Intelligent Design: If the male nursery web spider were a human, he would be sternly denounced as a vulgar cad. Researcher Maria Jose Albo of Denmark's Aarhus University told Live Science in November that the spiders typically obtain sex by making valuable "gifts" to females (usually, high-nutrition insects wrapped in silk), but if lacking resources, a male cleverly packages a fake gift (usually a piece of flower) also in silk but confoundingly wound so as to distract her as she unwraps it -- and then mounts her before she discovers the hoax. Albo also found that the male is not above playing dead to coax the female into relaxing her guard as she approaches the "carcass" -- only to be jumped from behind for sex.

-- Son Theodore Zimmick and two other relatives filed a lawsuit in November against the St. Stanislaus cemetery in Pittsburgh for the unprofessional burial of Theodore's mother, Agnes, in 2009. Agnes had purchased an 11-by-8-foot plot in 1945, but when she finally passed away, the graveyard had become so crowded that, according to the lawsuit, workers were forced to dig such a small hole that they had to jump up and down on the casket and whack it with poles to fit it into the space.

-- Managers of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., decided recently to relocate the statue of Abraham Lincoln that since 1895 had occupied a seldom-visited site and whose advocates over the years had insisted be given more prominence. It turned out that the most viable option was to swap locations with a conspicuous 1906 statue of Dr. Alexander Skene. Lincoln is certainly universally revered, but Dr. Skene has advocates, too, and some (according to a December Wall Street Journal report) are resisting the relocation because Dr. Skene (unlike Lincoln) was a Brooklynite, and Dr. Skene (unlike Lincoln) had a body part named after him ("Skene's glands," thought to be "vital" in understanding the "G spot").

-- The two hosts of the Dutch TV show "Guinea Pigs" apparently followed through on their plans in December to eat pieces of each other (fried in sunflower oil) in order to describe the taste. Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno underwent surgery to have small chunks removed for cooking, with Zeno perhaps faring worse (a piece of Storm's "bottom") compared to Storm (who got part of Zeno's abdomen).

-- A December New England Journal of Medicine report described a woman's "losing" her breast implant during a Pilates movement called the Valsalva (which involves breath-holding while "bearing down"). The woman said she felt no pain or shortness of breath but suddenly noticed that her implant was gone. Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore discovered that, because of the woman's recent heart surgery, the muscles between the ribs had loosened, and the implant had merely passed through a rib opening. (They returned it to its proper place.)

-- A balaclava-wearing man "kidnapped" Julian Buchwald and his girlfriend in 2008 in Australia's Alpine National Park as they were picnicking. The man separated the couple, tore their clothes off and buried them, but Buchwald escaped and rescued the girlfriend, and they wandered around naked for days before being rescued. The balaclava-clad man, it turns out, was Buchwald, whose plan was to convince the woman by his heroism that she should marry him (and more immediately, to have sex even though they had both pledged to remain virgins until marriage). Buchwald was convicted in Victoria County Court and sentenced in December to more than seven years in prison.

-- Laurie Martinez, 36, was charged in December with filing a false police report in Sacramento, Calif., alleging that she was raped, beaten bloody and robbed in her home. It turns out that she had become frustrated trying to get her husband to move them to a better neighborhood and that faking a rape was supposed to finally persuade him. Instead, he filed for divorce. Martinez is employed by the state as a psychologist.

-- After 12 almost intolerable months, Ms. Seemona Sumasar finally received justice in November from a New York City jury, which convicted Jerry Ramrattan of orchestrating a complex and ingenious scheme to convince police that Sumasar was a serial armed robber. Ramrattan, a private detective and "CSI" fan, had used his knowledge of police evidence-gathering to pin various open cases on Sumasar as revenge for her having dumped him (and to negate her claim that Ramrattan had raped her in retaliation). Ramrattan was so creative in linking evidence to Sumasar that her bail had been set at $1 million, causing her to spend seven months in jail. (Said one juror, "If I had seen this on TV, my reaction would be, 'How could this really happen?'")

