Blair Fowler, 16, delights her frenzied fans as a "haul queen," inspirationally "shopping for glory" by smartly tearing through stores and then displaying and expertly describing her purchases on Internet videos. A March Times of London dispatch from Los Angeles noted Fowler's acclaim "for her ability to deliver a high-pitched 10-minute lecture on the merits of skinny versus low-riding jeans, apparently without drawing breath." According to The Times, at least 100,000 "haul" videos are available on YouTube, mostly from "amateurs." Fowler's videos, though, have been viewed 75 million times by "haul" wannabes (mostly teenage girls).

-- American companies continue trying to outsource work overseas, no matter how increasingly improbable the project. The Chronicle of Higher Education in April reported on the University of Houston business school's contract to have student papers uploaded to "teaching assistants" (mostly residing in India, Singapore and Malaysia), who read them, mark them up and offer constructive advice. UH professor Lori Whisenant, who initiated the university's contract with the firm EduMetry, said she is generally pleased with the results.

-- Recycled Components: (1) Swiss clockmaker Artya announced in March the creation of a wristwatch set in fossilized dinosaur feces (with a strap made with skin from an American cane toad). Designer Yvan Arpa told the Associated Press the watch would sell for about $12,000. (2) The spa Ten Thousand Waves near Santa Fe, N.M., is only the latest U.S. facility to offer as a "signature" treatment the "Japanese Nightingale Facial," supposedly used for centuries by Japanese geisha for skin rejuvenation. Nightingale droppings are dried and sanitized, then spiced with oils and used as a face scrubber.

-- Recession-Proof Markets: (1) Jimmy Choo stores in New York City quickly sold out recently of their new, blinking, women's shoes with five-inch heels, which light up with every step taken, at $2,495 a pair (although the unrechargeable battery dies after about 100 uses). (2) A Georgia Tech advertising researcher, writing in the current Hastings Center Report, found that college women seeking to donate their eggs for in vitro fertilization could expect to make on average $2,350 more than someone just like them except who had SAT scores 100 points lower.

-- Stimuli: (1) A North Carolina research organization in March, picking the state's 10 worst destinations for federal stimulus grants, included two ongoing projects at Wake Forest University: long-term cocaine-addiction in monkeys, and the potential benefits of yoga on menopausal hot flashes. (2) The Florida Legislature, sensing a need to jump-start business in the faltering yacht industry, reduced the sales tax. Rather than tax the entire selling price, tax would be levied on only the first $300,000 (for example, giving a beleaguered yacht buyer a $42,000 cut on the overall price of a $1 million boat).

-- Bailing Out AIG (update): In 2006, the about-to-fail AIG wrote a $15 million life insurance policy on the nearly impecunious Suzy Tomlinson (then 72), wildly inflating her net worth, with her 32-year-old "social companion" as beneficiary. Two years later, Ms. Tomlinson drowned, fully dressed, in her bathtub following a night of partying, and the last person to see her alive was that $15 million man himself. Authorities in Indianapolis called the death an "accident," but AIG thinks it was gamed by the companion, an investment consultant. According to an April Wall Street Journal report, this is but one of 100 or so challenges to "stranger originated" life insurance policies sold in the go-go years in which investors sought creative ways to bet on "derivatives" like "stranger" life insurance.

-- Child-Bearing, Explained: Virginia state legislator Bob Marshall, speaking in February in opposition to state funding for Planned Parenthood, said the organization is partly responsible for the number of disabled children in America. According to the Old Testament, he said, being forced to bear a disabled child is punishment for the mother's having earlier aborted her first-born. "(W)hen you abort the first-born ... nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children." Said Marshall, the organization ought to call itself "Planned Barrenhood."

-- When stroke victims recover, they have sometimes acquired bizarre obsessions, like one by David Stopher of North Tynesdale, England, who found himself unable to say no to salespeople. According to a March Daily Mail report, the biggest beneficiary of Stopher's condition has been the wireless telephone network (known as 3), whose marketers had signed Stopher up for six different phones and plans at the same time (and paid all on time until his brothers stepped in to persuade 3 to restructure the account).

