"The trucks full of paperwork come every day," wrote The Washington Post in March, down a country road in Boyers, Pa., north of Pittsburgh, and descend "into the earth" to deliver federal retiree applications to the eight "supermarket"-sized caverns 230 feet below ground where Office of Personnel Management bureaucrats process them -- manually -- and store them in 28,000 metal filing cabinets. Applications thus take 61 days on average to process (compared to Texas' automated system, which takes two). One step requires a record's index to be digitized -- but a later step requires that the digital portion be printed out for further manila-foldered file work. OPM blames contractors' technology failures and bizarrely complicated retirement laws, but no relief is in sight except the hiring of more workers (and fortunately, cave-bound paper-shuffling is a well-regarded job around Boyers). [Washington Post, 3-22-2014]

-- In February, officials in Sudan seized at least 70 female sheep that had male sexual organs sewn on -- the result of livestock smugglers trying to circumvent export restrictions. (Ewes are valued more highly, and their sale is limited.) Authorities had been treating the inspections as routine until they spotted one "ram" urinating from the female posture. [BBC News, 2-10-2014]

-- Karma: Michael Schell, 24, and Jessica Briggs, 31, were arrested on several charges in Minot, N.D., in February when police were called to a convenience store because Schell and Briggs had commandeered a restroom and were having noisy sex. The store is part of the Iowa-based chain of 400 serving the Midwest that go by the name Kum & Go. [Minot Daily News, 2-12-2014]

-- U.S. Rep. Robert Andrews announced his retirement in February, after 23 years of representing his New Jersey district, and in "tribute," The Washington Post suggested he might be the least successful lawmaker of the past two decades, in that he had sponsored a total of 646 pieces of legislation -- more than any of his contemporaries -- but that not a single one became law. In fact, Andrews has not accomplished even the easiest of all bill-sponsoring -- to name a post office or a courthouse. [Washington Post, 2-4-2014]

-- November election returns for the city council of Flint, Mich., revealed that voters chose two convicted felons (Wantwaz Davis and Eric Mays) and two other candidates who had been through federal bankruptcy. Davis never publicized his 1991 second-degree murder plea, but said he talked about it while campaigning. (The Flint Journal acknowledged that it had poorly vetted Davis' record.) [Flint Journal, 11-6-2013]

-- The Internal Revenue Service reportedly hit the estate of Michael Jackson recently with a federal income tax bill of $702 million because of undervaluing properties that it owned -- including a valuation on the Jackson-owned catalog of Beatles songs at "zero." The estate reckoned that Mr. Jackson was worth a total of $7 million upon his death in 2009, but IRS placed the number at $1.125 billion. (In 2012 alone, according to Forbes magazine, Mr. Jackson earned more than any other celebrity, living or dead, at about $160 million.) [Los Angeles Times, 2-7-2014; Forbes, 11-18-2013]

-- The North Somerset office of Britain's National Health Service issued a formal apology in January to Leanda Preston, 31, who had accused it of "racism" because of the pass phrase she received to access the system for an appointment to manage her fibromyalgia. Preston, who is black, had received the random, computer-generated pass phrase "charcoal shade," which she complained was "offensive," demonstrating that NHS therefore lacked "decency" and "common sense." [Weston Mercury, 1-20-2014]

A Florida appeals court tossed out an $80,000 anti-discrimination settlement in February because the beneficiary's teenage daughter could not refrain from bragging about it -- even though the terms of the settlement required confidentiality. Gulliver Proprietary School in Miami had offered the sum to former headmaster Patrick Snay to make Snay's lawsuit go away, but Dana Snay almost immediately told her 1,200 Facebook friends that "Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. Suck it." Wrote the court, "(Snay's) daughter did precisely what the confidentiality agreement was designed to prevent." [Miami Herald, 2-26-2014]