Prominent Birmingham, Ala., politician Bill Johnson describes his wife as "the most beautiful woman in the world," but he revealed in December that, while on temporary duty recently as an earthquake relief specialist in New Zealand, he had clandestinely donated sperm to nine women (and that three were already pregnant). Becoming a biological father is "a need that I have," he told a New Zealand Herald reporter, and his wife had been unable to accommodate him. Asked if his wife knew of the nine women, Johnson said, "She does now." Indeed, Alabama newspapers quickly picked up the story, and Mrs. Johnson told the Mobile Press-Register that there is "healing to do."

Not Ready for Prime Time: The unidentified eyeglass-wearing robber of an HSBC Bank in Long Island City, N.Y., in December fled empty-handed and was being sought. Armed with a pistol and impatient with a slow teller, the man fired a shot into the ceiling to emphasize his seriousness. However, according to a police report, the gunshot seemed to panic him as much as it did the others in the bank, and he immediately ran out the door and jumped into a waiting vehicle.

-- James Ward's second annual festival of tedium (the "Boring conference"), in November at York Hall in east London, once again sold out, demonstrating the intrinsic excitement created by yawn-inducing subject matter. Last year's conference featured a man's discourse on the color and materials of his neckwear collection and another's structured milk-tasting, patterned after a wine-tasting. This second edition showcased a history of the electric hand-dryer and a seminar on the square root of 2.

-- Last month, News of the Weird informed readers of the woman who wanted to "be at one" with her recently deceased horse and thus stripped naked and climbed inside the bloody carcass (posing for a notorious Internet photo spread). Afghan slaughterhouse employees surely never consider being "at one" with water buffaloes, but a November Washington Post dispatch from Kabul mentions a similarity. U.S. slaughterhouse authority Chris Hart found, as he was helping to upgrade an antiquated abattoir near Kabul, that the facility employed a dwarf, "responsible" (wrote the Post) "for climbing inside water buffalo carcasses to cut out their colons." (Nonetheless, the slaughterhouse is halal, adhering to Islamic principles.)

-- No Longer Weird? One would think that classical musicians who carry precious violins, worth small fortunes, on public transportation would be especially vigilant to safeguard them. However, from time to time (for example, in 2008, 2009, 2010 and May 2011), absentmindedness prevailed. Most recently, in December, student MuChen Hsieh, 19, accompanying a 176-year-old violin (on loan from a foundation in Taiwan and worth about $170,000) on a bus ride from Boston to Philadelphia, forgot to check the overhead rack when departing and left without it. Fortunately, a bus company cleaner turned it in. (Most famously, in 1999, the master cellist Yo Yo Ma left his instrument in the trunk of a New York City taxicab.)

A regional development commission in Michigan, purchasing equipment for 13 counties in May using homeland security grants, bought 13 machines that make snow cones, at a total cost of $11,700 (after rejecting one county's request for a popcorn machine). Pressed to justify the purchases, officials pointed out that the machines make shaved ice, which might be useful for medical situations stemming from natural disasters and heat emergencies (but that they also make snow cones to draw crowds at homeland security demonstrations).

NOTE: Once again this week, check out a few more recent instances of Recurring Themes of weird news (plus important updates of previous stories):

-- Once again, a genius tried to pass a piece of U.S. currency in an amount not even close to being legal tender: a $1 million bill. (The largest denomination is $100.) Michael Fuller, 53, was arrested in Lexington, N.C., in November when a Walmart cashier turned him in after he attempted to buy electronics totaling $475.78 (apparently expecting change of $999,524.22).

-- Most News of the Weird epic cases of "scorned" lovers who seemingly never give up obnoxiously stalking their exes are of Japanese women, but "dumped" Americans surface occasionally. In October, Toni Jo Silvey, 49, was arrested in Houston when her ex (artist Peter Main) reported that she made 146 phone calls in one day and more than 1,000 (and 712 e-mails) in three months, following their 2009 breakup over his seeing a younger woman. She was also charged with attacking his home with a tire iron, eggs and a sword.

