-- The upscale restaurant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced in August that it would soon add a 20-item selection of waters from around the world, priced from $8 to $16 a bottle (except for a $12 "tasting menu"). Martin Riese, general manager of Ray's & Stark Bar, who is also a renowned water gourmet, will sell his own California-made 9OH2O, which comes in "limited editions of 10,000 individually numbered glass bottles" at $14 each. Said Riese, "(M)any people don't know that water is just as important to the entire dining experience (as, say, a good wine)." Riese has been certified as a Water Sommelier by the German Mineral Water Association. [Ray's & Stark press release via Eater.com, 8-6-2013]

-- A security lab, delivering a report to the makers of software for a luxury Japanese toilet, warned that a flaw in their Android program renders the toilet hackable -- even while a user sits on it. The Satis (which retails for the equivalent of about $5,600) includes automatic flushing, bidet spray, fragrance-spritzing, and music, according to an August BBC News report, and is controllable by a "My Satis" cellphone app. However, the PIN to operate the app is unalterably "0000," which means that a prankster with the app could create some very uncomfortable mischief in a public restroom. [BBC News, 8-5-2012]

-- The CEO of Christian Schools Australia told the Australian Associated Press in June that Caloundra Christian College in Queensland teaches a range of creative sexual health messages and offered the school's recent student pamphlet, "101 Things to Do Instead of Doing It," as evidence. Recommended substitutes: "Pretend you're six again," "Have a water fight," "Blow bubbles in the park," and "Have a burping contest." [Australian Associated Press via Stuff.co.nz, 6-22-2013]

-- What Hawkmoth Researchers Know: According to their study in July in the Royal Society of Biology Letters, researchers from the University of Florida and Boise State somehow have learned that the hawkmoth evolved to avoid predator bats by jamming bats' signature radar-like hunting technique called echolocation. A co-author told ScienceRecorder.com that the hawkmoth "confuses" the bats by emitting sonic pulses from its genitals. [Science Recorder, 7-5-2013]

-- New Meaning to "Hon. John Hurley": Immediately following Judge John Hurley's having reduced her bond from $76,000 to $10,000 on drug trafficking charges in a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., courtroom in August, Felicia Underwood, 38, asked, "You can't make it a little lower, hon?" According to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel report, Hurley was momentarily taken aback, asking: "Did she just refer to the court as 'honey'?" "Oh, well ..." (He kept the bond at $10,000.) [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 8-5-2013]

-- Adult "swinger" clubs occasionally rent commercial facilities like restaurants for an evening in which randy couples can mingle, but a club in Melbourne, Australia, struck a deal with the Casey Kids Play House Cranbourne, where frolickers could enjoy the playtime equipment -- until parents of children who play there found out in June. The parents were especially concerned about the partiers cavorting among the plastic balls in the giant ball pit. One parent told the Herald Sun, "My son is one (who) puts balls in his mouth." [Herald Sun, 6-24-2013]

-- British birdwatchers were especially excited by news earlier this year that a rare White-throated Needletail (the world's fastest flying bird) had been spotted on the U.K.'s Isles of Harris -- only the eighth such sighting in Britain in 170 years -- and ornithologists arranged for an expedition that attracted birdwatchers from around the world. A June report in the Daily Telegraph noted that about 80 people were on the scene when the bird appeared again, but then had to watch it fly straight toward the blades of a wind turbine. (As the event might be described by Monty Python, the bird thus joined the choir invisible, left this mortal coil, became an ex-White-throated Needletail.) [Daily Telegraph, 6-27-2013]

-- Helpful Derivative Military Technology: Manayunk Cleaners in Philadelphia has been testing delivery of customers' clothing via its own drone (a converted four-blade DJI Phantom quadcopter originally used for aerial photography), guided by GPS. Said one bemused customer, "I was wondering what the hell that was, to be honest." So far, the payload is limited to a shirt or towel, to be picked off the hovering aircraft by the customer, but owner Harout Vartanian hopes to buy a bigger drone soon. Agence France-Presse news service reported an even bolder drone program in August: delivering beer to music festival-goers in South Africa. The director of the Oppikoppi festival in Limpopo province attested to the drone's success. A reveler places an order by cellphone, which marks the location, and the drone is dispatched to lower the beer by parachute -- usually in the midst of a cheering crowd. [NBC10 (Philadelphia), 7-9-2013]

