University of California researchers, on a Pentagon contract, announced in January success at rigging a live flower beetle with electrodes and a radio receiver to enable scientists to control the insect's flight remotely. Pulses sent to the bug's muscles or optic lobes can command it to take off, turn left or right, or hover, according to a report in MIT Technology Review, and the insect's "large" size (up to a whopping four inches in length) would enable it to also carry a camera, giving the beetle military uses such as surveillance or search and rescue. The researchers admired the native flight-control ability of the beetle so much that they abandoned developing robot beetles (which required trying to mimic nature).

An official of the National Association of Letter Carriers in Buffalo, N.Y., said in February that it would challenge the Postal Service's threatened suspension of a carrier who was using sidewalks to get from house to house this winter instead of walking across ice-packed, deep-snow-drift yards. Cutting across yards is required by Postal Service rules in order to speed up deliveries.

(1) Allahmanamjad Barbel, 21, sought help in February at the police station in Barnstable, Mass., after his sister playfully put handcuffs on him at a birthday party and couldn't get them off. Police removed them and then, after running his name through the computer, discovered several outstanding warrants and immediately re-cuffed him. (2) Doctoral student Daniel Bennett filed a lawsuit against Britain's Leeds University in February because custodians had mistakenly thrown out research that he had been working with for the last seven years. Bennett is studying the rare Butaan lizard of the Philippines and over the years, to examine its diet, had painstakingly sifted through jungle dirt to gather over 70 pounds of its feces, which Bennett believes is worth far more than the ($720) Leeds has offered him.

-- A coin-operated self-service dog-washing machine ("self" meaning the dog's owner, not the dog) has been introduced in a half-dozen carwashes in the United States recently, at $10 for 10 minutes, according to a January report on one such franchise in Stuart, Fla. The "K9000" is a 3-foot-high, walk-in shower area (or push-in, for reluctant dogs) with an open top, has six separate wash cycles, conditioner and flea-and-tick options, and adjustable water pressure and dryer settings.

-- At Mannerspielplatz ("Men's Playground") near Kassel, Germany, testosterone-fueled office workers can get in touch with their "inner ditchdigger" (according to a January Wired magazine report) and frolic all day long on 29-ton backhoes, 32-ton front-end loaders, jackhammers and various other big, loud vehicles for an admission fee of about $280 a day. At the Men's Playground, the owner said, "We fulfill men's dreams."

-- "Reproduction is no fun if you're a squid," said a biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, referring especially to the deep-sea squid. Finding a mate a mile down in pitch-darkness is hard enough, but the combination of males that are smaller and fearful of being overpowered and females whose reception of sperm involves being stabbed makes the insemination process especially traumatic. Sperm deposits can be extensive and burdensome to the female and are delivered by the reckless slashing of the skin by the male. In fact, according to a December report in Germany's Der Spiegel, in the darkness the male sometimes misses the female altogether and inseminates himself.

-- Princeton University scientists, reporting in January on research in Peru, said they observed aggressive, carnivorous behavior for the first time among dung beetles, which decapitated and ate millipedes. Dung beetles were not known previously to be fussy eaters (except for a 2006 study in which they seemed to prefer horse dung to camel dung or sheep dung).

-- People With Too Much Money: At Tokyo's first fish auction of 2009 in January, the upscale Kyubey restaurant and the more moderate Itamae Sushi dining chain jointly purchased a single, 280-pound bluefin tuna for the equivalent of about $104,000. Kyubey said it would cut its half into slivers priced at about $22 each, while the popular Itamae planned to offer tinier, more affordable slivers.

-- In Hong Kong, according to a February Wall Street Journal report, when a feng shui master speaks on the economy, investors listen closely (especially in view of the mess quantitative analysis has made of things). Alion Yeo, an expert on the Chinese system of beliefs in stars, geography and the location of objects, and whose popular finance seminars attract high-end investors, told a group of about 170 recently that 2009 would be dismal because the U.S. economy is now in the hands of a president and a secretary of the Treasury who were both born in a Year of the Ox (1961), of which 2009 is another (and which has already started frighteningly with both a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse).

