Updating "The Smell of Napalm in the Morning": A cosmetics company in Gaza recently began selling a fragrance dedicated to victory over Israel and named after the signature M-75 missile that Hamas has been firing across the border. "The fragrance is pleasant and attractive," said the company owner, "like the missiles of the Palestinian resistance," and comes in masculine and feminine varieties, at premium prices (over, presumably, the prices of ordinary Gazan fragrances). Sympathizers can splash on victory, he said, from anywhere in the world. [The Times of Israel, 12-6-2012]

-- The Philadelphia Traffic Court has been so infused with ticket-fixing since its founding in 1938 that a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court report on the practice seemed resigned to it, according to a November Philadelphia Inquirer account. One court employee was quoted as defending the favoritism as fair (as long as no money changed hands) on the grounds that anyone could get local politicians to call a judge for him. Thus, said the employee, "It was the (traffic) violator's own fault if he or she didn't know enough" to get help from a political connection. Traffic Judge Christine Solomon, elected in November 2011 after a career as a favor-dispensing "ward healer," said the ticket-fixing was "just politics, that's all." [Philadelphia Inquirer, 11-25-2012]

-- One of the principal recommendations following the Sept. 11 attacks was that emergency and rescue personnel have one secure radio frequency on which all agencies that were merged into the Department of Homeland Security could communicate. In November, the department's inspector general revealed that, despite $430 million allotted to build and operate the frequency in the last nine years, it remains almost useless to DHS' 123,000 employees. The report surveyed 479 workers, but found only one who knew how to find the frequency, and 72 percent did not even know one existed (and half the department's radios couldn't have accessed it even if employees knew where to look). [ProPublica.org, 11-21-2012]

-- Remember Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere"?: In November, the Anchorage Daily News reported the Army Corps of Engineers is building a harbor on the Aleutian native community's island of Akutan, even though there is no road away from it. Thus, reported KUCB Radio, the only way to get into or out of the harbor is by boat. Any connector road to the only town on the island is "likely years in the future," according to the Daily News. As well, there is no assurance that the largest business in the area, Trident Seafoods, would ever use the harbor. [KUCB Radio (Unalaska, Alaska) via Anchorage Daily News, 11-15-2012]

In October, Austrian artist Alexander Riegler installed a one-way mirror in the ladies' room at a cafe in Vienna to allow men's room users to peer inside (in the name of "art," of course). Riegler said he wanted to start a "discussion of voyeurism and surveillance." Men could see only the faces of women standing at the lavatories, and he said then that in January, he would reverse the process and allow women to peer into the men's rooms. (The cafe had posted a sign advising restroom users that they would be part of an "art" project.) [Associated Press via Fox News, 10-22-2012]

-- Anthony Johnson, 49, was convicted in October in Hartford, Conn., of stealing an improbably large amount of money -- as much as $70,000 a weekend, off and on for five years -- by crawling on the floor of darkened theaters and lifting credit cards from purses that movie-watching women had set down. The FBI said Johnson was careful to pick films likely to engross female viewers so that he could operate freely. He was often able to finish up, leave the theater, and make cash-advance withdrawals from ATMs before the movie had ended. [Hartford Courant, 10-22-2012]

-- Things That Almost Never Happen: In October, a 34-year-old man being detained by Port St. Lucie, Fla., police on an indecent-exposure complaint convinced the officer to free him based on showing the officer his testicles. (A woman had complained that the man was masturbating in public, but the man apparently demonstrated an impressively severe rash that he said he could not avoid scratching.) [TCPalm.com (Stuart, Fla.), 10-23-2012]

-- Niles Gammons of Urbana, Ohio, apparently did some partying on Saturday night, Nov. 3, because he managed a rare DUI daily double. He was first cited for DUI at 1:08 a.m. Sunday and then, 60 minutes later, he was again cited for DUI at 1:08 a.m. (The first was during daylight saving time; the second was after the changeover.) [WHIO-TV (Dayton, Ohio), 11-7-2012]

