Bureaucrat's Delight: An update of the official index for classifying medical conditions (for research and quality control, and for insurance claims) was released recently, to take effect in October 2013, and replaced the current 18,000 codes with 140,000 much more specific ones. A September Wall Street Journal report noted, for example, 72 different codes for injuries involving birds, depending on the type. "Bitten by turtle" is different from "struck by turtle." Different codes cover injuries in "opera houses," on squash courts, and exactly where in or around a mobile home an injury occurred. "Walked into lamppost, initial encounter" is distinct from "walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter." Codes cover conditions stemming from encounters with extraterrestrials and conditions resulting from "burn due to water skis on fire." "Bizarre personal appearance" has a code, as well as "very low level of personal hygiene."

-- A small number of environmental and animal rights activists employ violence and physical threats in attempts to achieve their goals, and similar tactics have recently been used by another group bent on intimidating scientists: sufferers of "chronic fatigue syndrome." London's Observer reported in August that medical researchers who even suggest that the illness might have a "psychological" component have been subject to vitriolic abuse, stalking, disruptions to the scientists' workplaces, and even death threats. In at least one case, the activists succeeded: A psychiatry professor said he had moved his area of research from chronic fatigue to Gulf War syndrome. "That has taken me to Iraq and Afghanistan where ... I feel a lot safer."

-- Political Correctness Lives: British authorities threatened Iain Turnbull, 63, with a fine (equivalent of $1,530) in August because he refused to complete the mandatory census earlier this year. Turnbull, from Wales, was protesting that the government, intending to be progressively "inclusive," made available census questionnaires and instructions in such languages as Urdu, Punjabi and Tagalog -- but not Welsh (one of Britain's native languages, spoken by a half-million citizens).

-- Although the Patriot Act, drafted in the days after 9-11 and quickly enacted into law, was designed expressly to give prosecutors more leeway to challenge suspected terrorism, one of its key provisions has since then been used more than 100 times as often for drug investigations as for terrorism. New York magazine reported in September that "sneak and peek" warrants (enabling searches without notifying the targets) have been obtained only 15 times for terrorism threats but 1,618 times in drug cases.

-- In 2009 Diane Schuler, with a 0.19 blood-alcohol reading (and marijuana in her system), drove the wrong way for two miles on a New York freeway, finally crashing into another car, killing three people and herself. In July 2011, her widower, Dave Schuler, filed a lawsuit against the state, alleging that the collision was the state's fault for not posting signs warning motorists like Diane Schuler that they were going the wrong way. (Dave Schuler's own private investigator told The Daily Cortlandt newspaper that he tried to discourage Schuler from filing the lawsuit, to no avail.)

-- "(My) client was devastated by what happened," said the lawyer for Jean Pierre in announcing Pierre's $80 million lawsuit in August against the city of Newburgh, N.Y. Pierre's estranged girlfriend had committed suicide by driving into a city lake, taking the couple's three small children to their deaths, also. In the time before he became devastated, Pierre had been arrested for failure to pay child support and for endangering one of his children (found wandering the street in freezing weather on a Super Bowl Sunday), and friends of his girlfriend told the New York Post that Pierre constantly abused her, including immediately before her final drive.

-- Chicago's WLS Radio reported that a man (unnamed in the story) filed a $600,000 lawsuit on Sept. 2 against the Grossinger City Autoplex in the city, claiming that five employees had physically harassed him during business hours over a two-month period in 2009. Included was the man's claim that he had been given multiple "wedgies," one of which was a "hanging" wedgie.

-- Cicero, Ill., Town President Larry Dominick, the defendant in sexual harassment lawsuits filed by two female employees, gave depositions in the cases, in March 2009 and February 2011, but provided challenging answers on one issue. Asked in 2009 whether he had "ever touched" the plaintiff, Dominick, under oath, said "No." However, in 2011, Dominick (again under oath) gave a narrative of his relationship with the same plaintiff beginning in 2005, admitting that he had had sex with her numerous times at her home. (Dominick claimed to have misinterpreted the earlier question.)

