The usual 20,000 or so visitors every year to Belgium's Verbeke Foundation art park have the option (365 of them, anyway) to spend the night inside the feature attraction: a 20-foot-long, 6-foot-high polyester replica of a human colon created by Dutch designer Joep Van Lieshout. At one end, of course, another body part is replicated (and gives the installation its formal name, the Hotel CasAnus). The facility, though "cramped," according to one prominent review, features heating, shower and double bed, and rents for the equivalent of about $150 a night. The 30-acre art park is regarded as one of Europe's "edgiest" art destinations. [Huffington Post, 12-12-2012]

-- Giuseppe Tedesco took the witness stand in Newton, N.J., in December and swore that all six shots that hit his girlfriend, Alyssa Ruggieri (one of them fatal), were "self-defense" "accidents." After she discovered his .25-caliber handgun in sofa cushions, he said he reached for it and in the struggle was shot in the hand, but he still managed to grip the gun tightly, and the pair tumbled down some stairs. During the struggle, "both" hands shot Ruggieri twice. Despite their injuries, they both maintained their vice-like grips on the gun, he said, and "they" shot Ruggieri twice more. The final shot, he said, came with Ruggieri holding the gun point-blank at his face, and when he pushed it away, "they" fired another shot that hit Ruggieri in the temple. (At press time, the trial was continuing.) [Star-Ledger (Newark), 12-19-2012]

-- The issues director of the fundamentalist American Family Association told his radio audience in November that God's feelings will be hurt if America stops using fossil fuels for energy. "God has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us find them," said Bryan Fischer, who described Americans' campaigns against fossil fuels as similar to the time when Fischer, at age 6, told a birthday-present donor that he didn't like his gift. "And it just crushed that person." [AFA "Focal Point," 11-29-2012, via Raw Story.com]

-- Retrials and appeals are sometimes granted if a convicted criminal demonstrates that he received "ineffective assistance of counsel." Among the reasons that the lawyer for convicted Joliet, Ill., quadruple-murderer Christopher Vaughn offered in his November motion was the ineptness of other lawyers (but not himself). Specifically, he argued, the lawyers for the convicted wife-killing police officer Drew Peterson put on such a disgusting case that they gave all defense lawyers a bad name. (The website LoweringTheBar.net pointed out that Vaughn lawyer George Lenard himself violated a lawyers' "kitchen sink" standard by overlisting 51 separate reasons why his client deserved a new trial.) [Chicago Tribune, 11-26-2012; LoweringTheBar.net, 11-27-2012]

Mauricio Fierro gained instant fame in December in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as the reported victim of a car theft (captured on surveillance video) when he dashed into a pharmacy. He went to a police station to file a report, but encountered the pharmacy owner making his own report -- that Fierro was actually robbing him at the moment the car was taken. More surveillance video revealed that while Fierro was standing outside the pharmacy, wondering where his car was, a man ran by and stole the stolen cash. Fierro then immoderately complained to the police even more about Sao Paulo's crime rate and lack of security. Afterward, Fierro admitted to a local news website that in fact he had stolen the very car that he was reporting stolen. [New York Daily News, 12-13-2012]

-- Former undercover cop Mark Kennedy filed for damages in October against the London Metropolitan police, claiming post-traumatic stress syndrome based on the department's "negligence" in allowing him to have such a robust sex life on the job that he fell in love with a woman whose organization he had infiltrated. Kennedy's wife has filed for divorce and is also suing the department, and 10 other women (including three of Kennedy's former lovers) have also filed claims. [The Guardian, 11-25-2012]

-- Sarah Childs won a restraining order in Denham Springs, La., in December, forbidding the town from shutting down her "Christmas" lights decoration. The large outdoor display (in a neighborhood with traditional Christmas displays) was the image of two hands with middle fingers extended. [WAFB-TV (Baton Rouge, La.), 12-21-2012]

