Donald Duck may be a lovable icon of comic mishap to American youngsters, but in Germany, he is wise and complicated and retains followers well past their childhoods. Using licensed Disney storyline and art, the legendary translator Erika Fuchs created an erudite Donald, who often "quotes from German literature, speaks in grammatically complex sentences, and is prone to philosophical musings," according to a May Wall Street Journal dispatch. Though Donald and Uncle Scrooge ("Dagoberto") speak in a lofty richness, nephews Tick, Trick and Track use the slang of youth. Recently in Stuttgart, academics gathered for the 32nd annual convention of the "German Organization for Non-Commercial Followers of Pure Donaldism," with presentations on such topics as Duckburg's solar system.

-- The preferred "disciplinary" tactic of Tampa, Fla., high school assistant principal Olayinka Alege, 28, is to have underperforming students remove a shoe so he can "pop" their toes. Five students at King High School complained, triggering a sheriff's office investigation, but Alege was cleared, and indeed, the students admit that the popping is painless (though "weird," said some). One apparently incorrigible student said his toes had been popped 20 times. However, the principal recently ordered Alege to stop.

-- Chicago banker George Michael, seeking to avoid $80,000 a year in property taxes, decided to call his $3 million mansion a "church" and apply for tax exemption as pastor, and in July 2008, his application was somehow preliminarily approved by the Illinois Department of Revenue. According to a Chicago Tribune report, the application included a photograph of the "church," which was just a shot of an outer wall of Michael's house with a large cross on it, except that the cross was later discovered to have been merely placed on the photograph in marker pen. In July 2009, a state administrative law judge finally reversed the earlier approval.

-- The Economy Is Working: (1) Carole Bohanan was hired among 300 applicants by the Wookey Hole tourist facility in Somerset, England, in July to be its witch-in-residence, at a pro-rated annual salary of the equivalent of about $83,000. The witch's job is to linger in the caves full-time during tourist season, looking like a hag and cackling. (2) Officials in Heath, Ohio, might have solved their budget problems. The town (population 8,500) reported in July that its new, six-intersection traffic-camera ticketing system issued 10,000 citations in its first four weeks. (Nonetheless, officials admitted that was too many and were discussing how to ease up.)

-- The Economy Is Failing: (1) A 36-year-old woman pleaded guilty to prostitution in Oklahoma City in June, for giving oral sex to a Frito-Lay employee in exchange for a case of chips. (2) In an interview with the Toronto Star in June, a 36-year-old drag queen, who said he usually gets $60 for oral sex, was lately receiving offers as low as $5. Said "Ray": "I didn't spend two hours getting my makeup on and all dressed up for ($5)."

-- "Goose barnacles": A 6-foot-long log composed of hundreds of barnacles, locked together, washed ashore near Swansea, Wales, in August. Each of the barnacles uses tentacles for snatching food, and a 6-foot mass of snake-like appendages, writhing simultaneously, terrified local beachgoers. Scientists said goose barnacles usually remain on the ocean floor.

-- "Tubifex worms": Using a flexible-hose camera, public utility officials in Raleigh, N.C., inspected a faulty water pipe under the Cameron Village shopping district in April and found a pulsating, tennis-ball-size mass attached to a pipe wall. Local biologists identified it as a colony of tubifex worms that navigated the system until finding a propitious feeding spot. Officials have attempted to assure residents that the worms are somehow no threat to water quality.

(1) In April, researchers at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City reported the ability to encase scorpion venom in "nanoparticles" that were somehow able to guide the venom intravenously to the human brain, to attack tumors, potentially doubling the venom's success rate. (2) A team from Britain's University of Warwick announced in April that it had built a speedy, fully functioning Formula 3 race car using biodegradable ingredients in the frame (including carrots, potatoes and soybean foam) and chocolate oils in the fuel.