-- Unclear on the Concept: (1) Pennsylvania state Rep. Michael Sturla, an opponent of increased natural-gas drilling in his district, warned in August that one effect of the drilling would be an increase of sexually transmitted diseases "amongst the womenfolk." (He said later that he had heard that from a hospital administrator.) (2) Nicholas Davis was arrested in a public park in Seattle in August while, according to a police officer, "masturbating violently." The officer said Davis explained, "There just isn't enough free love in Seattle."

A female Wisconsin prison chaplain was charged in September with several crimes in an alleged attempt to stage a fake hostage situation with an inmate for the purpose of gaining transfers of both to another prison in the state. Prosecutors said the chaplain, a Wiccan priest named Jamyi Witch, 52, instructed the inmate at Oshkosh Correctional Institution to come to her office, barricade the door, throw things around the room, and role-play with Witch as if she were his mother. While the office was under siege, the pair allegedly had consensual sex, and Witch supplied the man with drugs and sang him lullabies, supposedly to calm him down, ending the drama (until charges were filed).

Anthony Watson, sentenced to prison in 1992 for crimes that included rape and robbery, became a notorious jailhouse lawyer (even drafting a book, "A Guide to the Plea Circus") and through successful challenges had reduced his 160-year sentence to 26 -- and a release date of 2018. However, he filed one appeal too many. A court ruled in his favor on that final appeal and ordered a new trial altogether (vacating the convictions and sentence but also the reductions Watson had worked so hard for). At the retrial in March 2011, he was found guilty again and this time sentenced to four consecutive life terms.

The most notorious fetishist toe-sucker of the last 20 years, Michael Wyatt, now age 50, who had been arrested in the 1990s in Conway, Ark., and nearby towns, returned to the news in August 2011. Two Conway women reported in separate incidents that a man had approached them, complimented their toes, and asked to suck them (and in one case, to imagine out loud doing violent things to the toes). Both women picked Wyatt out of a police lineup, but a third woman, reporting a similar incident, could not identify the perpetrator. Wyatt earlier served one year of a four-year prison term but was last heard from, according to news databases, in 1999.

Overenthusiastic Parent/Sports Involvement: In October (1995), Richard King, 36, pleaded guilty to making threatening and obscene phone calls to two boys who were star players on his son's Little League team in Blue Springs, Mo., to get them to reconsider their plans to quit the team. According to prosecutors, King called the boys several times while he was on a business trip in China and threatened to kill one kid and his parents and to commit sodomy on the kid's whole family.

An option for suicide "with elegance and euphoria" is how Lithuanian-born Ph.D. candidate Julijonas Urbonas (London's Royal College of Art) described his "Euthanasia (Roller) Coaster," currently on the drawing board. Urbonas' model of "gravitational aesthetics" would be a third-mile-long, 1,600-foot-high thrill ride engineered to supply 10 Gs of centrifugal force (a spin at about 220 mph) to induce cerebral hypoxia, forcing blood away from the head and denying oxygen to the brain. Euphoria (and disorientation and anxiety, but not pain) are likely states to precede the brain's shutdown. Urbonas insisted that users would have the option through the first two minutes of the three-minute ride to rethink their decision and bail out (or else to push the final "FALL" button). (Suicide is legal in four European countries and Oregon and Washington.)

-- An open-government advocacy group's survey of federal agencies, released in July, revealed that eight of them have unresolved Freedom of Information Act requests that are over a decade old, including one pending for more than 20 years. (The 1976 FOIA law requires resolution within 20 business days, with a 10-day extension under "unusual circumstances.") (Also, regarding the FOIA, a June 2011 request by the city of Sioux City, Iowa, for background documents regarding the recent Postal Service decision to move jobs from Sioux City to Sioux Falls, S.D., was met promptly -- by the Postal Service's forecast that the likely fee for the documents would be $831,000, even though under the law the first two search hours and the first 100 documents are free.)

