If an asteroid is ever on a collision course with Earth, it is feasible that the planet could be saved by firing paintballs at it, according to an MIT graduate student whose detailed plan won this year's prize in a United Nations space council competition, announced in October. White paint powder, landing strategically on the asteroid, would initially bump it a bit, but in addition would facilitate the sun's photons bouncing off the solid white surface. Over a period of years, the bounce energy would divert the body even farther off course. The already identified asteroid Apophis, which measures 1,500 feet in diameter and is projected to approach Earth in 2029, would require five tons of paintball ammo. [MIT press release, 10-26-2012]

-- Samuel Cutrufelli, 31, filed a lawsuit in October in Sacramento County, Calif., claiming that Jay Leone, 90, "negligently" shot him. Cutrufelli had burglarized Leone's home in Greenbrae, unaware that Leone was home. When Leone reached for one of his stashed handguns, Cutrufelli shot him in the jaw and then pulled the trigger point-blank at Leone's head, but was out of bullets. Leone then shot Cutrufelli several times, which Cutrufelli apparently felt was entirely unnecessary. [Marin Independent Journal, 10-23-2012]

-- In October, the former captain of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia (on which 32 people died after it ran aground in January 2012) filed a lawsuit against Costa Cruises for "wrongfully" firing him. Francesco Schettino is awaiting trial for manslaughter, accused of sending the ship dangerously close to shore on a personal lark, and was also charged with abandoning ship, since he was spotted in a lifeboat in the midst of passengers' escape. (Schettino said he wound up in the lifeboat only because he "slipped" and fell in.) [Reuters via Los Angeles Times, 10-13-2012]

-- China's legal system apparently is growing to resemble America's. A well-covered (but incompletely sourced) story from Chinese media in October reported that Mr. Jian Feng won the equivalent of $120,000 in a lawsuit against his well-to-do wife for deceiving him and subsequently giving birth to what Feng thought was an ugly baby. Feng discovered that his wife had had cosmetic surgery -- and thus was not, genetically, the beauty that he married but, in reality, plain-looking. [RIA Novosti (Moscow), 10-28-2012]

-- Amateur!: In October, a federal appeals court overturned the bribery conviction of a City of Chicago zoning inspector -- on the grounds that the bribes he was convicted of taking were too small to be covered by federal law. Dominick Owens, 46, was convicted of taking two bribes of $600 each to issue certificates of occupancy, but the law applies only to bribes of $5,000 or more. (Also in October, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel disbanded the city's ethics board after a 25-year run in which it never found an alderman in violation -- even though, during that time, 20 aldermen were convicted of felonies.) [Chicago Sun-Times, 10-11-2012] [Chicago Tribune, 10-3-2012]

-- The government's Health Canada agency announced in October that Avmor Ltd. had agreed to recall one lot of its Antimicrobial Foaming Hand Soap -- because it was contaminated with microbes. (The recall did not disclose whether the danger was due to too many microbes overwhelming the soap or due to the inability of the antimicrobial soap to kill any microbes at all.) [Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News, 10-15-2012]

-- Karma: (1) Tyller Myers, 19, was killed in a collision near Norwalk, Ohio, in September when he ran a stop sign and was rammed by a tractor-trailer. Afterward, police found three stolen stop signs in Myers' truck. (2) A 21-year-old man was killed crossing a highway at 5 a.m. in Athens, Ga., in September. Police said he had just dined-and-dashed out of a Waffle House restaurant and into the path of a pickup truck. [Athens Banner-Herald, 9-14-2012] [Yahoo News, 9-25-2012]