-- Some laid-off workers may be desperate to exhibit their work skills at any available job, but February news reports highlighted two government bureaucrats who draw $250,000 a year between them yet have been prevented from doing a stitch of work for, in one case, six years, and in the other, 18 months. Randall Hinton is nominally the chief of investigations for the New York State Insurance Fund but was ostracized by his supervisors in 2002 and has taken home his $93,000 a year for zero work ever since. U.S. Labor Department official Bob Whitmore earns $150,000 but has had no work to do since July 2007 due to a clash with his supervisors.

(1) Drug-trafficking is a capital offense in Malaysia, and it appeared that one man would go down after being spotted by a police officer with the key to a large drug locker. However, the man has an identical twin brother who was not charged, and in February, Kuala Lumpur High Court Judge Zaharah Ibrahim ruled that because it was impossible to know which one had been seen with the key, both had to go free. (2) Jeffrey Boyle was convicted in 2006 of setting eight fires during the time he was a lieutenant in the Chicago Fire Department and is serving a six-year sentence, but in January, he filed a lawsuit against the department demanding his pension, of about $50,000 a year, on the grounds that he was off duty during the time he set the fires.

Recurring Themes: (1) In February, David Hampton, 23, was charged in Charlotte County, Fla., with robbing a BP gas station and became the latest such robber to run out of gas in his getaway car even though minutes earlier, obviously, he had been present at a gas station. (2) In Marseille, France, in January, a 21-year-old man became the latest bank burglar with an ambitious plan and a mediocre sense of direction, as he drilled through the outside wall of a branch of Banque Populaire but missed the room with the safe deposit boxes and wound up instead in a restroom. [WWSB-TV (Sarasota), 2-9-09] [Reuters, 2-1-09]

A pre-trial hearing was scheduled in February 1996 in Lamar, Mo., on Joyce Lehr's lawsuit against the county for injuries suffered in a 1993 fall in the icy, unplowed parking lot of the local high school. The Carthage Press reported that Lehr claimed damage to nearly every part of her body. According to her lawsuit: "All the bones, organs, muscles, tendons, tissues, nerves, veins, arteries, ligaments ... discs, cartilages, and the joints of her body were fractured, broken, ruptured, punctured, compressed, dislocated, separated, bruised, contused, narrowed, abraded, lacerated, burned, cut, torn, wrenched, swollen, strained, sprained, inflamed and infected."

Belgian workers take sick leave nearly four times as often as U.S. workers, mostly attributed to Belgian law, which grants full salary the first month and then government-guaranteed 80-percent pay indefinitely. A recent study, noted in a January Wall Street Journal report, found that only 5 percent of Belgian leave-takers were proven malingerers, but that the biggest medical problem now is easily-diagnosed "depression" (exacerbated by the worsening economy), leading to free-form medical leave-taking and creative treatments often unchallenged, such as for the man who frolicked on the soccer field, bought an Alfa Romeo, and reconnected with old friends (all of which, not surprisingly, said his doctor, lessened his depression).

-- On successive days in January in the courthouse in Sheboygan, Wis., 17-year-old Alan Jepsen and 17-year-old Norma Guthrie were each charged with sexual assault for having consensual sex with their respective 14-year-old, opposite-sex companions. However, Jepsen was charged with a felony (maximum: 25 years in prison), and Guthrie was charged with a misdemeanor (maximum, 9 months).

-- In January, a judge at Britain's Bristol Crown Court dropped the case against a 20-year-old man accused of robbing a driving instructor because the victim-witness was "too believable" in her testimony to the jury. Judge Jamie Tabor explained that the victim had only seen the defendant for a split-second, but that she appeared so sincere and courageous that the jury probably regarded her courtroom identification of the man as more authoritative than the mere glimpse deserved.