-- Heather Has Two Mommies and a Daddy: Scientists at Britain's Newcastle University announced in April that they had grown human embryos free of certain serious genetic diseases by first merging DNA from two fertilized eggs to eliminate the potential deadly marker(s). The resulting child would have over 99 percent of the DNA of the mother and father (i.e., all except the unhealthy markers). One scientist compared the procedure to "changing the battery on a laptop" (which leaves the data files intact).

-- Intelligent Evolution: Researchers from Royal Roads University in Canada reported last year that the large, carnivorous pitcher plants of Borneo prefer to eat insects and spiders, but where those are in short supply, as in the Philippines highlands, the pitchers have grown to a size accommodating an alternative source of the nitrogen they need. The pitchers have "learned" that if they produce copious amounts of nectar, it will attract the tiny-mouse-sized tree shrew to harvest it, and the shrews, trapped inside the plant, will leave droppings directly on the spot most advantageous for the pitcher to consume them. Said professor Charles Clarke, discovery of the arrangement "totally blew us away."

(1) Police in Berwick, Maine, made an easy collar in April, solving four residential burglaries. As it turns out, their two suspects (ages 33 and 32) committed the crimes while wearing their GPS monitoring bracelets following an earlier arrest in New Hampshire, and their movements perfectly coincided with the burglars' route. (2) The Drug Warehouse burglar in Tulsa, Okla., in April escaped, but the crime was captured on surveillance video and features the perp, apparently hearing sirens, grabbing his ladder and scrambling up through the ceiling to find the passage he used to get in. However, as he scrambled, he kept falling through the ceiling to the floor, only to have to try again. He fell to the floor six times, but apparently escaped on the seventh try.

-- (1) Steven Plank, 52, was arrested in Port St. Lucie, Fla., in March after a spat with his disabled father, who had apparently used the stove out of turn to boil some potatoes. According to police, Plank dumped the pot of water on his dad, then grabbed the urine cup hanging on dad's walker and dumped that on him, too. (2) Jacoby Laquan Smith, 33, was charged with beating up his quadruple-amputee girlfriend in St. Paul, Minn., in March because, he said, she had blocked his view of the television. The girlfriend, 28, who lost both hands and part of both legs from a childhood illness, fought back, punching Smith and dumping her bedpan on him. Said Smith, of his frequent fights with her, "She'll swing, push me down, and choke me with her nubs."

Iraqi president Saddam Hussein filed a libel lawsuit in February (1997) in Paris against the magazine e Nouvel Observateur for a September 1996 story in which Saddam was described by various Arab leaders as stupid and incompetent and specifically, among other things, as an "executioner," a "monster," a "murderer," "a perfect cretin" and a "noodle."

Computer hardware engineer Toshio Yamamoto, 49, this year celebrates 15 years' work tasting and cataloguing all the Japanese ramen (instant noodles) he can get his hands on (including the full ingredients list, texture, flavor, price and "star" rating for each), for the massive 4,300-ramen database on his Web site, expanded recently with "hundreds" of video reviews and with re-reviews of many previously appearing products (in case the taste had changed, he told journalist Lisa Katayama, writing in April on the popular blog Boing Boing). Yamamoto said he had always eaten ramen for breakfast seven days a week, but cut back recently to five. "I feared that, if I continued at (the seven-day) pace, I would get bored."

-- In January the California Historical Resources Commission formally claimed, on behalf of the state, about 100 items of property on the surface of the moon having been left behind during the 1969 Apollo 11 landing (since California companies were instrumental in that mission and since only the moon surface itself is off limits to ownership claims under international law). Among the items declared are tools, a flag, bags of food and bags of human waste left by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

-- Nicolas Damato, 20, filed a lawsuit in March against Media, Pa., police officer Matthew Bellucci for false arrest after a 2008 traffic stop. Bellucci claimed Damato threatened bodily harm (but a judge later dismissed the charge). Damato acknowledged sending two letters to Bellucci's home, one of which said in part, "God is just, and you will be punished. F you! You are an a------! A f------ a-- ----!" (as the words were represented in the Philadelphia Daily News story). Damato said it was not a threat but that he was merely expressing a "religious" opinion.

