The Feral Professor: Tihomir Petrov, 43, a mathematics professor at California State University Northridge, was charged in January with misdemeanors for allegedly urinating twice on the office door of a colleague with whom he had been feuding. (Petrov was identified by a hidden camera installed after the original puddles turned up.) Petrov is the author of several scholarly papers, with titles such as "Rationality of Moduli of Elliptic Fibrations With Fixed Monodromy."

-- Gangs in Durban, South Africa, have recently begun stealing expensive anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs destined for AIDS patients and using them in the country's most popular street drug, "whoonga," a highly addictive, smoked cocktail of detergent, rat poison, marijuana and the ARVs. The crisis was reported by KwaZulu-Natal province drug-abuse organizations and Durban police, who stood by their claims despite attempts by South African president Jacob Zuma to assure international suppliers of ARVs that more were needed and that none were being diverted for whoonga.

-- Somehow, prison inmates finagled $39 million in undeserved federal tax refunds in 2009, according to a February report by the U.S. Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration. In Key West, Fla., for example, where prisoner Danilo Suarez was sentenced in January to five years in prison for filing multiple fraudulent returns, jailers discovered a pass-around sheet of instructions for false filings. While some refunds were legitimate (e.g., on pre-incarceration investment activity), the IRS was found to conduct fraud screenings on fewer than half of all returns filed by prisoners. (The IRS complained that, until 2008, it was illegal for the agency to share information with state corrections officials -- or even with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.)

-- State law in Tennessee prohibits registered sex offenders from re-contacting their victims, but there is no such restriction on anyone convicted of a sex crime before 2007, and still in prison, but who is not yet on the registered list. (Post-2007 sex criminals are automatically registered upon conviction.) Consequently, according to a February WMC-TV report, convicted molester Terry McConnell cannot be prevented from mailing birthday cards to one of his two pre-2007 victims (one reading, "I cannot believe my little tot-tot is already a teenager. You might be tired of me writing this, but I can't get over how fast you are growing up"). (Prison officials say their limited resources are better used on monitoring incoming mail rather than outgoing.)

-- Senior Houston police officer Mike Hamby, 51, was suspended in February after witnesses reported that he, off-duty and not in uniform, had tossed a tear-gas grenade into a group of rivals in a rodeo cooking contest. Hamby has 30 years' service and was a member of his union's board of directors. About 300 teams compete in the barbecue cook-off, and police were investigating whether Hamby was merely trying to sabotage a competitor's food.

-- As is usually the case when Walmart announces the intention to build a new store, community supporters (pushing for jobs, an enlarged tax base and shopper convenience) battle community opponents (trying to save mom-and-pop retailers), and when plans were announced for a northeast Washington, D.C., location, it was the local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, Brenda Speaks, who produced a brand-new reason for opposing such a store. Young people, she told an anti-Walmart rally (according to a February Washington Post report), would be more likely to get criminal records because, with a big corporation around, they could less resist the temptation to steal.

-- British drug dealer Luke Walsh-Pinnock, 22, recently released after a prison stint, threatened in February to sue police in the Kilburn neighborhood of London after officers distributed a leaflet near his mother's home warning that Walsh-Pinnock was once again free. Walsh-Pinnock said he felt "humiliated" by the leaflet, in violation of his "human rights."

(1) Timothy Walker, 48, was hospitalized in Burlington, N.C., in February after he fell off of an SUV while he was on top, holding down two mattresses for the driver, who apparently rounded a curve too fast. (2) Three people were hospitalized in Bellevue, Wash., in January when their van stalled and then exploded as the ignition was re-engaged. They were carrying two gallons of gasoline in an open container and had been feeding the carburetor directly, through an opening in the engine housing (between the seats), as the van was in motion. (It was not reported why they were doing it that way.)

