zhdanovo, Russia (just north of Mongolia), reported on the cultural use of vodka as holy water in that Buryat region, whose predominant religion is shamanism. Mongol devotees sometimes sip vodka during the entire 90-minute services, which brings, according to one shaman, "moral calmness" and the improved ability to "talk to god" (although shamanism includes more than 100 gods).

-- First Things First: Catholic priest Charles Mentrup, 41, was stabbed by a parishioner during confession in May; he survived but refused to identify the man who did it because of his vow of confidentiality. And at Christmastime 1999, a drunken guest disturbed the Cistercian monks of Caldey Island (Wales) by singing Welsh hymns and carols while they were celebrating their 12 hours of "Great Silence," but no one moved to quiet the guest because, after all, the monks could not speak.

-- In March, according to a Dallas police report, pro hockey goaltender Ed Belfour, desperately trying to avoid a public intoxication arrest, offered two patrolmen $100,000 to forget the whole thing, and by the time they were set to haul him to the station, Belfour had vomited all over himself and upped the offer to $1 billion.

-- Thieves With Identity Crises: Three gangs of cross-dressing male thieves were operating in three cities during May. Two of the three gangs cross-dressed as a distraction, in that the four black males working Annapolis, Md., stores were "very unattractive and obviously males," according to a police spokesperson, and the crew of four that hit stores in Calgary, Alberta, had been spotted parked in their car at a mall, donning dresses to resemble elderly women. However, a cast of about a dozen drag queens operating in Fort Lauderdale and Miami stores used their stolen credit cards mostly for female fashions and cosmetics.

According to an official in the regional government of Madrid, Spain, a public-financed guidebook for hikers was erroneously distributed despite the agency's dissatisfaction with some of the contract writer's geographical descriptions. In the book, the mountains of the Cuerda de las Cabrillas range near Madrid "are just like women -- the desire that they inspire is inversely proportional to the number of times one gets on top of them," and La Maliciosa mountain "has a pair of highly suggestive protuberances" that are "black, svelte, (hard) and slippy, like Naomi Campbell's loins."

News of the Weird reported in 1988 on an Indianapolis substitute teacher's suspension for arranging for the well-behaved kids in her fifth-grade class to line up and spit on the ones that had been bad, as they walked the line. Among this year's classroom line-up-and-punish incidents: A sixth-grade teacher allegedly assigned good kids to line up and punch a bad one (Somerset County, N.J., May); a preschool principal allegedly urged good 4-year-olds to line up and bite a bad one (Boston, June); and, in fact, second-grade teacher Madeline Raven, 27, allegedly had good kids line up and spit on a bad one, which forced the teacher to find the boy another shirt since the one he wore to school was thus covered with saliva (Sugar Land, Texas, April).

A 22-year-old bungee jumper was killed in the Swiss Alps in May when guides for the tour company Adventure World, according to local police, failed to change cords after people had finished their earlier, much-longer jump. Two weeks earlier, at a regional track and field meet in Turnov, Czech Republic, an 18-year-old female athlete was hit on the head and killed by an errant toss by the country's best hammer thrower.

A 3-foot-long iguana escaped from captivity, prompting a police alert, given its propensity for aggression toward menstruating women (St. Austell, England). A soiled diaper, in a plastic bag left in a 100-degree sun for three days, combusted, setting afire the walls of two apartments, causing $3,000 damage (Ennis, Texas). A disabled man had his motorized wheelchair stolen at gunpoint in a routine street mugging (Milwaukee). One of Rio de Janeiro's notorious bus thieves, who had just snatched about $800 from passengers, escaped by leaping out a door but landed in the midst of a 400-officer police force guarding the municipal governor during a downtown ceremony.

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

-- On July 4 at Coney Island in New York, Japan's Kazutoyo "The Rabbit" Arai (who weighs 101 pounds) beat defending champ Steve Keiner (400 pounds) in the annual Nathan's international hot-dog-eating championship. Arai gobbled up 25 in 12 minutes, to Keiner's 16. Slim Japanese eaters have frequently won the contest, which struck Keiner as "one of God's mysteries," but another bulbous former U.S. champ, Ed Krachie (who ate 15 this year), once postulated the "Belt of Fat" theory, that surrounding fat limits stomachs' expansion.

