-- Catholic Youth Organization coach Michael Kman, 45, was charged in May with various misdemeanors regarding an alleged attempt over a several-month period to fix kids' basketball games for Kman's Our Lady of Lourdes church team in East Pennsboro Township, Pa. According to police, Kman sent multiple text messages to referees Jay and Jon Leader, offering them as much as $2,500 if certain games reached the "right outcome." The Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg has suspended Kman from coaching. In Kman's day job, he is a financial consultant.

-- In May, Britain's Norfolk District Council banned the traditional barroom game of "dwile flonking" just as the inaugural "world championships" were to take place at the Dog Inn pub in Ludham, Great Yarmouth. The game, which some believe has been played since "medieval times," calls on players to fling a beer-soaked rag from the end of a small stick toward the face of an opponent, and in the event the tosser misses the target two straight times, he must quickly down a half-pint of ale. The council called the game a "health and safety" problem.

-- Among the unique dining experiences of the Beijing Zoo is the ability of patrons to view an exhibit of frolicking hippopotamuses and then step into the zoo's restaurant and dine on such dishes as toe of hippopotamus. Also available: kangaroo tail, deer penis, ant soup and other delectables. Animal welfare activists condemned the dining experience, according to a dispatch in London's Guardian.

-- Virginia state inmate Kendall Gibson, who is serving 47 years for abduction and robbery committed at age 18, has spent the last 10 years in the prison's "hole," 23 hours a day in a cell "the size of a gas station restroom" (wrote an Associated Press reporter), not because he's a danger to the prison population, but because he won't cut his hair. Gibson is a Rastafarian and says his dreadlocks are devoutly authorized by the spiritual Lord, Jah. (A 1999 Virginia prison regulation requires administrative segregation for long-hairs.)

-- In May, in a news reverberation heard around the Arab world from the city of Al-Mubarraz, Saudi Arabia, as a "policeman" from the notorious Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice approached a young couple in public to demand the woman's ID, the woman beat up the cop. Charges are pending against her, but women's rights activists across the Muslim world are reporting the incident as a watershed moment, according to the Media Line (Middle East) news agency.

-- Nelson Derbigney's second wife, Laura, is a Hispanic Catholic, but the first wife has a court order that Nelson's and her joint-custody son from that first marriage will be raised as an Orthodox Jew like his mother. That means that stepmother Laura must learn to create a strict kosher lifestyle when the son stays with his dad. (Said Laura's lawyer, of the logical extension of the court order, if one substituted "fundamental Islam" for "Orthodox Judaism," Catholic Laura might have to wear a burqa in public.)

-- Standing firm under severe local criticism, John Chianelli (the chief mental-health administrator of Milwaukee County, Wis.) has begun housing aggressive males and vulnerable females together in the same unit. Chianelli defended his decision with research showing that, in similar facilities, female patients provided a civilizing influence that reduced males' propensities to violence -- at least males' violence against other males.

-- Bucket Lists: (1) Patricia Edwards, 51, was arrested in Sanford, Fla., in March after being identified as the woman who walked into a Bank of America branch, handed over a robbery note and walked out with money. After being quickly nabbed, she explained: "There was no plan, no nothing, just impulse. I think everyone should have a list of things they want to do before they (die)." (2) Still stuck on the Bucket List (until recently) of great-grandmother Rosemary Douglas was her regret that, at 81, she had still never collected child support payments for her son, who is now 60, from the "boy's" father, Urban Joseph Grass, now 82. In a Los Angeles court filing in April, she claimed $50 per month from the date of the 1951 court order (totaling, including interest, $57,000).

-- "A Brave Man's Solution to Baldness" (read an April Toronto Star headline): Philip Levine, 28, working with artist Kat Sinclair, initially solved the problem of his "boring" shaved head by having her paint original murals on his dome, with the result that he became a star in the London (England) club scene. Since then, Levine has upgraded -- to painstakingly laying jewelry designs on his bald head, employing hundreds of thumbtack-sized Swarovski crystals to create a "swooping, shimmery, rockabilly" dome that dazzles in the light. The crystals shed after about a day, creating the opportunity for more designs.

