No Do-Overs: By 2009, James Washington believed he had gotten away with a 1995 murder, but then he had a heart attack, and on his deathbed, in a fit of remorse, he confessed to a confidant. ("I have to get something off my conscience," he told a guard in the jailhouse where he was serving time for a lesser, unrelated offense.) However, Washington miraculously recovered from the heart attack and tried to take back his confession, but prosecutors in Nashville, Tenn., were unfazed. They used it to augment the sparse evidence from 1995, and in October 2012 the now-healthier Washington was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 51 more years in prison. [WSMV-TV (Nashville, Tenn.), 10-31-2012]

-- Among the federally funded projects highlighted in the "2012 Waste Book" of U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn were a $325,000 grant to develop a "robosquirrel" (to help study the somehow-confusing interaction between squirrels and rattlesnakes) and a $700,000 grant by the National Science Foundation for a New York theater company to create a musical about climate change and biodiversity (which actually opened this year, in Kansas City, and included among its concepts, according to one critic, "flying monkey poop"). Abuses of the food stamp program were also detailed, such as by one exotic dancer who, while earning $85,000, drew food stamps in an amount roughly equivalent to the sum she spent on "cosmetic enhancements." [Fox News, 10-16-2012]

-- While the Department of Veterans Affairs remains under criticism for inadequate funding for personnel disabled in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it spent in 2010 more than $5 million on training conferences just to teach bureaucrats how to administer parts of its latest collective-bargaining contract, according to an October report in the Washington Examiner. In fact, reported the Examiner, $34 million in payroll goes to department officials who work mainly on union-related activities. [Washington Examiner, 10-1-2012]

-- "I wanted to create a self-portrait that was completely stripped of ... visual prejudice," said Polish-born New York artist Martynka Wawrzyniak, who thus chose the medium of "smell" for her gallery showing in New York City (running through mid-November). For starters, she "scientifically extracted" her hair oils, armpit perspiration and tears (to protest humans' cloaking themselves in deodorant soaps and laundry powders), and blasted visitors with whiffs of it as they entered the gallery. [Wired.com, 10-20-2012]

-- Because We Can: The Tate Liverpool museum in England was host on Oct. 19 to artist Kerry Morrison's Bird Sheet music project in which she laid down a giant blank musical score sheet under a tree and waited for birds to make "deposits" on it, which she took to represent "notes" that composer Jon Hering plans to play straight, as the "sound" of the blackbirds. [Liverpool Daily Post, 7-12-2012]

-- Getting Out the Vote: (1) Just before a primary election in June, Albuquerque, N.M., TV station KOB apparently caught, on camera, a poll worker for two county government candidates offering potential voters miniature bottles of whiskey to sip during free rides to early voting centers. (2) Los Angeles' KCBS-TV reported in October that leaflets sponsored by the Progress and Collaboration Slate for its local candidates in Eagle Rock, Calif., also mentioned an offer of $40 worth of "medical-grade marijuana" as incentive for voting. (3) Carme Cristina Lima, 32, running for town councillor in Itacoatiara, Brazil, was arrested in October for allegedly passing out cocaine packets attached to her campaign leaflets. [KOB-TV, 6-4-2012] [KCBS-TV, 10-19-2012] [TNOnline (Brazil) via Daily Telegraph (London), 10-8-2012]

-- Colleen Lachowicz won her contest for a Maine state senate seat in November despite ridicule by opponents for her admitted devotion to the online game World of Warcraft. "Certainly," said an opposing-party official, "the fact that she spends so much time on a video game says something about her work ethic and ... immaturity." Her WoW character is Santiaga, an "orc (Level 85) assassination rogue" with green skin, fangs, a Mohawk and pointy ears. [Politico, 10-4-2012]

-- In several high-profile races across the country in November, voters rejected candidates who had been accused of wrongdoing and corruption, but Brian Banks survived. He was elected as a Michigan state representative from Detroit, with 68 percent of the vote, even though his rap sheet includes eight felony convictions for bad checks and credit card fraud. (Campaign slogan: "You Can Bank on Banks.") Also, Michigan's 11th Congressional District elected reindeer farmer Kerry Bentivolio, whose brother had described him as "mentally unbalanced." [CBS Detroit, 11-7-2012] [Detroit Free Press, 11-7-2012]

Michael Carrier, 45, was arrested for soliciting prostitution in New Milford, Conn., in August -- not resulting from a police sting, which is usually how arrests for that crime are made. In Carrier's case, he was disturbing other customers at a Friendly's restaurant because, being hard of hearing, he was shouting to the prostitute the terms of their prospective business arrangement. [Republican-American (Waterbury, Conn.) via Boston Globe, 8-18-2012]