-- Washington, D.C., resident Nicole Pugh, arriving at her polling station in November with the sole intention of casting a vote for mayor, noticed a line on the ballot asking her choice for Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, even though no candidates were listed. On a lark and with no knowledge of the office, she wrote in her own name, and that evening was informed that she had been elected, 1-0, to an office that had been vacant, through apathy, for the previous 14 years. Though other Advisory Neighborhood Commission positions are contested and the candidates quite active, none is paid, and they work mostly via meetings. (However, having the title can garner press attention -- for example, for Brenda Speaks, commenting on the planned Walmart store, above.)

-- When James Maynard arrived at the murder trial of his former long-time lover Fiona Adams, 24, in February at Britain's Nottingham Crown Court, it was supposedly in support of Adams, who was contending that she did not recklessly start a fire that blazed out of control and took the lives of two of the couple's three children. However, Maynard, in full view of a mob of reporters, was wearing a grotesque clown mask resembling the face of the character Pennywise in the Stephen King novel "It," and he declined numerous opportunities to comment on why he was wearing it. (After a three-week trial, Adams was acquitted.)

Elusive Perps: (1) Armed-robbery convict Edward Nathan Jr. escaped from a Florida work-release center in 1983 and, as "Claude Brooks" and other identities, managed to avoid police for the next 27 years, until he slipped up in December in Atlanta -- arrested after being caught urinating in public. He was returned to Florida and charged with escape. (2) Accused thief Anthony Darwin, 30, who had successfully eluded authorities in Wisconsin since 2004, turned himself in to Sheriff Bob Spoden in Janesville in January, apparently only because he needs treatment for cancer. However, not wanting to pay for the expensive surgery, Spoden asked a judge to dismiss the arrest warrant and put Darwin back on the street. (Judge Alan Bates released Darwin for treatment, which will surely be paid for by the taxpayer, although perhaps not on the sheriff's account.)

The Country Afraid of Its Own Shadow: (1) Britain's Oxfordshire County Council, which oversees youth swimming classes, banned goggles from the pools in February because of the fear that kids might snap the elastic bands and hurt their eyes. (2) Malvern Primary School in Huyton, Merseyside, recently banned play with regulation soccer balls because they are made of leather. "Football," it ruled, must be played with less-dangerous sponge balls.

The German news agency Deutsche Presse Agentur reported in November (1992) on Japanese inventor Kenji Kawakami's "New Idea Academy," which features his own innovations and counts among his most successful products a portable washing machine that straps onto the user's leg (swirling the clothes with each step); a travel necktie with room for writing utensils and a calculator; padded booties for cats so they can dust the floor while walking around; and a "solar flashlight" that provides a strong beam of light as long as the sun is shining.

Thanks This Week to Brian Wilson, Bruce Leiserowitz, Gerald Sacks, Steve Dunn, and Tom Martin, and to News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

21st-Century American Exports? In strife-torn Sudan (land of the Darfur murder and rape atrocities and a per-capita annual income of $2,200), an epic, year-long Ponzi scheme engineered by a lowly former police officer has enticed nearly 50,000 victims to invest an estimated $180 million (according to a March dispatch on Slate.com). At the height of the hysteria, even militia fighters in Darfur rushed to invest. (As Bernard Madoff was initially, perpetrator Adam Ismael is lounging comfortably under house arrest.) And in February, NPR reported that the United States government will soon be asked to bail out yet another bank that dramatically overextended itself with bad loans -- and is now $900 million short: the Bank of Kabul in Afghanistan.

-- The essential uniform of super-ambitious Chinese businessmen nowadays includes a leather designer purse, reported the Los Angeles Times in a February dispatch from Beijing, and high-end sellers "can't believe their luck," now that "(b)oth sexes in the world's most populous country adore purses." The Coach company will have 53 stores in China by mid-year, and Hermes and Louis Vuitton are so optimistic that they built stores in less-obviously prosperous reaches of the country. (Apparently, only authentic designer items lend businessmen credibility. For the export market, China remains a world leader in trademark-pirating knock-offs.)

-- The lower house of Russia's parliament approved legislation in February to classify beer, for the very first time, as an alcoholic beverage. Traditionally, because of the dominance of the vodka industry, beer has been regarded as closer to a soft drink.

