In Chinese legend, tea leaves picked by fairies using not their hands but just their mouths yielded brewed tea that would bring prosperity and cure diseases, and now the historic, picturesque Jiuhua Mountain Tea Plantation (in Gushi, Henan province) has promised to hire up to 10 female virgins to provide the equivalently pure and delicate tea leaves, picked with the teeth and dropped into small baskets worn around the women's necks. According to an April report in London's Daily Mail, only virgins with strong necks and lips (and a bra size of C-cup or larger), and without visible scars or blemishes, will be considered for the equivalent-$80-a-day jobs (an almost unheard-of salary in China, especially for agricultural field work).

-- Cliche Come to Life: The person in the news most recently for slipping and falling on a banana peel might be Ida Valentine, 58, who filed a lawsuit in February against the 99 Cents Only chain after slipping on one while shopping in its store in Fontana, Calif., in April 2010. The fall, she said, left her with a herniated disk and tissue damage.

-- News of the Weird has reported several times on the confusion many art gallery visitors reveal in evaluating "abstract impressionist" pieces when they compare them to random scribblings of toddlers (and animals, such as chimpanzees and elephants). In April, academic researchers at Boston College reported that, indeed, gallery patrons correctly differentiated serious works from squiggles only about 60 percent to 70 percent of the time. Commented one survey subject, apparently realizing his confusion: "The chimpanzee's stuff is good. I like how he plays with metaphors about depth of field, but I think I like this guy (Mark) Rothko a little bit better."

-- The powerful suction of swimming pool filters can trap not only toddlers against the drain but a grown man in excellent physical condition, according to a lawsuit filed in May by the family of the late John Hoy Jr., who drowned when unable to pry himself loose from the vacuum drain of a hot tub at the Sandals resort in Nassau, Bahamas, in 2010. (The most notorious drain-pegging of all time was perhaps a 1994 incident at a Scottish Inn motel in Lakeland, Fla., when a 33-year-old guest's penis became stuck in the drain, apparently as he was testing the filter's suction. That story did not appear in News of the Weird, but several sources cite a July 1994 story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune.)

-- British welfare benefits are being reduced in two years, but for now, work-shunning parents who blithely navigate a series of government "support" payments can make a nice living for themselves. Kathy Black, 45, of East Hanningfield, Essex, with 16 children by six fathers thus qualifies for the equivalent of at least $1,000 a week (the take-home pay of someone earning the equivalent of $68,000 a year), and child support from one of the fathers adds even more to her account. Black's second husband, her 17-year-old son and her 22-year-old daughter spilled secrets of her irresponsibility to a Daily Mail reporter in February.

-- In May, a man exploring rural property in Lebanon, Ore., came across what appeared to be a classic World War II-era bomb, but, unfamiliar with the ordnance, he became only the most recent person to make the completely unwise decision to load it into his vehicle and drive to a police station (in Corvallis). Officers at the station reacted predictably and logically: They fled the room, closed down the streets around the station, and called the nearest bomb squad (which later detonated it safely).

-- Least Competent DIY Homeowners: Reports still frequently emerge of homeowners battling household pests, yet only creating an even worse problem (as if the pests ultimately outsmart them). In recent cases, for example, Robert Hughes tried to oust the squirrels from his townhome in Richton Park, Ill., in March, but his smoke bomb badly damaged his unit and his neighbor's. (Firefighters had to rip open the roof in the two units to battle the blaze.) Two weeks after that, in Mesa, Ariz., a man set his attic on fire trying to get rid of a beehive with brake fluid and a cigarette lighter.

-- Beauty contests for camels are very big business in Saudi Arabia, as News of the Weird reported in 2007, but the first one in Turkey (in Selcuk) was held in January and featured considerably lower-market camels. (The Turkish winner had been purchased for the equivalent of $26,000; a Saudi camel once won $10 million in a single show.) Judges supposedly look for muscle tone, elegance of tail wag and tooth quality, according to a January Wall Street Journal dispatch. Charisma is also important, according to one judge. "Camels," he said, "realize that people are watching them (and) are trying to pose." "Some will stop, open their back legs, and wave their tail, or (throw) their head back and moan ... this is the kind of posing we (judges) are looking for."