-- "Take Your Daughter (Son) to Work" days are still popular at some companies, to introduce children to their parents' cultures. Inadvertently, even criminals mimic the phenomenon. Joseph Romano, 2-year-old son in tow, was allegedly selling drugs when police picked him up in September in Tunkhannock Township, Pa. And Edward Chatman Jr., 32, who was arrested for raping a woman in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in August, had brought his 6-month-old baby with him when he climbed through the woman's window (though, police said, he stashed the kid in another room during the assault).

-- A cutting-edge treatment when News of the Weird first heard of it in 2000 is now mainstream for those suffering extreme diarrhea due to a lack of "predator bacteria" in the colon (perhaps caused by antibiotics). Among the primary treatments now is a transplant -- a transfusion of "fecal flora" from the gut of a bacteria-normal person, to restore the natural balance (introduced by a colonoscope after the stool is liquified in a blender). Following months of failed alternatives, Jerry Grant, 33, said in October that his transplant, at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., worked remarkably well. (A recent study reported success in 70 of 77 patients.)

-- The law of child support changes only slowly in the U.S., but maybe less so in Australia. American courts are reluctant to end payments even if the man later disproves paternity (citing the harm to the child if the payments stop). However, in October, the Federal Magistrates Court in Melbourne, Australia, acting on fertility-test results, ordered a mother to reimburse the man she swore was the father after he proved he had been sterile. The woman also "recalled," after extensive therapy, that she might have had a one-night stand with a stranger around the time of conception.

-- Perversion Du Jour: The 10-year-old law-enforcement crackdown on Internet child pornography has lately hit a technicality-based roadblock. Several times recently, perverts have beaten charges after creating "child pornography" that consisted of nude adult female bodies onto which facial photos of young girls had been pasted. This handiwork was apparently arousing to two Lakeland, Fla., men, Danny Parker, convicted in 2011, and John Stelmack, convicted in 2010, but both ultimately had their convictions overturned because no actual child was involved in sex.

-- Forgetting to pay the monthly rental fees on a storage locker can have serious consequences if the locker was used to store embarrassing or even incriminating materials. News of the Weird reported one such hapless client in 2007: a central Florida political activist under investigation whose locker yielded a rich trove for a local reporter. Similarly, perhaps, Dr. Conrad Murray (then under suspicion in the death of Michael Jackson) reportedly missed three payments on a Las Vegas storage locker, and prosecutors recovered items that appeared to contribute to their case (although it is not clear that any of the items were ever presented in court).

-- Hospital protocols may be changing, but too slowly for Doreen Wallace, who fell in the lobby of the Greater Niagara General Hospital in Ontario in October and broke her hip. Though it was less than 150 feet from the lobby to the emergency room, hospital personnel, following rules, instructed her to call an ambulance to take her around to the ER, though the nearest such ambulance, in the next city, did not arrive for 30 pain-filled minutes. Hospital officials said they would handle things better in the future.

-- A New York City jury awarded the family of a late teenager $1 million in November in its lawsuit against the city for mishandling the boy's brain after his 2005 death. Following "testing," the medical examiner kept the brain in a jar on a shelf, where it was inadvertently spotted by the victim's sister during a school field trip to the mortuary (treatment the family considered extremely disrespectful). The case calls to mind that of Arkansas rapist Wayne Dumond, who had been castrated by vigilantes in 1984 and whose genitals the local sheriff had recovered and kept in a jar on a shelf in his office as a symbol of "justice." Dumond subsequently (in 1988) won $110,000 in a "disrespect" lawsuit against the sheriff.

-- Jennifer Petkov of Trenton, Mich., is still charming the neighbors. An October 2010 Detroit News summary of a years-long feud between Petkov and various neighbors reported that she had been mercilessly taunting the family of Kathleen Edward, then 7 and suffering from the degenerating brain disorder Huntington's disease, which had taken her mother the year before. The more Kathleen's disability showed, the greater was Petkov's Facebook-page glee. In October 2011, Petkov, after a short promise of civility, returned to mocking Kathleen and the memory of her mother, such as in recent Facebook postings: "You thought the (past) 4+ years were bad you (sic) haven't seen nothing yet!" and "Block party when that kid dies."

