A recent surge of neo-Nazism in several countries -- including, improbably, Israel, and Mongolia (where some dark-skinned natives are rabidly anti-Chinese) -- has generally been denounced, but Corinna Burt credited it with rescuing her from a life of acting in pornographic videos. According to a hate-group watchdog, the Portland, Ore., woman is "the most prominent National Socialist Movement organizer in the Pacific Northwest." In an August interview with Gawker.com, the white-supremacist Burt (a mother of two and a professional embalmer who is also into bodybuilding) said she terminated her porn career (as "Cori Lou," doing mostly bondage and "torture" films) because, "If we (Caucasians) consider ourselves a master race then we have to act like a master race, not degenerates."

-- Though volunteers got the project started in May, Ventnor City, N.J., continued through the summer to seek financial donations to finish the new restrooms that provide relief for those visiting the town's Atlantic shore. Said Commissioner Stephen Weintrob, "How would someone like to have a toilet named after themselves, or a urinal or sink?"

-- A Treasury Department inspector general reported in June that, out of 2.6 million applicants for federal mortgage relief, 14,000 "home buyers" wrongly received tax credits and that in fact, 1,300 of them were living in prison at the time of filing, including 241 serving life sentences. Sixty-seven of the 14,000 received tax credits for the same house, and 87 more potentially fraudulent tax-credit applications were filed by Internal Revenue Service employees.

-- Things That Shouldn't Get Backlogged: (1) California requires that if a sex offender's GPS tagging device signals that he's in a prohibited area, parole agents must immediately respond, but that law was easier to pass than to implement. As of June, according to a San Diego Union-Tribune investigation, the state had fallen about 31,000 responses behind. (2) A July Illinois law requires that all hospital "rape kits" on victims be tested for blood and DNA (in that finding a rapist, and certainly convicting him, without such evidence is often hopelessly difficult). Until now, 80 percent of the rape kits taken in the state had sat, untested. (As TV police dramas emphasize, many rape victims are reluctant to submit to the indignity of swabbing and photographing so soon after being violated and comply only because detectives assure them of the rape kit's importance.)

-- It is common knowledge that American corporations avoid taxes by running U.S. profits through offshore "tax havens" like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, but a May Bloomberg Business Week investigation traced the specific steps that the pharmaceutical company Forest Labs takes to short the U.S. Treasury. Although Forest's anti-depressant Lexapro is sold only in the U.S., the company's patent is held by an Irish subsidiary (and since 2005, shared with a Bermuda subsidiary in a tax-code hocus-pocus that insiders call the "Double Irish"), which allows the vast majority of the $2 billion Forest earns a year on Lexapro to be taxed at Ireland's low rate (and at Bermuda's rate of zero). Bloomberg estimates that the U.S. Treasury loses at least $60 billion annually by corporations' "transfer pricing" -- enough to pay for the entire Department of Homeland Security for a year.

-- Time magazine reported in August that among the entrants in this year's "Detroit Hair Wars" (showcasing 34 stylists working with 300 models) were The Hummer (stylist: "Little Willie"), in which a mass of extensions is shaped to resemble the vehicle, including four large tires -- with "metal" wheels and front grid added -- sitting upon the styled hair of model Sharv Bailey; and Beautiful Butterfly (stylist: Niecy Hayes), featuring extensions thinned, teased and stretched into four artistic "wings" arising from the styled hair of model Taja Hiu. Both stylings appear to be at least 2 feet long, dwarfing the models' heads, and take at least 10 hours to prepare.

-- Featured at London's Royal College of Art in June was Hiromi Ozaki's "Menstruation Machine" -- a wearable contraption that enables men to experience the two primary symptoms of the "curse." It periodically generates abdominal pain, and its reservoir permits liquid ("blood") to be stored and released over several days' time.

-- In July, Manuel "Lefty" Hernandez, 28, was charged in Springfield, Mass., with snatching a man's wallet (which he probably did with his left hand, which is his only hand). (If he had had a weapon, police could have charged him with a felony, but it was only a misdemeanor because Hernandez was unarmed.)