-- Australia's Queensland Rail agency disclosed in January that it would quickly offer refunds to passengers on a Cairns-to-Brisbane train that crashed just outside Cairns, but reiterated at the same time that it would not pay refunds to survivors of a November 2008 Brisbane-to-Cairns train crash that killed two and injured nine. The difference, according to a Queensland Rail general manager, was that the 2009 trip was just getting underway from Cairns when it crashed, but that the 2008 trip, also near Cairns, was "95 percent over" by the time the deadly crash occurred (and thus, the survivors had basically reached their destination).

-- Timothy Hoffman, 26, was awarded $76.6 million by a jury in Viera, Fla., in January for becoming paralyzed in a 2003 incident when, on a dare, he dove headfirst into the Indian River, which, unknown to him, was about a foot deep at that point. One reason for the large judgment may have been that the defendant, C&D Dock Works, one of whose employees may have been the one that issued the dare, is bankrupt and did not defend itself at the trial. (There was also evidence that Hoffman may have solicited the dare himself.)

-- Paul Sanchez, 67, an "occasional" golfer, filed a lawsuit in Brentwood, N.H., in February against the Candia Woods Golf Links for a 2006 incident in which his approach shot hit a yard marker in the fairway, bounced back, and struck him in the eye. Sanchez claimed the course owners were negligent in placing the sign in the fairway and also should have warned him that balls would bounce off of it.

-- (1) The $500,000 top prize in Alaska's January statewide lottery, to benefit the organization Standing Together Against Rape, for victims of sexual assault, was won by Alec Ahsoak, 53, who coincidentally is a twice-convicted sex offender. (2) Sweden's Hallands Nyheter newspaper reported in January that a police officer had endured four operations at a private clinic in Gothenburg to correct a birth condition that made one leg shorter than the other, but operations on the longer leg cut off too much, so it is now shorter than the leg that used to be the shorter one.

-- In January, an appeals court in Newark, N.J., reinstated Doris Sexton's worker-compensation lawsuit against a county-owned nursing home where Sexton had claimed that breathing a co-worker's perfume one day in 2004 had made her permanently disabled and tethered to an oxygen tank. A lower court had decided that it was far more likely that her disability was caused by Sexton's 43-year, pack-a-day cigarette habit than by the brief exposure to perfume.

-- Inadvertently, Raed Jarrar, 30, made his August 2006 airline flight from New York to Oakland, Calif., pay off handsomely for him, despite some inconvenience and harassment. Jarrar, an Iraqi-born U.S. resident married to an American citizen, was wearing a T-shirt with Arabic lettering at the JetBlue gate at JFK airport when the airline denied him boarding. After negotiating, he was allowed to board provided he cover the shirt and sit in the back row. In January 2009, JetBlue and two officials of the Transportation Security Administration agreed to pay Jarrar $240,000 to settle his racial profiling lawsuit. (The T-shirt read "We Will Not Be Silent" and was in both English and Arabic.)

-- In January, assistant coaches Scott Coy and Darren DeMeio, of the Westminister College (New Wilmington, Pa.) football team, who were in Nashville, Tenn., for a coaches' convention, were seriously injured during 4 a.m. horseplay-wrestling at their hotel. The men, who weigh a combined 525 lbs., crashed through the double-paned window in their fourth-floor room and fell to the ground in their underwear.

-- Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) John West, 20, and Ashley Sorensen, 20, were arrested in Auburn, Calif., in January after allegedly stealing the tires and rims off a car. The pair had put the tires on their own car and then violated a cardinal rule by returning to the crime scene, to see if the owner had called the police. (She had, and she pointed out the pair's car to officers.) (2) A man who demanded the bank's money in Nicholasville, Ky., in January left empty-handed after an employee at the counter informed him that the building is now a regional water-district office and not the bank that used to be there.