-- In October, Colorado state Sen. Suzanne Williams settled more-serious 2010 traffic charges by pleading no contest to a misdemeanor and paying $268 to a court in Amarillo, Texas. State troopers had accused Williams of driving with unbelted grandchildren in her SUV when it drifted across a center line and hit another vehicle, killing the driver and ejecting the kids. The Texas troopers suggested that Williams scooped up the worse-injured grandchild, returned him to the SUV and belted him into a child seat, which was especially significant because Williams had sponsored a mandatory child-safety belting law in Colorado in 2010. However, the grand jury declined to indict her, and she refused to discuss the case further.

-- No Longer Weird: Some Recurring Themes appear so frequently as to be boring even to the creator of News of the Weird. For instance, people steal scrap metal for sale to recyclers, even if it winds up disrupting the infrastructure. Two brothers, Benjamin and Alexander Jones, of New Castle, Pa., were charged in October with having dismantled an entire, little-used, 15-ton bridge in the area, anticipating a big payday, but ultimately clearing only about $5,000 from laborious work with blow torches. (But Kirk Wise, 45, told the Phoenix New Times in August that he had earned about $95,000 in the previous year and a half selling scrap metal -- though he admitted blowing most of it on methamphetamines.)

NOTE: So much "weird" news just involves different people caught in the middle of the same old weirdness. For this week and next, check out recent Recurring Themes (plus important Updates of previous stories):

-- Larry Walters made history in 1982 with perhaps the most famous balloon ride of all time -- in an ordinary lawn chair, lifted by 45 helium-filled weather balloons -- soaring to over 16,000 feet in Southern California before descending by shooting the balloons one by one. In 2008, gas station manager Kent Couch of Bend, Ore., made a similar lawn-chair flight and had scheduled another, for November 2011, to float over now-allegedly peaceful Baghdad, to raise money for Iraqi orphans. (Couch subsequently postponed his flight until March 2012 to give the charities more time to organize.)

-- Corruption in some Latin American prisons has allowed powerful criminals to buy extraordinary privileges behind bars. News of the Weird's report on Venezuela's San Antonio prison in July described the imperial reign of one drug lord-inmate, who presided over a personal armory, a local-community drug market and private parties (and with his own DirecTV account). In a surprise raid in November on a prison in Acapulco, Mexico, the usual drugs and weapons turned up, but also 100 fighting roosters for daily gambling, along with a prisoner's two pet peacocks.

-- The lives of many choking victims have been saved by the Heimlich Maneuver -- even one received inadvertently, such as the one a Leesburg, Fla., motorist gave himself in 2001, after gagging on a hamburger, then losing control and smashing into a utility pole. As he was thrust against the steering wheel, the burger dislodged. In November 2011, as the mother of 8-year-old Laci Davis drove her to a Cincinnati hospital after a locket stuck in her throat and caused her to double over in pain, Mom hit a pothole, which jarred Laci and dislodged the locket loose into her stomach (later to come out naturally).

-- It seemed a rare event (first reported in 1994 but initially regarded as an "urban legend"). However, twice now recently, workers have played a particularly dangerous prank on a colleague. A month after the recent News of the Weird story about Gareth Durrant's lawsuit in England against co-workers who had inserted a compressed-air hose into his rectum, a carpenter's assistant in Nicosia, Cyprus, was jailed for 45 days for pulling the same stunt on his colleague, rupturing his large intestine.

-- Sometimes professionals who overbill for their hours go too far, claiming obviously impossible schedules, such as lawyers News of the Weird reported on in 1992 and 1994 (one, a Raleigh, N.C., lawyer, submitted one client bills averaging nearly 1,200 hours a month -- even though a month only has 744 hours). New York City officials said in October 2011, however, that it's quite possible that city prison psychiatrist Dr. Quazi Rahman actually did work 141 hours one week, including 96 straight (because of a shortage of staff and because he could properly nap during his shifts). They ordered him to return only a tiny amount of his $500,000 in overtime payments for the last year.

