A 53-year-old man with failing eyesight and who had recently undergone intestinal surgery told Sonoma, Calif., police that on Sunday afternoon, May 1, a woman had come to his home and instructed him to drop his pants and get face-down on the bed so that she could administer an enema. He said he assumed his doctor had sent her and thus complied, and it was over in two minutes, and she was gone. The doctor later said he had no idea who the woman was. (In the 1970s, in the Champaign, Ill., area, Michael Kenyon operated similarly as the "Illinois Enema Bandit" -- and inspired the late Frank Zappa's "Illinois Enema Bandit Blues.")

-- Several funeral homes in the United States have drive-thru windows to serve rushed mourners or those stressed by the parlor experience. "Not quite as emotional," said one visitor to the Robert L. Adams Mortuary in Compton, Calif., referring to the need not to linger in the queue of bereaved, idling motorists. The Adams facility was even more popular during the peak of gang murders in the area, according to an April Los Angeles Times report, because the drive-thru window's bulletproof glass rendered unnecessary the precarious indoor service in which gangbangers tried to further desecrate late rivals' corpses.

-- Noses Know: (1) In April, two Italian entrepreneurs introduced a perfume meant to evoke the scents of a person's blood, varying by type (A, B, AB, O) -- but with no actual blood. A prominent member of the U.S. "vampire community" fondly described the "intriguing" olfactory sensations of Type B (the "black cherry, pomegranate and patchouli infusions") and Type O ("raspberry, rose hips and birch"). Another "vampirist" called the whole idea "cheesy." (2) Artist Charity Blansit (aka Cherry Tree) told AOL News in May that she has been working on a fragrance based on her own urine (although not prepared to bring it to market yet), enhanced mainly with sugar.

Because of a loophole in Michigan law (which, at press time, legislators were working to fix), a winner of the "Make Me Rich" lottery game in July 2010 (publicized value: $2 million) has been openly receiving the same food-stamp allotment he had been receiving before he won. In May 2011, confronted by WNEM-TV in Saginaw, winner Leroy Fick was defiant about his food stamps. Currently, eligibility is based on regular income, and Fick had taken his payoff last year in one lump sum.

(1) Dugan Smith, 13, is almost as good as new, having overcome an extremely rare malignant tumor on his thigh bone. A surgeon at Ohio State's James Cancer Hospital removed the middle of Smith's leg, turned the bottom of it around so that the back faces the front, and reconnected the parts. (2) According to a February report in China's Wuhan Morning News, a 55-year-old farmer from Jiayu county in Hubei province finally has a functioning anus. His congenital condition had required him to restrict his diet severely and to "squeeze stools out with his hands."

The Belly Button Biodiversity project at North Carolina State University has begun examining the "faunal differences" in the microbial ecosystems of our navels, to foster understanding of the "tens of thousands" of organisms crawling around inside (almost all benign or even helpful). An 85-year-old man in North Carolina may have "very different navel life" than a 7-year-old girl in France, according to a May Raleigh News & Observer report. So far, only the organisms themselves and the host's demographics have been studied; other issues, such as variations by hairiness of navel, remain.

Good Jobs: (1) Prison Guard ("the greatest entry-level job in California," according to an April Wall Street Journal report highlighting its benefits over a typical job resulting from a Harvard University education). Starting pay is comparable; loans are not necessary (since the guard "academy" actually pays the student); and vacation time is more generous (seven weeks, five paid). One downside: The prison system is more selective (Harvard accepts 6.2 percent of applicants versus the guard service's fewer-than-1 percent of 120,000 applicants). (2) California taxpayers were also astonished to learn in May that several beach communities (led by Newport Beach) pay some lifeguards more than $100,000 annually in salary and benefits. (Generally, those are for long-time and supervisory jobs; ordinary "summer job" lifeguards typically make $16 to $22 an hour.)

-- Cat Failing to Know Its Role: In Cleveland, Texas (near Houston), a man had to be airlifted to an emergency trauma unit after losing a fight with a house cat. He was even armed with a knife as he took on the beast, but somehow the attacking cat caused him to lose his balance and fall on the blade.

-- Procreation Interventions: (1) Because female giant tortoises are lackadaisical about mating, the Knoxville (Tenn.) Zoo in May temporarily moved its two males, Al and Tex, to Zoo Atlanta to encourage Knoxville females Patches, Corky and Standup to yearn for them. Tex, by the way, is 90 years old, and Al is 130 (and hasn't had a date since 1983, according to a May Knoxville News-Sentinel story). (2) Hopewell Township, N.J., officials, responding to noise complaints in April, passed an ordinance limiting rooster access to hens to only 10 days a year. (The chickens also must, of course, be "disease-free.")

Oklahoma inmate Eric Torpy has served only six years of his 33-year sentence for armed robbery, but already he is looking ahead to the years 2035-2038. His original sentence was 30 years, but he challenged the judge that if he was "going down," it would be in "Larry Bird's jersey" -- the number 33 worn by the basketball player. Judge Ray Elliott then accommodated Torpy by adding three years. Said Torpy, in May, "Recently, I've wisened up." "I'm pretty sure (Bird) thinks I'm an idiot. (T)ruthfully, most people do. My own family does, so I'm pretty sure he does, too."

An unidentified man told police in Niles, Ill., in May that he had been victimized by a medical exam, which was conducted in an otherwise-abandoned office, by a lone "doctor" wearing a white lab coat, who used toothpicks for acupuncture pressure points, and who dispensed a container of pills (labeled "dietary supplements") with an expiration date of February 2002. The man said he paid $200 and is not sure he got his money's worth.

(1) A judge in Britain's Cambridge Crown Court sentenced two teenage boys to jail for burglary in May but allowed their 20-year-old partner, who has a much longer criminal record, to have a non-custodial sentence because he has a "cleanliness disorder" that a jailhouse would traumatize. (2) In a widely reported story that originated in the Brazilian press, accountant (and severe-anxiety and hypersexuality sufferer) Ana Catarian Bezerra, 36, was said to have prevailed after a court battle in April to be allowed breaks during the work day to masturbate.

Police in East Patchogue, N.Y., filed a false-report charge against Nicholas Lalla, 32, in January (1995) after he had sworn out a complaint that his estranged wife slapped him. Lalla played for police an audiotape he had made, clandestinely, in which slapping sounds are heard amidst his yelling "Don't hit me." When police informed Mrs. Lalla of that clandestine audiotape, she played for them a clandestine videotape she had made of him staging the audiotaping: He is shown, alone, yelling "Don't hit me" outside her house after she had walked away.

UPDATE: Morris Wayne Givens, charged with murder in October 1998 in Prattville, Ala., was subsequently freed and all charges dropped, according to a family source. His name has been removed from the News of the Weird Classic Middle Name series.

Thanks This Week to Brian Bjolin, Bruce Leiserowitz, Barry Rose, Kathryn Wood, Roy Henock, Derek Costello, and Jeff Jacobovitz, the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

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.