-- A frightening August headline in The Union (Grass Valley, Calif.): "S.W.A.T. Team Requested for Violent Midgets." In fact, they were steroid-using, bodybuilder midgets, headed by an apparently particularly dangerous "lead female."

In March, four NYPD officers, acting on department intelligence, went to the home of Walter and Rose Martin in Brooklyn, N.Y., looking for a suspect, and broke a window as they worked their way inside. The Martins, retired and in their 80s, were clean, and a police spokesman later admitted that officers had wrongly visited or raided the Martins' home more than 50 times since 2002 because of a stubborn computer glitch. When the software was originally installed, an operator tested it by mindlessly typing in a random address, but that happened to be the Martins' house, and thus the visits and raids began. The Martins say they have been assured several times that the problem had been corrected, but evidently their address has wormed its way too deep into the system.

Recurring Themes: Eugene Palmer, 40, wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun, was arrested in Brunswick, Ga., in March as he tried to rush into a SunTrust bank during business hours but became frustrated by the locked doors -- in that it was a drive-thru-only branch. (2) Danny Spencer, 31, and a partner were arrested in Bridgeport, Conn., in December as they called attention to themselves by driving through the city dragging a half-ton safe they could not crack open at the Madison Auto store they had just burglarized. (3) Ethan Ayers, 18, and a partner were arrested in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in March after an alleged mugging. Police found them easily, as their transportation that night was a relative's van advertising in large lettering, "Big Earl's Gold Mine," a Des Moines strip club.

(1) After surveying 374 waitresses, professor Michael Lynn, who teaches marketing and tourism at Cornell University, concluded that customers left larger tips to those with certain physical characteristics such as being slender, being blond or having big breasts. Lynn told the Cornell Daily Sun in May that his study was important in helping potential waitresses gauge their "prospects in the industry." (2) Perhaps more usefully, University of Central Lancashire (England) researchers writing in a recent Archives of Sexual Behavior reported that women achieve orgasm more often during foreplay than intercourse but that they more frequently emit orgasm-signaling "vocalizations" just before, or simultaneously with, male ejaculation.

In May (1996), Minneapolis artist Judy Olausen's hardcover photographic essay "Mother" went on sale, featuring her 70-year-old mom as a series of passive, subordinate characters. Included were her mother kneeling on all fours with a pane of glass on her back ("Mother as Coffee Table"), lying alongside a highway ("Mother as Road Kill"), and sprawled at an entrance ("Mother as Doormat"). Said Olausen, "My brothers think I'm torturing my mother," but actually, "I'm immortalizing her."

Woody Allen Joke Come to Life: Shirley Anderson, 71, is suing her son Ken, 46, in Vancouver, British Columbia, for parental support -- even though she and his father had abandoned him when he was 15 (having one day just picked up and moved and, as in Mr. Allen's joke, "left no forwarding address"). An archaic 1922 law in British Columbia obligates adult children to support "dependent" parents, and in 2000, Shirley sued, demanding $350(Cdn) per month each from Ken, who is a trucker, and his four siblings (three of whom were at least 17 when the parents left and not considered "abandoned"). A judge awarded token interim support pending a final resolution, which after years of paperwork and delay was to come in early August but has been postponed once again.

-- We Have Rules! A team of anglers from Hatteras, N.C., had first place wrapped up in the prestigious Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament in June, salivating over their $1,231,575 prize money (including a bonus for single-largest catch), when judges discovered that one member of the Hatteras crew, Peter Wann, had not gotten a $30 North Carolina coastal recreational fishing license before their boat pushed off that day. Under the rules, the entire team was disqualified, and the runner-up, from Cape Carteret, N.C., got the money.

-- They Don't Make "Drug Lords" Like They Used To: (1) Widely feared Jamaican drug kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke was arrested in June and extradited to New York City after being picked up wearing women's clothes and a 1970s-style Afro wig too small for his head (with a pink wig on standby). The Jamaica Observer reported that Coke wet his pants as he was arrested. (2) Longtime South African drug lord Fadwaan "Fat" Murphy, speaking at a bail hearing in January in Cape Town, disclosed that he was born a hermaphrodite and has a separate identity ("Hilary"), which became relevant when arresting officers discovered that Murphy was wearing a strap-on penis. Nonetheless, he insists he is a man: "I look like a man. I talk like a man. I am a man."

