A 200-exhibit installation on the history of dirt and filth and their importance in our lives opened in a London gallery in March, featuring the ordinary (dust), the educational (a video tribute to New York's Fresh Kills landfill, at one time the world's largest), the medical (vials of historic, nasty-looking secretions from cholera victims), and the artistic (bricks fashioned from feces gathered by India's Dalits, who hand-clean latrines). Dirt may worry us as a society, said the exhibit's curator, but we have learned that we "need bits of it and, guiltily, secretly, we are sometimes drawn to it." Capping the exhibit, leaning against a wall, was what appeared at a distance to be an ordinary broom but whose handle was studded with diamonds and pearls.

-- The CIA recently won two court rulings allowing the agency to refuse comment about its former contractor Dennis Montgomery -- rulings that issues involving him are "state secrets" (despite strong evidence that the main "secret" is merely how foolish the agency, and the U.S. Air Force, were to pay Montgomery at least $20 million for bogus software following 9-11, according to a February New York Times report). Montgomery, a small-time gambler who said he was once abducted by aliens, convinced the two agencies that his sophisticated software could detect secret al-Qaida messages embedded in video pixels on Al Jazeera's news website. According to the Times report, Montgomery has not been charged with wrongdoing and is not likely to be, since the agencies do not want their gullibility publicized.

-- For about a year, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) has been facilitating Mexico's increasingly bloody drug wars by turning a blind eye to U.S. gun sales to the cartels -- even though those very guns account for some civilian deaths as well as the December fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. According to the senior ATF agent who supplied evidence to CBS News, neither the Mexican government nor many U.S. officials were aware of the program (called "Fast and Furious") until mid-March. ATF allowed the sales so it could track the guns' locations, to facilitate, at some future date, bringing indictments against drug traffickers.

-- Until recently, many pregnant women at risk of delivering prematurely could be aided by an obstetrician-recommended workup of a chemical compound, at a cost of about $10 to $20 a dose. However, in February, the Food and Drug Administration approved a specific commercial version, K-V Pharmaceutical's Makena, which K-V began pricing at $1,500 a dose (citing its need to recoup "research" costs). K-V also began threatening dispensers of the workup compound, since FDA had anointed Makena with "market exclusivity." (Update: FDA changed its mind in March and announced that providers of the workup compound could continue to offer it.)

(1) The manager of the Channel Islands Co-operative store in the British territory of Jersey acknowledged to BBC News in November that a shopper's complaint was justified and that refunds would be made. The customer believed she had been overcharged by about five pounds (about $8) because, while weighing fruits and vegetables, the clerk had been leaning over so that her breasts accidentally increased pressure on the scale. (2) Britain's Border Agency announced the firing of an immigration officer in January. The man had apparently turned sour on his marriage, and while his wife was on holiday with her family in Pakistan, he quietly added her name to the terrorist list of people not allowed into the country.

-- Tough Guys: (1) In Houston in February, Christopher Harding, 23, was sentenced to three years in prison for beating up his mother (who is disabled and requires a caretaker) and yanking out her dentures. (2) In Long Beach, Calif., in February, police arrested two 19-year-old men, Kirk Lewis and Daniel Bard, and charged them as two of the three men they sought in the robbery of a 5-year-old girl.

-- Intra-Geek-Community Crime: In March, a teenager was charged with attempting to rob the Fun 4 All comic-book store in Southfield, Mich., with a homemade bomb (that looked realistic but turned out to be harmless) and presenting a list of the specific collectors' merchandise (not money) he wanted. After the clerk balked at the demands, the robber relented, paid cash for a few of the items on the list, and left. When arrested later, he called the incident a "social experiment."

-- Timothy James Chapek, 24, was charged with burglary in March after he broke into a house in Portland, Ore., and took a shower. Unknown to him, the resident was in another part of the house and came, with his two German shepherds and a gun, to confront Chapek through the closed bathroom door, while calling 911. Fearing the dogs and the gun, Chapek simultaneously dialed 911 himself, begging that officers come quickly and arrest him. (Chapek, later released on bond, was re-arrested two days later in Chehalis, Wash., while, according to police, loading shoplifted goods into a stolen car.)

-- In February, a New York City gallery began offering classes in "anthropomorphic taxidermy," described as a "Victorian hobby" in which mouse carcasses are not only meticulously cleaned and stuffed, but outfitted in handmade miniature 19th-century clothing, such as bloomers. British practitioners are said to have created elaborate scenes featuring scores of the costumed bodies. Class instructor Susan Jeiven said the mice have to look "classy." "I don't like rogue taxidermy."