(1) A 114-pound tortoise, part of the Zambini Family Circus performing in Madison, Wis., in July, escaped. He actually made good time on his dash for freedom, covering two miles in six days before being spotted. (2) About 20 men were present for a Belgian body builders' championship in May when three anti-doping officials arrived unexpectedly and requested urine samples. Every single contestant abruptly grabbed his gear and fled, according to press reports, and the event was canceled.

According to prosecutors in Britain's Preston Crown Court in July, Christopher Monks, 24, wanted two things (based on transcribed Internet chat room dialogue): his parents killed and his penis bitten off. As the Internet is fertile ground for communities of sexual aberrants, Monks easily found a man, Shaun Skarnes, 19, who was searching to accommodate someone on the latter desire and who allegedly agreed to kill Monks' parents in exchange. However, Skarnes botched the killings, and Monks, himself, is still intact.

No Respect: (1) The latest community to challenge the taboo about disturbing a graveyard is Peoria, Ill., where the Lincoln Branch Library is planning an expansion, though on land that was a 19th-century burial ground. By law, all bodies must be preserved, but each exploratory dig turns up more bodies, driving up costs to the city. (2) Neighborhoods near the Wimbledon tennis tournament in suburban London are typically clogged in June, as visitors scramble for parking space. This year, nearby St. Mary's Church sold parking for 20 pounds a day (about $33), even though the space offered was directly above gravesites in the church's cemetery.

Latest Playdates: Las Vegas, August (Jesus on a sticker on woman's toilet lid); Bryan, Texas, July (Mary on a bird dropping on the side mirror of a pickup truck); Ravena, N.Y., June (Jesus in a coffee stain on a mason jar); Dallas, May (Jesus-shaped piece in a bag of Cheetos); Harlingen, Texas, May (Mary's image on a dry-cleaning company's press); Calexico, Calif., April (Mary on the griddle of the Las Palmas restaurant); New Gloucester, Maine (Jesus on the neck of a guitar); Sudbury, Ontario, April (Jesus on a maple leaf being raked); Netherlands, April (Jesus on a Kit Kat bar). (Only the news report of the Bryan, Texas, sighting indicated that pilgrims were actually visiting the site to pray.)

Among the exhibits at the Impulse to Collect show at San Jose State University in February 1998 were Chris Daubert's "Chromatic extrusions rodenta" (rats' droppings following their ingestion of various of his oil paints), Maryly Snow's collection of 696 toothbrushes (each catalogued on 13 attributes), and Bob Rasmussen's variety of unrelated items containing red X's. Among the exhibits rejected were a man's huge mass of dryer lint, another's assortment of cat snot on slides, and yet another's 15-year collection of umbilical cords. Said organizer Theta Belcher, on what makes a real collector: "They take it that one step too far."

World-Class Adolescent Endeavors: Japanese engineer Takuo Toda's paper airplane was certified in May as the Guinness Book record-holder for the longest flight from a single folded sheet of paper: 27.9 seconds. And in Witcham, England, in July, Jim Collins won the World Peashooting Championship, using a "traditional" instrument blowing at a target 12 yards away, but noncompeting ex-champion George Hollis once again drew the most attention with his homemade, gyroscopic-balancing, laser-guided peashooter, with which he won three previous championships.

-- When motorist Timothy Pereira, 19, rammed Christine Speliotis' car head-on in Salem, Mass., in March, there was no doubt in police officers' minds what the cause was: Pereira was driving 85 mph in a 35 mph zone and had swerved into Speliotis' lane. However, in July, Brandon Pereira, 17, an injured passenger in his cousin's car, filed a lawsuit against Speliotis for negligence, claiming that if she had been quicker to get out of the way, the collision would not have occurred.

-- Failed Defenses: (1) A woman in Kansas City, Mo., told police in June that the reason she had stabbed her sleepwalking 24-year-old boyfriend in the face was that she feared he would hurt her if she didn't wake him up. (She said the man had also just finished urinating in her closet.) (2) In Britain's Chelmsford Crown Court in July, Sultan Al-Sayed, 40, was convicted of peeping under the next stall in a department-store changing room despite his claim that the only reason he placed his face on the floor was to relieve pain from a toothache.