-- Contrary to popular wisdom, cows do not sleep standing up, but actually spend 12-14 hours a day lying down, even though their shape makes the position uncomfortable. Conscientious dairy farmers use beds of sand to adapt to the cow's contour, and since the late 1990s, a Wisconsin firm (Advanced Comfort Technology) has marketed $200 cow waterbeds, which are even more flexible. Waterbeds may be superior, also, because they are built with an extra chamber that makes it easier for the cow to lower herself safely. The founders' daughter, Amy Throndsen, told Huffington Post in June that her parents endured awkward moments starting the company: "Everyone . . . is telling them, Don't do it. Don't do it. Are you kidding me? Waterbeds?" [Huffington Post, 6-23-2013]

-- "High School in the Community" (HSC), the teachers' union-managed school in New Haven, Conn., recently completed the first year of its program aimed in part at ending "social promotion" -- the automatic passing of students to the next grade even if they lack the skills and knowledge necessary for that grade. However, the officials were shocked to learn that not a single one of the school's 44 first-time 9th-graders passed the promotion tests (and will have lengthy 9th-grade make-up sessions over the summer or beginning again in September). (Several other 9th-graders, who were already repeating 9th grade, were promoted.) [New Haven Independent, 6-28-13]

-- Look! Up in the Sky!: (1) Andy Hill was enjoying a leisurely inner-tube ride on the Clark Fork River near Missoula, Mont., on Sunday, July 21st -- when a man landed on top of him, sending Hill to the hospital with broken bones and torn ligaments. The man, who was not seriously hurt, had playfully jumped from a bridge without looking. (2) College baseball shortstop Mattingly Romanin, 20, suffered a concussion in July, while on the field before a summer league game, when a skydiver knocked him to the ground. The skydiver was part of a pre-game flyover at the Hannibal (Mo.) Cavemen's game, but was windblown slightly off-course. [Associated Press via Great Falls Tribune, 7-25-2013]

-- Recurring Themes: (1) A 28-year-old man ordered to submit to fingerprinting in Mason, Mich., in July in connection with a fraud investigation, had another charge added when he decided to pay the $16 fingerprinting fee with a stolen credit card. (2) Sheriff's deputies in Apopka, Fla., charged Chad Winslow with burglary after finding him stuck in a grease vent (facing outward) on the roof of Sam's Discount Food Store in June. According to a deputy, Winslow's first words were, "I'm stuck, and I have to take a poop." [MLive.com (Grand Rapids), 7-11-2013] [Bright House Cable News (Orlando), 6-23-2013]

Librarian Graham Barker, 45, of Perth, Australia, casually revealed to a reporter in October (2010) that his hobby of 26 years -- harvesting his own navel lint daily, just before he showers -- has now won acclaim in the Guinness Book of World Records. His three-jar collection (a fourth is in progress) has been sold to a local museum. His pastime, he told London's Daily Mail in October, "costs nothing and takes almost no time or effort, so there is no compelling reason to stop." Barker, who also collects McDonald's tray liners, said he once did a "navel lint survey," and "a handful of respondents" "confessed" to having the hobby. "One guy (said he) might have persisted, but he got married, and his wife ordered him to stop." [Daily Mail, 10-25-2010]

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

-- At age 20, Kyle Kandilian of Dearborn, Mich., has created a start-up business to fund his college expenses, but it involves a roomful (in the family home) of nearly 200,000 cockroaches. The environmental science major at University of Michigan-Dearborn breeds species ranging from the familiar household pests, which he sells on the cheap as food for other people's pets, to the more interesting, exotic Madagascar hissing roaches and rhino roaches, which can live for 10 to 15 years. (Kandilian told the Detroit Free Press in July that of the 4,000 cockroach species, only about a dozen are pests.) Why not choose a more conventional "pet"? Because "(m)ammals smell," he said. (Missing from the Free Press story: details on the likely interesting initial conversation between Kyle and his mother when he asked if he could have 200,000 cockroaches in the house.) [Detroit Free Press, 7-28-2013]