-- Scottish artist Jane Forbes, 47, won the "Shoe Is Art" competition in Dundee in late 2010 with a work ("Ad Infinitum") that a University of Dundee spokesman called "awe-inspiring." Forbes painted (and photographed) the same pair of shoes every day for 66 consecutive days, hypothesizing that subtle differences in her "mood" would be detectable in any variations in the paint jobs.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Jason Davis was sentenced in December in Burlington, Iowa, to five years in prison for one crime, but still pending is his August 2010 arrest for shoplifting at Westland Mall, which ended with Davis passed out after making a crime-scene boo-boo in his pants. (2) Michael Trias, 20, was arrested in March in Mesa, Ariz., after a botched residential burglary. According to police, Trias had come in through a window but had landed in a clothes basket made of PVC and netting, and become entangled. His flailing attempts to free himself alerted the homeowner.

Salt Lake County (Utah) corrections officer Robert Monson, 38, was charged in December with having sex with a female he had met while she was in lockup. According to the woman, the couple's trysts were not impeded by her ankle monitor, which Monson insisted was "sexy." (In fact, shortly after the monitor was removed, the relationship ended.) (2) A 50-year-old man was charged with indecent exposure near Yakima, Wash., in March when he jumped in front of a woman, genitals exposed, but otherwise dressed in a diver's wet suit, mask and bright orange gloves.

India's legal system is notoriously among the world's most leisurely paced. In December (1990) in New Delhi, four men (ages 82, 71, 63 and 62) were acquitted of accusations that they defrauded a government-run transport company by buying bogus motor parts. The men had been charged with the crime in 1955 (when they were, respectively, 47, 36, 28 and 27 years old), and the trial began in 1957. Hearings continued, off and on, for 33 years before Judge V.B. Gupta concluded in December that the government had failed to prove its case.

Gen. Than Shwe of Myanmar, leader of Asia's most authoritarian regime, made a rare public appearance in February but dressed in a women's sarong. Most likely, according to a report on AOL News, he was challenging the country's increasingly successful "panty protests" in which females opposed to the regime toss their underwear at the leaders or onto government property to, according to superstition, weaken the oppressors. (Men wear sarongs, too, in Myanmar, but the general's sarong was uniquely of a design worn by women.) An Internet site run by the protesters urges sympathetic women worldwide to "post, deliver or fling" panties at any Burmese embassy.

-- The "F State's" Legislature at Work: (1) Florida Senate Bill 1246, introduced in February, would make it a first-degree felony to take a picture of any farmland, even from the side of the road, without written permission of the land's owner. (The bill is perhaps an overenthusiastic attempt to pre-empt campaigns by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.) (2) Though Florida faces a serious budget shortfall, another Senate bill, 1846, would authorize the state to borrow money for golf courses and resorts in at least five state parks and would require that the courses be designed by golf legend Jack Nicklaus' firm. (Update: SB1846 was too excessive even for Florida and was withdrawn.)

-- No Sense of Shame: (1) Nurse Sarah Casareto resigned in February from Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, and faced possible criminal charges, after allegedly swiping the painkiller fentanyl from her patient's IV line as he was undergoing kidney-stone surgery (telling him once to "man up" when he complained about the pain). (2) Karen Remsing, 42, stands accused of much the same thing after her November arrest involving an unspecified pain medicine delivered by IV at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Children's Hospital. However, Remsing's case was different in that the IV line being shorted was that of her own, terminally ill, 15-year-old son.

-- New Orleans clothing designer Cree McCree, an ardent environmentalist, ordinarily would never work with animal fur, but the Louisiana state pest, the nutria (swamp rat), is culled in abundance by hunters, who leave the carcasses where they fall. Calling its soft-brown coat "guilt-free fur that belongs on the runway instead of at the bottom of the bayou," McCree has encouraged a small industry of local designers to create nutria fashions -- and in November went big-time with a New York City show ("Nutria-palooza"). Now, according to a November New York Times report, designers Billy Reid and Oscar de la Renta are sampling nutria's "righteous fur."

-- In late 2010, a Georgia utility contractor discovered an elaborate "Internet-controlled network of web-accessible cameras" and three shotguns aimed into a food-garden plot on a Georgia Power Company right of way (as reported by the Augusta Chronicle in January). The Georgia Wildlife Resources Division and U.S. Homeland Security took a look, but by then, the structure had been moved. (Homeland Security speculated that the set-up was to keep feral hogs away from the food stock.)