A controversial landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2005 for the first time allowed a city to force unwilling owners to sell private property not for a school or police station or other traditional municipal necessity, but just because a developer promised to improve the neighborhood. Consequently, longtime residents such as Susette Kelo were forced off their land because the city of New London, Conn., had hopes of a prosperous buildup anchored by a new facility from the drugmaker Pfizer. The Weekly Standard magazine reported in February that, nine years down the road, Pfizer has backed out, and the 90-acre area of New London in which Kelo and others were bulldozed off of is waist-high in weeds -- an even worse blight than that which New London sacrificed private property rights in order to prevent. [The Weekly Standard, 2-10-2014]

Plastic surgeons have performed beard implants before, but only for men with facial scarring or for female-to-male transgenders. Recently, New York city surgeons report an uptick in business by men solely to achieve the proper aesthetic look. According to the New York City website DNAinfo, the procedure is the same as for hair transplants -- and takes eight hours to do, at a cost of about $7,000. Said veteran plastic surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, "Whether you're talking about the Brooklyn hipster or the advertising executive, the look is definitely to have a bit of facial hair." [DNAinfo New York, 2-25-2014]

Cable's TLC channel (formerly, The Learning Channel) recently completed its fifth season of "My Strange Addiction," mostly starring a host of compulsives who apparently cannot refrain from eating that which should not be eaten (mattress stuffing, diapers, plastic bags, makeup -- plus the engaging Heather Bell, who eats paint, to her a "thicker version of warm milk"). The full-body-suited "Living Dolls" (reported here two weeks ago) led off the season -- the first time News of the Weird and "My Strange Addiction" had shared a subject since Ms. Jazz Sinkfield exhibited her 24-inch fingernails (on each finger, totaling almost 20 feet of superfluous nail) in Season 2 (and in News of the Weird in 2012) and the 22-procedure breast-enhancer Sheyla Hershey appeared in Season 3 (and in News of the Weird in 2010). [Daily Mail (London), 1-2-2014] [Wikipedia, My_Strange_Addiction]

(1) Hernando County (Fla.) Sheriff's detective James Smith happened across longtime fugitive James Dixon, 53, in March and detained him, even though Dixon claimed he was actually one of his own twin brothers, Gary Dixon. On a hunch, Det. Smith called out to "Gary," "Hey, James!" -- and "Gary" quickly turned his head to see what Smith wanted. Smith said "Gary" then put his head down and acknowledged that he was really James. He was held for extradition on a 30-year-old Michigan warrant. (2) Colton Green was arrested in Decatur, Ill., in March, shortly after a nearby Circle K gas station was robbed. Police said it was not a challenging collar, in that Green was on probation and wearing an ankle monitor whose GPS trail placed him at the Circle K at the time of the robbery. [Tampa Bay Online, 3-21-2014] [Illinois Home Page, 3-20-2014]

(1) A self-described "devil"-possessed Stephanie Hamman, 23, was arrested in Church Hill, Tenn., in March after driving her car through the front door of the Providence Church, then summoning her husband on the phone, and when he arrived, stabbing him in the chest for "worshipping the NASCAR race" that he had been devoted to on TV that day. (2) Police were called to a Taco Bell in Tega Cay, S.C., in March after one customer became irate that another had audibly belched in the dining area yet had not said "excuse me." The enraged man jostled the burper with a chair and grabbed at his throat, but no arrest was made. [Times-News (Kingsport, Tenn.) via KnoxNews.com (Knoxville), 3-17-2014] [WSOC-TV (Charlotte, N.C.), 3-17-2014]

Thanks This Week to Royal Byre, Perry Levin, George Rubin, Neil Gimon, Jim Peterson, and John McGaw, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Kevin Walters, 21, staged an emotional, though unsuccessful, one-man, chained-to-the-door protest in March to prevent the closing of a commercial rest stop along the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway near Des Plaines, Ill. Ultimately, the Des Plaines Oasis, housing shops and fast-food restaurants, will be demolished as part of a highway-widening project. Walters told WBBM Radio that his poignant attachment to the oasis was because his parents had told him it was where he was conceived as they returned home from a 1992 Phil Collins concert. [WBBM, 3-14-2014]