-- "(A) new high point" in electoral politics in Philadelphia occurred this spring, according to the publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, when openly gay state Rep. Babette Josephs "outed" her primary opponent Gregg Kravitz as straight. According to Josephs, the heterosexual Kravitz was posing in Josephs' gay-friendly 182nd District as bi-sexual. Kravitz said he is "attracted" to both men and women and found Josephs' comments offensive.

-- Charmed Lives: (1) Recently while visiting her childhood home of Bishop, Texas, Joan Ginther won a Texas lottery drawing for the fourth time, taking home a $10 million first prize to lift her career Texas lottery winnings to $20.4 million. (By then, she had already moved to Las Vegas.) (2) At the other end of luck, British farm worker Mick Wilary, 58, was hospitalized in April after machinery crushed both his legs. According to the Daily Telegraph, Wilary has also had his ankles broken (twice), ribs cracked, finger cut off, head split open, collarbone broken and fingers broken, and been stabbed, and been frequently kicked by livestock.

-- Thinking Large: (1) Northern Ireland farmer William Taylor introduced his prototype Livestock Power Mill recently and claimed that the world's 1.3 billion cattle, using treadmills for eight hours a day, could produce 6 percent of the world's electricity requirement. (The cow must keep walking to avoid sliding down an incline.) (2) California gubernatorial candidate Douglas Hughes proposed this year to solve the state's child-molestation problem by developing an island 30 miles off the Santa Barbara coast to contain the state's pedophiles, who would, according to The Daily Caller, "write their own constitution, build their own infrastructure and maintain a society."

-- Avoiding Marriage, the Hard Way: A female lawyer from Puri, India, in her mid-30s told The Times of India in July that she recently underwent gender-reassignment surgery in part to avoid the male-female marriage that her parents were arranging for her: "I did not want a family life which is being forced on girls in our society."

-- The Power of Books: Speaking to the city council of Crestview, Fla., in July, the founder of the local "Protect Our Children" citizens' group said her son (whose age was not revealed) had "lost his mind" when he looked through the violent Japanese "manga" graphic novel he found on open stacks in the Crestview Public Library. "Now," she said, "he's in a home for extensive therapy."

-- North Korea's World Cup adventure began auspiciously with a hard-fought 2-1 loss to a superior Brazil team, leading the government to release photographs of the North Korean coach supposedly receiving long-distance telepathic strategy signals during the game from Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il. With the country's hopes up, the team was embarrassed in two subsequent games and dispatched from the tournament. Back home in July, the players were paraded into the People's Palace of Culture in Pyongyang, where for six hours, they were publicly denounced and taunted. Coach Kim Jong-huh is said to fear an eventual violent end.

-- Just before the World Cup matches, North Korea issued a public demand for compensation, blaming the United States for almost every single misfortune suffered by the country in the last 65 years. Its official news agency assigned the U.S. responsibility for 5 million people injured, kidnapped, missing or killed -- as well as for economic damages resulting from U.S.-led trade sanctions. According to the news agency, America can atone for the losses by sending North Korea $65 trillion.

(1) James Burden, 55, was convicted of indecent exposure in Scotland's Falkirk Sheriff Court in June based on a March incident when a neighbor looked out her window before dawn and saw Burden, naked, smoking a cigarette and masturbating while bouncing on her family's outdoor trampoline. Burden said he did not know anyone would be watching at that hour. (2) In New Zealand's Auckland District Court in June, Judge Mary Beth Sharp dismissed an elderly male juror from a trial involving sexual abuse because the man disclosed, under questioning, that he had worn a condom under his clothes in the jury box because the testimony was making him aroused.