-- A 55-year-old woman in the Netherlands seemed to be experiencing orgasms emanating from her foot, she said, and Dr. Marcel Waldinger of Utrecht University (writing in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, online in June) produced a possible explanation. The applicable left foot nerve enters the spinal cord at about the same level as the vaginal nerve, Waldinger wrote, and the woman's recent foot injury might have caused the nerves to cross. The woman reported "five or six" orgasms per day that felt exactly like "regular" orgasms and, she said, were making her feel terribly guilty and embarrassed. After treatment with a nerve anesthetic, she reported being orgasm-free (in the foot, at least) for eight months. [CBS News via KHOU-TV (Houston), 7-1-2013]

-- The intersection of West Gateway Boulevard and North Congress Avenue in Boynton Beach, Fla. (pop. 60,000), is nine lanes wide, busy even at 11 p.m. on Sunday night, as it was at that time in July when a 2-year-old girl darted across, a combination of good fortune and sometimes-rare Florida driver alertness allowing her safe arrival on the other side without a scratch. "It's a miracle," said Harry Scott, who witnessed it. "I'm telling you the truth." Mom Kayla Campbell, 26, was charged with felony neglect, as she appeared "oblivious," said police, to the child's absence from home. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 7-9-2013]

-- An unnamed restaurateur from Nagoya, Japan, has filed a lawsuit against an affiliate of the country's largest organized crime syndicate, Yamaguchi-gumi, demanding a refund of "protection" money she had been paying for more than 12 years (in total, the equivalent of about $170,000). The affiliate, Kodo-kai, burned down a bar in 2010, killing people, in a similar protection arrangement that went bad, and the plaintiff said she, too, was threatened with arson when she decided to stop paying. According to an expert on Japanese "yakuza," a relative of one of the victims of the 2010 fire may also sue Kodo-kai. [Japan Today via Quartz, 7-18-2013]

-- In June, following his guilty plea in Corpus Christi, Texas, to possession of child pornography, Jose Salazar, 70, offered to perform public service to reduce the 12-year sentence a federal judge had handed him. Salazar said he "had a lot to offer society," according to an Associated Press story, and could be "useful" in mentoring children. [Associated Press via Beaumont Enterprise, 6-21-2013]

-- At Atherstone, England's, Twycross Zoo, a program is underway to try to teach quarter-ton giant tortoises to speed up. An extended outdoor pen had been built for Speedy (age 70), Tim, 40, and Shelly, 30, but that meant it took a longer time to round them up for bed at the end of the day. The Leicester Mercury reported in June that zoo officials were trying to use the lure of food to get the tortoises to significantly improve their way-under-1-mile-per-hour gait. [Leicester Mercury, 6-21-2013]

-- Actually, It Might Enhance the Experience: The British sex toy manufacturer Ann Summers issued a recall in June of a certain model of its popular Ultimate O Vibrator because of a problem with the electrical charger. The company said it was being cautious but that the risk of danger is low. [Daily Telegraph, 6-14-2013]

-- Tina Marie Garrison, 37, and her son Junior Lee Dillon, 18, of Preston, Minn., were charged in June with stealing almost $5,000 worth of gopher feet from the freezer of a gopher trapper in Granger, Minn., and selling them for the local offered bounty of $3 per pair. Garrison, Dillon, and the victimized trapper were friends, and it was not clear why the thinly populated gopher-foot market would not have deterred Garrison and Dillon. [Post-Bulletin (Rochester, Minn.), 6-18-2013]

-- Louann Giambattista, 55, a 33-year-veteran American Airlines flight attendant, filed a lawsuit against the company in July alleging that it had subjected her to baseless hassles because of co-workers' accusations that, argued her attorney, were wrongly "making her out to be a nut." One of the accusations was that she was "hiding rats in her underwear (and pantyhose) and sneaking them onto planes" based apparently on Giambattista's hobby of raising pets at home. The airline has allegedly subjected her to enhanced security measures for more than a year, allegedly causing her post-traumatic stress disorder and "debilitating anxiety." [New York Post, 7-7-2013]

-- The Best of the International Press: In July, the governor of Gorontalo province in Indonesia decreed that female secretaries should be replaced immediately with males. He was responding to a recent excessive spate of extramarital affairs by male bureaucrats with their female secretaries. ("[O]ld women who are no longer attractive" could also be hired, he said.) [Agence France-Presse via Fox News, 7-14-2013]