-- In tribe-controlled areas of India, children who disrespect their families by marrying outside their castes are still, occasionally, put to death despite strong national laws. However, enlightenment is advancing, and Mr. Sidhnath Sharma recently filed a lawsuit instead against his caste-straying son for "destroying the family tradition" and "lowering his father's prestige." Sharma, a lawyer in Patna, India, is demanding that the son pay a monthly royalty of the equivalent of $163 for the son's now-unauthorized use of the father's name. [The Hindu, 1-25-2014]

-- Fighter jets from France were forced in February to accompany the hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane commandeered by the co-pilot, who had diverted the plane to Geneva in order to apply for asylum. The Swiss air force would normally have taken over the mission in its own air space, but the incident occurred at 4:30 a.m., and Swiss air force pilots were likely still asleep, as they work only "regular office hours," beginning at 8 a.m. (French military officials said they are accustomed to covering for Switzerland.) [The Local (Paris), 2-18-2014]

-- Sweden's foul-smelling canned herring (surstromming) inexplicably raises passions among some traditionalists -- which is why it was big news in February when a man found a bulging tin whose contents had been fermenting for about 25 years and reckoned he needed help to "disarm" it, lest it "explode" and damage his cabin. Ruben Madsen of Sweden's Surstromming Academy agreed to attend the can-opening and assured the man that spewing, not explosion, was the likely outcome. [The Local (Oslo), 2-10-2014]

-- In 2010, News of the Weird reported on the enthusiastically obese Donna Simpson, who ate meals in front of her webcam so that "chub chasers" could watch her (pay-per-view) growing larger before their eyes. Now comes a South Korean, Ms. Park Seo-yeon, 34, not at all overweight, also on pay-per-view, breaking bread with friend-challenged people desperate to avoid eating alone, however forced the circumstances. Reuters reported that Park's "gastronomic voyeurism" earns her, some months, the equivalent of more than $9,000 for her series of two-to-three-hour meals, featuring real-time chatting. [Reuters via Yahoo News, 1-26-2014]

Pastor Allen Parker conducts services in the nude, for the nude, according to a February report on WWBT-TV (Richmond, Va.). Parker's White Tail Chapel is located on a similarly named nudist resort in Ivor, Va., and even in winter, when disrobing visitors are scarce, the chapel is open for congregants. (In summertime, when naked people abound, the chapel's services are often standing-room-only.) Baring the body to Christ is hardly unusual, Parker reminded, since that's the way we all come into the world. [WWBT-TV, 2-20-2014]

-- After a Feb. 11 explosion at a natural gas well in Greene County, Pa., killed one worker, burned for four days and caused massive traffic jams and other inconveniences, the public relations response of well-owner Chevron was merely to give away vouchers for pizza and soda at local hangout Bobtown Pizza. Environmentalists were outraged at Chevron's "let them eat cake/pizza" attitude, but CBS News found quite a few locals who supported Chevron's response. (For one thing, Bobtown's pizza is apparently highly regarded.) [CBS News, 3-7-2014]

-- Injudicious: (1) James Degorski, 41, serving life in prison for a cold-blooded mass murder during a botched restaurant robbery in Palatine, Ill., in 1993, was awarded $451,000 by a jury recently after a prison guard punched him in the face, necessitating complex surgery. Said a parent of one of Degorski's victims, "If broken bones are worth a half-million, how much are (the seven victims') lives worth?" (2) Former star soccer goalie Bruno Fernandes de Souza, 28, serving 22 years in prison in Brazil for the murder of his girlfriend and feeding of part of her body to his dogs, was granted work-release in March by prison officials -- with the "work" assignment being to play soccer for a Brazilian pro team that, upon learning of the rehabilitation law, signed him to a contract and urged his release. [ABC News via WHAS-TV (Louisville), 3-10-2014] [Daily Mail (London), 3-12-2014]