-- Researcher Peter Cochrane of British Telecommunications continues development of his "Soul Catcher" brain-implanted microchip that he believes some day will be capable of recording all of a person's chemical reactions in all senses so as to capture "a lifetime's worth of experience and feeling," according to a June New York Times report. (Already, doctors at a Veterans Administration hospital believe they have trained a patient whose ability to communicate was shut down by a brain-stem trauma; after an implant, he can order a cursor around merely by thinking of where he wants it to go.)

In June, a British housewife held an appliance repairer hostage in her home for three hours until the company agreed to replace the faulty washing machine it had sold her and been unable to fix (Somerset, England). In April near Milan, Italy, about 30 voters showed up at the polls wearing only underwear, somehow in protest of excessive airport noise. In May, an unidentified man burst into a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., armed with jagged-edged soda bottles and threatened to kill himself if someone didn't stop Pepsi from selling sodas to eastern European countries.

-- In May, the Maricopa County (Ariz.) District Library announced that it had received a 15,000-book donation from a drive sponsored by the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain, a campaign that all together distributed more than 1 million donated books. However, the Maricopa County gift consisted of 1,000 pasta cookbooks, 200 copies of a book on Windows 95 software, and 11,796 copies of the same children's book, "What Would Happen If ..."

-- In April, the New Hampshire legislature voted to correct its law on penalties for sex abuse of children. Adults convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child in New Hampshire can receive up to 20 years in prison, but until the new bill actually becomes law, molesting one's own child still draws a maximum of only seven years.

-- In May, a judge in Tampa, Fla., sentenced teen-ager Valessa Robinson to 18 years in prison for the confessed-to brutal beating death of her mother at the hands of Valessa and her boyfriend. Four days earlier, two other Florida judges had sentenced statutory-rape defendants (whose victims only reluctantly testified against them) to 71 years and 105 years in prison. (The first was a 25-year-old South Dakota man who clumsily romanced a 13-year-old Largo girl with a diamond ring; the second was a Miami college professor who had smuggled a somewhat-eager Honduran teen-age boy into the United States as a housemate and had occasional sex with him.)

-- Queens College (New York City) professor Harvey Baker told The New York Times in May that he had a dynamic new method for helping people overcome even intense fears of tarantulas. However, he had fallen far short of the 100 volunteers he needed to demonstrate the method because few people who have extreme tarantula phobia would participate in his study.

-- In February, Patrick Lee Harned, 17, who is jailed in Astoria, Ore., on charges that he killed a 7-year-old girl at the command of the voices in his head, turned to convicted serial killer Keith "Happy Face" Jesperson, serving a life term at the Oregon State Penitentiary, for advice on prison life, girls and, of course, defense strategy. Wrote Harned, "I just want to get my time done and do good and get married and have a kid and have a better life and walk on the beach with my wife, kid, family, and have a better life with help, amen. What can I do?"

-- An April New England Journal of Medicine article reporting the results of automobile whiplash claims in Saskatchewan before and after the province switched to no-fault insurance revealed that whiplash was much more common under the "fault" system. According to a commentator, part of the result might be due to victims gaming the system, but the results might also show that "if you have to prove you are ill, you can't get well."

Pittsburgh anti-circumcision activist Ron Miller, 58, speaking to a meeting of men to encourage foreskin-restoration in order to enhance penile sensitivity, quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in April: "(The pleasure) you're going to get back is so different, don't expect your brain to understand it." He also admonished men not to delay, as he did: "I'm pissed off about the 40 years of wasted sex I had."

A genre given up in this column four years ago as No Longer Weird has been resurrected by advances in science. It has been known for years that production of heat-trapping methane by livestock flatulence was a major contributor to global warming, but the 1997 Kyoto protocol created technology incentives to reduce the problem, such as the development in Scotland recently of special bacteria for animal feed that converts the methane to less-noxious carbon dioxide in cows' digestive systems, and an industrial Beano-type supplement developed by a Canadian firm to ease cows' belches and other emissions.