-- From time to time, someone visiting his bathroom looks down and finds eyes of a critter staring back at him from the toilet bowl. In March, Dennis Mulholland, 67, of Paisley, Scotland, encountered a 3-foot-long California king snake hiding in the bowl after escaping from elsewhere in the building. In December a woman in Edmond, Okla., had a similar experience with a squirrel, which, hypothesized police, might have crawled through a sewer drain.

-- "Personal body orifices," as storage units for contraband, seem more than ever in vogue. Recent inventories made by police of suspects' vaginas included LSD in aluminum foil and marijuana in two sandwich bags (woman in Englewood, Fla., January); pills (woman in Manatee County, Fla., February); heroin (woman in Scranton, Pa., March); a fraudulent driver's license and credit card (woman in Lee County, Fla., May); and pills and a knife (woman in Fort Myers, Fla., May). Rectal safe-keeping included a man with a baggie of marijuana (Louisville, Ky., March); a man with a marijuana pipe (Port St. Lucie, Fla., May), and a man with 30 items inside a condom (Sarasota, Fla., February), including a syringe, lip balm, six matches, a cigarette, 17 pills and a CVS receipt and coupon.

-- Christopher Bjerkness, 33, was arrested in May in Duluth, Minn., and charged with burglary after being discovered mid-day in the physical-therapy room at the Chester Creek Academy. The room contained inflatable exercise balls that appeared to be undisturbed, but Bjerkness has been arrested at least twice before, in 2005 (reported in News of the Weird) and 2009, because of his self-described compulsion to slash inflatable balls.

-- When News of the Weird first mentioned buzkashi (1989), it was merely the "national game" of Afghanistan, resembling hockey on horseback, with a dead goat (or calf, which is more durable) as the puck, carried by a team and deposited in a circle guarded by opponents (and played largely ruleless). As warlords' power has grown, and the Taliban has departed, and Western money and commerce have been introduced, team owners now bid on the best players, some of whom also have lucrative product-endorsement contracts and are treated as Afghan royalty. Said champion player Jahaan Geer, 33, to a Wall Street Journal reporter in April, "I used to practice buzkashi on donkeys. Now I drive a Lexus!"

-- David Truscott, 41, was convicted in Britain's Truro Crown Court in February of violating a restraining order to keep away from the Woodbury House Farm in Redruth, Cornwall, after being caught there two times previously wallowing in the farm's manure pit while masturbating. Said the prosecutor, "This is the only place (Truscott) seeks to gratify himself in this particular manner ..."

Ellenbeth Wachs, 48, was arrested in Lakeland, Fla., in May on a complaint that she "simulated" a sex act in front of a minor. In a March incident, Wachs, after receiving medication for her multiple sclerosis, was awakened at 8:30 a.m. by her 10-year-old neighbor boy's clamorous basketball game, near Wachs' window. After unsuccessfully beseeching the boy for quiet, Wachs -- hoping, perhaps, to make a point about noisy neighbors -- began moaning out the window (while remaining out of sight), "Oh, John! Oh! John!" over and over at increased shrillness as if in the throes of orgasm. The basketball-playing stopped, but the incident was not a teaching moment. The boy's father, Otto Lehman, called the police and filed for an order of protection against Wachs.

-- Dalia Dippolito, 30, of Boynton Beach, Fla., was convicted in May of hiring a hit man to kill her husband, but not before offering an ultra-modern defense: Her lawyer told the jury that it was all a fake scheme to pitch a reality-TV show about one spouse's ordering a hit on the other (and that her husband, Michael, had originally come up with the idea). As Dippolito's plan unfolded, her boyfriend alerted police, who set up a sting and witnessed Dippolito dictating exactly what she wanted done. (In fact, the sting itself was captured on video for the "Cops" TV show.) Michael denied any involvement, and the jury appeared not to give her story any credence.