(1) Among the filings published in November by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was Google's 2012 application covering a throat tattoo -- actually a mobile skin "microphone" with lie-detecting capability, presumably to encourage truthfulness from people as they speak. The application explains how to couple an electronic skin tattoo to a mobile device, using "flexible substrate." (2) Among the "secrets" revealed recently on a BBC television special on South America's beauty-queen obsession was one by Ms. Wi May Nava, first runner-up for Miss Venezuela 2013. Nava had a patch of plastic mesh sewn onto her tongue to create so much pain when she ate that she was forced to stick to liquids. [The Register, 11-8-2013] [Gawker, 2-6-14]

-- An Iowa administrative law judge ruled in February that it might be reasonable to accidentally damage a stubborn vending machine that ate your money -- but not by commandeering a forklift, raising the vending machine 2 feet off the concrete floor, and slamming it to the ground to dislodge the reluctant candy bar (a Twix). Consequently, Robert McKevitt, fired recently over the incident by Polaris Industries in Milford, Iowa, was deemed not entitled to worker compensation. (McKevitt admitted picking up the machine with the forklift, but said he just shook it and then set it down gently.) [Des Moines Register, 2-19-2014]

-- In November, a New York appeals court approved a Rockland County judge's jury instructions, which had resulted in the jury's absolving Brittany Lahm of fault when she flipped her car on the New York Thruway, killing one passenger and injuring others. Lahm was driving friends home from the beach when one passenger unexpectedly unfastened Lahm's bikini top, leading her to stretch her arms to re-tie it, which caused her to lose control of the car. The judges ruled that the jury could (and ultimately did) consider that Lahm faced an "unforeseen emergency" and was not negligent. (The only fatality in the crash was the original unfastener.) [Associated Press via WABC-TV (New York City), 11-25-2013]

Among the websites whose stunning visual sophistication lies in stark contrast to their marginal importance in the world is "Carpets for Airports," apparently still the go-to site for viewing and judging air terminal floor coverings around the world. Singapore's carpet consists of an indescribably erratic, "psychologically terrifying" design, while Lima's Jorge Chavez International Airport's is "muted" and "calming" -- appropriate for the nervous traveler about to experience an Andes mountains take-off. The least ambitious of all, so far, is Denver's "featureless" non-pattern -- settled on in 2001 after religious fundamentalists objected to the evolution-enabled images on its original carpeting. [BBC News, 2-25-2014; CarpetsForAirports.com]

Florida Selfies: (1) Spencer Toner, 79, was arrested for indecent exposure in a McDonald's parking lot in January in Bonita Springs, Fla., after a complainant said Toner was watching pornography on a laptop computer and masturbating (a downside of McDonald's early-on, company-wide adoption of Wi-Fi). Toner had demanded earlier that the complainant give him privacy. (2) In December, Francis Bianco, 76, was arrested shortly after noon for indecent exposure in the parking lot of a Winn Dixie grocery store in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. Bianco protested, claiming he was merely urinating (apparently, thought to be not as offensive). (3) William Gibson, 50, was charged with "lewd and lascivious" behavior in front of a store in Jensen Beach, Fla., in November after he began (according to the police report) "fluffing" his genitals and performing other genital-related activities. [WBBH-TV (Fort Myers), News-Press, 1-24-2014] [WZVN-TV (Fort Myers), 12-16- 2013] [TCPalm.com (Stuart, Fla.), 11-15-2013]

Thanks This Week to Cindy Hildebrand and Jessica Binns, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

