We disagree on what we consider general programming practice vs. programming for special cases, but it seems to me that this is a tomayto-tomahto difference of opinion.
Update: Perhaps I should clarify that, most of my programming is scripting, not module-writing, and of the module writing I do, 90% of it is OO classes. In the case of scripts, INIT is perfectly fine; it gives me a hook that I know will happen after all the BEGINs I have scattered throughout my code. In my OO code I rarely if ever need static variables.