Neurosurgeon Denise Crute left Colorado in 2005 after admitting to four serious mistakes (including wrong-side surgeries on patients' brain and spine) and left Illinois several years after that, when the state medical board concluded that she made three more serious mistakes (including another wrong-side spine surgery). Nonetheless, she was not formally "disciplined" by either state in that she was permitted merely to "surrender" her licenses, which the profession does not regard as "discipline." In November, Denver's KMGH-TV reported that Dr. Crute had landed a job at the prestigious Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, where she treats post-surgery patients (and she informed Illinois officials recently that she is fully licensed in New York to resume performing neurosurgery). [KMGH-TV, 11-4-2012]

Among the contestants so far on this year's The Learning Channel cable TV series "Extreme Cheapskates": "Roy" of Huntington, Vt., who reuses dental floss; Jeff Yeager of Accokeek, Md., who combs butcher shops for odd animal parts about to be discarded; and "Victoria" of Columbus, Ohio, who specializes in Dumpster-diving and infrequent toilet flushes that involve, according to one report, personalized urine jars. The season's star is expected to be "Kay," from New York, who is shown on camera demonstrating the nonessential nature of toilet paper by wiping herself with soap and water while seated on the throne. [TLC via Daily Mail (London), 10-1-2012]

Rookie Mistakes: (1) Arthur Bundrage, 28, was arrested in Syracuse, N.Y., in October after he returned to the Alliance Bank -- which he had just robbed minutes earlier -- because he discovered that the employee had given him less than the $20,000 his demand note ordered. Officers arrived to find Bundrage standing by the front doors, trying to get back in. (2) A September theft from a sofa superstore in Northampton, England, ended badly for two men, who had just loaded a pair of couches (worth the equivalent of about $650 each) into their truck and were about to drive off. However, the store manager rushed out and, noticing the truck's unfastened back door, reached in and pulled the sofas out, leaving the men to drive away empty-handed. The sequence was captured on surveillance video, leading store owner Mark Kypta to liken it to "something out of a Benny Hill film." [Syracuse Post-Standard, 10-22-2012] [Daily Mail (London), 10-2-2012]

(1) In October, a 2-foot-long shark fell from the sky and landed near the 12th tee at the San Juan Hills Golf Club in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. A security guard saw the incident, and an attendant placed the shark in a bucket of water (with some salt) and drove it four miles to the Pacific Ocean. (Best guess among observers: An osprey or peregrine falcon had snatched it from the ocean but eventually lost its grip.) (2) In October, a major fire mysteriously started inside Red Lion Liquors (in, coincidentally, Burnsville, Minn.). Since nothing spark-producing was found, fire officials guessed that sunlight, magnified through vodka bottles, had ignited surrounding paper signs, and the heat eventually pressured the vodka bottles' tops to burst, exacerbating the flames. Firefighters, even, appeared amazed, with one quoted as saying, "This is so cool!" [USA Today, 10-25-2012] [KMSP-TV (Minneapolis-St. Paul), 11-4-2012]

Thanks This Week to Gerald Thomason, John Votel, Hal Dunham, and Thomas Sullivan, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

In October, state alcohol agents, assisted by local police in full riot gear, pointing their weapons, raided a bar in Largo, Fla., to shut down the latest gathering of the venerable Nutz Poker League, even though its players do not wager. (They meet at bars and restaurants, where management gives winners token gifts in exchange for the increased business.) A prosecutor told the Tampa Bay Times that Florida law defines illegal "gambling" as any game that permits players to win something -- even if they don't have to "ante up." The raid (during which players were ordered to keep their hands where the officers could see them) came after a months-long undercover investigation. [Tampa Bay Times, 10-25-2012]

-- Among the most creative illegal behaviors are those of clever smugglers -- or immigrants trying to enter a country illegally. In September, two Moroccans tried to smuggle a Guinean man into Spain at the Melilla border in north Morocco by disguising him as a Renault car seat. One Moroccan drove, with the passenger perched on a seat in which the foam had been removed to make room for the Guinean. A police spokesman called the attempt "novel." [Daily Telegraph (London), 9-25-2012]

-- India's notorious bureaucracy records deaths particularly ineptly, to the advantage of men seeking an alternative to divorce. They find it easier merely to swear out a death certificate on one wife so they can marry another, but that means the first wife will face years, and maybe decades, of campaigning to convince officials that she is not dead. BBC News chronicled the plight of Ms. Asharfi Devi, now 64, in September as she was finally declared "alive" after being deserted by her husband at age 23 and ruled dead at age 40. After Devi finally earned a hearing and brought relatives and evidence to the village council, deliberations took eight more months. Notwithstanding the ruling, the husband stuck to his story. [BBC News, 9-2-2012]