-- Ten years ago, the fashionable bulletproof clothing industry was in its infancy, with Miss Israel creating a stir at the 2001 Miss Universe pageant with a bulletproof evening gown. Since then, technology and design improvements (along with more rich people!) have enabled leading stylist Miguel Caballero of Colombia to add to his fashion line. The New Yorker reported in September 2011 that Caballero had made a bulletproof dinner jacket for Sean Combs and kimono for Steven Seagal, and that Caballero clothes are available in strengths of bullet-stopping, from "9 mm" to "Uzi."

-- Rumors that daring youth are inserting tampons soaked in vodka into body orifices to speed alcohol delivery have been around for at least 10 years. Curiously, the only regular-sourced news stories come from TV stations in Phoenix (KNXV-TV in 2009 and KPHO-TV in 2011), and the "urban legends" source Snopes.com calls the whole idea far-fetched. Nonetheless, in November 2011, a school resource officer told KPHO's Elizabeth Erwin that there are "documented cases" and that "guys," too, engage by inserting the tampons into their rectums. Dr. Dan Quan of the Maricopa Medical Center cautioned against the practice, warning of the dangers of mucosal irritation.

-- Anti-government survivalists engaged in high-profile standoffs have made News of the Weird -- most recently the story of Ed Brown and his wife and supporters, resisting a federal tax bill, holed up for nine months in the New Hampshire woods near Plainfield in 2007. (The Browns were arrested by a U.S. marshal who tricked his way inside.) The longest-running standoff now is probably that of John Joe Gray, 63, and his extended family in a 47-acre, well-fortified compound in Trinidad, Texas, southeast of Dallas. They have lived ascetic settlers' lives since Gray jumped bail in 2000 on a traffic charge. Gray has said he feels free on his land and warned authorities "better bring plenty of body bags" if they try to re-arrest him.

-- Unlicensed "surgeon"-castrator Edward Bodkin re-surfaced recently after more than a decade under the radar. He was sentenced to four years in prison in 1999 in Huntington, Ind., for unauthorized practice of medicine (removing the testicles, with consent, of five men). Bodkin was arrested in August 2011 in Wetumpka, Ala., and charged with possession of child pornography, but authorities also recovered castration equipment, videos of castrations, photos of testicles in jars and a form contract apparently used by Bodkin to obtain the consent of men going under his knife.

-- In January 2009, the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services removed three kids from the home of Heath and Deborah Campbell in Holland Township, apparently after becoming alarmed that the Campbells might be white supremacists. Though a court later concluded that the kids had been "abused," the Campbells told the New York Daily News in October 2011 that the state acted only based on the names the parents had given the kids -- Adolf Hitler Campbell, who was then 3, and his then-1-year-old sisters, Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell and JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell. The Campbells have consistently denied that they are neo-Nazis.

-- It is almost No Longer Weird that Western chefs attempt to get as exotic as they can serving plants, insects and obscure parts of animals in their dishes that are usually only experienced by cultures far removed from America. Jennifer McLagan's recent book on how to cook animals' "odd" parts describes various recipes for cooking hearts, heads, tongues and ears, and guesses that the next big thing in Western eating will be testicles. "(S)teaks and chops are like bulletproof to cook," she said. "Any idiot can cook a steak, right?"

-- Thomas Beatie was big news in March 2008 when he and his wife, Nancy, decided to start a family, except that Thomas, not Nancy, took on the child-bearing responsibilities. (Thomas, born a female, had his breasts removed but retained his reproductive organs.) Thomas got pregnant, appeared on "Oprah," and subsequently had three children (who mugged delightfully for the cameras on the syndicated TV show "The Doctors" in October 2011). He also revealed on the show that it might be time to get his tubes tied, as each pregnancy requires him, irritatingly, to abandon his male hormone regimen.