Orestes De La Paz's exhibit at the Frost Art Museum in Miami in May recalled Chuck Palahniuk's novel and film "Fight Club," in which lead character Tyler Durden's principal income source was making upscale soap using discarded liposuctioned fat fetched from the garbage of cosmetic surgeons (thus closing the loop of fat from rich ladies recycled back to rich ladies). De La Paz told his mentor at Florida International University that he wanted only to display his own liposuctioned fat provocatively, but decided to make soap when he realized that the fat would otherwise quickly rot. Some visitors to the exhibit were able to wash their hands with the engineered soap, which De La Paz offered for sale at $1,000 a bar. [WLRN-TV (Miami), 5-16-2013]

-- As recently as mid-May, people with disabilities had been earning hefty black-market fees by taking strangers into Disneyland and Disney World using the parks' own liberal "disability" passes (which allow for up to five relatives or guests at a time to accompany the disabled person in skipping the sometimes-hours-long lines and having immediate access to the rides). The pass-holding "guide," according to NBC's "Today" show, could charge as much as $200 through advertising on CraigsList and via word-of-mouth to some travel agents. Following reports in the New York Post and other outlets, Disney was said in late May to be warning disabled permit-holders not to abuse the privilege. [New York Post, 5-14-2013; NBC News, 5-31-2013]

-- After setting out to create a protective garment for mixed martial arts fighters, Jeremiah Raber of High Ridge, Mo., realized that his "groin protection device" could also help police, athletes and military contractors. Armored Nutshellz underwear, now selling for $125 each, has multiple layers of Kevlar plus another fabric called Dyneema, which Raber said can "resist" multiple shots from 9 mm and .22-caliber handguns. He said the Army will be testing Nutshellz in August, hoping it can reduce the number of servicemen who come home with devastating groin injuries. [KSDK-TV, 5-6-2013]

-- "Ambulance-chasing" lawyers are less the cliche than they formerly were because of bar association crackdowns, but fire truck-chasing contractors and "public adjusters" are still a problem -- at least in Florida, where the state Supreme Court tossed out a "48-hour" time- out rule that would have given casualty victims space to reflect on their losses before being overwhelmed by home-restoration salesmen. Consequently, as firefighters told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in May, the contractors are usually "right behind" them on the scene, pestering anxious or grief-stricken victims. The Sun-Sentinel found one woman being begged to sign up while she was still crying out for her dog that remained trapped in the blaze. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 5-18-2013]

-- Researchers writing recently in the journal PLoS ONE disclosed that they had found certain types of dirt that contain antimicrobial agents capable of killing E. coli and the antibiotic-resistant MRSA. According to the article, medical "texts" back to 3000 B.C. mentioned clays that, when rubbed on wounds, reduce inflammation and pain. [Popular Science, 5-22-2013]

-- Researchers writing in May in the journal Pediatrics found that some infants whose parents regularly sucked their babies' pacifiers to clean them (rather than rinsing or boiling them) developed fewer allergies and cases of asthma. (On the other hand, parental-cleansing might make other maladies more likely, such as tooth decay.) [New York Times, 5-6-2013]

Archeologists discovered in May that a construction company had bulldozed 2,300-year-old Mayan ruins in northern Belize -- simply to mine the rocks for road fill to build a highway. A researcher said it could hardly have been an accident, for the ruins were 100 feet high in an otherwise flat landscape, and a Tulane University anthropologist estimated that Mayan ruins are being mined for road fill an average of once a day in their ancient habitats. Said another, "(T)o realize" that Mayans created these structures using only stone tools and then "carried these materials on their heads" to build them -- and then that bulldozers can almost instantly destroy them -- is "mind-boggling." [Associated Press via Yahoo News, 5-14-2013]

A woman in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood reported to a local news blog in May that she had seen (and her husband briefly conversed with) a man who was operating a "drone" from a sidewalk, guiding the noisy device to a point just outside a third-floor window in a private home. The pilot said he was "doing research" and, perhaps protected by a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision, asserted that he was not violating anyone's privacy because he, himself, was on a public sidewalk while the drone was in public airspace. The couple called for a police officer, but by the time one arrived, the pilot and his drone had departed, according to a report on the Capitol Hill Seattle blog. [Capitol Hill Seattle via Betabeat.com (New York City), 5-14-2013]