-- In August, the Securities and Exchange Commission's inspector general revealed that a $1,200 cash award was paid by the agency in 2010 to one of the very employees who had been specifically singled out for allowing Bernard Madoff to talk his way out of SEC inquiries in 2005 and 2006, before his epic Ponzi scheme was exposed in 2008. (The IG helpfully recommended that, in the future, awards not be given to employees who have recently been facing potential disciplinary action for poor performance.)

-- Among the aftershocks of the 9-11 attacks on America was the colossal budget-busting on "homeland security" -- a spending binge that, additionally, was thought to require something approaching uniform disbursement of funds throughout the 50 states. (Endless "what if" possibilities left no legislator willing to forsake maximum security.) Among the questionable projects described in a Los Angeles Times August review were the purchase of an inflatable Zodiac boat with wide-scan sonar -- in case terrorists were eyeing Lake McConaughy in Keith County, Neb.; cattle nose leads, halters and electric prods (to protect against biological attacks on cows, awarded to Cherry County, Neb.); a terrorist-proof iron fence around a Veterans Affairs hospital near Asheville, N.C.; and $557,400 in communications and rescue gear in case North Pole, Alaska, got hit.

-- The Office of Personnel Management's inspector general denounced the agency in September for promiscuously continuing to pay pension benefits to deceased federal retirees -- citing a 70 percent rise in bogus payments over the last five years. However, another federal inspector general (the Social Security Administration's) chastised its agency for the opposite reason: About 14,000 people each year are cut off from benefits after erroneously being declared dead.

The convenience store clerk, Ms. Falguni Patel, was giving testimony in the September trial of Morgan Armstrong (charged with robbing her in Hudson, Fla., in 2009) when she began shaking and then passed out while seated in the witness box. A relative of Patel's approached, removed her sneaker and held it to Patel's face, without success. The relative explained that Patel was subject to such blackouts and that sniffing the sneaker often revives her. (After paramedics attended to her, Patel took the rest of the day off and went back to court the next morning.)

-- Although Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, 27, concedes that photographs can be misinterpreted, he maintains on his website that he never wants to hurt people's feelings. Nevertheless, he said he is proud of his photo exhibit in which he stands completely nude, allowing various verses of the Quran to be projected on his skin. His latest scheduled appearance was at an art fair in Marrakesh in October.

-- Two women were charged in September with what was likely a major art theft for Johnson City, Tenn. Connie Sumlin, 45, and Gail Johnson, 58, were identified from surveillance video as the ones who snatched two pieces of art off the wall in the entrance of a local Arby's restaurant (a picture of some pears, and a metal art object, with an alleged combined value, according to the police report, of "$1,200").

-- Earlier this year, Marion Laval-Jeantet won a notable Prix Ars Electronica award for her "hybrid" work that, she said, intends to blur the boundaries between species. Laval-Jeantet stepped onstage in Ljubljana, Slovenia, as a horse-human, having earlier injected herself with horse blood (after prepping her body for several months with different horse immunoglobulins). She also walked with stilts that had "hooves" affixed to the bottom. She capped the show by extracting some of her own presumably-hybrid blood, to be frozen and stored for future research.

Indecent-exposure flashers appear to be invading even off-limits sanctuaries in their quest to be seen -- in Florida, anyway. In Sarasota County in September, Shane Wheatley, 31, was arrested after a Comcast cable customer complained that Wheatley had begun fondling himself while installing the woman's TV service. Three days earlier, in Niceville, a 14-year-old boy (whose name was not released) was charged with indecent exposure after a worshipper reported him masturbating openly during services at the First United Methodist Church. The boy admitted he had done the same thing during services the week before because he was "bored."