-- "Wrong" Impressions: (1) The Sergeants Benevolent Association, fighting back in April against corruption charges (that its NYPD officers often "fix" traffic tickets for celebrities, high officials and selected "friends") claimed in a recorded message reported in The New York Times that such fixes are merely "courtesy," not corruption. (2) A 20-year-old Jersey City, N.J., gym member claimed "criminal sexual contact" in March, acknowledging that while she had given a male club therapist permission to massage her breasts and buttocks, she had been under the impression that he is gay. When another gym member told her that the therapist has a girlfriend, she called the police.

-- Quite a Disease, That Lyme: (1) Marilyn Michose, 46, was referred for medical evaluation in May after she was spotted roaming the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City wearing neon pink panties on top of her street clothes, with a .25-caliber Beretta visible in her jacket pocket, and speaking gibberish. According to Michose's mother, Marilyn had overmedicated for her Lyme disease. (2) A restraining order, to keep away from Sarah Palin and her family, was extended in May against Shawn Christy, 19, of McAdoo, Pa., by a magistrate in Anchorage, Alaska. Christy has admitted to traveling to Alaska to meet Palin, to making numerous telephone calls to her, and to once threatening to sexually assault her. According to a 2009 psychiatric evaluation ordered by the Secret Service, Christy appeared to suffer from "latent onset" Lyme disease.

-- Erie County (N.Y.) jail officials suspended guards Lawrence Mule, a 26-year veteran, and James Conlin, a 29-year veteran, after they scuffled at the County Correctional Facility on April 21, reportedly over a bag of chips. An inmate had to break up the fight.

-- An anti-terrorism drill scheduled for Pottawattamie County, Iowa, in March, which was to practice community co-ordination after an attack by a hypothetical white supremacist group angry about illegal immigration, had to be canceled. The sheriff said callers claiming to be white supremacists were angry at being picked on as "terrorists" and had threatened a school in Treynor, Iowa, with an attack that closely resembled the kind of imagined attack that would have preceded the simulated drill.

-- In April, officials in the northern Swedish city of Angermanland temporarily shut down the operator of a colonic cleansing service, and issued fines because it was not up to code. It had insufficient restroom facilities, thus requiring some of its clients to cleanse their colons in front of other clients.

The lawyer for Charles Wilhite expressed shock in a formal motion before the court after his client's murder trial in Springfield, Mass., in April (in which Wilhite was convicted). How could it be, he asked the judge, that despite having to evaluate 19 witnesses and examine 55 pieces of evidence, the jury could so quickly have decided (three hours total) that Wilhite and his partner Angel Hernandez were guilty? (The lawyer insinuated that the jury had thus been inattentive or biased, but did not mention the possibility that Wilhite and Hernandez were so obviously guilty that no more time was necessary.)

"Dog Stylist" Dara Foster ("I show people how to live together with their dogs in a stylish way") told a TV audience recently that some dog owners are dressing their pooches in "'80s-inspired punk," "giving way to a grunge movement in dog fashion -- I swear to God." The ubiquitous TV guest and apparel designer estimates that since Americans already spend $47 billion a year on pets, they need more than ever to know what's hot -- fluorescent styling gel, for example, and precooked meals for dogs, and owners getting matching tattoos with their dogs, and a recently spotted synthetic mullet wig for dogs.

(1) To hype attendance for Easter services this year, Lindenwald Baptist Church in Hamilton, Ohio, raffled off $1,000 on Easter Sunday. As a result, attendance more than doubled, to 1,137 (including 1,135 raffle losers). (2) A month earlier, Pastor John Goodman of the Houston Unity Baptist Church tried a different approach, calling on parishioners to cede their income-tax refunds to the church and warning that anyone who failed to come to the aid of the church is a "devil" and could be refused communion.