Army Major Nidal Hasan went on trial in June for killing 13 and wounding another 32 in the notorious November 2009 shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, but his 43 months in lockup since then have been lucrative. WFAA-TV (Dallas-Fort Worth) reported in May that Maj. Hasan has earned $278,000 (and counting) in salary and benefits because his pay cannot be stopped until he is convicted. By contrast, some of the 32 surviving victims complain of difficulty wrenching money out of the Army for worker compensation and disability treatment -- because the Army has refused to classify the spree-shooting as a combat-similar "terrorist attack" (in favor of terming it the politically correct "workplace violence"). [WFAA-TV, 5-22-2013]

(1) John Allison, 41, who was arrested inside a Hannaford's grocery store in Massena, N.Y., in May, first aroused suspicion as an anticipated shoplifter, but it turns out that all he wanted to do was to remove a pepperoni from the meat case, rub it on his penis and put it back. He was charged with criminal mischief. (2) David Beckman, 64, was charged in DuPage County, Ill., in May with misdemeanor animal cruelty after he allegedly sexually abused his pet peacock, "Phyl." [Watertown Daily News, 5-16-2013] [WMAQ-TV (Chicago), 5-12-2013]

Three men committed home invasion of a Houston residence on May 14 and, although two escaped, one wound up in the hospital and under arrest. The three men kicked in a door and shut the resident in an upstairs closet while they ransacked the home, but they failed to inspect the closet first and thus did not realize that it was the resident's handgun-storage closet. A few minutes later, the resident emerged, locked and loaded, and wounded one of the men in the shoulder and leg. [Houston Chronicle, 5-14-2013]

(1) Bryan Zuniga, 20, was (according to a deputy) weaving in traffic in his SUV in May near the St. Petersburg, Fla., city limit, but instead of submitting to the deputy, he fled on foot and eventually climbed a fence to a water-treatment plant -- and apparently disturbed an alligator residing in a pond. Zuniga was treated at St. Petersburg General Hospital for bites to his face and arm. (2) In Albuquerque in May, Luis Briones, 25, became the most recent person arrested for distracted driving -- after he crashed into another car while engaged in sexual intercourse in the driver's seat. (His naked lady-friend was thrown from the car, but not seriously hurt.) [Tampa Bay Times, 5-9-2013] [The Smoking Gun, 5-29-2013]

Thanks this week to Elaine Weiss, David Swanson, Gary DaSilva, Michael Harris, Candy Clouston, John McGaw, Steve Dunn, Paul Krause, Peter Swank, and Chris Banta, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

-- The Food and Drug Administration proposed recently to limit the quantity of tiny "mites" that could occupy imported cheese, even though living, crawling mites are a feature desired by aficionados. ("Cheese is absolutely alive!" proclaimed microbiologist Rachel Dutton, who runs the "cheese laboratory" at Harvard University.) In fact, cheese is home to various molds, bacteria and yeasts, which give it flavor, and sellers routinely use blowers to expel excessive critters, but the FDA now wants to limit them to 6 bugs per square inch. However, according to a May report on NPR, lovers of some cheeses, especially the French Mimolette, object, asserting both an indifference to the sight of mites creeping around -- and a fear of taste-loss (since the mites burrow into the hunk, aerating it and

extending the flavor). [NPR, 5-11-2013]

-- Energy West, the natural gas supplier in Great Falls, Mont., had tried recently to raise awareness of leaks by distributing scratch-and-sniff cards to residents, demonstrating gas's distinctive, rotten-egg smell. In May, workers cast aside several cartons of leftover cards, which were hauled off and disposed of by crushing -- which released the scent and produced a massive blanket of odor over downtown Great Falls, resulting in a flurry of panicked calls to firefighters about gas leaks. [Great Falls Tribune, 5-8-2013]

-- Well, Of Course! (1) The Ypsilanti, Mich., City Council voted in May on a resolution that would have required the members always to vote either "yes" or "no" (to thus reduce the recent, annoying number of "abstain" votes). The resolution to ban abstaining failed because three of the seven members abstained. (2) Doctors told a

newspaper in Stockholm in April that at least one of Sweden's premier modeling agencies, looking for recruits, had been caught passing out business cards adjacent to the country's largest eating-disorder clinic, forcing the clinic to change its rules on patients taking outside walks. [Associated Press via WHTM-TV

(Harrisburg, Pa.), 5-23-2013] [The Local (Stockholm), 4-18-2013]