(1) Scottish TV personality Drew McAdam, a professional body-language reader who advises the "Five's Trisha" talk show on whether guests with fabulous stories are telling the truth or not, was rejected for jury duty in May after being called by the Livingston Sheriff Court. (Obviously, at least one of the lawyers thought his side would have a better chance without an "expert" lie-detector evaluating witnesses.) (2) Restaurateur Ted Bulthaup told WRTV in Indianapolis in May that he had finally convinced the Internal Revenue Service of a rare, "five-figure" income tax reduction based on years of unusual "disaster" losses. Bulthaup proved to the IRS that he was making good money until Conseco Fieldhouse was built in his downtown neighborhood (occupied 40 nights a year by the mediocre Indiana Pacers NBA team), which caused his business to fall off sharply.

Walter "Butch" Rubincan, 46, was charged in February in Newark, Del., as being a serial thief with perhaps a 20-year habit, specializing in men's shoes. When not out taking things, Rubincan (who "kept to himself," according to neighbors) is a medical technologist at two local hospitals, a part-time actor, and a one-time championship figure-skater. When police investigators first visited Rubincan's home, they discovered 3,900 shoes in about 150 boxes and bags (along with a few more upscale items and stolen photographs of young men), and Rubincan finally admitted he needed help.

Their Getaways Hit a Dead End: (1) Noah Comer, 39, crashed his motorcycle and was killed as he tried to flee sheriff's deputies in San Diego in January after allegedly stealing a pack of cigarettes from the AM/PM minimart. (2) Gordon Wright, 58, and two associates were killed in January going the wrong way on Interstate 94 in a Detroit suburb after allegedly stealing $45 worth of Axe beauty products from a CVS store. (Police said they were not pursuing Wright but that he was merely in a hurry to get away.)

British mechanical engineer John Tyrer told an audience at the annual meeting of the Institute of Physics in Brighton, England, in March (1998) that he and his colleagues were using lasers to design a more comfortable bra. "A breast imposes various load distributions ... and vibrational problems as the woman walks," he said, and he criticized the "strap design" that "transmits the load to the wrong places." According to Tyrer, the technology, "Electron Speckle Pattern Interfermometry," analyzes the way a three-dimensional surface (like a bra) changes when a force is applied to it.

It's clear, based on a May Time magazine dispatch, that Norway's felons and miscreants are of a superior class than America's. When Norway's brand-new Halden prison opened in April, the country's King Harald V headlined a glitzy gala that celebrated what has been called the world's "most humane" lockup. Among the facilities: a sound studio, jogging trails, a guest house for inmates' visitors, and a scrumptious-smelling "kitchen laboratory" where murderers and bandits can learn to cook. Guards are unarmed (half are women) and intermingle with the rapists, drug dealers and others, dining with them and joining them in intramural sports. The recidivist rate for Norwegian prisoners in general is only 20 percent (versus 50 percent to 60 percent in the United States), but it is still early to tell whether Halden's prisoners will find life behind bars so pleasant that they don't mind risking another stretch there by returning to crime.

-- Cutting-Edge Products: (1) A Portland, Ore., inventor recently began offering a colorful patch designed to cover the area just below a dog's tail. The "Rear Gear" is featured on the handmade-crafts' site, Etsy.com. (2) Tyrone Henry and Fermin Esson, of Opa Locka, Fla., near Miami, told reporters they were recently granted a patent for "saggy pants" that they say will satisfy young men's street-fashion sense yet not run afoul of municipal laws around the country banning exposed underwear.

-- Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, On Edge: Last November, the government of North Korea made an ultimately disastrous decision to radically devalue its currency, overnight making 100 North Korean won worth 1 North Korean won, and the country's citizens (as well as, reportedly, the Dear Leader himself) were not pleased. Three months later, without much fanfare, came the official announcement that the government's (i.e., the Workers' Party's) chief finance minister, Pak Nam-gi, had been executed by firing squad.

-- In May, the German manufacturer Ex Oriente Lux AG set up its "Gold To Go" vending machine in the lobby of Abu Dhabi's Emirates Palace Hotel, offering gold coins and one-, five- and 10-gram bars of gold, based on the current world price at the time of the transaction.

-- Intelligent Design: Among the new species first reported this year are a "nose" leech, a "Dracula" fish, a "psychedelic" frogfish and a "bombardier" worm, according to scientists at the University of Arizona and medical school researchers in Lima, Peru. The Peru-based leech, which is fanged and probably has been around since the time of dinosaurs, prefers nasal mucus as a habitat. The "Dracula" fish of Myanmar, with "canine-like fangs," has an extraordinarily flexible mouth. The multicolored frogfish has apparently adapted to live among the colorful, venomous coral off Bali, Indonesia. The "bombardier" worm, found in California's Monterey Bay, releases glow-in-the-dark projectiles when threatened.

-- Until recently, researchers were certain that at least one ability separated humans from higher-functioning apes: the creation and use of tools for sex. However, primatologists writing in a recent issue of Science described a male chimpanzee's repetitive use of a dried leaf in the same way that a male human of a certain class might employ a fast car. In the presence of a female chimp, the male carefully crinkles the leaf until she, seemingly accustomed to such leaf-crinkling, notices the male, along with his generous erection, and may then choose to join him.

-- Too Much Information: British and Australian researchers, writing in a journal article in March, concluded that the world's strongest insect (relative to body weight) is the male dung beetle, which can lift more than 1,100 times its weight (equivalent for an average male human: 80 tons). Since the beetles mate inside dung patties, their every move is a struggle against the resistance posed by the feces. (On the other hand, the researchers also found weaker dung beetles that mated just fine helped not by their strength but by unusually large testicles.)

-- Sounds Like a Joke: University of Michigan computer engineer Wei Lu revealed in April that he and colleagues were working on a new supercomputer design that is a radical departure from current computer architecture. Wei Lu's design breakthrough (which has piqued the interest of the Pentagon's DARPA think-tankers) is to model the operating system like the brain of a cat, he said, even though his supercomputer could never actually outperform the cat's brain.

-- Last September, James Jones, 33, and a friend were issued disorderly conduct citations by police after witnesses reported that the pair, inebriated, had placed their genitals on a vegetables' weighing scale in a supermarket in Edinburgh, Scotland. (They were acquitted in April 2010 when the only witness admitted that she only saw the men zipping up after claiming to have weighed themselves.)

-- Fluids Festivals: (1) A 44-year-old man was charged with battery in Crestview, Fla., in April as a result of a fight with his girlfriend, during which he pinched off one of his nostrils and blew mucus and blood out of the other (with contents landing on her "face, chest, arms and pants"). (2) Madison, Wis., neighbors Nina Bell, 56, and Arnessa Battles, 38, were cited for disorderly conduct in March in a dispute over Battles' dog's winter-long output of droppings that had just been revealed by melting snow. According to the police report, by the time an officer arrived on the scene, both of the women had smeared each other's cars with large quantities of dog poop.

World-class sword-swallower Chayne Hultgren, 32, is a veteran of such exhibitions as Scotland's Kamikaze Freakshow, as well as this year's Psycho Sideshow in Australia, and he holds the Guinness Book record by downing 18 swords simultaneously. Part of his skill, he told Sydney's Daily Telegraph in April, is learning to relax his body, but he also credited his 5-inch-longer-than-normal stomach and his decision to implant a row of magnets along his breastbone that he says ever-so-slightly diverts the metal swords away from vital organs. Reminiscing, Hultgren noted that once, during a show's run in Belgium, an average of seven spectators a night were fainting (known in the trade as "falling ovations"). What does Hultgren 's future hold? "I've never had another job."