People Who Didn't Think It Through: (1) Joseph Price, 61, left the PNC Bank in Okeechobee, Fla., empty-handed on May 6 despite having passed the teller a note demanding a "sack full of cash." However, he hadn't brought a sack with him, and the teller said she didn't have one, either. He was arrested seven minutes after leaving the bank. (2) Joseph Brice, 21, of Clarkston, Wash., was indicted in May on one count of having manufactured a bomb in 2010. Brice inadvertently called attention to himself by ordering his bomb components under the name of (Oklahoma City bomber) "Timothy McVeigh."

In December, the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay, Wis., announced it had received approval to designate a site in Champion, Wis., as the 11th official, Vatican-authorized location of a Virgin Mary apparition (witnessed by a nun in 1859). Meanwhile, these recent bootleg public appearances were reported: Yucca Valley, Calif., in April (Jesus on the petal of a poppy plant). Brisbane, Australia, in March (Jesus on a pie from the Posh Pizza restaurant). Los Angeles in February (Jesus on a rocking chair). Pequabuck, Conn., in February (Mary in an ice formation on a neighbor's roof). Comal County, Texas, just north of San Antonio, in December (Mary, "floating" on the wall of an apartment building). Elwood, Ind., in December (Jesus on a woman's chest X-ray).

On Halloween day (1989), Tallahassee, Fla., K-Mart employee Jeff Sablom was taking a break in the back of the store to try on the Batman costume he had planned to wear to a party that night when a security guard asked for his help to apprehend a shoplifter. Said the guard later, "You should have seen that man's eyes when he looked back and saw Batman chasing him." Sablom recovered four cartons of cigarettes and two videocassettes.

Rights of women are severely restricted in Pakistan's tribal areas and among Muslim fundamentalists, but the rights of the country's estimated 50,000 "transgenders" blossomed in April when the country's Supreme Court ordered the government to accept a "third sex" designation on official documents (instead of forcing a choice of "male" or "female"). The court further recommended that transgenders be awarded government job quotas and suggested "tax collector" as one task for which they are particularly suited, since their presence at homes and businesses still tends to embarrass debtors into paying up quickly (especially since many transgenders outfit themselves, and behave, flamboyantly).

-- Imprisoned rapist Troy Fears, 55, had another four years tacked onto his sentence in April by a federal judge in Phoenix after he was convicted of swindling the IRS out of $119,000 by filing 117 fake tax returns from 2005 to 2009. According to prosecutors, IRS routinely dispatched direct-deposit refunds while indifferent to matching the payment recipient with the person whose Social Security number was on the return. (In fact, Fears was caught not by the IRS but by a prison guard who happened upon his paperwork.)

-- Apparently, the federal government failed to foresee that fighting two wars simultaneously, with historically high wound-survival rates, might produce surges of disability claims. Just in the last year, according to an April USA Today report, claims are up over 50 percent, and those taking longer than two months to resolve have more than doubled. (Tragically, Marine Clay Hunt, who was a national spokesman for disability rights and who suffered from post-traumatic stress, killed himself on March 31, ultimately frustrated that the Department of Veterans Affairs had lost his paperwork. "I can track my pizza from Pizza Hut on my BlackBerry," he once said, "but the VA can't find my claim for four months.")

-- Close Enough for Government Work: (1) A contract security guard at Detroit's McNamara Building (which houses the FBI and other vital federal offices) was found in March to have casually laid aside, for three weeks, a suspicious package that turned out to be a real bomb. (It was, eventually, safely detonated.) (2) The Census Bureau got it right this time around for Lost Springs, Wyo. In 2000, it had missed 80 percent of the population (counting 1 instead of 5). The new total (4) is correct, since two people subsequently died, and one moved in.

Great Art!

Occasionally (as News of the Weird has reported), patrons of art galleries mistake ordinary objects as the actual art (for example, solemnly "contemplating" a broom inadvertently left behind by a janitor), and sometimes the opposite mistake occurs. At the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam in May, a wandering patron absent-mindedly traipsed through a re-creation of Wim T. Schippers' floor-level Peanut Butter Platform (a 40-square-foot installation of creamy spread). (The museum manager had declined to fence in the exhibit, which he said would spoil its beauty.)