(1) Justin Johnson, 21, was arrested in Bloomfield, Ind., in July after failing to get a Bloomfield State Bank branch to cash his bogus check for $1 million, which he presented to a teller in the bank's drive-through window. Optimistic, he had handed over his driver's license for ID along with the check. (2) Scot Davis, 52, was charged with robbing the All in the Family bar in Des Moines, Iowa, in March. Davis, a contractor who is friends with bartender Gladys York, had spent the evening at the bar passing out business cards before leaving. Said York, when Davis re-appeared carrying a .22-caliber rifle and demanding money, "Scot, What the (expletive)?" Said an officer, "This is not the hardest case our detectives have ever had to investigate."

Ron Kravitz, 22, filed a lawsuit in June (1989) against Mickey Mantle Sports Productions Inc., for injuries he suffered the previous September while watching a company baseball video in his den to improve his base-stealing technique. While attempting to "beat" Tom Seaver's pickoff throw to "first base," he crashed into a table, resulting in torn ligaments and a severed tendon, which he thought somehow was the production company's fault.

The Outer Frontiers of U.S. Immigration Policy: The $125 million Jay Peak ski resort in Vermont, with 120-room hotel, ice arena, golf course and the Northeast's largest water park, is just months away from completion, thanks to half-million-dollar investments from each of 250 foreign nationals from 43 countries who, as part of the deal, were given conditional U.S. "green cards" (for permanent residency). At the other end of America's immigration conundrum, prosecutors in Snohomish County, Wash., dropped the rape charge in July against illegal immigrant Jose Madrigal-Lopez, 46, for lack of evidence and released him back onto the street. Madrigal-Lopez has been deported from the U.S. 10 times already but keeps returning. [ABC News-AP, 7-8-10] [Seattle Times, 7-9-10]

-- Two-year-old Ardi Rizal of Banyuasin, Indonesia, has developed a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, according to several news organizations that splashed his story around the world in May, with video of Ardi casually puffing away as he frolics on his tricycle. Said Ardi's mother, "If he doesn't get cigarettes, he gets angry and screams and batters his head against the wall." Ardi's father, noting the kid's pudginess, seems not to sense the problem: "He looks pretty healthy to me." An additional concern is financial: Ardi will smoke only one particular premium brand, at a cost of the equivalent of about $5.50 a day. [New York Daily News, 5-26-10, Daily Mail (London), 5-27-10]

-- With heroin too expensive for many African addicts, some ask an addicted friend for a temporary fix -- withdrawing a teaspoonful of the friend's heroin-tinged blood and injecting it into their own bloodstream. Evidence of this practice (called "flashblood") comes from anecdotes from health officials in Tanzania, Zanzibar and Kenya, reported in The New York Times in July. Doctors said they question the euphoria-producing quality of such tiny amounts of heroin, but are certain that flashblood will potently deliver any HIV present in the donor's blood. [New York Times, 7-13-10]

-- Motherly Love: (1) Ranay Collins, 49, was arrested in Las Vegas in June and charged with beating her 16-year-old daughter with a cane. The arresting officer quoted Collins' explanation: "That (expletive) owes me $50 for rent." (2) Police arrested Christina Muniz, 29, in Surprise, Ariz., in June, after being summoned to the home by Muniz's son, 11. Muniz had just informed the boy and his brother, 6, that she was abandoning them to move to California with her boyfriend to fulfill her dream of becoming a stripper. With police watching, the older boy approached Muniz for a hug, but Muniz slugged him in the stomach. [KTNV-TV (Las Vegas), 6-25-10] [ABC News, 6-15-10]

-- Colin Hall, Lord Mayor of Leicester, England, visiting the Southfields library for its Summer Showcase on global understanding in June, apparently at some point experienced his pants falling down. His spokesman later said, "He was not wearing a belt, and the trousers came loose and fell." (Reports in The Guardian and other newspapers emphasized that nothing indecent occurred.) [Sydney Morning Herald-Press Association (London), 7-1-10]

-- Jammie Harms, 34, who had been executive assistant to CEO John Smith of the developer Hearthstone Homes, filed a lawsuit against the Omaha, Neb., company in June for wrongful firing. According to the lawsuit, Smith told Harms that, after consulting with psychics, he was troubled by her pregnancy. He said he was feeling "negative energy" from her fetus, sensing that it was "hostile" toward him and causing him to be reminded of his own unpleasant experience as a fetus. [KFAB Radio (Omaha)-AP, 7-1-10]