Not Ready for Prime-Time Crime: (1) Jacob Collins, 28, was arrested in April and charged with burglary of Matlack's Hometown Pharmacy in Landisville, N.J., despite the fact that the medicine he stole was probably by mistake. Police said they were almost certain Collins was after the painkiller "Oxycontin" but instead swiped a supply of "Oxybutynin," which treats overactive bladder. (2) On the other hand, Sean Almond, 43, was charged on the same day as Collins for allegedly robbing the Kangaroo Mart on Wilroy Road in Suffolk, Va., and could have used some Oxybutynin. Almond was caught immediately after the robbery because his getaway was delayed. He was spotted in a nearby alley, where he had been overcome by a sudden urge to relieve himself.

In March (1995), after the president of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives accused him of illegal drug use, Sen. Freddie Valentin denied the charge and led reporters into a restroom in the Capitol building in San Juan, where he yielded a urine sample that he later submitted to the Senate leadership. A TV cameraman shot over Valentin's shoulder, and journalist Sonia Salgado's play-by-play radio report ended, "I have just transmitted, for the first time ever, a senator taking a pee before the media."

America What a Country! In 2007, after a stay in the United States distinguished mainly by his acquisition of a long police record, illegal immigrant Cecil Harvey, 55, was deported to his native Barbados. However, according to records revealed by the New York Post in May, Harvey received, in late 2009, one last remembrance of America: $145,000 from the city of New York in settlement of his lawsuit over having once been held at Rikers Island jail for about a month longer than the law permitted.

-- Betty Lou Lynn, 83, was mugged and had her wallet stolen in her new hometown of Mount Airy, N.C., in April. Lynn is the actress who played Barney Fife's best girl, Thelma Lou, in the Andy Griffith TV show and had lived in Los Angeles until she became alarmed at the city's crime rate. She decided in 2007 to move to the quieter, peaceful Mount Airy, which was Griffith's birthplace and the model for the TV town of Mayberry.

-- Gary Null filed a lawsuit in New York City in April against the maker of a nutrition supplement called Ultimate Power Meal, alleging that he had suffered constant pain, kidney damage and internal bleeding from the product's recommended daily regimen. Ultimate Power Meal is one of the "health" supplements packaged under the label of ... Gary Null, a nationally prominent pitchman for homeopathic remedies. Null is suing the manufacturer who supplies the product on which Null affixes his Ultimate Power Meal label. (According to consumer advisers at Quackwatch.org, Null is "one of the nation's leading promoters of dubious treatment for serious disease.")

-- According to court records cited by The Washington Post in April, Rene Fernandez, 45, will plead guilty to one count of a DUI-caused injury in connection with a 2009 traffic accident in Montgomery County, Md., that severely injured a retired county judge and his wife, both in their 80s. Fernandez and the judge, Edwin Collier, had met previously, in 1998, when Judge Collier pronounced sentence on Fernandez for DUI. At that time, Judge Collier released Fernandez on probation, even though Fernandez had been arrested for DUI twice in the previous three months.

-- Paula Wolf, 41, was arrested in Stevens Point, Wis., and charged with hitting four pedestrians at random with projectiles on April 21. In Wolf's car, police found a blow gun, a slingshot and a bucket of rocks, and after questioning, Wolf told police that she just "liked to hear people say 'ouch.'"

-- Lame: (1) The reason career criminal Kevin Polwart gave for his brief February escape from New Zealand's Auckland Prison was to demonstrate that he posed no threat to society on the outside (and thus that he should be parolled). (Instead, authorities added nine months to his sentence.) (2) A judge in Scotland went lenient on George McIntosh, 53, who had been convicted of embezzling the equivalent of about $87,000 from two pro golfing organizations. McIntosh claimed that his medication for Parkinson's disease had made him "compulsive(ly)" generous so that he needed to embezzle money in order to buy gifts for his friends.