Human rights activists have for years deplored the preferences for male offspring in India and other nations -- ranging from cultures that marginalize female babies to some that practice discreet infanticide of girls. Increasingly, though, because of "advances" in science, Westerners can buy expensive in vitro fertilization procedures that use a laser to breach a fertilized embryo to determine whether it contains XY chromosome pairs (i.e., males) or larger XX ones so that only the desired-gender embryos are chosen. Noted Slate.com in September, such procedures are illegal in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (except for bona fide medical reasons), but legal in the United States. [Slate.com, 9-14-2012]

Justin Jedlica, 32, of New York City, bills himself as the "human Ken doll" after a 10-year odyssey of cosmetic surgery (90 procedures) to achieve the "perfect" body. "I love to metamorphosize myself, and the stranger the surgery, the better," he told ABC News in October, even though the amount of silicone in his body, say doctors (when told of Jedlica's various implants), has reached a dangerous level. He dismisses actually "earning" the body, through gym workouts, as just "not exciting, not glamorous." (Of course, the "perfect" body is never perfect, Jedlica acknowledged, as illustrated by his recollection of his first surgery -- to get a perfect nose -- which is still not done after three follow-ups. "Just got to get that nose up a few more millimeters," he said. [ABC News via Huffington Post, 10-16-2012]

Emerging democracies have experienced brawls and fisticuffs in their legislatures as they learn self-government, with Ukraine perhaps the most volatile. When some legislators rose to change party affiliations in December, a fracas broke out and, according to Yahoo News, "Images ... showed a scene that resembled a WWE pay-per-view event, with parliament members using full nelsons, choke holds and other moves familiar to American wrestling fans." In fact, a man with the same name as a WWE heavyweight ("Rybak") had just been elected speaker, and the country's well-known boxing champion Vitali Klitschko was in attendance (as a member of a minority party called "Punch"). (One 2010 brawl in the Ukrainian legislature sent six deputies to the hospital with concussions.) [Yahoo News, 12-13-2012]

This, the 1,300th edition of News of the Weird, marks birthday No. 25. So, what was happening in 1988 in that first batch of stories published by that first adventurous editor? Well, there was the Alton, Ill., woman who died with a will specifying that her husband, who was an enthusiastic transvestite, was to receive not a penny of her $82,000 cash estate -- but all of her dresses and accessories. And there was Hal Warden, the Tennessee 16-year-old who was granted a divorce from his wife, 13. Hal had previously been married at age 12 to a 14-year-old, who divorced Hal because, she told the judge, "He was acting like a 10-year-old." Happy Birthday to News of the Weird.

Thanks This Week to Craig Cryer and Bob McCabe and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Update: Gary Medrow, 68, has periodically surfaced in News of the Weird since 1991 for his unique behavior of using a false identity to persuade Milwaukee-area strangers over the phone to lift other strangers off the ground -- behavior for which he has occasionally been jailed and ordered to psychiatric care. After a recent period of calm, Medrow slipped in November and was charged with impersonating a photojournalist to convince two Cedarburg (Wis.) High School students to hoist each other on their shoulders (and four similar incidents were under investigation). At an earlier hearing, Medrow said that his "addiction" helps him to relieve tension and anxiety. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 11-16-2012]

-- Floyd Johnson pleaded guilty to attempted murder in an odd scene in a New York City courtroom in November. Johnson has only one leg, and had been charged with stabbing a fellow homeless shelter resident who has no legs. Johnson's public-defender lawyer (who caught the case at random) has only one leg, also. Johnson said he was taking the plea in part because of excruciating leg pain -- in the leg he doesn't have ("phantom leg" syndrome), and Johnson's lawyer said he suffers from the same thing. (The lawyer subsequently filed to withdraw the guilty plea because the pain had clouded his client's judgment.) [New York Post, 11-9-2012]

-- Amber Roberts, 30, a resident of the unit for the criminally insane at Eastern State Hospital in Spokane, Wash., informed officials in November that "I (just now) murdered someone, but you're going to have to find him." As staff members searched the facility, Roberts offered to help by shouting "hot," "cold," "you're getting warmer," and so forth. Roberts yelled "Hot!" as they closed in on the room containing the body of a 56-year-old patient that Roberts then admitted strangling. (However, a few days later in court, she pleaded not guilty.) [Associated Press via KATU-TV (Portland, Ore.), 11-21-2012]