-- In a 3-2 decision, the Board of Adjustment in the Seattle suburb of Clyde Hill ruled that a homeowner must chop down two large, elegant trees on his property because they obstruct a neighbor's scenic view of Seattle's skyline. The board's majority reasoned that the complaining neighbor (who happens to be former baseball all-star John Olerud) would otherwise suffer a $255,000 devaluation of his $4 million estate. (Olerud was ordered to pay for the tree removal and to plant the neighbor two smaller trees in place of the majestic ones). [Seattle Times, 11-8-2012]

(1) New York's highest court ruled in November that subway "grinders" (men who masturbate by rubbing up against women on trains) cannot be charged with felonies as long as they don't use force to restrain their victims (but only commit misdemeanors that usually result in no jail time). (2) Police in Phuket, Thailand, announced that their all-points search for a public masturbator who harassed a restaurant's staff had produced no suspects -- although a spokesman said they did find "a few people (nearby) who were masturbating in their vehicles, but none of them were the man we are looking for." [New York Daily News, 9-17-2012] [Phuket Gazette, 10-4-2012]

Update: Four months have passed since News of the Weird mentioned that at least 60 North Carolina prisoners have been improperly incarcerated -- legally innocent based on a 2011 federal appeals court decision. (Still others are at least owed sentence reduction because they had been convicted of offenses in addition to the incorrect one.) A June USA Today story revealed the injustice, and the federal government took until August to release holds on the inmates, but since then, only 44 of the estimated 175 affected prisoners have been correctly adjudicated. USA Today reported in December that the recent delay has been because of the obstinacy of some North Carolina federal judges, including cases involving citizens by now wrongfully locked up for more than 18 months. [USA Today, 12-26-2012]

(1) The week before Christmas, a Nottingham, England, officer wrote parking tickets to drivers of two ambulances that were taking too long to board wheelchair-using schoolchildren who had just sung carols for an hour downtown to raise money for the homeless shelter Emmanuel House. (Following an outpouring of complaints, the Nottingham City Council revoked the tickets.) (2) An ambulance on call, with lights and siren, pulled into the parking lot of Quicky's convenience store in New Orleans in November to treat a customer, but one employee nonetheless obeyed what he believed to be his employer's no-parking rule and applied an immobilizing "boot" to the ambulance. The man, Ahmed Sidi Aleywa, was later fired. A co-worker said Aleywa was an immigrant who had said he was not familiar with "ambulances." [Nottingham Post, 12-19-2012] [WWL-TV (New Orleans), 11-30-2012, 12-3-2012]

Recurring Themes: (1) Marquis Diggs, 29, entering the county administration building in Jersey City, N.J., in December for a hearing in family court over his mother's restraining order against him, became the most recent drug possessor not to have realized that he might be subjected to a search. Police confiscated 32 baggies of "suspected marijuana." (2) Cleland Ayison, 32, got a sentencing break in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in December when federal judge William Dimitrouleas pitied him. Ayison got only house arrest and community service because his crime -- trying to pass a U.S. Federal Reserve note with a face value of $500 million -- was so "silly." [Jersey Journal, 12-18-2012] [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 12-4-2012]

Ironies: (1) A 20-year-old man's life ended when he was shot to death in an altercation in San Bernardino, Calif., on Friday, Dec. 21, while attending a Mayan-inspired "End of the World" party. (2) The next night, in Fort Worth, Texas, a 47-year-old drummer collapsed of a seizure and died onstage. He had played with several bands, including Rigor Mortis. [KCBS-TV (Los Angeles), 12-25-2012] [Rolling Stone via NBC News, 12-25-2012]

Thanks This Week to Bruce Leiserowitz, Gary DaSilva, and Gerald Sacks, to the News of the Weird Senior Advisors (Jenny T. Beatty, Paul Di Filippo, Ginger Katz, Joe Littrell, Matt Mirapaul, Paul Music, Karl Olson, and Jim Sweeney) and Board of Editorial Advisors (Tom Barker, Paul Blumstein, Harry Farkas, Sam Gaines, Herb Jue, Emory Kimbrough, Scott Langill, Steve Miller, Christopher Nalty, Mark Neunder, Bob Pert, Larry Ellis Reed, Rob Snyder, Stephen Taylor, Bruce Townley, and Jerry Whittle).

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.