-- Ewwww! (1) The government of Malawi's proposed environmental control legislation, introduced in January, was thought by some advocates to be broad enough to criminalize flatulence. The justice minister said the section about "fouling the air" should cover extreme flatus, but the country's solicitor general insisted that only commercial air pollution was punishable. (2) Only 20 percent of Cambodians have access to toilets (half as many as have mobile phones), and missions such as International Development Enterprises blanket the countryside to urge more toilet usage. In one promotion campaign in Kandal province, according to a February BBC News dispatch, an investigating team called a public meeting and singled out ("amid much laughter") one particular farmer whom it had calculated as producing the most excrement of anyone in the village.

"I thought, 'Man, is this what Jesus would do?'" said Akron, Ohio, repo man Ken Falzini, after surviving a short, harrowing ride clinging to the hood of the Lexus he was trying to repossess from Bishop Marc Neal of Akron's Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church in January. Neal, later charged with felony assault, told a reporter he thought it "disrespectful" for Falzini to try to repossess a preacher's car during Sunday services. Falzini said Neal was "laughing" during parts of the drive, which included sharp zig-zagging at speeds around 50 mph to dislodge Falzini from the hood.

-- In Britain's Coleraine Crown Court in February, Colin Howell, convicted last year of a double murder (of his wife and his girlfriend's husband), testified at the girlfriend's trial for the same crimes that he frequently drugged her during their sex sessions. She had requested to be unconscious during sex, according to Howell, so that she would not be bothered by "Christian guilt" over the extramarital affair they were having. (The trial was ongoing at press time.)

(1) In January, Czech Television reported on a recent, joyous, but confusing, family reunion featuring a woman (Ilona Tomeckova) who had become a man (Dominik Sejda), and who had finally found love (in the person of Andrea Kajzarova, who was, before her own sex change, a bodybuilder named Tomas Kajzar). Dominik, motivated to reconnect with his original family, learned that the son he had given birth to (Radim) was himself undergoing a sex change (to become Viki). (2) Rachel Brock, 21, was arrested in Phoenix in December for an alleged sexual relationship with an underage boy -- the same boy that her mother, Susan Brock, had already been arrested for sexually abusing. (Neither Rachel nor Susan knew about the other's affair.)

-- Just How Bad Was Mom? In Brooklyn, N.Y., Judge Bernard Graham recently awarded custody of an estranged couple's teenage boy to the father even though the father was at the time homeless and living from night to night in shelters and storefronts. The mother, Jeannette Traylor, who earns $90,000 a year as a courthouse employee, was even denied visitation rights. (Judge Graham insisted the arrangement was in the boy's best interest, but Graham was later transferred to non-divorce cases.)

-- Apathy is a problem with many homeowners' associations, but at the annual meeting of the Hillbrook-Tall Oaks Civic Association of Annandale, Va., in June, 50 people sleepily voted for Ms. Beatha Lee as president, thus electing (in a legitimate, by-the-book process) a Wheaten terrier belonging to former association officer Mark Crawford. Crawford said that Beatha, as a manager, "delegates a lot."

(1) An unnamed man was taken to St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla., in February with a gash on his face and a bullet (later removed) in his sinus cavity. KOKI-TV reported that police think "he might have been chewing on a firecracker or a bullet" when it exploded. (2) A 50-year-old woman was arrested in February in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after managers at a Family Dollar store accused her of walking out without paying for packages of baking soda and dishwashing detergent and a pair of thong panties (total value, according to Family Dollar, $7.50).

(1) To conceal an arrest warrant for auto theft, Amos Ashley, 62, told traffic-stop officers in Lawrenceburg, Ind., in February that he was (as he wrote on a paper for them) "Rorth Taylor." ("Pronounce it," ordered a trooper.) "Robert Taylor." ("Spell it once more, please.") "R-e-r-e-r-t," wrote Ashley. ("And 'Taylor'?") "T-a-y-l-o-e-r." Several more attempts followed, until Ashley finally admitted his name and was arrested. (2) Police in Princess Anne, Md., arrested George Ballard, 25, inside a PNC Bank at 11 p.m. on Jan. 25 after a motion detector sounded. Officers said the "cash" Ballard was in the process of taking was in fact a stack of fake bills the bank uses for training.

