In March, offensive lineman John Urschel of the Baltimore Ravens added to his curriculum vitae by co-authoring the latest of his several peer-reviewed academic articles -- "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians" in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. If Urschel can understand, and even advance, tangled, obtuse formulas (which use familiar numbers, e.g., 1, 2, 3, and Greek letters such as phi, lambda, and sigma -- lots of sigmas), why is he a football player, he asked himself on the Players Tribune website. "There's a rush you get when you go out on the field . . . and physically dominate the player across from you." He added, "I love hitting people." [Bloomberg Business, 3-20-2015]

-- The National Gallery of Australia hosted a special series of tours of "James Turrell: A Retrospective" in early April -- in which all guests were nude. The tours were staged by Australian artist Stuart Ringholt, who introduced the concept earlier at the Museum of Contemporary Art (and was nude, himself, for the Turrell show, though other gallery staff remained clothed). The post-tour cocktail reception was also in the nude. [ABC News, 3-26-2015]

-- The Australian "abstract expressionist" Aelita Andre began painting "professionally" at age 9 months, said her parents, and by 22 months had her own exhibit at Melbourne's Brunswick Street gallery, and by age 4, the paintbrush-armed toddler had enjoyed a $24,000 sale. She has now also distinguished herself as an "artist" of another type while explaining her approach. In April, the now-8-year-old told News.com.au, "I interpret my style of painting as a magic, abstract universe. It doesn't sit in one tiny sphere in all realism; it goes out and it explores the world." She acknowledged seeing things (e.g., "rabbits") that an 8-year-old might, but pointed out that she also sees "the cosmos." "I just feel free. I don't feel locked up in a tiny world." [News.com.au (Sydney), 4-7-2015]

-- In March, two men serving time for anti-gay murders became the first same-sex couple allowed to get married behind bars in Britain, at the Full Sutton Prison in East Yorkshire. The romance blossomed after the two men (Marc Goodwin, 31, serving life, and pedophile Mikhail Gallatinov, 40, who is eligible for release sooner) met at the prison library, and the wedding party included four relatives of the two killers. [Daily Telegraph, 3-29-2015]

-- In January, the principal of W.F. Burns Middle School in Valley, Alabama, sent home a letter to parents with her suggestions on how to train students in the event an active shooter breaks into the classroom. In order not to be "sitting ducks" for the intruder, each child was asked to be armed with an 8-ounce canned food item to toss at any potential spree-killer. The can is designed to give the student a "sense of empowerment" in the face of extreme danger, the principal told WHNT-TV of Huntsville, but acknowledged that "(T)his is a sensitive topic." [WHNT-TV, 1-12-2015]

Newly elected Alabama state Sen. Larry Stutts, in one of his first actions in office, introduced a bill to repeal "Rose's Law," a 1999 legislation that, had it been on the books the year before, might have saved the life of new mother Rose Church, whose doctor was OB/GYN Larry Stutts. Rose's Law gave new mothers a legal right to remain hospitalized for up to 96 hours after birth, depending on circumstances, but the new senator calls that right just another "Obamacare-style law" in which legislators in Montgomery intrude into doctors' decisions. (Stutts also proposed to repeal the requirement for written cautions to patients whose mammograms show unusual density.) Though her daughter survived, Rose died of a heart attack following two "doctor's decision" hospital releases, and her husband's wrongful-death lawsuit against Stutts and others reached a settlement in 2005. [Alabama Political Reporter, 3-28-2015]

-- A man in Mios, France, fired from his job several years ago, and who had been receiving unemployment benefits, suddenly found himself being dunned by the national labor agency when a tribunal finally ruled in the employer's favor and ordered the man's benefits paid back. The agency ordered the man's current employer to garnishee his paycheck of the equivalent of $160-$210 per week -- until, according to a March report on Paris's The Local, he hired a certain (unnamed) lawyer. The labor agency's new order requires the current employer, instead, to garnishee the pay by 1 centime (about a penny) a month for the next 26,126 years. [The Local (Paris), 3-30-2015]

-- Kimberly Kitchen, 45, was a successful estate lawyer in Huntington, Pennsylvania, with more than 30 clients for the BMZ Law firm (so successful in her 10-year career that she had just been promoted to partner and had served as president of the local bar association) with but one complication -- that in December she was finally revealed not to be a lawyer at all. Her diploma, bar exam results, and other documents were forgeries, according to the Pennsylvania attorney general's office, which filed charges in March. [Associated Press via Yahoo News, 3-27-2015]