-- Tunisia's Ministry for Women and Family Affairs demanded in October that the government prosecute the publisher of the children's magazine Qaws Quzah ("Rainbow"), aimed at ages 5 to 15, for an article in the then-current issue on how to construct a gasoline bomb (aka the "Molotov cocktail" in America). The country has been rocked by the same kind of upheaval experienced in other Arab countries, except less so since its longtime president stepped down rather quickly in January 2011. [BBC News, 10-9-2012]

-- Notwithstanding its nuclear submarines, ballistic missiles and spy satellites, France maintains Europe's last "squadron" of military carrier pigeons. Legislator Jean-Pierre Decool lauds the pigeons and campaigns for their upgrade, warning that in the event of war or other catastrophe, the birds would be a valuable messaging network. (Pigeons have been used at times in the current Syrian civil war.) Until very recently, according to a November Wall Street Journal dispatch, pigeons wearing harnesses had been used by a hospital in Normandy to ferry blood samples to a testing lab (a 25-minute flight). [Wall Street Journal, 11-10-2012]

Jason Schall, 38, who has retired as a financial planner and now devotes his energy to fishing, had a spectacular week in September when he won a catch-and-release tournament in Charleston, S.C., came within 1 1/2 inches of a world record on another catch, and was notified of recently setting two Nevada state records for largest fish caught. Schall's coup de grace, he told the Charleston Post and Courier, came a few days later when he caught a redfish while sitting on his living room sofa in Daniel Island, S.C., watching a Clemson football game with a pal. He had run a line with bait through a crack in the door, through his yard into the lake behind his home. [Post and Courier, 10-2-2012]

Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found recently in tests that 10th-grade students who play video games (especially shooting and sports games) regularly score just as high in robotic surgery dexterity as resident doctors. The lead researcher said that surgery simulations (for example, suturing) have built-in unpredictability, for training purposes, but since complex video games are laden with unpredictability, players logging at least two hours a day with the joystick in fact may even slightly outperform the residents. [Slate.com, 11-21-2012]

-- How Drunk Do You Have to Be? (1) College student Courtney Malloy, 22, was rescued in November after getting stuck at about 1 a.m. trying to cut between two buildings in Providence, R.I. The space between City Sports and FedEx Kinko's was 8 to 9 inches, said firefighters, who found Malloy horizontal and about 2 feet off the ground and "unable" to explain how she got there. (2) Leslie Newton, 68, was pulled over by Florida Highway Patrol officers near St. Augustine in December while driving erratically. He also had a portion of a traffic sign embedded in his skull after colliding with it. (In both cases, officers said they believed the victims to be intoxicated.) [Providence Journal, 11-9-2012] [WTEV-TV (Jacksonville), 12-3-2012]

-- Helen Springthorpe, 58, with only three months on the job as the bell-ringer at St. Nicholas Church in Bathampton, England, was knocked unconscious in November when she became entangled in the bells' ropes and was jerked too-and-fro around the belfry, her head smashing against a wall. Fire and ambulance crews eventually lowered her about 20 feet to the ground. [BBC News, 11-6-2012]

Homeless man Darren Kersey, 28, was jailed overnight in November in Sarasota, Fla., after being busted for charging his cellphone at an outlet at a public picnic shelter in the city's Gillespie Park. The police report noted that "(T)heft of city utilities will not be tolerated ...." However, for owners of electric cars (less likely to be homeless!), the city runs several absolutely free charging stations, including one at city hall. The American Civil Liberties Union has accused the city for years of being aggressively inhospitable toward the city's homeless. (Kersey was released the next day when a judge ruled the arrest improper.) [Sarasota Herald Tribune, 11-12-2012]