World's Greatest Lawyer: Christopher Soon won an acquittal in February for his client Alan Patton, who had been charged with violating a law that had been passed primarily to stop Alan Patton. That law makes it illegal to collect urine from public restrooms. Patton, of Dublin, Ohio, was convicted in 1993 and 2008, and charged again in October 2010, with waiting in restrooms and, when young boys finished using the urinal (after Patton had obstructed the flushing mechanism), rushing to gather the contents, which he admitted sexually excited him. After Patton's 2008 conviction, the Ohio legislature made that specific act a felony, and Patton's arrest in October was supposed to lead to a premiere conviction. (The judge did find Patton guilty of "criminal mischief," a misdemeanor.)

Doug Guetzloe, one of central Florida's most prominent political operatives (and a subject of investigations by the Florida Elections Commission and an expressway commission in Orlando), had long infuriated prosecutors with his slippery denials of knowledge of unethical campaigns that they were certain he was deeply involved in. However, late (in 2006), Guetzloe missed a payment on his rental storage locker, and 50 boxes of his professional and personal records were seized and auctioned for $10 to a curious citizen, who then gave them to Orlando's WKMG-TV, which had several earlier investigations of Guetzloe still open. Based on early readings of the storage-locker papers, Guetzloe was quickly indicted for felony perjury.

New York University arts professor Wafaa Bilal had his camera surgically removed in February -- the one that was implanted in the back of his skull in November to record, at 60-second intervals, the places he had left behind (beamed to and archived by a museum in Qatar). The camera had been mounted under his skin, braced by three titanium posts, but his body very painfully rejected one of the posts, and his temporary solution is to merely tie the camera to the back of his neck (even though that work-around is unsatisfactory to him because it represents a less-personal "commitment" to the art). In the future, he said, communication devices like his will routinely be part of our bodies.

-- Till Krautkraemer's New York City beverage company MeatWater creates dozens of flavors of water for the upscale market of hearty gourmets who would like their daily salads, or shellfish, or goulash from a bottle instead of from a plate. Among his new flavors introduced in January, according to an AOL News report, were poached salmon salad water and a Caribbean shrimp salad water that can double as a vodka mixer. Old standbys include Peking duck water, tandoori chicken water, bangers 'n' mash water, and Krautkraemer's favorite, German sauerbraten water.

-- Sell What You Know: In December, a company in eastern Ukraine (a country known for hard drinking) announced a "drinking buddy" service in which, for the equivalent of about $18, it would supply a barroom companion for the evening, "qualified" to discuss politics, sports, women, etc., and even to offer psychological counseling if appropriate.

-- Not Your Father's Scotch: (1) The Panamanian company Scottish Spirits recently introduced a straight Scotch whisky in 12-ounce cans, for a market of mobile drinkers who prefer not to invest in a whole bottle. The international Scotch whisky trade association expressed alarm. (2) At Clive's, of Victoria, British Columbia, Glenfiddich Scotch whisky is only one ingredient in the signature cocktail "Cold Night In," which, according to a January New York Times review, combines "molecular mixology" and comfort food. An especially buttery grilled-cheese sandwich is soaked overnight in the Scotch, along with Mt. Gay rum and Lillet Blanc wine. Following a brief freeze to congeal any remaining fat, and double-straining, it is ready to serve -- with a celery stick and other garnishments.

-- "Vulva Original," from a German company, VivaEros, is the "scent of a beautiful woman," reported in Harper's magazine in August 2010, and selling as a fragrance concentrate for the equivalent of about $35 for a small roll-on container. (Its promotional video is of a lavishly photographed gym scene, with a handsome male, observing a beautiful female working out on a stationary bike, followed afterward by the male's gently sniffing the seat.) "The female smell of intimacy," promised VivaEros, "triggers sexual attraction and desire," which men can address "more intensely during self-stimulation."