-- The United Nations Conference on Disarmament, a multilateral forum on arms control agreements, was chaired beginning May 27th (until June 23rd) by Iran, which, for that time, at least, had the awkward job of overseeing resolutions on nuclear non-proliferation, which the country is widely thought to be ignoring. [Fox News, 5-13-2013]

-- Unclear on the Concept: (1) Ruben Pavon was identified by surveillance video in Derry, N.H., in April snatching a grill from the front porch of a thrift store. Pavon explained to police that the store's name, "Finders Keepers," indicated to him that the objects were free for the taking and admitted that he had previously taken items from the porch. (2) In May, Los Angeles police bought back

1,200 guns in one of the periodic U.S. buy-back programs, but they declined to accept the pipe bomb a man said he wanted to sell. "This is not a pipe-bomb buyback," said Chief Charlie Beck. "Pipe bombs are illegal ... " The man was promptly arrested. [WMUR-TV (Manchester, N.H.), 5-1-2013] [KCBS-TV (Los Angeles, 5-6-2013]

-- Too Much Information: John Casey, 51, was caught by security staff at an Asda supermarket in Washington, England last October after allegedly stealing a slab of beef. He was convicted in May even after offering the compelling explanation that he had concealed the beef underneath other purchases not to avoid paying for it, but only because the sight of the raw meat gave him "flashbacks" to his dead grandmother, who had passed away of a blood clot when Casey was a child. [Sunderland Echo, 5-23-2013]

-- Keith Judd filed a lawsuit in Iowa in May, in essence to invalidate the 2012 election by having President Obama officially declared a Kenyan and not an American. Judd filed the papers from a federal penitentiary in Texas, where he is serving 17 years for threatening a woman he believed to be a "clone" of the singer Stevie Nicks, because Nicks (or the clone) had tried to sabotage his home improvement company. (Bonus Fact: In the 2012 Democratic presidential primary in West Virginia, Judd, a write-in candidate, defeated President Obama in nine counties and lost the state by only 33,000 votes.) [Des Moines Register, 5-23-2013]

-- Edward Kramer, co-founder of the annual Atlanta fantasy-character convention Dragon*Con, was arrested in 2000 for allegedly having sex with underage boys, but has yet to stand trial in Georgia because he has engineered a never-ending set of legal delays -- if not because of his version of Orthodox Judaism that limits his diet and activities, then it his allegedly poor health. ("As soon as he puts on an orange jumpsuit," said prosecutor Danny Porter, "he becomes an invalid," requiring a wheelchair and oxygen tank.) In 2011, after managing to get "house arrest," he violated it by being caught with an underage boy. Lately, according to a May Atlanta Journal-Constitution report, he files an average of three demands per day from his Gwinnett County, Ga., lockup, each requiring painstaking review before being rejected. Kramer still owns about one-third of Dragon*Con, whose current officials are mortified that they cannot expel a man they consider a child molester. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 5-28-2013]

-- In May, the Florida House of Representatives adjourned for the year without assessing themselves even a nominal increase in health insurance premiums for their own taxpayer-funded deluxe coverage, which will remain at $8.34 per month for individuals ($30 for families). Several days earlier, the House had voted to reject several billion dollars in federal grants for extending health insurance

coverage to about a million more poor people in the state's

Medicaid program. The House premiums are even lower than those of state senators and rank-and-file state employees, and lower than the premiums of Medicaid recipients who have the ability to pay. [Tampa Bay Times, 5-13-2013]

Apparently running out of space on his body (which is two-thirds tattooed), Brazilian Rodrigo Fernando dos Santos has moved on to his eyeballs. According to the body-modification website BME.com, eyeball-tattooing is safe if done correctly, which involves the artist injecting the ink precisely between the conjunctiva and the sclera layers --with the main risk, of course, that the client can go blind. In April, Sao Paulo tattoo artist Rafael Leao Dias, who said he had studied eyeball work for two years, successfully turned dos Santos's eyes into pools of dark ink. "I cried ink for two days," he told a local blogger. BME.com said eyeball tattoos have been reported for nearly 2,000 years. [Huffington Post, 4-17-2013]

-- Paul Gardener and Chad Leakey were arrested in Tempe, Ariz., in May and charged with a spree of car burglaries. According to police, the men were trying various cars' doors, looking for any that were unlocked, when they inadvertently opened the back door of an unmarked police car. The men had apparently not noticed (until too

late) that two uniformed officers were sitting in the front seat and had also failed to notice that cage wiring separated the back seat from the front seat. [AzFamily.com (Phoenix), 5-14-2013]