-- When the tenant failed to pay $87,000 in rent in April and May on two townhouses and a retail property at Trump Plaza in New York City, the landlord did what Donald Trump would surely do: It began eviction proceedings. However, the tenant in this case is Donald Trump's Trump Corp., which leases the space from the current landlord, the Trump Plaza Owners co-op. Said the co-op president: "If you don't pay the rent when Donald Trump is your landlord, he comes down on you like a hammer. Well, lo and behold...."

-- In July, Mexican authorities accused one of the country's newer drug cartels, La Familia, of murdering 12 federal agents following a 2007 debut in which it rolled five severed heads into a dance hall in a show of intimidation. According to an April Reuters report, captured documents indicate that La Familia gang members are strictly required to attend regular prayer meetings, to never drink alcohol or take drugs, and to attend classes in "ethics" and "personal improvement."

-- Relatives of two British convicted murderers, claiming a breach of "privacy" under the European Convention on Human Rights, filed lawsuits recently against the Greater Manchester Police over a crime-prevention campaign. High-profile gangbangers Colin Joyce, 29, and Lee Amos, 32, had been sentenced to long prison terms, and the GMP, trying to turn youths away from gangs, created computer images on billboards of the two men as they might look when they are released, sometime after the year 2040. Their families were outraged. (GMP reported that gang-related shootings are down 92 percent since Joyce and Amos were caught.)

-- Schoolteacher Charlene Schmitz, convicted in February 2008 of using electronic messaging to seduce a 14-year-old student in Leroy, Ala., was fired and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence. However, under Alabama law, she is still entitled to draw her $51,000 salary until all legal issues are concluded, and Schmitz is both appealing her conviction and suing the school board for firing her. Another aspect of state law requires the settlement of all criminal issues before the lawsuit can even be addressed. The school board, with an already limited budget, must thus pay Schmitz and her replacement during the process.

-- A Canadian public employees' union local had been on strike in Toronto for weeks, causing an otherwise popular public park to fall into disuse because of high grass and lack of maintenance. Fed-up neighbors brought their own mowers to the park and cleaned it up, making it once again a valuable community resource for dog-walking, ball-playing and picnics. Said the local union's president, in July, of the neighbors' effort: "You could use the word 'scab.'"

Christopher Bjerkness, 31, was arrested in Duluth, Minn., in July and charged with another episode of breaking into a gym facility and slashing numerous large rubber exercise balls. He had acknowledged a sexual urge to slash that type of ball following a conviction in 2006 for cutting up 70 balls in three incidents at the University of Minnesota Duluth. This time, 40 balls were damaged at a St. Mary's/Duluth Clinic West building. Police were told by a psychologist last year, after Bjerkness abandoned court-ordered therapy, that he "continues to be a risk to society."

Recurring Themes: (1) Lonnie Meckwood, 29, and Phillip Weeks, 51, were arrested in Kirkwood, N.Y., in June after allegedly robbing the Quickway Convenience Store. Their getaway ended about a mile from the crime scene as their car ran out of gas, even though the Quickway is also a gas station. (2) Hatim Gulamhusein, 48, was arrested at Toronto International Airport in April, suspected of bringing 76 swallowed packets of cocaine into the country as a drug mule, despite a mighty effort to avoid being charged. Gulamhusein managed to control his bowels so well that it took three weeks for all the packets to pass.