-- "You're not going to like this," warned NPR's Robert Krulwich, about to deliver a February story about visionary robotics developers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, who created a carnivorous clock, supposedly able to power itself for 12 days merely on the carcasses of 12 dead houseflies (which the clock traps with fly paper and then mechanically razors in two). The pair also showed a prototype of a coffee table that catches mice by luring them up the table legs with cheese into a hole in the center, where they are guillotined. Auger and Loizeau said their creations are just extensions of TV nature programs showing animals hunting in the wild, but Krulwich fretted about the dangers inherent in "giving robots a taste for (meat)."

-- Scientists have long observed male capuchin monkeys urinating on their hands and then rubbing down their bodies, but researchers were unclear about the purpose (whether for identification, or threat-prevention, or mating) -- until a recent issue of the American Journal of Primatology. Dr. Kimberly Phillips and colleagues found that the practice helps clarify mating priorities, in that, first, males rub down promptly after being solicited by females in heat, and second, based on MRI scans of capuchins' brains, female mating activity is triggered only by adults' urine.

In May 2008, classroom disrupter Alex Barton, 5, was finally made by his teacher at Morningside Elementary kindergarten in St. Lucie County, Fla., to sit down and listen to the accumulated complaints of his classmates, who then were asked to vote on asking Alex to leave the class. (He lost, 14-2.) Shortly afterward, Alex was diagnosed with a form of autism, and his mother filed a federal disability discrimination lawsuit, citing Alex's "humiliation" by the voting incident. A settlement was reached in February 2011 when the school district agreed to pay Alex $350,000 (which included legal expenses). Said Ms. Barton, "Money can't take care of what (the school district) did to my family."

Lawyer Terry Watkins admitted to a judge in Faribault, Minn., in February that his client William Melchert-Dinkel did things that were "abhorrent," "sick" and "creepy," but that doesn't make him a criminal. Melchert-Dinkel has been charged with two felonies for counseling depressed people online on the techniques and virtues of suicide (for example, recommending positioning for a noose to a Briton who hanged himself three days later). (A judge's decision was pending at press time.)

Mental health practitioners, writing in the January issue of the journal Substance Abuse, described two patients who had recently arrived at a clinic in Ranchi, India, after allowing themselves to be bitten by cobras for recreational highs. Both men had decades-long substance-abuse issues, especially involving opiates, and decided to try what they had heard about on the street. One, age 44, bitten on the foot, experienced "a blackout associated with a sense of well-being, lethargy and sleepiness." The other, 52, reported "dizziness and blurred vision followed by a heightened arousal and a sense of well-being," and apparently was so impressed that he returned to the snake charmer two weeks later for a second bite.

Recurring Theme: Another "negative cash-flow" robbery occurred in February, in Kansas City, Mo., as an unidentified man tried to distract the clerk at a gun store by laying $40 on the counter to buy a box of bullets, then pulling a gun and demanding all the store's money. The clerk thwarted the robbery by pulling his own gun (not surprisingly, since it was a gun store) and scaring the robber off -- while the $40 remained on the counter.

From time to time a woman appears in the news proudly displaying her years-long cultivation of fingernail growth. This time it was Ms. Jazz Ison Sinkfield, a grandmother from Atlanta, who showed off her hands for WXIA-TV in February. She admits some handicaps from her 20- to 24-inch long nails that skew and curl in seemingly random directions (e.g., no bowling, shoe-tying or computer work, and the expense of a five-hour, $250 salon session each month), but claims to be unfazed if people she meets find the sight of her nails repulsive. Said Sinkfield, "Some people are jealous."

Bangkok economics student Panupol Sujjayakorn interrupted his studies in November (2005) to defend his World Scrabble Championship in London, one of many non-English-speaking competitors who achieved top-of-the-line ranking by memorizing up to 100,000 words in English without ever knowing their meanings. Like the others, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Panupol learned first those premium words that overuse the prominent Scrabble letter tiles (such as "aureolae"). (Alas, this time around, a native English speaker, Dr. Adam Logan, a number theory researcher, won the title, building actual words like "qanat" and "euripi.")