-- Principal Angela Jennings of Rock Chapel Elementary School in Lithonia, Ga., resigned after an investigation revealed that she had temporarily unenrolled 13 students last year for the sole purpose of keeping them from annual statewide tests because she feared their scores would drag down her school's performance. (When the test was over, Jennings re-enrolled them.) The resignation, effective in June, was revealed in February by Atlanta's WSB-TV.

-- Artists Adam Zaretsky and Tony Allard told AOL News in February of their plans to create "bio-art" based on an epoxy-preserved "glob" of feces excreted by the counterculture novelist William S. Burroughs (who died in 1997). The pair would isolate Burroughs' DNA, make copies, soak them in gold dust, and, with a laboratory "gene gun," shoot the mixture into blood, feces and semen to create "living bio-art." (Zaretsky was less certain when asked what was actually being produced, suggesting that they may call their work a "living cut-up literary device" or just a mutant sculpture. Zaretsky is a Ph.D. candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Allard is a college professor in San Diego.)

-- Questionable Redemption: For two philanthropic gifts totaling $105,000, Jim Massen, 80, a retired television repairman and farmer in Windsor, Ontario, has perhaps salvaged his good name, overcoming a 1990 guilty plea (and one-year jail sentence) for molesting three teenage boys. The gifts, acknowledged in February, mean that a scoreboard clock, an administrative office, the street leading to the complex, and a walking trail will all be named for him.

-- Theory of Evolution: Last year, the highly qualified agriculture expert Ricardo Salvador was passed over by Iowa State University to run its Center for Sustainable Agriculture, even after the person who finished ahead of him declined the job. According to a June Chronicle of Higher Education report, Salvador had committed an unpardonable faux pas during the hiring process -- by stating the obvious fact that cows everywhere, historically, eat "grass." (Since Iowa's dominant crop is corn, "grass" was the wrong answer.) When a Chronicle reporter asked the dean of Iowa State's agriculture school whether cows evolved eating grass, the dean said she did not have an "opinion" about that.

(1) Over the last 10 years, newspaper vendor Miljenko Bukovic, 56, of Valparaiso, Chile, has acquired 82 Julia Roberts face tattoos on his upper body -- all, he said, inspired by scenes from the movie "Erin Brockovich." (2) On Feb. 21, Jessica Davey, 22, of Salisbury, England, saw that her car had been wrongly immobilized with a boot. Angry at probably missing work, she locked herself in the car, thus impeding the tow truck, and remained for 30 hours, until a parking inspector dropped by and removed the boot.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Arkeen Thomas, 19, broke into a home in Port St. Lucie, Fla., in March, but the residents were present, and the male resident immediately punched Thomas in the mouth, sending him fleeing. (Minutes later, a woman identified as Thomas' mother arrived, picked up her son's gold teeth that had been knocked out, and left.) (2) In March, Briton Luke Clay, 21, was sentenced to eight months in prison by a Nottingham Crown Court judge for a home invasion. Luke and his brother fled the home empty-handed after the resident, Joan Parmenter, 79, knocked Luke down with one punch to the jaw.

Another "Sovereign" Citizen: In February, the Sarasota (Fla.) Police Department fired veteran homicide detective Tom Laughlin, almost a year after he had filed formal papers identifying himself as part of the "sovereign" movement, whose members believe they are beyond the control of any government and can establish their own financial system (which usually makes them much richer -- on paper), among other assertions. (The U.S. Constitution is cited as their authority, but only the original and not the popular version, which is a sham secretly switched with the original by President Abraham Lincoln.) In a subsequent interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Laughlin, who had a strong record as a detective, acknowledged that maybe he had gotten carried away.

In April (2006), a dead, decaying cow got caught on a tree branch at a dam near West Milford, W.Va., and remained there for "several weeks," according to an Associated Press report, grossing out neighbors, while five government agencies split hairs to keep from getting involved. Could the West Milford city government move the cow? (No, outside city limits.) State Department of Natural Resources? (No, they handle only wild animals.) State Environmental Protection agency? (No, the cow presents no ecological danger.) State Agriculture Department? (No, it's a local issue.) Regional Water Board? (No, just no.) Finally, workers from the state Division of Highways, along with volunteer firefighters, removed the cow.

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.