Weird: Dan Kennedy of Salt Lake City was driving to work on March 31 when a large bag fell off of the truck in front of him, and, for traffic safety, he stopped to move it from the road -- and discovered it contained about 75 pounds' worth of U.S. currency (about $22,000) in a plastic bag marked with the name of the Brinks armored truck company. The bag remained sealed (any tear could have produced "leakage" weakening Brinks' claims on the loose money), and Kennedy dutifully contacted state troopers and handed it over. He sounded perplexed when Brinks immediately sent him a $5,000 gift check. "Why would I get anything for that?" "Almost anyone," he said, would have done what he did. [KSL-TV, 4-6-2015]

-- Police in Malegaon, India, seeking to reduce tensions between Muslims and Hindus over the theft and butchering of cattle (which the latter hold sacred), requested that local farmers send them "mugshots" of their cows, along with other biographical information, such as why the farmer has the cow in the first place, so they could build a database to improve bovine security. [Agence France-Presse via MSN.com, 4-1-2015]

-- Elizabeth Quinn Gallagher, 23, received free around-the-world plane travel in December just for having the correct name. Jordan Axani used to have a girlfriend of that name, and bought the couple world-travel tickets, but they broke up, and the tickets were not refundable. Axani decided in December to find a compatible "Elizabeth Gallagher" to use the ticket with him, and the 23-year-old Cole Harbor, Nova Scotia, student won out over 18 other "Elizabeth Gallaghers." The trip was "strictly platonic," he said, though he acknowledged that Gallagher's boyfriend did not seem pleased. [Associated Press via Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News, 12-17-2014]

(1) Wayne Clark, 52, collapsed and died in January of an apparent heart attack seconds after walking into the Aldi grocery store in Edgewood, Maryland, and announcing a robbery. At his home, police discovered evidence linking Clark to two earlier robberies. (2) Anthony Stokes, 17, died in March from car-crash injuries as he was fleeing Roswell, Georgia, police following a home invasion. Stokes drew national attention in 2013 when, in order to receive a heart transplant, he promised to turn around his until-then-criminal life. Soon after the surgery, though, he was posting thug selfies on Facebook, and in January 2015 had been jailed for possessing stolen property. [Baltimore Sun, 1-24-2015] [New York Daily News, 4-1-2015]

In Ogden, Utah, in October (2009), Adam Manning, 30, accompanied his pregnant girlfriend to the McKay-Dee Hospital emergency room as she was going into labor. According to witnesses, as a nurse attended to the woman, Manning began flirting with her, complimenting the nurse's looks and giving her neck rubs. When Manning then allegedly groped the nurse's breast, she called security, and Manning was arrested and taken to jail -- and of course missed the birth of his child (though it did give him time to think of what to tell his girlfriend). [Salt Lake Tribune, 10-10-2009]

Thanks This Week to Ken Lilly and Gerald Davidson, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

On Feb. 9 a single traffic stop in Alderson, West Virginia, resulted in the arrest of six people from the same family, trafficking in stolen power tools (including one man who traded a leaf blower, hedge trimmer and weed trimmer for Percocet pills). However, a month later, members of an even more charming family were caught in raids in Elyria, Ohio. Officers from three jurisdictions arrested 34 people -- all related to each other -- in connection with a $400,000 drug operation. [Register-Herald (Beckley, W.Va.), 2-12-2015] [WEWS-TV (Cleveland), 3-18-2015]

-- The predawn line in March actually started forming at midnight, snaking around the building in Maitland, Florida, but it wasn't for concert tickets. The dozens of people needed coveted visitor passes just to speak to an IRS agent -- because budget cuts and personnel reductions have limited services. "I just came here to verify my identity," said one frustrated taxpayer, who arrived at 8 a.m. and would not be served that day. The agency said its budget had been cut by $1 billion since the congressional "sequestration" in 2011. [News 13 (Orlando), 3-16-2015]

-- Nope, They Haven't Grown Back Yet: Canada's Department of Veterans Affairs requires any vet receiving disability benefits to have a doctor recertify the condition annually -- including people like Afghan war double-leg amputee Paul Franklin. He complained to Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News in March that he had been harshly threatened with loss of benefits if he failed to file (even though the department told CBC News that it might perhaps relax the certification requirement to "every third year").