-- (a) On the Open Road: A 70-lb. pit bull jumped on a car's gearshift at a carwash in Pryor, Okla., in November, sending the car out of the bay, to circle the lot briefly. And a boxer-shar-pei mix similarly jostled the gearshift of a van in Port Jefferson, N.Y., in November, sending it through the front window of the Cool Beanz coffee shop. (b) On the Firing Line: Oregon State Police said a gunshot into a boat on Tillamook Bay in November was probably caused by a Labrador's jumping on a 12-gauge shotgun while the boat was unattended. And a 19-year-old man had several toes shot off on a hunting trip in January in Forrest City, Ark., when his dog jumped onto a shotgun in the front seat of his truck.

-- The Baltimore Sun reported in June 1993 that New York City artist Todd Alden had recently asked 400 art collectors worldwide to send him samples of their feces so he could offer them for sale in personalized tins. Said Alden, "Scatology is emerging as an increasingly significant part of artistic inquiry in the 1990s." A 30-gram tin of the feces of Italian artist Piero Manzoni, canned in 1961, sold just before that for $75,000. Subsequent to this story, News of the Weird periodically tracked the fluctuating price of the several Manzoni tins, including Britain's Tate Gallery's 2002 purchase for $38,000 (which was over 100 times the price of an equal amount of gold). A colleague of Manzoni revealed in 2007 that his tins probably contained just plaster, but a Tate curator pointed out the irrelevance of the physical content of art.

Though India is recognized as a world leader in promoting the health benefits of urine, its dominance will be assured by the end of the year when a cow-urine-based soft drink comes to market. Om Prakash, chief of the Cow Protection Department of the RSS organization (India's largest Hindu nationalist group), trying to reassure a Times of London reporter in February, promised, "It won't smell like urine and will be tasty, too," noting that medicinal herbs would be added and toxins removed. In addition to improved health, he said, India needs a domestic (and especially Hindu) beverage to compete with the foreign influence of Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

-- After 50 years' separation following their adoptions by separate families, identical twins Rosabelle Glasby of Australia and Dorothy Loader of Malaysia were reunited in September 2008 after a years-long search by Glasby, and she applied to bring Loader to Australia under the country's family migration policy. However, in January, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship ruled that, under the law, Loader is not related to Glasby (in that the adoption wipes out birth status).

-- Change We Can Believe In: In December, the city council in Brighton, Mich., passed an ordinance making it illegal for anyone to be "annoying" in public, "by word of mouth, sign or motions." Violators can be ticketed and fined.

-- States That Need Better Training in Arithmetic: (1) Two Maryland officials (reportedly new on the job) made a simple error in addition in 2007 (in estimating counties' property values) that was revealed in January 2009 to have cost state offices $31 million in overpayments, according to a Washington Post report. (2) In October, the Dallas school district was forced to lay off 375 teachers to ameliorate an $84 million deficit caused by a massive math error in the budget, according to a report by WFAA-TV.

-- Earlier, He Could've Gotten a Mortgage, Too: In a December test of the laxness of New York City's property-ownership office, a New York Daily News reporter walked out of the city's register of deeds with title to the $2 billion Empire State Building. His fake purchase document, with a fake notary public stamp and a fake "witness" signature (of "Fay Wray," star of the original "King Kong"), took 90 minutes to convert to an official deed, which of course came as a great surprise to Empire State Land Associates, to whose shocked representative the reporter "returned" the property the next day.

-- The campus police chief of Colorado State University, Dexter Yarbrough, also teaches a criminology class, during which he gives a flavor of real police work (since he's a former Chicago cop). According to audio recordings of his lectures reported in January by the campus newspaper The Collegian, Yarbrough acknowledged that police sometimes have to "lie" and "cut corners" and "beat (the) ass" of a suspect if they "deserve" it. Sometimes, a confidential informant gets paid off with police-seized drugs, but only after being warned, "(H)ey, if you get caught with this, you know, don't say my name." Most unenlightened of all was Yarbrough's characterization of some rape victims: "(E)ven when (women) say 'no,' (t)hey want the dick."