-- Puzzingly, adults continue to accidentally ingest improbable objects, often seemingly unaware of what they did. Lee Gardner, 40, of Barnsley, England, swallowed a plastic fork 10 years ago, but said he "forgot" about it until violent stomach pains forced him to the hospital in August. And British student Georgie Smith, 19, became the latest person to accidentally swallow a regular-sized toothbrush (though the first doctor she consulted told her he couldn't spot any "toothbrush" on an X-ray). (With kids, the phenomenon is more understandable. Sinus-suffering Isaak Lasson, 6, of Salt Lake City was finally diagnosed in August to have accidentally stuck a Lego piece up his nose three years ago, and Hector Flores Jr., 7, of New York City, was found in October to have swallowed the whistle mechanism of a plastic duck, causing him to tweet when he laughed.) [Press Association via The Guardian, 8-17-2012] [The Sun, 10-31-2012] [KSL-TV via New York Daily News, 8-7-2012] [WABC-TV (New York City), 10-16-2012]

-- Again this year, a serial drowning made the news (where one jumps in to rescue another, and a third is needed to rescue the first two, and a fourth, and none survives.) In Ulster, Northern Ireland, in September, rugby player Nevin Spence, along with his brother and father, died in a slurry tank on the family's farm, and their sister, who also attempted a rescue, was hospitalized. Officials said they could not determine the order in which the men entered the pit until the sister was well enough to talk. [Daily Telegraph, 9-15-2012]

-- Darren Hieber, 33, became the most recent person to choose drastic means to reconcile with an ex. Twice Hieber, of Onawa, Iowa, arranged to have himself shot in order to win his ex-wife's sympathy. The first hit man shot Hieber in the leg, but the wife still ignored him, and a second job was arranged in March, with two different shooters, but that failed, also. Adding to his frustration, Hieber was sentenced to 10 years in prison in August because it is illegal in Iowa to have yourself shot. [Associated Press via KCCI-TV(Des Moines), 8-23-2012]

-- Former U.S. Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, who made the "wide stance" famous when he explained his alleged, notorious restroom encounter with another man in June 2007, has been sued by the Federal Election Commission because he used $217,000 in campaign donations to fund his legal defense to the resulting indecent exposure charges. Craig pointed out that visiting the restroom (irrespective of any alleged activities there) occurred during the ordinary course of Senate travel and thus that he was entitled to spend campaign funds. [Associated Press via Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 8-3-2012]

-- Jonathan Lee Riches, perhaps America's most prolific quixotic litigator (chronicled in News of the Weird for his lawsuits against, among others, George W. Bush, Charlie Sheen, Kanye West, Steve Jobs and -- for luggage theft -- Tiger Woods), was likely the person named "Naomi Riches" who filed a $3 billion October lawsuit in Pennsylvania against the acquitted child-murder suspect Casey Anthony, whom Naomi said had conspired with TV personality Nancy Grace to poison Naomi's water supply. Anthony had also allegedly threatened to stab Naomi in the left eye as a symbol of the Illuminati conspiracy. (Judge David Baker quickly dismissed the lawsuit.) [Huffington Post, 10-13-2012]

-- Two FBI agents, providing a backstory to "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's Christmas-time 2009 attempt to bring down an airliner in Detroit, said they believe the man accustomed himself to the tricked-out scivvies beforehand by wearing them full-time for the three weeks leading up to his flight (except for bathing). The agents, speaking to Detroit's WXYZ-TV in September, suggested that the excessive wearing might have ruined the detonation mechanism. [WXYZ-TV, 9-27-2012]

-- Oops, My Bad: Hattiesburg, Miss., dentist Michael West has for years been a well-compensated, prosecution-friendly "expert" witness who claimed he could match bite marks on victims' bodies to bite patterns of whichever defendant the prosecutor wanted convicted. In "dozens" of cases, according to an Associated Press report, he helped persuade judges and jurors that his analysis was just as solid as fingerprint identification. (Other forensic experts regularly ridiculed West's "science.") In August, the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., uncovered a 2011 deposition in which West finally admitted that his bite-mark analysis should not have been used in court cases. It is not yet known how many defendants' trials were tainted by West's testimony. [Associated Press via WLOX-TV (Biloxi), 8-6-2012]