-- Several theaters in Denmark reported in March that they had begun adding subtitles -- to Danish-language films, because so many customers complained that the dialogue was incomprehensible. Apparently, it is widely known that spoken Danish is harder to understand than the written, but Copenhagen's website The Local reported that actors had rebelled at improving their diction, claiming that their "mumbling" adds "realism" to the films. [The Local, 3-6-2015]

-- Attention to Detail: Major League pitcher Max Scherzer, new this season to the Washington Nationals, informed manager Matt Williams in March, according to a New York Times report, that he requires assistance when he warms up during daily practice sessions. He spoke of the importance of simulating actual game conditions, and since Scherzer is a starting pitcher, he needed someone to stand beside him and hum "The Star-Spangled Banner" before he begins his practice pitching. [New York Times, 3-2-2015]

Lawyers Brendan and Nessa Coppinger live in a Washington, D.C., row house next door to a tobacco user, whose smoke seeps into their unit, and (especially since Nessa is pregnant) the Coppingers have filed a $500,000 lawsuit against the neighbor. However, the anti-corruption website Republic Report found that one of Nessa Coppinger's clients is Suncoke Energy, which is being sued by four Ohio residents who allege that Suncoke does to them what Coppinger's neighbor does to her and her fetus. (Suncoke's "clouds or haze," containing particulates of lead, mercury, arsenic, chromium, creosote, coal tar pitch and other alarming substances, allegedly threatens the neighbors' health and property values.) [Salon.com, 3-24-2015]

-- Superman: While thousands of Japanese women accept commercial pornographic movie roles, only a dwindling number of males (by one estimate, only 30 industrywide) are available to pair with them ("stallions on call," according to one producer). That makes the undisputed king of Japanese porn, "Shimiken," 35, in such demand that he works as many as six movies a day with few days off. His oeuvre, according to a double entendre-laden March profile in Details magazine, includes 7,000 films, with at least 7,500 "co-stars," including, once, 72-year-old twins. To maintain his vigor, he hits the gym fanatically and downs mineral supplements and complex amino acids -- but no Viagra. "I haven't had to use it," he said (adding, after a pause, "yet"). [Details, March 2015]

-- Among Colorado's legal contortions to improve mass murderer James Holmes' chances of getting a "fair" trial, officials in January called more than 9,000 people to choose its jury of 12 (plus 12 alternates) who will somehow surmise whether the Aurora theater shooter was legally sane at the time he killed 12 and wounded 70. The 9,000 first had to complete lengthy questionnaires, with "thousands" returning for individual interrogation, and many for follow-up screening. (Among the prospects the judge encountered was one man skeptical of the death penalty -- except in the case of a "zombie apocalypse." Said Judge Carlos Samour Jr., "You meet some interesting people in this job.") [Associated Press, 3-9-2015]

Some states that rushed to enact systems to evaluate schoolteachers by the test scores of their students left the details of such regimens for later, resulting, for example, in absurdities like the Washington, D.C., public school custodians and lunchroom workers who a few years ago were being evaluated, in part, by student test scores in English and math. In March, a New York public school art teacher, writing in The Washington Post, complained that his coveted "effective" rating one year had dropped to "developing" simply because his school's student math score had fallen. Furthermore, since he is now "developing," he must file plans for improving his performance (i.e., how, from art class, he can raise math scores among students he does not teach). [Washington Post, 3-25-2015]

(1) In March, the Simoneau family in a town near Australia's Sunshine Coast at first considered the three-foot-long slitherer to be one of the country's ubiquitous snakes, but the home invader was moving very slowly and, it turned out, was merely from one of those hair-raising Australian species -- gigantic earthworms. (2) Dogs and cats, as well as wild animals searching for food, sometimes show up with their heads caught in fences, buckets or food containers (and, to avoid starvation, need to be freed by helpful humans). In a suburb of Adelaide, in March, a deadly Eastern brown snake turned up needing similar aid, but it being Australia, its head was stuck in a beer can. [Sunshine Coast Daily, 3-5-2015] [ninemsn.com.au (ASydney), 3-15-2015]

(1) Burger King Japan commenced an April rollout -- limited in duration and only in Japan -- of Burger King-branded cologne (mimicking the Whopper's savory "flame-grilled scent"). Early reviews were favorable, even though the launch date, suspiciously, was April 1. (2) A small Virginia defense contractor won a $7 million job recently to help Pentagon analysts sift through supercomputer research, and according to the industry watchdog Defense One, the firm has decided to stick with its long-ago- selected original name. Even though events have overtaken that name, the company will still be known as Isis Defense. [The Verge, 4-1-2015] [DefenseOne.com, 3-9-2015]