In June, according to police in Detroit, Dwayne Nolan was to meet his lawyer at a police station so they could fill out the paperwork to get Nolan's car back after it had been impounded in an alleged drug deal. As Nolan awaited the lawyer's arrival, officers noticed that Nolan was in fact the same man currently wanted locally for murder. Said Sgt. Joe O'Leary later: "I've never seen anybody actually walk into a station on another matter, obviously knowing he's wanted on a murder warrant." To make it official, an officer asked the lawyer, matter-of-factly, to identify a photo taken from the warrant, which he did (according to the police), and Nolan was arrested.

A 23-year-old man died from a friend's punch to the chest, delivered only after the man begged to be hit to relieve his hiccups (Ocean City, Md.). A vicious heat wave in Turkey was credited with saving a life when a suicidal woman on a mountainside swooned before she could leap, and was rescued. An America West pilot (who had flown the day before), riding as a passenger on an America West flight, went out of control, screaming, throwing things, and yelling "Get away from me," until he was restrained by the crew (Phoenix). A county judge (who is an opera fan) enlisted 21 jail inmates to be extras in a local production of Verdi's "Aida," earning community-service credits (Cincinnati).

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

-- In May, a 19-year-old mentally ill patient walked away from the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs, and authorities warned that he was potentially dangerous. Twelve hours later, the patient, Terry Crazy, was picked up along Interstate 90. According to hospital spokeswoman Connie Worl, "Mr. Crazy was brought back ... without incident."

-- Males, Especially, Should Not Read This Item: In June, an 11-year-old boy in Grimsby, England, standing on a chair holding a snooker cue stick as if riding a pogo stick, with the tip at the juncture of his legs, slipped and fell to the floor, incurring perhaps the most serious injury possible under the circumstances (although he is recuperating satisfactorily). Scrotal repair was necessary, as was abdominal surgery, to fix the rupture caused by the protruding tip of the stick.

According to her lawyer, Teren Basel's 2 1/2-year divorce battle with wealthy husband Peter Basel was "a trip to a concentration camp that she survived by the skin of her teeth" (Bolton, Mass., January). And Catholic Cardinal Thomas Winning, describing the "bombard(ment)" of Scotland by gay-rights advocates, likened it to "the dark days of World War II" (Edinburgh, Scotland, January). And San Carlos, Calif., tavern owner Al Tolbert, reluctantly enforcing the state's clean-air-in-bars law, decorated his no-smoking signs with swastikas; said Tolbert, "It appears a bunch of (Adolf Hitler's) adherents are running (the California government)" (January).

-- In February, voters in Holland, Mich., rejected a ballot initiative to restrict Internet access on local public library computers so as to keep pornography from minors. The initiative was led by Irvin Bos, 59, who told reporters that he became a pornography foe at age 12 when he found a sexually explicit book on the side of a road and sneaked looks at it in the family barn, and that within six months, lightning had hit the barn, demolishing it. Said Bos, "I just knew (that my pornography) had caused that barn to burn down."

-- Disabled Springfield, Mass., police officer Charles Peck, 55, asked the city council last year for higher benefits based on his 1982 squad car crash that ended his career. Peck was hurt so severely that he was declared dead at the scene (only to be resuscitated at the hospital), and his latest petition demands benefits equal to his full salary, which is an amount available only to surviving spouses of deceased officers. Thus, Peck appears to be claiming that since he was declared dead in 1982, he actually is his own survivor. At press time, the Springfield city council had not decided.

-- Dennis Ferrer, 56, was arrested in Chalmette, La., in March and charged with stealing from the donation box at Our Lady of Prompt Succor Catholic Church. Ferrer had on him three thin rods with a sticky substance on one end, and $381, but said he was not stealing the money, but rather freeing it because the church was run by communists.