Stubborn: (1) Briton Robert Moore, 31, got a relatively light sentence in Bradford Crown Court in October when he convinced a judge that he only inadvertently possessed child pornography, in that he was largely interested in human-animal porn (including with a pig, a goat, a horse and an octopus). Moore was not eligible for a court-ordered "treatment" alternative to prison because he told the judge that he does not believe he has a deviancy. (2) Carlos Romero, 31, told arresting officers in Ocala, Fla., in September that Florida was a "backwards" state because it still punishes his sexual behavior with a donkey. He admitted to being aroused by animals "in heat" but explained that all he did was stand behind the animal and masturbate while fondling her genitals. Any genital-genital contact, he said, was "accidental." [Daily Mirror (London), 10-19-2012] [The Smoking Gun, 9-18-2012]

Orly Taitz, an Orange County, Calif., dentist and lawyer, is America's most prominent "birther," having filed dozens of lawsuits, appeals and other legal petitions expressing her certainty that President Obama was not born in America. In her latest legal foray, a California judge tossed her lawsuit against Occidental College (to require it to disregard privacy rights and release Obama's college transcripts and other papers). The loss brings birthers' record (Taitz's plus a few comrades') to 0-for-258, according to the websites WhatsYourEvidence.com and LoweringTheBar.net. And of course, when Taitz's lawsuit was dismissed in November, she merely appealed again. Taitz was described by one critic as "almost charmingly insane." [Huffington Post, 12-3-2012; Lowering the Bar, 10-26-2012]

Daniel Greer, 24, told the New York Daily News that on Sept. 7 in Brooklyn, N.Y., a police officer who had been trailing the bicyclist stopped him and issued separate traffic tickets for riding through three red lights while listening to music through earphones. The three offenses, plus a related ticket, forced Greer to court, where he clumsily pleaded guilty, not aware of the amount of the fine. His multiple offenses made him a repeat offender, and he was fined $1,550. [New York Daily News, 10-13-2012]

Thanks This Week to Gary Scher and Sandy Pearlman, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

The head of the Perse School in Cambridge, England, recently instituted a "10-Second Rule" for minor disciplinary infractions: Students could avoid punishment if they quickly produced a clever explanation for their misbehavior. "Getting children to talk their way out of a tight corner in a very short period of time" said Ed Elliott, encourages creativity and could produce a generation of British entrepreneurs. Said a supporter, "Often the ones who get further are the artful dodgers," who "bend the truth." (Elliott warned, though, that "out-and-out falseness" would not be tolerated.) [BBC News, 11-19-2012]

-- Family Values: (1) A Tampa, Fla., mother and daughter (ages 56 and 22, with their familial ties verified by a Huffington Post reporter), shoot scenes together for their pornography website ("The Sexxxtons"), including threesomes with a man, but the women insist that they never incestuously touch each other. (2) Tiffany Hartford, 23, and George Sayers Jr., 48, were charged in Bethel, Conn., in December with selling unauthorized videos of Hartford having sex with another woman. That other woman charged, and a DNA test confirmed, that Sayers is Hartford's father and that the two have a baby (although both deny knowing they were father-daughter at the time they had sex). [Huffington Post, 12-5-2012] [New York Daily News, 12-5-2012]

-- Sheriff's officials in Deerfield Beach, Fla., arrested nine people in October and charged them in connection with a betting ring that set point spreads and took bets not only on pro and college games but on kids' games of the South Florida Youth Football League. Six thousand children play in the 22-team association. [Associated Press via CBS News, 10-30-2012]

-- Too Silly To Be True: (1) Police in Geraldton, Australia, reported in November that they had captured a thief they were chasing in the dark through a neighborhood's backyards. As the thief came to a fence and leaped over it, he happened to land on a family's trampoline and was propelled backward, practically into cops' laps. (2) Guy Black, 76, was charged in Turbotville, Pa., in October with threatening housemate Ronald Tanner with a chainsaw. Tanner, defending himself with the only "weapon" within reach -- an umbrella -- managed to pin Black with it as the chainsaw jammed. (Most people who bring an umbrella to a chainsaw fight would be less successful.) [Australian Broadcasting Corp. News, 11-14- 2012] [Associated Press via WPVI-TV (Philadelphia), 10-22-2012]

-- Deputy NYPD Commissioner Paul Browne told reporters in November that, in the 24 hours of Monday, November 26th, not a single criminal shooting, stabbing, or slashing was reported in the five boroughs. Browne said no police official could remember such a day, ever. (The city is on track to finish 2012 with fewer than 400 homicides--compared to the record year of 1990, when 2,245 people were murdered.) [New York Daily News, 11-28-2012]