Didn't Go As Planned: (1) Surveillance cameras revealed a man with a gun inside the Circle K in Palm Bay, Florida, on Jan. 31. Since the clerk was in the back, with the cash register locked, the man decided to wait for him -- for 17 seconds, according to the video -- but then, impatient, fled empty-handed. (2) According to a February Ormond Beach, Florida, police report, Matthew Semione, 26, handed a holdup note (implying that he was armed) to a Sun Trust bank teller, who walked away to get money. Semione grew weary of waiting and left empty-handed, but was arrested minutes later. [Florida Today, 2-1-2015] [Daytona Beach News-Journal, 2-19-2015]

To most, the toilet is merely functional, but to brilliant thinkers, it can be the birthplace of masterpieces. Thus, the price tags were high this summer (2010) when commodes belonging to two creative giants went on sale. In August, a gaudily designed toilet from John Lennon's 1969-71 residence in Berkshire, England, fetched 9,500 pounds (about $14,740) at a Liverpool auction, and a North Carolina collectibles dealer opened bids on the toilet upon which reclusive author J.D. Salinger spent many hours while at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. The dealer's initial price was $1 million because, "who knows how many of Salinger's stories were thought up and written while (he) sat on this throne!" [Reuters, 8-28-2010] [BBC News, 8-20-2010]

Thanks This Week to Ken Lilly and Gerald Davidson, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

An unarmed man, suspected of no crime, who three years ago was shot 16 times by police while lying in his bed, told a Seattle Times reporter in March that he bears no ill will for the cops who shot him. Said Dustin Theoharis, now 32, "Sometimes (police) make mistakes." Theoharis was napping in a friend's house in Puyallup, Washington, when police arrived to arrest the friend's son, and when Theoharis reached for his ID, one officer imagined a gun, and the two officers opened fire, hitting Theoharis in the jaw, both upper arms, both lower arms, wrist, hand, shoulder, abdomen and both legs. He spent months in a hospital and skilled nursing facility and today is largely immobile and unable to work. (He "won" legal settlements totaling $5.5 million, but one-third went to lawyers, and much of the rest has paid medical bills.) [Seattle Times, 3-21-2015]

-- Update: According to the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, it appears that some of the 2016 Summer Olympics aquatic events will take place among floating household trash and raw sewage in Guanabara Bay (although Mayor Eduardo Paes noted to the Associated Press in March that the events are scheduled for the "cleanest part" of the bay). To acquire the games, organizers had promised a massive cleanup, but now, with 500 days to go, Paes conceded that the goals will not be met and that, indeed, infrastructure improvements still have not halted the sewage flow into the bay. [Associated Press, 3-23-2015]

-- Despite the skepticism of a few tech writers, the Internet pornography super-site Pornhub insists that it is developing a wristband that stores energy (enough to power a cellphone) that can be generated by the "up and down" motion of masturbation. Pornhub announced in February that it will soon begin recruiting human testers for its Wankband. [Pornhub press release via New York Daily News, 2-28-2015]

-- According to the 17-year-old bicyclist who was broadsided by a motorist at rush hour in Sheffield, England, on March 6, a woman at first alighted from the car to help. However, upon seeing the extent of the cyclist's injuries, she apologized and walked away, telling the sprawled-out victim that her children were in the car and would be "scared" to see all that blood -- and so she would drive them on to school. (Witnesses provided a description of the vehicle, but the hit-and-run driver was still at large.) [Huffington Post UK, 3-12-2015]

-- Trying to stake out a position on the Paris murders of the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine, Pope Francis in January told an audience during his Philippines tour that freedom of speech is important, but that there are limits. "If my good friend Dr. (Alberto) Gasbarri (who organized the pope's visit and was standing at his side) says a curse word against my mother," Francis said, "he can expect a punch." He then "threw" a mock "punch" toward Gasbarri. (The Vatican press office was later moved to clarify that violence in God's name can never be justified.) [Associated Press via Yahoo News, 1-15-2015]