Update: Briton Stephen Gough's rap sheet includes 18 convictions for failure to wear clothes in public. He has spent the last six years almost continuously in prison because, usually, each time he is released, he immediately shucks his clothes as he walks out the gate (and whenever arrested, he strips during court appearances). He was released in October from his most recent incarceration, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and authorities were puzzled how to proceed since Gough (aka "the naked rambler") appears maniacally committed to the clothes-free lifestyle. A BBC News profile suggests that Scotland may simply send him back to England and hope he stays. [BBC News, 10-5-2012]

Recurring Themes: (1) Jamel Wilson, 18, in Knoxville, Tenn., became the most recent hapless carjacker forced to abort his gunpoint heist after discovering the car was a stick shift, which he could not drive. He fled on foot but was arrested minutes later. (2) David Weber, 53, was arrested in Miami Beach in September, minutes after allegedly stealing items from a locked car, including a credit card. Police were called when Weber tried to use the card at a nearby bar and learned to his dismay that the card belonged to the bartender. [Associated Press via The Tennessean, 9-3-2012] [Miami Herald, 9-11-2012]

(1) Maria Pestrikoff, whose home is on a 60-foot cliff near Kodiak, Alaska, was rescued in September after she accidentally fell off while text-messaging a friend. (2) The remains of a 70-year-old hog farmer were found on his property near Riverton, Ore., in September, and authorities said, based on the condition of his body, that his hogs had gotten to him before he got to them. [Anchorage Daily News, 9-26-2012] [KCBY-TV (Coos Bay, Ore.), 10-1-1012]

Thanks This Week to Sandy Pearlman, John McGaw, Gerald Sacks, Bob Cowing, Frank Smith, Mike Walsh, Alan Magid, Donald Stephen-Dunn, Peter Swank, Doug Smith, and Barclay Livker, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Chutzpah! The former police chief of Bell, Calif., Randy Adams, had resigned in disgrace after prosecutors charged eight other city officials with looting the municipal budget. Adams had been recruited by the alleged miscreants (at a sweetheart salary twice what he made as police chief of much larger Glendale), and his resignation left him with a generous state pension of $240,000 a year. Rather than quietly accept the payout, Adams immediately appealed to a state pension panel, claiming that his one inexplicably rich year in Bell had actually upped his pension to $510,000 a year. In September, with a straight face, Adams pleaded his case to the panel, but 20 times during the questioning invoked his right not to incriminate himself. [Los Angeles Times, 9-21-2012]

-- Doctors Just Want to Have Fun: (1) Navy medical examiner Dr. Mark Shelly was notified of disciplinary action in July after admitting that he let his children handle a brain (and pose for photos with it) that he was transporting for autopsy to Portsmouth, Va. (2) A 15-year-old Swedish student, working at Malmo University Hospital on a "practical work-life" internship, was allowed by a doctor to make part of the incision for a cesarean section childbirth and to examine the patient vaginally. One alarmed cesarean patient alerted news media after reading about the orientation program in May and wondering if she had been a "hands-on" patient. [Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.), 7-13-2012] [The Local (Stockholm), 10-1-2012]

-- IRS agents, investigating tax-fraud suspect Rashia Wilson, 26, turned up "thousands" of identification numbers in a September home search in Tampa. Wilson had already laid down a challenge in May, when she wrote on Facebook: "I'm Rashia, the queen of IRS tax fraud. (I'm) a millionaire for the record. So if you think that indicting me will be easy, it won't. I promise you. I won't do no time, dumb (expletive unpublished)." The search also turned up a handgun, and since Wilson is a convicted felon (with 40 arrests), she was jailed, and denied bail in part because of the Facebook post. [Tampa Bay Times, 9-22-2012]

-- Many visitors to San Francisco's historic Castro neighborhood are shocked at the city's culture of street nudism (virtually all by males). Only if the display is "lewd and lascivious" (with the purpose to arouse) is it illegal, but a September report in SF Weekly suggests that the nudity must be total -- that calling any attention at all to the genitals may suggest lewdness, such as by rings worn around the scrotum. [SF Weekly, 9-7-2012]

Way Too Many Apps: (1) The Swiss company Blacksocks offers an iPhone app that utilizes radio frequency identification chips inserted into socks so they can be automatically sorted. (2) The iPoo app, reported Wired magazine in November, "(l)ets you chat with your fellow defecators from the comfort of your own toilet." (3) "In development" now, according to Harvard freshman Olenka Polak, is a "Code Red" app that creates an exchange network so that women and girls who find themselves unexpectedly spotting can locate an emergency source for a tampon or pad. [New York Times, 9-22-2012] [Wired, November 2012] [Harvard Crimson, 10-3-2012]