-- Timothy Adams, 24, was charged with home invasion in May in Gardner, Mass., but only after resident Michael Salame slammed him into the floor. Salame is 70 years old, has had eight heart stents, and is forced to wear special coverings on his arms at night because of nerve damage -- yet Adams apparently went down easily and at one point offered Salame "thousands of dollars" to let him up before police arrived. [WBZ-TV (Boston), 5-

9-2013]

-- Dogs Gone Wild: (1) Oscar, a Lawrence, Mass., K-9, accidentally fired a gun into an occupied home during a police chase in March. He had pawed the trigger while digging into snow where a fleeing suspect had tossed his gun. (No one was injured.) (2) In March, a dog left inside an otherwise unattended, engine-running car accidentally kicked it into gear and pinned an unidentified pedestrian, knocking him unconscious. He was taken to a hospital in York, Pa., and revived. (3) Gregory Lanier, 35, driving his dog in a truck in Sebring, Fla., in February, was shot in the leg when the dog stepped on a .380 caliber pistol. He was not seriously hurt. [WFXT-TV (Boston), 3-3-2013] [York Daily Record, 3-29-2013] [Highlands Today (Sebring), 2-25-2013]

Thanks This Week to Dave Ryan, David Rubin, Rebekah

Kogelschatz, Dave Abdoo, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Low Fashion Meets Islam on Turkish TV: Five self-proclaimed devout, conservative Muslim women host the TV series "Building Bridges" on channel A9, presenting the seemingly contradictory case against both the female headscarf and Turkey's turn to secularism. A report on Slate.com in May noted that the five are "mostly bottle blonds ... (with) neon lipstick" wearing "brightly colored satin pantsuits and T-shirts with designer brand names that stretched over their chests." "Building Bridges" in principle supports interfaith dialogue, but guests (noted Slate) "often appear ... with their eyebrows arched in the manner of a serious person certain he is the victim of a practical joke." [Slate.com, 5-2-2013]

-- Creative Smuggling: Abdullah Riyaz, 50, was arrested at the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, India, in April after he appeared to be uncomfortable sitting in the waiting area. Officials found four "biscuits" of solid gold in his socks but obviously thought there might be more, and after nature took its course, found Riyaz to be one of those rare humans with the ability to brag that he once excreted gold (eight more "biscuits"). [Khaleej Times (Dubai), 4-19-2013]

-- A report circulated in April that an apparently Orthodox Jewish man (likely a "Kohen") had tied himself up, head to toe, in a plastic bag while seated on an airline flight -- likely because his teachings told him that flying over a cemetery would yield "impurities." News of the Weird mentioned a similar report in 2001. Airlines have made accommodations in the past, even in the face of criticism that a man in a plastic bag is a safety hazard. (Exceptions to the Kohen belief: Accidental tears in the bag are excused, but pre-punched air holes not; Kohenim unaware of the cemetery overflight in advance do not need protection; and deceased family members yield no impurities.) [Daily Mail (London), 4-11-2013; Jewish Press, 4-12-2013]

-- Accountability: The chairman of the National Showcaves Center in a Welsh national park, aiming to halt a recent downturn in tourism business, threatened in April to sue the U.K. National Weather Service for its "all too (frequent) ... gloom and doom reports." The NWS had called for snow and cold weather over Easter weekend, but no snow fell, and the cold weather was tempered by sun and blue skies. (He also suggested adding "health"-type warnings to forecasts, e.g., beware that weather reports might be wrong.) [Daily Mail (London), 4-17-2013]

-- In New Haven, Conn., in March, police had trapped two car-theft suspects in a multifamily building whose occupants were hiding from the suspects, thus necessitating urgency in ending the siege. Officers ordered a K-9 unit but were told it would be delayed. In a tactic departments occasionally employ, officers still threatened to release the dogs immediately, and to make the threat credible, available officers began barking. The suspects quickly surrendered rather than face the vicious canines. [WFSB-TV (Hartford), 4-1-2013]

-- Herbert and Catherine Schaible, members of the First Century Gospel Church in Philadelphia and believers in faith-healing rather than medical care, were convicted in 2011 in the bacterial-pneumonia death of their 2-year-old son, Kent. As a condition of probation, they promised medical care for their remaining eight children, but in April 2013, their youngest son, Brandon, died after severe diarrhea and pneumonia, again treated only by prayer, and they were arrested -- and the other children removed from the home. The medical examiner called Brandon's death a homicide, and the couple also face five to 10 years in prison for violating probation. [Philadelphia Daily News, 4-23-2013; Philadelphia Inquirer, 5-22-2013]