Super-Protective Parenting: Standardized placement exams are typically far more determinative of student success in Asian countries than the United States, and in March in some testing centers in India's Bihar state, "traditional" rampant cheating became grotesque. Dozens of parents were seen climbing outside walls of one center (to pass answers and notes to the students), reminiscent of movie depictions of Santa Anna's army scaling the walls of the Alamo. The week-long secondary school exams, testing 1.4 million students, had early-on seen 400-plus students expelled, nine bags of cheat sheets confiscated, and at least seven parents arrested. However, officials admitted that their security forces were overmatched by parents desperate to assist their children. [BBC News, 3-19-2015]

Chicago's WGN-TV was forced to apologize in March for a misjudgment in booking its "Morning Show" after an unconventional "circus" performer, in a live-television publicity segment, took a power saw to a metal box affixed to her crotch. "Dancer" Shana Vaughan-Gabor, of the Cirque De La Femme, created a dazzling shower of sparks, provoking the male host to first demand that the camera cut away, but then admitting, "I've been waiting my whole life to meet a woman like this." In the follow-up segment, a group of children who had witnessed the scene used descriptions like "creepy" and "stinky," but Vaughan-Gabor later urged the station to "save the children from 'boring' (entertainment)." [Daily Mail (London), 3-18-2015]

In March, the Administrative Office of the Courts revealed a slight increase in federal litigation in 2014, but a much larger increase in prisoner lawsuits. Leading the upturn was Dale Maisano, 63, serving 15 years for aggravated assault, who last year alone filed 3,613 cases concerning his Florence, Arizona, facility. Counting previous prison stints, Maisano has filed 6,076 complaints against various officials and prison system health-care providers. (In a 2014 USA Today report, Maisano volunteered that he himself "could use some mental health help.") [Washington Post, 3-20-2015]

In March, the investment bank Credit Suisse Group AG agreed to pay $16.25 million to settle a client's charges that Credit Suisse gave faulty investment advice on two acquisitions by Freeport-McMoRan (one of the world's largest producers of copper and gold). Actually, according to a Wall Street Journal report, Freeport will receive only $10 million in cash. The remaining amount it agreed to accept, to make up for Credit Suisse's faulty advice, is $6.25 million worth of future investment advice. [Wall Street Journal, 3-17-2015]

Ion Productions of Cincinnati is eager to sell "the world's first commercially available hand-held flamethrower" -- the XM42, which could shoot 25-foot flames and costs between $700 and $800. Ion announced in March that it was seeking additional funding, touting the device's uses ("killing insects," "eliminating weeds between pavement cracks," "melting snow," "entertaining friends") and assuring potential buyers that portable flamethrowers are less regulated than handguns. (Only California and Maryland legislators, and a few city or county officials, appear to be on top of the issue of amateur flame-throwing.) [Washington Post, 3-22-2015]

Police in Grandville, Michigan, arrested David Slovinski, 51, following a pair of January incidents in which he approached employees of Meijer stores and showed them cellphone photos of his genitals. Slovinski, already a "sexually delinquent person" under the law, was on a GPS monitor during the incidents. He later told a police investigator that he knew what he was doing was wrong, but that showing his penis to people "cheers me up when I'm feeling down." [MLive.com (Grand Rapids), 3-19-2015]

Recurring Theme: Perpetrators on the run frequently, unintentionally reveal their whereabouts by their need to show off on social media, but Christopher Wallace has reached legendary show-off status. Being sought in connection with a January burglary, he went to his home in Fairfield, Maine -- and posted on the Snapchat site that that's where he was. Police arrived and, during their canvass, noticed a brand-new Snapchat post from Wallace -- mischievously writing that police were in his home right then, searching for him, but that he was cunningly hiding in a cabinet. Police opened the cabinet and arrested him. [Associated Press via Morning Sentinel (Waterville, Maine), 3-24-2015]

In mid-April (2010), senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi issued a warning that then-recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere were caused by women's loose sex and immodest dress. Immediately, Australian Jennifer McCreight began campaigning worldwide, urging women to dress provocatively on April 26, to create "boobquake" to test the cleric's theory, and at least 90,000 women pledged to reveal scandalous cleavage on that date. On April 26, a Richter-scale 6.5 quake did in fact hit just south of Taiwan. (Tempering the ayatollah's "victory," a Purdue University seismologist observed that a 6.5 quake was not uncommon for that region). [Courier-Mail (Brisbane)-AFP, 4-17-10; Indianapolis Star, 4-28-10]

Thanks This Week to Gerald Sacks, Robert Coleridge, Bruce Leiserowitz, Kathryn Wood, and Crystal Hipkins, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.