In September, a jury found Terry Newman, 25, and an associate guilty of aggravated assault for a home invasion in San Antonio in 2009, thus adding insult to Newman's injuries. Newman was shot by a resident during the initial invasion, and then again by another resident when he returned 15 minutes later to retrieve his car. Finally, after police encountered Newman following a short chase, he resisted officers and was shot again, for the third time. (None of the injuries was life-threatening.)

An inquest in Yorkshire, England, in September found that the February death of Brian Depledge, 38, was accidental -- that he had inadvertently strangled himself after falling onto a folding clothes horse (of the kind often used to hang recently washed laundry on to dry). The coroner concluded that Depledge's body had become trapped between rungs in such a way that the more he moved his arms to extricate himself, the tighter was the pressure that was unavoidably placed on his neck.

After Emmalee Bauer, 25, was fired by the Sheraton hotel company in late 2006, she sought unemployment compensation under Iowa law that affords benefits to employees terminated through no fault of their own. However, the judge decided Bauer did not qualify. She had written a 300-page journal, during office hours, describing in detail her efforts to avoid work. Among her entries: "This typing thing seems to be doing the trick. It just looks like I am hard at work on something," and "Once lunch is over, I will come right back to writing to piddle away the rest of the afternoon," and "Accomplishment is overrated, anyway."

Risky Business Models: (1) Orlando-area cosmetic surgeon Jeffrey Hartog inaugurated Liquid Gold, a storehouse for patients' frozen liposuctioned fat, charging $900 to safekeep a coffee-cup-sized portion and $200 per year storage (in case the fat is needed later, as for smoothing facial wrinkles). A Massachusetts General Hospital physician shook his head, telling the Orlando Sentinel, "(F)rozen fat doesn't hold up as well as fresh fat." (2) German biochemist Peer Bork told the journal Nature in September that he and his partners built the not-for-profit MyMicrobes.com social network so that people with similar stomach bacteria can commiserate over diet and gastrointestinal woes. The $2,100 signup fee includes a full gut-bacteria sequencing.

-- Wild Things: Motorist Clyde White of Corbin, Ky., was charged with attempted murder in August after police finally collared him following a road-rage chase that reached speeds of over 100 mph. White, who had repeatedly rammed his two siblings in their vehicle, is 78 years old, and in that other vehicle were his brother, 82, and his sister, 83.

-- According to a recent report from Britain's Office of National Statistics, there are 297,000 households in the country in which no adult has ever held any kind of job. The number of individuals who thus may never have developed the "habit of work," and who instead have grown accustomed to the country's generous welfare payments, might total 700,000. (In an example cited by the Daily Mail, one such couple in their late 30s, and their children, "earn" the equivalent of almost $1,100 per week in income support and disability payments.)

-- Chicago massage therapist Liudmyla Ksenych, testifying for the prosecution in August in a sex-trafficking trial, happened to notice from the witness stand that the defense lawyer, Douglas Rathe, was formerly a client of hers. The judge immediately declared a mistrial. Rathe later said he visited Ksenych four times in 2009 but that "nothing inappropriate" happened.

(1) What Year Is This? In August in Lubbock, Texas, Carl Wade Curry, 44, was sentenced to 99 years in prison for cattle rustling. (Said one of the victims, Curry tried to be a smooth-talking, handshake-dealing cattle seller, but "he wasn't capable.") (2) In Jackson, Minn., in March, Andrew Espey was sentenced to 90 days in jail for improperly shingling the roof of his house. Complained Espey, "(A) drunk can drive down the highway and get a lot less (of a sentence)." (He had affixed new shingles without first removing the old ones.)

-- Larry Stone, jailed on property crimes in Tavares, Fla., because he could not make the $1,250 bail, posted the bond in July by earning $1,300 in telephone-company money after discovering a management error that credited his jail account $46 for every international call he pretended to make. (The company figured out the problem a day later and recovered all the payouts from the accounts of Stone and 250 other prisoners who had learned of the glitch. Stone's bond was revoked, of course, and he was returned to lockup.)