The ecology-conscious city (having recently encouraged routine composting of dinner leftovers) is now considering environment-friendly public urinals such as the PPlanter created by engineer Brent Bucknum. Users urinate into a ceramic basin and flush the waste with run-off hand-washing water into a bed of bamboo plants. Bucknum claims minimal maintenance and an odor-free experience, but on the other hand, only a user's midsection area is blocked from public view -- a concession necessitated by San Francisco's sour experience with lockable public toilets, which shielded sex acts and crime. (A less-elaborate structure -- the open-air, similarly privacy-challenging "pPod" -- is currently being readied for deployment in the city's Dolores Park.) [Mother Nature Network, 2-28-2014] [KTVU (Oakland), 3-6-2014]

-- Branko Bogdanov, 58, his wife, Lela, 52, and daughter Julia, 34, were arrested in March and charged in a 10-year shoplifting enterprise run out of their upscale Northbrook, Ill., home, which they allegedly used as a base while prowling stores in states as far away as Florida, stealing high-end toys and jewelry, which they resold on eBay and to their fences. Police estimate the Bogdanovs swiped as much as $7 million worth on their forays -- many items being stashed in Lela's customized flowing skirts with hidden pockets. [Associated Press via Yahoo News, 3-5-2014]

-- A trauma victim arriving at a hospital emergency room but requiring specialized intensive care would usually be transferred promptly to a qualified "trauma center," whose success rate with such patients is believed to be 25 percent better than that of ordinary hospitals. However, a recent study from Stanford University researchers found that, among 636 hospitals observed, there was a greater reluctance to make the transfer -- if the patient was fully insured. (That is, the authors suggest, there is a tendency for hospitals to hang onto insured patients, even though their outcomes might be worse, but not to similarly hang onto the uninsured -- who are more likely to be properly transferred.) [NPR, 2-19-2014]

-- Latest Female Beauty Products: Cosmetic surgery is expensive, but beauty-conscious Japanese girls and women (especially those obsessed with a more "Western" look) have low-priced workarounds to choose from -- as uncovered in January by the fashion blogger Liz Katz: (1) the $63 Face-Slimmer Exercise Mouthpiece (insert it for three minutes a day, make vowel sounds and watch a "saggy" mouth turn taut); (2) the Beauty Lift High Nose nostril clip, which emits electronic vibrations to raise the proboscis's profile; (3) an altogether different but similarly painful-appearing Nose Straightener (insert for 20 minutes a day for added "perkiness"). [LizKatz.com (1-4-2014]

-- Technological Know-How at Work: Hard-core pornography fans are split (according to a January report on Salon.com) on whether they want male actors to use condoms, but California's Falcon Studios has the technology to serve both audiences. Falcon's actors wear them, but in some movies those condoms might be digitally "removed" during post-production. The major downside, said one renowned director, is the prohibitive cost -- about $100,000 to re-digitize the estimated 90,000 frames in a typical "low-budget" porno film. The Falcon president said he is trying an alternative -- using clever lighting during filming to de-emphasize the condom's presence. [Salon, 1-25-2014]

-- Security and law enforcement agencies are looking beyond traditional biometric identification techniques (such as the accurate but obtrusive fingerprint and iris scans and unobtrusive yet questionably accurate facial-recognition) and, based on recent laboratory research, are now considering earwax and underarm odors. Work by Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center shows that ear secretions may reveal personal identity, ethnicity, health status and sexual orientation, among other information, and researchers at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain) said their work demonstrates that recognizable patterns in body odor remain stable even through disease and diet change (although admitting that even the best odor technology is far inferior to a dog's nose). [Science Daily, 2-12-2014] [Phys.org Science News, 2-4-2014]

-- Farming continues to be a noble but grueling existence for rural residents of China, who work for the equivalent of only about $1,300 a year, but in one village (Jianshe, in southwest Sichuan province), farmers have established a co-operative capitalist model, and in January officials delivered residents their annual dividend in cold cash -- the equivalent of about $2.1 million to split among 438 households. Authorities unloaded banknotes in stacks that constituted a 7-foot-high wall of money, requiring villagers to pull 24-hour shifts to guard it. [BBC News, 1-15-2014]