-- Louis Woodcock, 23, testified at his Toronto trial in March that he was not involved in the 2005 shooting of a woman, despite being seen on surveillance video approaching the woman and holding his hand inside his jacket until gunshots rang out. He said he often kept his hand inside his jacket to keep from sucking his thumb, which is a habit he picked up in childhood and which did not go over well on the street. (The jury, apparently not seeing him as the thumb-sucking type, convicted him of manslaughter.)

-- In February, Jesse McCabe, 29, was spared jail time (probation and community service only) for his conviction in connection with a missing $18,000 in bank deposits he was to have made for his employer in New Port Richey, Fla. Police discovered 13 deposits, from a six-week period, in McCabe's home, but all the money was recovered, and McCabe persuaded the judge that he just hadn't been able to make it to the bank yet.

-- Karen Salmansohn, 49, prominent author of self-help books for women with relationship and career problems, including "Prince Harming Syndrome" and "How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Successful Dog Trainers," filed a lawsuit in March against cad Mitchell Leff. Salmansohn said Leff had strung her along for months with promises of marriage and a baby, but abruptly cut off support when she became pregnant. Said Salmansohn, "I'm a self-help author, not a psychic."

-- Former baseball star Lenny "Nails" Dykstra recently started accepting clients for his investment advice service, charging $999 a year, according to a March Wall Street Journal report. His Web site discloses that while Dykstra is "NOT" (his emphasis) a "registered" financial adviser, his "proven track record has caught the attention of many." (Dykstra filed for bankruptcy in July 2009 to stave off more than 20 lawsuits against him for entrepreneurial ventures gone bad, and in November, the bankruptcy judge denied him the right to reorganize his debts, converting his case to a chapter 7 liquidation.)

-- In March, Monica Conyers, pleading insufficient funds, was granted a court-appointed lawyer to appeal her bribery conviction stemming from her work as a city councilwoman in Detroit. Conyers is the wife of John Conyers, the Michigan congressman who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. (Mrs. Conyers arrived in court on the day of her sentencing clutching what reporters said appeared to be a Louis Vuitton handbag that sells for $1,000.)

-- Britain's National Health Service in Warwickshire recently assigned Mavis Eldridge to receive care at the Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham for the age-related macular degeneration she is suffering in her left eye. The decision was puzzling to Eldridge and her doctors because her right eye is already being treated for the same disorder at University Hospital in Coventry, 20 miles away. University officials said they were booked up.

-- Paula Oertel, on Medicare, has a brain tumor that had miraculously been in remission for nine years thanks to a type of interferon approved for multiple sclerosis but not for cancer. Medicare had been paying about $100,000 a year for the drug, but when Oertel relocated from one county in Wisconsin to another, 30 miles away, it triggered an automatic, full-scale review of her records, at which point officials realized that her drug was unauthorized and stopped paying. According to a March Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report, her doctors scrambled to find a drug on the "approved" list, but discovered neither a less expensive one nor one nearly as effective, and Oertel's tumor has returned.

(1) A February New York Times/CBS News poll, asking respondents if they approve of gays serving openly in the military, found that 79 percent of self-identified Democrats approve if openly serving gays are referred to in the question as "gay men and lesbians." However, when the openly serving gays are referred to in the question as "homosexuals," only 43 percent of self-identified Democrats approve. (2) In March, the government of New South Wales in Australia granted "Norrie" a certificate as the state's (perhaps the country's, perhaps the world's) only official genderless person. Norrie prefers to live that way, and two doctors had certified that the former male is now "physically and psychologically androgynous."