-- Police in Holland Township, N.J., removed three kids from the home of Heath and Deborah Campbell in January at the behest of the state Division of Youth and Family Services. The kids are 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell and his 1-year-old sisters, Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell and JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell. The family was also in the news in December when their local ShopRite supermarket bakery refused to make a birthday cake with little Adolf's name on it.

(1) Michael Reed, 50, was charged with attempted robbery of Eddie's Fried Chicken in Fort Worth, Texas, in December. He was armed only with a tree branch and was quickly neutralized by a 56-year-old employee, who grabbed a broom, and the men proceeded to duel until Reed dropped his branch and fled (but was arrested nearby). (2) The Happy Egg Company (Lincoln, England) altered the packaging in January for its six-egg cartons to include the prominent warning, "Allergy Advice: Contains Egg."

(1) The Northwest Florida Daily News reported the arrest of a woman for trespassing in December in Mary Esther, Fla., after she was reluctant to leave a neighbor's porch. According to the newspaper, she eventually "left ... in anger, knocking over a dryer ... in the front yard." (2) Robert Blue, 53, was arrested in Las Vegas in January and charged with chaining his 15-year-old daughter to her bed at night to keep her from eating. Blue told police that the girl weighs 165 pounds, but that he wanted her at 145, which he said is her ideal fighting weight for mixed martial arts.

A masked man escaped in December after trying unsuccessfully to rob the Washman carwash in Portland, Ore. In the middle of the job, the man's gun literally broke apart and fell to the ground. As he continued to demand money, it became clear why robbing a carwash is tricky. The employee grabbed the nearest tool, which was the wand of a pressure washer (2,000 pounds per square inch) and hosed the robber, sending him fleeing.

Texas "Justice": As far as the state of Texas is concerned, Andre Thomas, 25, was and is sane and was and is competent to assist his lawyers. Thomas was convicted of murdering his wife and two kids in 2004 after a judge ruled him competent despite the fact that after the killings, Thomas had carved out the victims' hearts, put them in his pocket, and later tossed them in the garbage. In addition, before trial, Thomas had plucked out his right eye and eaten it. In October 2008, Texas' highest criminal court upheld the conviction and sentence, endorsing the trial judge's view of Thomas' sanity. In January 2009, on death row in Livingston, Texas, Thomas plucked out his left eye and ate it.

Elderly drivers' recent lapses of concentration, confusing the brake pedal with the gas (or "drive" with "reverse"): Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Joe Greenhill, 94, crashed into a restraining wall in downtown Austin, nearly winding up in Lady Bird Lake (December). A 90-year-old woman, driving her brand-new Dodge Challenger, rammed a pole while turning left in Pompano Beach, Fla. (October). An 83-year-old man drove through his garage wall and continued on about 70 yards in Lycoming Township, Pa. (September). An 83-year-old man drove 50 feet into Big 5 Sporting Goods Store in Milwaukie, Ore. (December). An 82-year-old man crashed his SUV into a tree on a Pittsburgh golf course after zigzagging out of control across the fairway (September). An 82-year-old man crashed into a group of Cub Scouts lining up for a Christmas parade (injuring 12) in Dallas (December).

In April 1997, Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik opened a two-week New York City show, "I Bite America and America Bites Me," in which he stayed in character as a dog, on all fours, from the time his plane landed in New York until the moment he left town. Kulik holed up in a gallery cage wearing only a dog collar and exhibiting dog behaviors and emotions, and visitors could enter the cage to play with him only after putting on protective padding in case Kulik bit them. Kulik had been arrested in three countries for biting his audience. (A Paris gallery owner has called Kulik "a great intellectual" whose art is rooted in the downfall of communism in Russia.)