-- "Sorry, Honey. I Was Aiming at the Dog": (1) Betty Walker, allegedly firing at the pit bull that she saw lunging at some children, hit the dog with one shot and her husband, 53, with a second shot, killing him (Jackson, Miss., July). (2) Brent Bader, allegedly firing at the family dog, instead hit his wife once in the head, killing her (Twin Peaks, Calif., February). (3) Samuel Campos, 46, allegedly firing to put away the family Chihuahua after having inadvertently wounded it the day before, instead hit his girlfriend, 41, killing her (Willits, Calif., March).

While too many children in Third World countries die from starvation or lack of basic medicines, the preschoolers of the TLC TV channel's "Outrageous Kid Parties" reality show celebrate birthdays and "graduation" (from or to kindergarten) with spectacular events that may cost their parents $30,000 or more. Typical features, according to an August ABC News report, included a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, a dunking booth, animal rides and a cotton candy machine, as well as the obligatory live music and limo or horseback (for grand entrances).

Strategies: (1) Alicia Bouchard, 41, was arrested in Jackson County, Fla., in August, accused of hatching a plot with her husband to impregnate a 12-year-old girl for the purpose of producing a baby that would eventually earn an additional welfare check. (2) In August, the Japanese construction firm Maeda Corp. ordered its 2,700 employees to adopt standard, short hairstyles (a "bob" for women with a longer fringe that could be swept to the side, and a routine short-back-and-sides cut for men with a slightly longer cut on top). Maeda said it was responding to the government's plea to reduce energy usage (less water, less hair dryer time).

(1) Travis Keen, 28, was arrested in Ouachita Parish, La., in August and charged with indecent exposure while driving around the parking lot at a Walmart. According to the police report, Keen explained that, based on experience, "when he comes to Walmart, he gets aroused." (2) William Falkingham, 34, was warned by police in Idaho Falls, Idaho, in August that he'd better stop wearing his large, black bunny-rabbit suit in public. One resident complained that his son had been frightened and that others were "greatly disturbed," and besides, Falkingham sometimes wore a tutu with the bunny outfit.

(1) Lon Groves, 40, was arrested in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after a brief standoff with police in July following an incident in which he allegedly held a handgun to the head of his wife in an argument over which of their granddaughters was the wife's favorite. (2) Pastor Daryl Riley of the New Welcome Baptist Church in St. Elmo, Ala., was tased, allegedly by the church's music minister, whom Riley had just fired in August (which led another parishioner to pull a knife and begin stabbing wildly in a melee). Said the music minister's mother, "He done cut (me) before anything started."

Anecdotes have surfaced over the years about an alleged sexual fetish of purposely pumping air into the rectum, and the Snopes.com "urban legends" website accepts that at least one instance has been reliably reported (in 1993 in Thailand, although that involved not self-gratification but a prank that got out of hand, resulting in the death of the victim). In July 2010, in Hull County, England, electrician Gareth Durrant, 26, was the victim of a prank that mirrored the 1993 case except that a quick-acting colleague removed the air hose, which had been inserted by co-workers as Durrant lounged on a break. Durrant said his body felt like it was inflating. In August 2011, as his lawsuit went to Hull Crown Court (as he has been unable to work ever since), he said that he still suffers headaches and stomach pains.

Because perhaps hundreds of Japanese Yakuza gangsters are nearing retirement age, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has drafted rules for the former gambling, loan shark and protection workers to qualify for benefits, according to a March dispatch from Tokyo in The Times of London. Since organized gangs avoid paper trails, ex-mobsters must supply a letter acknowledging retirement from their crime boss in order to sign up, although local governments are expected to accept as provisional proof criminal records, gang tattoos and demonstrations of missing fingertips (traditional Yakuza punishment for mistakes).