What stunned officials in Polson, Mont., the most wasn't that Brent Wilson, 53, was charged in March with attempting to illegally acquire ownership of someone else's house. It was that Wilson had attempted to register the title as property located on the "third planet from the sun" and as a conveyance from God, in a transaction that has yet to take place (scheduled for the year 6010). Authorities believe Wilson might have fallen for the elaborate teachings of a scammer who conducts seminars on outsmarting the law governing foreclosures. Wilson was also charged with breaking into the house illegally and changing the locks. Said the recording supervisor of Gallatin County, "I can't explain why people do what they do."

In October 2003, West Point, Ky., hosted 12,000 visitors for the weekend Knob Creek Gun Range Machine Gun Shoot, billed as the nation's largest, with a separate competition for flame-throwers. Especially coveted is "The Line," where 60 people (the waiting list is 10 years long to be admitted) get to fire their machine guns into a field of cars and boats, and during which a shooter might run through $10,000 in ammunition. Among the champions: Samantha Sawyer, 16, the top women's submachine gunner for the previous four years. One man interviewed by the Louisville Courier-Journal said he met his future wife at a previous Shoot, impressed that "she could accept flame-throwing as a hobby." Said another: "This is one of those times when you know (America) is the greatest place on Earth."

A new sports center in Mexico City will be devoted to the revival of ancient Aztec- and Mayan-created games that are rarely played in Mexico because they are dangerous, including a field-hockey-like competition played with a fireball. In another game, "pelota mixteca," players wearing metal-knuckled leather gloves punch a 2-pound, hard-rubber ball that could knock opponents unconscious. One thrill of the flaming-ball game, "pelota purepecha," is that some play it at night on unlighted fields. (In Mayan culture, according to a March USA Today dispatch, the world began with the gods challenging two humans to a ball game, and beating them, at which point the two die and are resurrected as the sun and moon.)

-- Felon-Candidates: (1) John White, now running for sheriff in Roundup, Mont., will be unable to carry a gun if he wins because of a long-ago bank robbery conviction. (2) Convicted felons might be running against each other if they win their primaries in May for county judge-executive in Hindman, Ky. Democrat Donnie Newsome and Republican Randy Thompson were both convicted of election fraud (though Thompson's case is still on appeal). (3) Cynthia Diaz was re-elected town clerk in Coventry, Vt., in March, though still facing 10 felony personal tax-filing counts. (The town clerk is the town's treasurer, delinquent-tax collector and trustee of public money.)

-- The U.S. Senate passed a bill in March to correct a misimpression Congress had in the 1990s when it instituted mandatory sentences for crack-cocaine possession that were about 100 times the sentences for powdered cocaine. Scientists long ago pointed out that the two substances are chemically the same, and the new provisions set crack-cocaine sentences at only about 18 times those for powder.

-- Tackling the Big Issues: (1) The Utah legislature passed a bill in March to, for the first time, legalize the personal collection of rainwater. "Harvesting" rain has been illegal, but now would be allowed, with a state permit, in special state-approved containers. (2) The Tennessee legislature is considering removing a longstanding ban on fish tanks in barbershops. Currently, no "animals, birds or fish" (except guide dogs) are permitted where hair is cut. Opponents said they don't mind aquariums but fear that trendy pedicures by nibbling fish (now in New York and Los Angeles salons) might come to Tennessee.

-- On Jan. 29, more than 200 Alabama state troopers were amassed at 4 a.m. for the purpose of raiding several illegal bingo parlors. The raids were eventually called off, but a University of Alabama professor estimated the staging cost to the budget-shriveled state at $130,000. Said a spokesman for Gov. Bob Riley, "No matter what it costs, the law must be enforced."

