May Visions of Marlon Brando in a Giant Bagel Suit Dance in Your Head

Fact-o-Rama: It’s our end-of-the-millennium close-out and everything must go! Stock up on these random facts--all 100% true--while supplies last:

* For his role as Superman’s father in a 1978 movie, Marlon Brando wanted to wear a costume that looked like a giant bagel. The director talked him out of it.

* A Washington man has launched Club Hair for G.I. Joe, a service that restores fuzzy hair to balding G.I. Joe dolls.

* Astronauts have to shave carefully in space because nicks don’t heal in zero gravity.

* When a Vermont mailman tried to deliver a crate of 24 baby chicks and the addressee wasn’t home, he took the birds out of the box and stuffed them--one at a time--through the envelope slot in the front door.

* Bears at Yosemite prefer to break into Hondas when searching for food, an evolutionary leap from Yogi Bear’s picnic basket days.

* Henry Kissinger sometimes escaped the pressures of the Nixon White House by going to Disneyland, where managers let him anonymously work at one of the popcorn stands. Or, if that didn’t calm his nerves, he traveled to Yosemite and dressed like a bear breaking into Hondas.

* “Friends” star Matthew Perry is frantically taping episodes of “Dukes of Hazzard” in case TV stations crash on Jan. 1.

* A newly opened fragrance museum in New York City displays old perfume bottles shaped like beer kegs, doughnuts and car tires.

* Willie Nelson’s dream for the year 2000 is to invent a device that automatically delivers marijuana to every home on the planet.

* Israel is bracing for a millennial epidemic of “Jerusalem syndrome,” in which visiting pilgrims become convinced they are biblical characters. Some dress in white robes--often made from hotel bedsheets--and preach odd sermons.

* In “The Hanukkah Song,” Adam Sandler sings that Harrison Ford is “a quarter Jewish, not too shabby.” But Ford tells gossip journalist Baird Jones that he’s actually “totally Jewish, at least by Jewish law” because his mother was Jewish. (Ford’s dad was Irish.)

* A Virginia man claims that voodoo can be used to rid homes of rats, roaches and other pests.

* A rare 1916 U.S. quarter featuring a topless Miss Liberty will be auctioned off next month in Dallas. Only a few hundred of the coins are believed to be in existence. The U.S. Mint halted production in 1917 after public protests.

* A song featuring a yodeling hamster is climbing the charts in Britain.

* Movieline magazine says it has investigated and debunked longtime rumors that actor Richard Gere once visited an L.A. emergency room to have a gerbil removed from his posterior. But no word on what Gere thinks of Britain’s yodeling hamster.

* General Electric is building an 88-foot-tall, 100,000-watt light bulb in Cleveland to usher in the new year. Other Ohio celebrations: the city of Tiffin will lower 100 bags of potato chips from a height of 90 feet, Bryan will drop a lighted ball toward a giant Etch A Sketch that says “2000,” and Pemberville will lower an 8-foot tomato.

Best Tabloid Headline: “Alcoholic Cockroaches Invade Russian Bars!” (Weekly World News)

Unpaid Informants: Wireless Flash News Service, “The Directors: Take One” (TV Books), Meg Ausman, Discover, Glamour, London Times, Associated Press, Reuters, “Mouse Tales” by David Koenig, the Realist, Chicago Sun-Times. E-mail Off-Kilter at roy.rivenburg@latimes.com. Off-Kilter runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Also: Merry Christmas and may God bless you in the new millennium.