-- Pedophile Pediatricians: Dr. David Mark Stier, 42, pled guilty in Charlotte, N.C., in March to having sex with an underage teen-ager. (Though a pediatrician, said his lawyer, Stier in reality "had no idea the age of this child.") And in Alexandria, Va., in February, Dr. Jonathan L. Weinstein, 32, was sentenced to a year in prison for possession of child pornography. (According to his lawyer, Weinstein got no personal pleasure from the pornography, but was merely a pack rat who accumulated things; said the lawyer, Weinstein still has "Froot Loops that date from 1995," "chocolate pudding from 1983," "guitar strings," and "his teen-aged T-shirts."

-- In April, Ontario Justice Peter Harris dismissed charges against a woman accused of prostitution when she told him that she was just out that night hitchhiking, which Harris thought was too "innocuous" an activity to permit a conviction. However, the woman had been asked "How much?" by an undercover police officer and had answered "Forty dollars," but Judge Harris said she might have meant only how much she would pay for a ride.

-- In April, alleged Mafia boss Vincenzo Curcio broke out of the high-security Vallette prison in Turin, Italy, by patiently sawing through the bars with dental floss. (The prison, built in the 1970s, had installed bars of abnormally soft iron.) And the month before, Texas inmate Antonio Lara used a makeshift dental-floss-like substance to saw his way out of his cell at the Coffield facility near Palestine, Texas, allegedly in order to kill rival Roland Rios in another cell.

-- Prospective bride and groom Dorrell Mainer, 38, and Kevin Rainey, 41, were arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y., and charged with attempting on June 7 to rob a Chase Manhattan Bank (a robbery they had to abort when a teller delayed getting the money). The couple had scheduled a huge wedding for June 10 with out-of-town guests, intending to pay for it with a tax refund, but when IRS denied the refund, according to police, the bank robbery was the best way the couple knew to pay the caterers and avoid disappointing their relatives.

According to a University of Cologne archaeologist, addressing a meeting in Cairo, Egypt, in April, nearly all prehistoric sites along the Nile valley have been spoiled by land and building projects, and now tourists are destroying Egypt's Western Desert sites. One of the most ruinous tactics, he said, is tourists' pouring water over 9,000-year-old paintings so they can see the features more clearly.

In 1993, News of the Weird reported on a Redmond, Wash., judge who, when his defendant broke free of bailiffs and fled, leaped off the bench himself and, robe flapping, pursued the man out of the courthouse and down the street. In April 2000, Philadelphia Judge Peter Rogers showed a similar impatience with his own bailiffs and dashed after escaping suspect John Jordan, who was making a run for it after having simply failed to appear for his previous 24 court hearings. Unlike the Redmond judge, Rogers came back empty-handed.

Dennis Sullivan, 23, was arrested in January for the robbery of what he thought was an armored car, according to Manassas, Va., police. In reality, it was a laundry truck delivering towels and mops to a Bowl America. Said a police officer, "(Sullivan, holding a sawed-off shotgun), ran up to the (driver) and said, 'Give it up.' The (driver) said, 'What?'" Sullivan grabbed a bag and ran but soon realized he had a bag of mopheads. By the time police spotted him running for his getaway car, he was no longer dangerous because his shotgun, which was snug against his arm underneath his long-sleeved shirt, had become tangled in the shirt and could not be aimed.

The government insultingly said Harold Gaulding's 1.25 acres that it confiscated for road-widening was worth $525, but a jury said it is worth $50,000 (Colbert, Ga.). A police sergeant who is also a youth league baseball coach was demoted to patrolman after traffic-ticketing an umpire who had just ejected him for arguing a call at first base (Alvin, Texas). A 29-year-old murder suspect was arrested outside the house he had been sharing with an overtrusting executive for the TV show "Cops" (Los Angeles). A rapist was sentenced to only seven years for his crime because, noted the judge, when the victim started choking, he loosened her gag and gave her a glass of water (Pontevedra, Spain). A 21-year-old woman dumped her infant off with friends on false pretenses so she could fulfill her dream by joining a traveling carnival (Buffalo, N.Y.)

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