(1) Homeless Charles Mader, a convicted sex offender in Albuquerque, was arrested in May for failure to report his change of address, as required by law. Mader had moved out of his registered address, which was a Dumpster, into a community shelter. (2) Robert Norton Kennedy, 51, was arrested in Horry County, S.C., in May and charged with assault and battery, despite the humble tattoo on his forehead referencing a Bible verse and reading, "Please forgive me if I say or do anything stupid."

(1) Sharon Newling, 58, was arrested in Salisbury, N.C., in April and charged with shooting at her stepson with a .22-caliber rifle. She denied shooting "at" him, but said she was just shooting toward him "to make him stop working on his truck." (2) In April in Greensboro, N.C., Stephanie Preston and Bobby Duncan were married in front of family and friends at the local Jiffy Lube. (3) A 25-year-old man in Okaloosa County, Fla., was arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing after he entered the Club 51 Gentlemen's Club, from which he had been banned after a February incident. The man told police that he knew he had been banned from a strip club but couldn't remember which one.

-- A college senior in Colorado complained long-distance in March to the Better Business Bureau in Minnesota's Twin Cities because EssayWritingCompany.com, headquartered in Farmington, Minn., failed to deliver the class paper she ordered (at $23 per page). (The meaning of "academic dishonesty" is evolving, but it is still a sometimes-expellable offense to submit someone else's work as one's own.)

-- Filipino Henson Chua, working in the U.S., was indicted in March for illegally bringing back into the country an American-made military spy plane and openly offering it for sale for $13,000 on eBay. Sophisticated equipment such as the RQ-11B "Raven" Unmanned Aerial Vehicle requires high-level government approval to prevent acquisition by U.S. enemies.

(1) Lisa Osborn was one of only two candidates who qualified to run for the two vacant seats on the Bentley (Mich.) Board of Education in May, yet she did not win. One vote would have put her on the board, but she got none (having been too busy even to vote for herself that day because of her son's baseball game). (2) Monika Strub began campaigning for a state parliament seat in Germany in March as a member of the Left Party. Until 2002, Strub, then "Horst Strub," was with the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, but then decided he was really a female, underwent surgery and became Monika, a socialist. Not surprisingly, she has been harassed by some of her former colleagues.

Perps Making It Easy on the Cops in Joliet, Ill.: (1) Domonique Loggins, 21, was running from two Joliet officers in April (suspected of assaulting his girlfriend) when his escape took him through Bicentennial Park downtown. Obviously unknown to him, dozens of police officers from surrounding jurisdictions were in the park that day on a training session (with 60 squad cars in a parking lot). Loggins was arrested. (2) Police imposters usually drive cars outfitted to resemble cruisers (flashing lights, scanners) and carry impressive, if fake, ID. However, Hector Garcia-Martinez, 35, fooled no one in April as the two Joliet women whose car he stopped immediately called 911. "Officer" Garcia-Martinez had none of the trappings -- except, as he lamely pointed out, a sticker on his front license plate reading "Woodridge Police Junior Officer" (typically given to children at police events).

Anorexia nervosa is widely recognized as a debilitating eating disorder that can be fatal in as many as 10 percent of cases. However, men with masturbation fantasies about super-skinny women have fueled an almost-five-fold increase in "ana-porn" websites, to more than 1,500 since 2006, according to an April report by London's The Guardian. One site's recruiting page limited models to those with a body-mass index of 15 or under, and warned that "(b)ones and ribs must be very visible." However, these recruiters are sometimes anorexics' only flatterers, terming them "superstar(s) of starvation," "much prettier than all those meat mountains." (Unlike child or animal pornography, ana-porn is not illegal.)

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation of voter rolls since 1981 in East St. Louis, Ill., identified 27 specific dead people who voted in various elections, complete through the 1990 primary. Inspiringly, two men who had never cast a single vote while alive apparently decided to begin participating in the democratic process once they had died, and Mr. Willie E. Fox Sr., who has voted six times since his death in 1987, mysteriously switched registration this year (1991) from Republican to Democrat.