Lead Stories *Joe Firmage, age 28, multimillionaire founder of the high-profile Internet consulting firm USWeb, resigned in January out of fear that the company’s reputation was being hurt by his public announcement that extraterrestrials are responsible for many high-tech inventions, such as semiconductors and lasers. According to his autobiography, which…

Lead Story *Since 1996 accused murderer and paranoid schizophrenic Eric Brown has been rendered incompetent to stand trial, but officials at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts said recently that he had made enough progress while on medication that a trial can be scheduled. In December, however, Brown demanded to be…

Lead Stories *Since July the Totenko Chinese restaurant in Tokyo has been offering an all-you-can-eat luncheon buffet (that regularly costs sixteen dollars per person) to the first 30 diners each day at the price of about 30 cents per minute, measured by a time clock that diners punch when entering…

Lead Stories *In November Wichita, Kansas, police removed four children from their parents’ mobile home, which was littered with animal feces. When police arrived they noticed stacks of Star Trek posters and magazines and heard the parents and kids speaking fluent Klingon, the language created for the Star Trek series…

Lead Stories *In December a deer hunter in upscale Nantucket, Massachusetts stumbled across the hatch that leads to the eight-by-eight-by-seven-foot-deep underground squatter’s apartment of Thomas Johnson, age 38. Johnson said he built the place ten years ago when he was on the lam from drug charges in Italy. His apartment…

Lead Stories *In November to improve lagging sales, the Liko-L tourism company in Kiev, Ukraine, announced a new attraction: a daylong visit to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which has been closed to the public since the catastrophic accident there in 1986. Liko-L said the government, in need of tax…

Lead Stories *The November Canadian Finals Rodeo in Edmonton, Alberta, featured the very popular “Cowboy Poker,” in which four men sit at a table in the middle of the arena “playing cards,” while a particularly aggressive bull is turned loose. As the bull rushes them, the last cowboy to stay…

Lead Stories *A November Associated Press dispatch described the work of commercial leech and maggot suppliers who sell to hospitals for medical treatments. A Welsh firm, Biopharm Ltd., moves about 20,000 three-inch-long leeches a year at seventeen dollars each to suck blood through delicate, clogged veins to restore circulation. A…

Lead Stories *The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (Alberta, Canada) announced in November that this year’s single permit to hunt an Alberta big-horn sheep was won by Sherwin Scott of Phoenix, Arizona with a high bid of $405,000 (U.S.). The foundation will use the money for conservation. Scott said he was…

Lead Stories *Calgary, Alberta, construction worker Michael Pearse, age 22, an admitted hothead, pleaded guilty to making threats in 1996 while trying to find a friend’s ex-girlfriend, but at his sentencing hearing in November 1998 he claimed to be a gentle man and had the report of a government neuropsychologist…

Lead Stories *According to an October Wall Street Journal profile, Randall C. Hutchens is one jailbird making a comfortable living behind bars as he serves out a two-year sentence for tax evasion. He files $5000 stockholder-fraud lawsuits in California small-claims courts and so far has received settlement checks in various…

Lead Stories *In September a Tennessee appeals court rejected a woman’s challenge to a child custody ruling that she said endangers her twelve-year-old son. According to the court: “Record does not support finding that unsupervised visitation with husband puts child in danger. (T)here is not one whisper of anything improper…

Lead Stories *In October the New York Times reported on an emerging mental health condition called “uplift anxiety,” in which Prozac users who were uplifted by the drug grieve for their former selves because, in the words of a writer who has overcome depression: “The most fundamental aspect of yourself…

Lead Story *A University of California professor’s request to see FBI records on Groucho Marx was granted in September. Included in the records were reports of Marx’s friendships with other liberal Hollywood types and public quotes by Marx critical of the United States, some obviously made just for laughs. Despite…

Lead Stories *Public relations executive Jim O’Connor opened the Cuss Control Academy in Chicago in September; he charges $300 for a five-day program promoting patience and less-hostile language. In a Chicago Sun-Times story about the class, a Northwestern University professor pointed out that discouraging profanity might create “a loss of…

Lead Stories *In August a Virginia Circuit Court, ruling in the divorce case of Glaze v. Glaze, said that “sexual intercourse” was not a legal requirement for having “sexual relations.” The court did rule, however, that sexual intercourse was necessary for the ground of “adultery,” and since Mrs. Glaze was…

Lead Stories *World’s greatest athletes: According to Pacific Dunlop, the company supplying condoms for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, Olympic officials have requested 51 condoms per participant for the seventeen-day event. Said one athlete interviewed by the London Daily Telegraph: “Three per day sounds too many.” *Five people…

Lead Stories *And Perrier and bowls of red M&Ms: When authorities raided a cockfighting operation near Gadsden, Alabama, in July, they found not only a restaurant and 250-seat theater for patrons but two air-conditioned trailers in which the roosters hung out before their matches; one trailer offered piped-in country music…

Lead Stories *This past summer the city councils of Fostoria, Ohio, and Victoria, British Columbia, adopted codes of conduct for their citizens, in Fostoria to provide a “moral compass” and in Victoria to restore “courteous behavior.” Fostoria implores people to “try to do what is right and try to help…

Lead Stories *Sweden’s Social Democrat party and England’s Vegetarian Society released controversial erotic video ads in August. The Swedish commercial was shot by the party’s youth wing and featured a young couple in bed discussing how cool their “first time” was (meaning, first time voting). In the English spot, phallic-shaped…

Lead Stories *Among the street theater performances at New York City’s International Fringe Festival in August: a 45-minute satirical, bigoted rant against hunchbacks from Nebraska; a six-person troupe performing Eugene Ionesco’s Bald Soprano play continuously, for a total of 24 times in 24 hours; and “Brown and Blue,” an “ode…