-- The Will of God: Devoted Catholic David Jimenez, 45, had been praying regularly to a large crucifix outside the Church of St. Patrick in Newburgh, N.Y., having become convinced that it was responsible for eradicating his wife's ovarian cancer. He even got permission from the church to spruce up the structure, as befit its power. Then, during a cleaning in May 2010, the 600-pound crucifix came loose and fell on Jimenez's leg, which had to be amputated. From a holy object of worship to precipitator of a lawsuit: Jimenez's $3 million litigation against the archdiocese goes to trial in January. [WCBS-TV (New York), 10-26-2012] [Associated Press via Newsday, 11-7-2012]

Not Mine! (1) James White, 30, was arrested in Grove City, Fla., after being stopped by police patrolling a high-burglary neighborhood, and in a consensual search of his pants, officers found a packet of Oxycodone pills for which White did not have a prescription. However, according to the police report, White suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, wait! These aren't my pants!" (2) Ms. Vida Golac, 18, was arrested in Naples, Fla., in October, and charged with possessing marijuana, which police discovered in her genitals as she was being strip-searched. According to the police report, Golac denied that the drugs were hers and explained that she was just hiding them there for friends. [Sun-Sentinel, 10-20-2012] [Naples Daily News, 10-5-2012]

As a service to taxpayers, the IRS's longtime policy is to pay tax refund claims promptly and only later to refer the refund files for possible audits and collection, in the event of overpayments or fraud. This policy, though, means that ordinary taxpayers are treated better than the nation's wounded warriors who file disability claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA's assumption seems to be that wounded veterans are cheating -- and thus most veterans receive at least five evaluations, and each one reviewed over a several-year period, before full benefits can be awarded. (Even though some temporary financial relief is available before final determination, veterans complain that the amount is almost never enough for complicated rehabilitation programs and other support.) [Washington Post, 11-11-2012]

An articulate, functional "cave man" of El Paso, Texas, continues to roam his neighborhood, often naked, and to resist efforts to bring him back onto the grid, according to October coverage by El Paso's KVIA-TV. His mountainside subterranean structure, described as "intricate," might be on land owned by the local water utility, which, pending an investigation, could evict him. Some neighbors say they fear the man, who has allegedly swum in their pools and even swiped items from their laundry rooms, but nonetheless, he swears that he is harmless. "I'm a plasma donor ... drug free" and "sin-free ... baptized and saved." Other neighbors have supported him, he said, and the complainers need to "help the community more." [KVIA-TV, 10-15-2012, 10-17-2012]

Cunning Plans: (1) William Keltner, 52, was arrested in Abilene, Texas, in November, after he underestimated the security at a Wal-mart self-checkout line. He had taken the barcode off of a $1.17 item, placed it on a $228 TV set, and checked himself out, assuming no one would notice. (2) Kerri Heffernan, 31, was charged in October in Massachusetts with robbing banks in Brockton and Whitman. Heffernan perhaps acquired a feeling of doom when, in the midst of one robbery, a teller-friend appeared and asked, "Do you want to make a deposit, Kerri?" [KTXS-TV (Abilene), 11-5-2012] [WBZ-TV (Boston), 10-22-2012]

Election Follies: (1) Robert McDonald tied Olivia Ballou for the final seat on the city council of Walton, Ky., with 669 votes, but only later found out that his wife (exhausted from a hospital's night shift) had not made it to the polls. (The following week, as per voting rules, McDonald and Ballou held a coin flip. Ballou won but relinquished the seat to McDonald for an unrelated reason.) (2) Holly Solomon, 28, was arrested in Gilbert, Ariz., a few days after the election when, police said, she chased her husband with her Jeep and rammed him during a drunken rant blaming him for President Obama's victory (though Arizona's electoral votes went solidly for Mitt Romney). Daniel Solomon was hospitalized in critical condition. [WKRC-TV (Cincinnati), 11-9-2012, 11-20-2012] [Phoenix New Times, 11-12-2012]

Thanks This Week to Gerald Sacks, Scott Huber, May Foo, James White, Stephan Hopman, John McGaw, Craig Cryer, John Maple, Peter Smagorinsky, Milford Sprecher, and Josh Levin, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

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.