-- "Braco," a Croatian-born "healer" (although he rejects the term), seems to make legions of sick or troubled believers feel better merely by entering a room and gazing at them in silence for a few minutes before leaving. (A Washington Post reporter, seeking relief from his allergies, attended a 100-person session in Alexandria, Va., in October, but found no improvement.) "Whatever is flowing through him," said one transfixed fan, "is able to connect with a part of us." Said another enthusiast, "The thing that makes Braco unique is he really doesn't do anything." [Washington Post, 10-12-2012]

-- In October, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals petitioned Irvine, Calif., to create a roadside memorial for the truckload of live fish that had perished in a recent traffic accident. (After all, fish, like humans, use tools, tell time, sing, and have long-term memories, wrote PETA.) On the other hand, the traffic casualties that day were en route to the Irvine Ranch Market to be sold as food. [Orange County Register, 10-29-2012]

-- The governing Council of Brentwood, England, professes a "reputation as one of the most transparent" in the country, but in November, responding to a Freedom of Information request for documents on a government contract, it merely released 425 totally-blackened ("redacted") pages. The official explanation was that all of the papers concerning construction of a movie theater were deemed "commercially sensitive" and "not in the public interest." (Following an outcry, the Council re-thought the FOI request and disclosed "considerably more information," according to the Daily Telegraph.) [Daily Telegraph, 11-29-2012]

(1) Detroit police chief Ralph Godbee was suspended in October after an affair with a subordinate became public. Godbee's predecessor had been fired for the same reason (among other reasons), and in fact, Godbee had previously had an affair with the same subordinate who had been implicated with his predecessor. (2) The former mayor of Flint, Don Williamson, who resigned in 2009 while being targeted in a recall election, recently erected a large bronze statue of himself outside his home in Davison Township. (3) In June, former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, having served 99 days in jail on obstruction-of-justice charges and still awaiting a federal corruption trial, asked Michigan prison officials to relieve him of "community service" parole obligations -- because he had a number of paid speeches scheduled out of town. [Detroit Free Press, 10-2-2012] [Associated Press via West Virginia Gazette (Charleston), 11-2-2012] [Associated Press via Austin American- Statesman, 6-5-2012]

-- Shortly after drug-possession suspect Patrick Townsend, 30, was arrested in Lakeland, Fla., in November and had allegedly confessed into a detective's digital recorder, Townsend managed to snatch the unattended recorder from a table, took a restroom break, and flushed it down the toilet. Townsend's subsequent advice to the detective: "Tighten up on your job, homie." ("Destroying evidence" was added to Townsend's charges.) [The Ledger (Lakeland), 11-23- 2012]

-- Casey Anthony was acquitted by a jury in Orlando in 2011 of killing her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, in part because investigation of her computer did not yield incriminating evidence (e.g., suspicious search terms in her Internet Explorer's history). However, in November 2012, with Anthony protected by the Constitutional prohibition against "double jeopardy," investigators admitted they had overlooked the computer's other web browser (Firefox). There, on the date of Caylee's disappearance, were pages containing such search terms as "fool-proof suffication" (sic) and "asphyxiation." [USA Today, 11-25-2012]

High School Inspirations: (1) Trent Bauer became a mid-season replacement as starting quarterback for Paul Laurence Dunbar High School (Lexington, Ky.) after beginning the season merely as the team's bulldog-costumed mascot on the sidelines. In his first game, in October, he threw two touchdown passes in a 22-19 victory. (2) Also in October, South Plantation (Fla.) High School's third-string quarterback, Ms. Erin DiMeglio, was voted the school's homecoming queen. In her first game this season, she had come off the bench in a brief stint and completed two passes. [Herald-Leader, 10-15-2012] [New York Daily News, 10-13-2012]

Thanks This Week to Harry Thompson, Sandy Pearlman, Raan Young, Bruce Leiserowitz, Tim Trewhella, Francee Fulller, and Hal Dunham, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.