-- A December Seattle Times profile of Rachel Porcaro (a single mother with an $18,000-a-year hair-cutting job, raising two kids, living with her parents) centered on the IRS's year-long, full-blown audit of her, and subsequently of her parents, because she was flagged for earning too little money on which to raise a family in Seattle. Ultimately, Rachel and her parents prevailed on every issue except the Earned Income Tax Credit, in that Rachel's kids receive a little too much help from her parents for her to qualify.

Raj Patel's recent appearance on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" was ostensibly based around his work on global poverty and food production, but followers of an 87-year-old Scottish mystic named Benjamin Creme received a different message that Patel was the long-awaited messiah that Creme had been promising would appear to unite humanity. Overwhelmed by the followers during a recent book-signing tour, according to a March profile in London's Guardian, Patel made public denials of any messianic role (which of course only confirmed the sect's certainty that he is the man) and engaged a few in conversation, but, he said, talking to them "made me really depressed, actually."

How much can a shoplifter stuff in his pants? A man seen on surveillance video at a Mobil on the Run convenience store in Bloomfield, Conn., in February fled after stuffing at least 17 cans of Red Bull energy drink down his pants. And in Cairns, Australia, a 51-year-old man was caught shoplifting in March, witnessed by security staff putting three limes and a package of beef tongue in his pants. When cornered, the man (like clowns exiting a clown car) pulled out an additional two onions, three trays of rump steaks and a packet of lamb forequarter chops.

(1) Schoolteacher Lucia Carico, who has been in good standing in Hawkins County, Tenn., schools since 1973, was fired in March over an incident in which she stabbed a 7th-grade student in the arm seven times with a pen (because, she said, he had been unruly, singing and passing gas). (2) Teacher Randolphe Forde was fired in January by the Clayton County, Ga., school board for an October incident in which he allegedly "put a hit" on an 11th-grade student (offering $50).

Sex for One: (1) In February, police in Upper Darby, Pa., said they had to delay processing accused molester Siri Pinnya, 36, because he would not stop masturbating. Said the police superintendent, "We only fingerprinted his left hand." (2) Martin Guerrero, 17, was eventually arrested in his W.T. White High School classroom in Dallas in December after the teacher noticed him staring off into space. When she approached his desk, he shouted, "Ay Mami," and continued masturbating. (3) Shanna Vonfeldt was fired from her job at KUSA Aviation in Beaumont, Texas, but claimed in a lawsuit filed in January that she left only because of boss Kyle Knupple's habit of masturbating in the office.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Russell Wayne Upton Jr., Reno, Nev., March (charged at last in a 1995 murder); Kenneth Wayne Scott, Fort Worth, Texas, March; John Wayne Wilson, Bethel Springs, Tenn., March; Robert Wayne Hurst, Knoxville, Tenn., January; Bart Wayne Johnson, Pelham, Ala., December. Murder trial completed, awaiting delayed judgment: Steven Wayne Hillier, Canberra, Australia, April. Convicted of murder: Kevin Wayne Dunigan, Sacramento, Calif., November; Michael Wayne Wesley, Eugene, Ore., November. Appeal denied: Kelly Wayne Dozier, Houston, April (convicted of a 2006 murder).

(1) Itinerant contractor Billie Bobbie Harrison, 24, was charged in Spartanburg, S.C., with indecent exposure in February, after he approached a homeowner, lowered his pants, and offered to pave her driveway later if she would have sex with him. (2) Hemingway, S.C., police, responding in March to shots fired at the BT Express gas station, apprehended James Scott after he and Jackie Dollard had finished cleaning a chicken. Witnesses said Scott and Dollard fought over who got to keep the chicken.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson told his "700 Club" TV audience in June (1998) that the city of Orlando, Fla., was taking a big risk to sponsor the recent "Gay Days" festival. "I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes," he said, "and I don't think I'd be waving those (Gay Days logo) flags in God's face if I were you." Homosexuality, he said, "will bring about terrorist bombs, it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor." (In fact, 1998's first hurricane, Bonnie, made landfall two months later in North Carolina, near the Virginia Beach, Va., headquarters of Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network.)