-- With property values sky-high in posh London boroughs like Chelsea and Kensington, some super-wealthy residents desiring to expand -- and who might ordinarily be forced to build up higher -- are building down, constructing elaborate, multistory basements instead. CNN reported in January that additions are underway (one covering five floors below ground) for subterranean home theaters, gyms, golf simulators, bowling alleys and even swimming pools. [CNN, 1-24-2014]

-- Costs of Spain's Economic Collapse: (1) London's Daily Mail reported in March that Spain might have as many as 2,900 recently abandoned "villages" (swaths of land with clusters of houses) deserted by owners forced into cities to find work during the current recession -- and that speculators were buying entire villages at single-house prices and turning them into vacation retreats. (2) A formal association of sex workers in Barcelona has introduced a four-hour "introduction to prostitution" class for women transitioning from other occupations due to layoffs. Course topics include tax-return help (prostitution is not illegal in Spain) and marketing, as well as sex tricks. [Daily Mail, 3-10-2014] [The Guardian, 3-3-2014]

-- News of the Weird has reported recently on the staggeringly large amounts of money to be made by financial trading firms that can execute buys and sells even a split-second before another firm. The Wall Street Journal reported in January that the "race to zero" ("zero" being trades executed at the speed of light) now involves sophisticated lasers beamed between trading hubs (initially, East Coast data centers, but eventually linking nearly all U.S. stock exchanges) so that a firm's automatically enacted trades (by self-actuating computer programs) can be further reduced from the current 0.004-second "lag" time. [Wall Street Journal, 2-12-2014]

A more ornate, dedicated subset of cross-dressers -- the "living dolls" or "maskers" -- was captured for a British TV documentary in January (and likely to appear on U.S. television soon). "Secrets of the Living Dolls" follows ordinary men (one, a forklift operator by day; another, divorced and 70, whose daughter knows he's a "doll" but otherwise maintains a "don't ask, don't tell" relationship) who come alive several nights a month when they don expensive ($800 to $1,800), tailored, head-to-toe silicone bodysuits that feature breasts and genitalia, to party as young, glamorously dressed women. Two of the men lamented the dolls' lack of full acceptance into the transvestite or transgender communities -- though much of that distrust may stem from dolls' use of masks (perhaps similar to the backlash faced by clowns). [The Daily Beast, 1-7-2014; Daily Mail (London), 1-6-2014]

Christopher Fulton turned himself in in Midwest City, Okla., in March after seeing a surveillance photo of the robbery of an IBC Bank. He told police he indeed must be the robber, that he saw his body in the bank photo -- although he insisted that his mind had no recollection of it. Police were about to arrest Fulton, anyway, because the robber's holdup note was written on a blank check with the account holder's name and address (Fulton's mom's) scratched out, except that police-lab technology easily read through the scratch-outs. [KOCO-TV (Oklahoma City), 3-4-2014]

(1) A plaintiff in an auto-accident lawsuit, who is claiming an injury that has impaired her inclination for "social activities," was ordered by a judge in Nova Scotia to prove her loss by showing a reduction in the time she spent on Facebook. Justice Glen McDougall ruled that Joanne Conrod must disclose her log-in and log-out information but need not reveal her complete Facebook profile. (2) Arizona-based Christian "exorcist" Bob Larson, who claims to have performed more than 20,000 demon-expulsions, recently branched out by allegedly (in front of CNN's Anderson Cooper) cleansing a client in Norway -- via the Internet-enabled phone application Skype. (Given the fragility of computer operating systems, critics -- including "mainstream" exorcists -- find it puzzling that a demon could not disable Larson's.) [Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News, 1-30-2014] [CNN, 1-24-2014]

Thanks This Week to Simone Mishulovin and Tony Pappas and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.