-- (1) Gerard Streator, 47, pleaded guilty in June in Waukesha, Wis., County Court to public lewdness and placed on probation after his arrest last year of going through the motions of intercourse with a discarded couch on a public street. An off-duty police officer thought initially that he had caught a couple, but on closer inspection, he realized Streator (who was aroused) was alone. (2) The day before, in Ostersund, Sweden, a 35-year-old man was arrested after a surveillance camera revealed him to be the one who repeatedly punctured Per Edstrom's bicycle's tires and who that evening was seen sitting on the bicycle pleasuring himself. [The Smoking Gun, 6-24-2013] [The Local (Stockholm), 6-23-2013]

-- (1) A 28-year-old man was accidentally killed in Shelby, N.C., in April. Police say he had trespassed on a salvage lot at 5 a.m. and was underneath a wrecked car trying to steal a catalytic converter when the jack slipped, and the car fell on him. (2) A 42-year-old man was shot and wounded while on his front porch in Antioch, Calif., on Friday morning, June 28. He was treated and released, but then walked out on his porch the next morning and was again shot, this time fatally. [Shelby Star, 4-1-2013] [San Francisco Chronicle, 6-29-2011]

A News of the Weird Classic

-- When Alcoa, Inc., prepared to build an aluminum smelting plant in Iceland in 2004, the government forced it to hire an expert to assure that none of the country's legendary "hidden people" lived underneath the property. The elf-like goblins provoke genuine apprehensiveness in many of the country's 300,000 natives (who are all, reputedly, related by blood). An Alcoa spokesman told Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis (for an April 2009 report) that the inspection (which delayed construction for six months) was necessary: "[W]e couldn't be in the position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people." (Lewis offered several explanations for the country's spectacular financial implosion in 2008, including Icelanders' incomprehensible superiority complex, which convinced many lifelong fishermen that they were gifted investment bankers.) [Vanity Fair, April 2009]

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

The National Security Agency is a "supercomputing powerhouse," wrote ProPublica.org in July, with "machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second" -- but apparently it has no ability to bulk-search its own employees' official emails. Thus, ProPublica's Freedom of Information Act demand for a seemingly simple all-hands search was turned down in July with the NSA informing ProPublica that the best it could do would be to go one-by-one through the emails of each of the agency's 30,000 employees -- which would be prohibitively expensive. (ProPublica reported that companywide searches are "common" for large corporations, which must respond to judicial subpoenas and provide information for their own internal investigations.) [ProPublica, 7-23-2013]

-- To commemorate its 500th "deep brain stimulation" surgery in May, UCLA Medical Center live-Tweeted its operation on musician Brad Carter, 39, during which he was required to strum his guitar and sing so that surgeons would know where in his brain to plant the electrical stimulator that would relieve his Parkinson's disease symptoms. Carter had developed hand tremors in 2006, but the stimulator, once it is properly programed and the surgery healed, is expected to reduce his symptoms, restore some guitar-playing ability, and reduce his medication need. (And, yes, patients normally remain conscious during the surgery.) [Daily Mail (London), 5-24-2013]

-- Firefighters are not infrequently called on to extricate adventurous men from sex toys, but one "armor-plat(ed)" device, six inches in diameter, into which the 51-year-old German entrapped himself in July in Ibiza, Mallorca, was especially challenging, according to the Diario de Mallorca newspaper, and took two hours and a dose of anesthesia toward the end. The saw blade the emergency workers used wore out during the rescue and had to be replaced, along with two sets of batteries. The man was kept overnight at Can Misses hospital, but was otherwise OK. [The Local (Madrid), 7-5-2013]

-- Americans stage dog shows, and Middle-Easterners stage camel beauty contests, and in June, the annual German Holstein Show took over the city of Oldenburg, with the two-day event won by "Loh Nastygirl," topping bovine beauties from Germany, Luxembourg and Austria. The event is also a showcase for the cow hairdressers, who trim cows' leg and belly hair (to better display their veins). Said one dresser, "It is just like with us people -- primping helps." Groomed or not, cows with powerful legs, bulging udders and a strong bone structure are the favorites. [The Local (Berlin), 6-14-2013]

-- Fruit of any kind retails for outlandish prices in Japan, but some, such as Yubari cantaloupes, are so prestigious that they are often presented as gifts to friends or colleagues, and it was only mildly surprising that a pair of the melons sold in May for the equivalent of about $15,700 at auction at the Sapporo Central Wholesale Market. The melons appeared to be perfect specimens, with their T-shaped stalk still attached. The record melon-pair price, set in 2008, is about $24,500 measured at today's exchange rate. [Agence France-Presse via Global Post, 5-24-2013]