It should be well-known by now to News of the Weird readers that a DNA test disproving fatherhood will not necessarily relieve a man of child-support obligations. Frank Hatley's case is especially alarming. He was finally released in July in Cook County, Ga., but only after having spent 13 months in jail because he had missed a few payments for another man's child. Hatley had paid conscientiously, albeit incompletely, from 1987-2000, out of meager wages, and continued (even during periods of unemployment and homelessness) for several years after he learned he was not the father. In 2001, a court absolved him of the duty to make future payments, but the state interpreted that ruling as not affecting the overdue amounts from the past, and in 2008 jailed him.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Jerry Wayne Damron, Taylorsville, N.C. (July); Edward Wayne Edwards, Louisville, Ky. (August); Anthony Wayne Thomas, Orlando, Fla., (June); Travis Wayne Baczewski, Austin, Texas (July). Indicted recently for murder: Heath Wayne Overstreet, Roanoke, Va. (July); John Wayne Boyer, Nashville, Tenn. (August); David Wayne Hoshaw, Norfolk, Va. (August); Kenneth Wayne Baker, Churchville, Va. (July). Federal appeal of murder conviction denied: Mark Wayne Wiles, Ravenna, Ohio (August). Sentenced for murder: Carl Wayne Bowen, Swansea, Wales (July). And, alas, comes word from Caroline County, Va., that John Wayne Peck, who made this list upon his arrest in 2007 for murder, was found not guilty by a jury (July).

Writing in the February 1995 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, two Wisconsin researchers concluded that nose-picking does not create problems for most people, but that for some the habit "may meet criteria for a disorder -- rhinotillexomania." Among their survey findings: 66.4 percent of pickers did it "to relieve discomfort or itchiness" (versus 2.1 percent for "enjoyment" and 0.4 percent for "sexual stimulation"); 65.1 percent used the index finger (versus 20.2 percent little finger and 16.4 percent thumb); and "Once removed, the nasal debris was examined, at least some of the time, by most respondents."

A Whiff of Injustice: William Dillon was released in November after 26 years in prison when a DNA test ruled him out as the murderer. He was the second Florida man recently freed by DNA after being positively identified at trial by a star police dog, Harass II, whose trainer Bill Preston had sworn could amazingly track scents through water and after months of site contamination. In June, the Innocence Project of Florida said as many as 60 other convicts might have been "identified" by Harass II. According to an Orlando Sentinel report, only one judge (who's now retired) thought to actually test Harass II's ability in a courtroom, and he wrote that the dog failed badly.

-- "If I had portrayed Hitler in his underpants," explained Belgian artist Jan Bucquoy at the opening of his museum in July in Brussels, "there would not have been a war." Bucquoy has displayed, in glass cases, the drawers of prominent Belgians, but also exhibits "Warhol-type" drawings of underwear-clad celebrities as he imagines them (like Margaret Thatcher). As Bucquoy told Reuters: "If you are scared of someone, just imagine them in their underpants. The hierarchy will fall." Whose knickers does the artist most covet? France's First Lady Carla Bruni's would be nice, he said, but even better, the pope's.

-- Another Belgian artist, Jacques Charlier, was rejected by the judges of the Venice Biennale gala when he submitted his poster-sized sketches of other artists' genitals idiosyncratically drawn to suggest whose belong to whom. For example, Charlier's representation of the artist Christo (famous for "wrapping" in cloth panels and ribbons such locations as New York City's Central Park) depicts genitals wrapped up to resemble a parcel. The artists are not named, and guessing their identities from the sketches is part of the show, with prizes for guests who can name 20 of the 100 pieces.

-- British Broadcasting Corp. announced in May that it would "revive an art form" by dispatching a poet to the front lines in Afghanistan to embed with UK troops. BBC selected prominent poet Simon Armitage to mark "a new era in war poetry for the 21st century."

-- Small Town Management: (1) After haggling for a while at its June 16 meeting, the county board in Lincoln, Neb., finally voted, 2-1, to reimburse Shum Darwin for his pants, which went missing at the jail after Darwin was arrested. The city's liability was clear; the debate was about whether the pants were worth $12 or $10. (2) The city council of Brooksville, Fla., by 4-1, adopted an appearance policy in June that requires all municipal employees to wear underwear while on the clock and to make sure it is not visible.