(1) An internal police inquiry concluded in April that it was an accident that an officer in the Utica, N.Y., courtroom of Judge Randal Caldwell shot Caldwell in the leg with his Taser gun. Investigators concluded that the officer was merely trying to re-holster the weapon to make it less uncomfortable, and it slipped. (2) Youth worker Cherie Beekman, 33, took a group of her kids to a bowling alley in Didsbury, England, in April for a diversion but got her thumb stuck in her bowling ball. She was taken to a fire station, where, for over two hours, rescuers used an electric saw, hacksaw and chisel to free her. [Utica Observer-Dispatch, 4-9-10] [Daily Mail, 4-20-10]

-- Fine Point of Florida Law: David Lowe, 47, was convicted in Brooksville, Fla., last year of "lewd or lascivious exhibition" after he sat in his car, masturbating, outside a convenience store while ostentatiously holding a large dildo to his mouth in front of a woman and her child. In July 2010, a Florida appeals court reversed the conviction and freed Lowe, pointing out that conviction under that particular statute requires "sexual activity," which is defined as occurring between two or more persons. [WKMG-TV (Orlando), 7-7-10]

-- Vietnam's Version of an "Innocence Project": "Traditional medicine" practitioner Pham Thi Hong is credited with freeing three men who had been convicted of a rape in 2000 and were serving 16-year prison sentences. According to Hong, men with certain small spots on their ears are virgins, and since the men still have their spots, they could not have committed rape. (Although Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet was reportedly impressed with Hong's work and thus ordered the case re-opened, discovery of additional errors by police and prosecutors contributed to the recent decision to release the men.) [Yahoo News-AP, 7-2-10]

-- Mark Seamands, 39, went to trial in May in Port Angeles, Wash., accused of second-degree assault and two lesser charges for the hot-iron "branding" of his three children, aged 13, 15 and 18. Each of the kids bore the mark "SK," for "Seamands' Kids." At trial, however, the kids testified that they not only consented to the branding but thought it was cool (despite the second-degree burns), and as a result, the jury dismissed the assault charge and deadlocked on the two lesser ones. [KIRO-TV (Seattle)-AP, 5-14-10]

(1) In July, Mike Morateck, 46, a self-described "man of science," won the Jefferson (Wis.) County Fair's annual cricket-spitting contest with a hock of 21 feet, 2 inches. His two main "scientific" secrets (he told Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel): "pick a big cricket" and "feet first on its back with the head pointing out because you don't want the legs dragging on the way out." (2) Juliana Bryant, 33, was arrested in Florala, Ala., in July after police were called to her home on a disturbing-the-peace complaint and discovered several open gasoline containers throughout the house. Bryant explained to the officers that she "like(s) the smell." [Journal Sentinel, 7-7-10] [Mobile Press-Register, 7-22-10]

Crime Scene Escapades: (1) Allen Dawes, 28, and Jimmy Lee, 43, were charged as burglars in, respectively, York, Pa. (June), and Blackburn, England (July), after having inexplicably left clues behind. For reasons unreported, Dawes had left his birth certificate at the scene and Lee his DNA-laden false teeth. (2) Officials at the Synergy Credit Union in Lashburn, Saskatchewan, have the surveillance video but not the perp. On April 13, a man in black with a curved sword jabbed at the ATM, then smashed his way through the glass front door, then roamed around, leaping over counters and jabbing at more things with the sword before departing empty-handed (and bleeding). [Yahoo News-AP, 6-23-10] [Blackburn Citizen, 7-19-10] [CNews (Toronto), 4-22-10]

Denise and Jeffrey Lagrimas, who were hosting a neighborhood watch meeting in their Oroville, Calif., home in December (1989) to discuss rising concerns about local crime, were arrested during the meeting after a neighbor spotted her recently stolen TV set in the house and then realized that Denise was wearing her stolen dress. Police officers were already on hand at the meeting to give a presentation and subsequently found $9,000 worth of stolen goods. [San Jose Mercury News, 12-12-1989]

Thanks This Week to Chris Paone, Steve Dunn, Jon LaFalce, and Michael Greer, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.