-- Detectives' New Best Friend (Facebook): Christopher Robinson, 23, became just one of many recent suspects whose addiction to Facebook did him in. Robinson had never made a single child support payment in the three years since a court order was issued in Milwaukee, Wis., and the case had languished over how to prove that he was hiding money. Using other evidence for probable cause, the prosecutor got a warrant to search Robinson's private Facebook information and discovered a candid photograph of him, laughing over a pile of cash. [ABC News, 3-23-2012]

-- The annual Chinese "tomb sweeping" celebration has been mentioned several times in News of the Weird, but has experienced a resurgence since 2008 when the government reinstated it as an official holiday. The theory is that people bring valuable items (such as jewelry) to ancestors' gravesites and bury them with the body, which will upgrade the relative's afterlife. Now, however, practitioners seem convinced that paper images of items are sufficient (and, of course, less expensive). Many simply leave signed (and generous!) checks for the dead, according to an April New York Times dispatch, and others bury representations of "mistresses" to accompany presumably frisky corpses. [New York Times, 4-5-2013]

-- News of the Weird first learned of kopi luwak in 1993 -- coffee beans sold as gourmet because they had been swallowed by certain Asian civet cats and recovered from feces and washed. Since then, as Internet news of kopi luwak has spread, it has become no longer obscure, and in April, the environmental-activist website MongaBay.com warned that, based on increased demand, civet "farms" had sprung up in Indonesia and that civets were being caged for their entire lives solely for access to their poop. While none of the main kopi luwak civet species is formally "endangered," activists warned that populations are dwindling for, said one, "the most ridiculous threat ... to any wildlife I have seen yet." [MongaBay.com (San Francisco), 4-16-2013]

-- In one of the more prominent recent "that's my story, and I'm sticking to it" cases, Vicky Pryce, 60, finally gave up in March and admitted to a judge that her husband, not she, was driving their speeding car in 2003. She was married at the time to high-ranking British government official Chris Huhne, whose license would have been suspended had he been driving -- and thus, she volunteered. The couple's 10-year ruse had inspired two trials ending without decision. (Huhne "rewarded" Pryce for her loyalty in 2010 by having an affair. The couple are divorced and will be imprisoned separately for perverting justice.) [New York Times, 3-8-2013]

-- "Recovered memory" was a popular psychotherapy diagnosis in the 1980s, ultimately responsible for jail sentences for priests, parents and school officials after patients suddenly somehow "remembered" long-suppressed bizarre and vicious (and sometimes "satanic") sex crimes that never actually happened. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California, Irvine, and other skeptics have since proven that false memories can be created and are now concentrating on fashioning them for beneficial purposes -- to lose weight, to stop smoking, to curb drinking. An April report in Time magazine noted that "up to 40 percent" of people could be convinced that they had had bad experiences with a certain behavior and that, properly identified, those people could be taught to avoid it. Said Dr. Loftus, "We do have a malleable memory." [Time, 4-12-2013]

-- Briton James McCormick caused the deaths of hundreds of Iraqis after convincing a Baghdad police official that his "electronic" wands could detect bombs at 400 security checkpoints (in spite of U.S. officials' many warnings that they were useless). (In October 2009, for example, suicide bombers walked past two wand-equipped checkpoints into a neighborhood and killed 155.) McCormick, who sold 6,000 of the devices to Iraq and the country of Georgia at prices of up to $40,000 each, was convicted of fraud in April. According to London prosecutors, he also claimed that his wands were programmable to ferret out drugs and paper money and to detect them from high above or up to a kilometer underground. [BBC News, 4-23-2013]

-- Catholic nun Megan Rice, 83, and two other peace activists were convicted in May of breaking into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., last year -- with "intent to harm national security." Sympathizers lauded the activists' motives and asked whether national security was actually "harmed," but somehow the intruders' stealth "attack" was treated seriously. That is, three amateurs cut through numerous fences undetected, then bypassed several sensors and alarms (either malfunctioning or unmonitored) before being stopped by a lone guard. (While Israel currently frets over Iran's accumulation of up to 500 pounds of highly enriched uranium for building one bomb, Y-12 houses an estimated 400 tons.) [Washington Post, 5-8-2013]

Thanks This Week to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.