-- Small-Town Politics: In June, the city council of Indian Trail Town, N.C., voted, 4-1, to declare Mayor John Quinn's comments about the council in the town newsletter "whiny" and to ban his remarks from subsequent issues and from the town Web site. The new policy also prohibits Mayor Quinn from talking to any municipal employee unless the town manager is at his side, and requires Quinn to get express permission to enter the town hall except for places open to the general public.

-- An investigation by the U.K. TV channel More4 revealed in June that local U.K. councils spend the equivalent of $80 million a year translating their documents into dozens of languages in the cause of "fairness," even obscure languages that few residents speak, and even given evidence that, in dozens of cases, no one has ever tried to access the documents. Translations were found in Albanian, Bengali, Kurdish, Somali, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sierra Leonean Creole, Karen (eastern Burma) and Ga (Ghana), among others.

In the American version (which actually happened at least once, in Bucks County, Pa., in the 1980s), cynical cops use a photocopier "connected" by a crude wire to the suspect, and a sheet of "He's Lying" paper in the output tray, as a "lie detector" test. In July, the Tel Aviv, Israel, Police Department used a "memory machine" to change the mind of a murder suspect who swore he could not remember anything about the night of the crime. Hooked up to an electrocardiogram machine, the perp was "informed" that certain squiggles on the paper proved that he did indeed remember and must be hiding details. Andrei Polokhin, 47, then confessed and was charged with fatally stabbing his neighbor.

David Shayler, 43, used to be a British MI5 intelligence officer, but apparently went downhill after a controversy with superiors and today lives as Delores Kent, in full female dress, and believes "in (his) heart" that he is the Messiah who will save mankind from its upcoming 2012 doomsday by turning billions of people on to the virtues of hemp, which is "perfectly balanced ... full of omega-3, -6, and -9 to help muscles grow and repair." Shayler/Kent also believes that Americans staged Sept. 11 and that Jesus Christ was, like him, a transvestite.

(1) Least Competent Cops: Officers in Forrest City, Ark., arrested Lawrence Harden Jr. in June for robbing a liquor store. They cuffed him, shackled him, and head-stuffed him into their SUV, but he got out and ran away. Police dogs found Harden an hour later, and he was re-cuffed, re-shackled and re-head-stuffed into a squad car. He got out again and ran away (but was caught again and finally jailed). (2) Least Competent Priest: In a soon-to-be-released memoir, retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, Wis., claims that, at first, he had no idea that priests' sexual abuse of young boys was a crime. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Weakland writes, "We all considered sexual abuse of minors as (only) a moral evil."

News of the Weird's favorite animal was called "heroic" by Argentine researchers in a July issue of the journal Paleontology. Had it not been for high-performance South American scarab dung beetles, they wrote, gargantuan prehistoric mammals would have choked vast areas of the continent knee-deep in manure. The researchers found that, by burying tennis-ball-sized "food supplies" for their young, the beetles also improved surface sanitation by leaving less dung available for "disease-carrying flies."

For years, News of the Weird has touted the magnificently dysfunctional municipal government of Washington, D.C., as the "District of Calamity," but improvements have been made, and the nation's capital has been overtaken by the disaster that is Detroit. (1) A Detroit News investigation revealed in June that the police department has routinely downgraded obvious "murder" cases, to make the city seem less unsafe. (2) A Detroit Public Schools auditor reported in June that the system has been issuing regular paychecks to 257 nonexistent employees. (3) City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, the wife of a U.S. congressman, pleaded guilty in June to accepting a cash bribe for a council vote. (4) A May Detroit Free Press survey revealed that the population of three large Detroit jails has mysteriously declined, which it suggested was because police have simply stopped investigating certain crimes.

In early 1995, Chesapeake, Va., inmate Robert Lee Brock filed a $5 million lawsuit against Robert Lee Brock -- accusing himself of violating his own religious beliefs and his own civil rights by getting himself drunk enough to engage in the various crimes that put him behind bars. He wrote: "I want to pay myself five million dollars (for being made to suffer from this breach of rights) but ask the state to pay it in my behalf since I can't work and am a ward of the state." (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.)