-- The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that an insane person cannot be executed, no matter how heinous the crime, because he cannot understand why he was being killed. Notwithstanding that, Florida Judge David Glant has ordered John Ferguson, 64, to death for a 1978 multiple-murder conviction, despite evaluations from 30 doctors that Ferguson is an insane paranoid schizophrenic. (At press time, the U.S. Court of Appeals is considering Ferguson's lawyers' last-second challenge.) Judge Glant acknowledges that Ferguson is delusional, but found that he nevertheless understands why he is being executed. Ferguson's belief in a Jesus-like resurrection upon death, with a glorious afterlife, is not, Glant said, "so significantly different from beliefs (that) other Christians may hold so as to consider it a sign of insanity." [The Guardian (London), 10-14-2012; CNN, 10-23-2012]

-- Spare the Rod: Former Arkansas state legislator Charlie Fuqua is running again after a 14-year absence from elective office. In the interim, reported the Arkansas Times in October, he wrote a book, "God's Law: The Only Political Solution," reminding Christians that they could put their super-rebellious children to death as long as proper procedure (set out in Deuteronomy 21:18-21) was followed. "Even though this (capital punishment) would rarely be used," Fuqua wrote, "if it were the law of the land ... it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents." [Arkansas Times, 10-8-2012]

-- Evangelicals' Nightmare Come to Life: A city official in nominally Catholic Tupa, Brazil, granted, for the first time, official "civil union" status to a man and two women, who thus enjoy all the legal benefits of marriage (as per a recent Brazilian Supreme Court decision). A CNN reporter, translating Portuguese documents, said the union was called "polyfidelitous." [CNN, 8-31-2012]

"Why You Little ...!" (1) A teenager, apparently fed up with his parents' commandeering of their home's basement for an elaborate marijuana-growing operation, turned the couple in in August. The Doylestown Township, Pa., couple (a chiropractor mom and software engineer dad) had sophisticated hardware and 18 plants. (2) Police in Athens, Ga., searching for Homer Parham, 51, at his house in September, came up empty, and his wife said he wasn't there. But as officers were leaving, the couple's young daughter said, "Mommy locked Daddy in the closet." Parham was found hiding in a high-up crawl space. [PhillyBurbs.com, 8-19-2012] [Athens Banner-Herald, 9-20-2012]

America now has about 700 pet "aftercare" facilities, providing funeral services to the nation's companion animals, according to a September NBC News report. Oakey's, in Roanoke, Va., performs 800 to 900 pet cremations annually and provides about 20 customers a year with pet caskets, part of the estimated $53 billion America spends on pets (higher than the Gross National Products of more than 100 countries). The basic charge of Heartland Pet Cremation of St Louis is $275 for a private cremation, including a "basic" urn and memorial video slideshow. (For the more upscale, other facilities offer deluxe urns, taxidermy, freeze-drying pets and creating a synthetic diamond out of pet ashes.) [NBC News, 9-17-2012]

Gareth Lloyd, 49, admitted that he is the one who made about 5,800 random phone calls (over a 90-day period -- averaging 64 a day!) to people just to listen to their reactions when he told them that his penis was stuck in a household object (usually jars or a vacuum cleaner). A Flintshire, Wales, court sentenced Lloyd only to probation (with restrictions on telephone use). [Daily Mail (London), 10-11-2012]

Latest Negative-Cash-Flow Robbery: Two men robbing an Open Pantry store in Madison, Wis., in October escaped, but with less money than they came with. The lead thief grabbed a handful of cash that the clerk had been counting when the pair entered. The clerk pleaded, then sternly demanded that the man give back the money. The thief thought for a moment, became remorseful, threw all the money in his pocket to the floor, and fled. The clerk told police that when she re-counted the money, there was $1 more than in her original count, meaning that the thief had accidentally tossed in a dollar of his own. [WISC-TV (Madison), 10-22-2012]

(1) The Red Flower Chinese Restaurant in Williamsburg, Ky., was shut down by health authorities in September after a customer said he witnessed a roadkill deer carcass being wheeled through the dining room into the kitchen. The chief Whitley County health inspector said the owners did not appear to understand that they should not do that. (2) Edward Archbold, 32, died in October following his victory at the bug-eating contest sponsored by the Ben Siegel Reptile Store in Deerfield Beach, Fla. Archbold (described by friends as a "life of the party" type) had stuffed handfuls of insects into his mouth (which people do harmlessly around the world in various cultures), but collapsed a short time later. [WKYT-TV (Lexington, Ky.), 9-30-2012] [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 10-9-2012]

Thanks This Week to David Swanson, Jeff Powell, John McGaw, Peter Smagorinsky, Jan Wolitzky, Doug Smith, Paul Peterson, Peter Swank, Nate Tracy, Gary Davidson, Scott Huber, Gary DaSilva and William Ellis, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.