-- In April, George Black's lawsuit to be compensated for his injuries was permitted to proceed to trial, following an Ontario Superior Court decision. Black was playing third base (the "hot corner") in a softball game in Hamilton when he lost track of a line drive in the sun. The ball hit him in the head, smashing his glasses into his face and causing serious trauma to his eye. Black figures his injury is the fault of the owner of the softball field for failing to put up any kind of shade to block the late afternoon sun.

-- Melanie Shaker filed a lawsuit recently against the Fases Salon in Chicago for her 2008 injuries, which she incurred when she fell through the salon's front window and badly slashed herself. She fell after losing her balance while attempting to kick her husband during a quarrel along Sheffield Avenue following dinner (and, of course, drinks). Shaker suffered deep cuts to her arm, back and feet, which she now says was the salon's fault in that they had neglected to use "safety glass" in their front window, which would not have shattered into glass shards.

-- Jo Ann Fonzone's four-year quest to divorce the rock singer David Lee Roth (of Van Halen) continues, according to a May report in the Morning Call of Allentown, Pa. Roth, through his publicist, denied any connection whatsoever to Fonzone, who has filed nearly two dozen lawsuits against various people who she claims have done her wrong, including Hollywood executive Cary Woods and MTV CEO Judy McGrath, who each has been accused of trying to steal Fonzone's identity. Judges have noted that Fonzone's claims are unaccompanied by any "evidence" (such as a marriage license to Roth, or even photographs of the "couple" together), and most judges who have heard her claims regard the lawsuits as "frivolous." Said a court records chief of Fonzone's prolific filings, "When (the clerks) see her, they all want to run." Fonzone actually has a law degree, from Western State University in Fullerton, Calif.

In April, warehouse workers at the Copenhagen, Denmark, brewery that makes Carlsberg beer went on strike after the company cut back on its allowance of providing up to three free beers per shift, which workers thought made their mundane jobs easier to take. As of April 1, only one beer per shift was provided, and only at lunch. (The previous "right" belonged also to delivery drivers, according to a Reuters report, but it was not clear how that right squared with drunk-driving laws.)

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) John Campana, 18, was detained by police after they found him with several pieces of expensive jewelry in Gainesville, Fla. As they were questioning him about where he got the jewelry, Campana (according to the police report) started shaking and sweating, and then fainted. (He was charged several days later with burglary.) (2) Jason Robinson, 22, was arrested at a Burger King in Pine Bluff, Ark., in May after robbing the restaurant manager at gunpoint. As the manager handed over the day's proceeds, Robinson set his gun down on a counter to grab the money. Not surprisingly, the manager picked up the gun and shot Robinson in the leg.

Recurring Theme: Police in Austin, Texas, executing a search warrant in May, discovered an elaborate, three-story tunnel complex extending as far as 35 feet underground, beneath the home of Jose Del Rio, 70, which he apparently dug over at least a two-year period. Police also found 19 guns, plus ammunition, batteries and compressed gas (which presented a serious safety hazard). The property showed signs of caving in and posed a threat to adjacent property, as well. Police noted that Del Rio (who neighbors said "kept to himself") was cooperative during the search although he offered no particular explanation for the tunnels.

The New York Daily News reported in April (1994) on a cellblock fight between prominent New York mass murderers Colin Ferguson and Joel Rifkin while they were awaiting trials at the Nassau County jail. (They were later convicted.) Reportedly, Ferguson was using a telephone and told Rifkin to be quiet. According to the Daily News source, Ferguson told Rifkin, "I wiped out six devils (white people), and you only killed women." Rifkin allegedly responded, "Yeah, but I had more victims." Ferguson then allegedly punched Rifkin in the mouth.