-- Still Unclear on the Concept: Briar MacLean, 13, of Calgary, Alberta, was reprimanded by school officials in May (and then also lost an appeal) after he stepped between two students because one, holding a knife, was bullying the other. The vice principal appeared to regard Briar's action as equal to that of the bully, telling Briar's mother later that the school does not "condone heroics," and that it was "beside the point" that Briar might well have prevented a slashing (which could have occurred if he had left the boys behind to go find a teacher). [National Post (Toronto), 5-31-2013]

-- Some crime-scene investigative techniques seem far-fetched, as News of the Weird has reported, but police use of "ear prints" might be approaching the mainstream. Britain convicted its first burglar based on an ear print in 1998, and in May 2013, investigators in Lyon, France, tied a 26-year-old man from the Republic of Georgia to a string of about 80 burglaries -- by taking prints from doors the man had leaned against while listening for activity inside the home. [Expatica.com (Amsterdam), 6-3-2013]

-- First-World Crises: It is not quite to the level of the $15,700 Japanese melons, but the behavior of women descending upon New York City stores in June for the annual "sale" on designer shoes is nonetheless a spectacle. The event makes the city's upscale commercial district look like "an insane asylum of very well-dressed women," reported The New York Times. The shoes' everyday prices require, wrote the Times, "the willful suspension of rational thinking." The average transaction at Barneys is $850, still far below, for example, a pair of wicker-basket-like sandals ($1,995 by Charlotte Olympia) or a certain Christian Louboutin pump ($1,595 -- $4,645 if in crocodile). Prices are so unhinged, according to the Times, that standards from the iconic "Sex and the City" designer Manolo Blahnik are now low-price leaders, holding at about $595. [New York Times, 6-19-2013]

-- Among the oldest classic stories in News of the Weird is the hapless burglar or bank robber who inadvertently incriminates himself at the scene of the crime. Recently, (1) Korey Harris, a defensive lineman for West Virginia University's football team, was arrested in July for a home invasion he allegedly committed while wearing his practice sweatpants emblazoned with his jersey number (96). (2) Police in Boston are confident that Zachary Tentoni is the man who robbed a woman in the yard of Harbor Middle School in June because, as he grabbed her purse and fled, he dropped two bags he was carrying. Among the contents: Tentoni's birth certificate and a letter from his mother. [Yahoo News, 7-22-2013] [Boston Globe, 6-25-2013]

-- Zero-Tolerance Alive and Well: Second-grader Josh Welch's two-day suspension in March was upheld on appeal in June by Park Elementary School officials of Anne Arundel County, Md., even though his offense was that he had nibbled a pastry into the shape of a gun, which he then waved around. Said Josh's attorney: "If this (school system) can't educate a 7-year-old without putting him out of school, how are they going to deal with 17-year-olds?" [Baltimore Sun, 6-10-2013]

-- It took a year and a half of legal wrangling over a technicality, but Marshall University was finally dropped in June as one of the defendants in Louis Helmburg III's lawsuit for his injuries when fellow party-goer Travis Hughes shot bottle rockets out of his posterior in 2011. Helmburg, some will recall, was so startled by Hughes' stunt that he fell off the rail-less deck at a fraternity party staged by Alpha Tau Omega of Marshall University. Hughes and the fraternity remain as defendants in the January 2012 lawsuit. [West Virginia Record (Charleston), 6-12-2013]

-- The Mexican economy has improved markedly since News of the Weird first mentioned the EcoAlberto theme park in the central state of Hidalgo in 2005, which offers an attraction simulating the rigors of border-jumping. In 2005, it was thought that many of the attendees were using the setup to improve their chances of sneaking into the U.S., but now park officials believe nearly all are being discouraged, with the improving economy (and stepped-up U.S. enforcement) helping. The ordeal is played out as a three-hour game, with "U.S. Border Patrol" agents using sirens, dogs and verbal threats, and chasing the players into the night. [PBS.org, 6-24-2013]

-- Final Chapter for America's Most Overconfident Murderer: Anthony Garcia, 25, was convicted in July for a 2004 murder he had apparently gotten away with. He had been subsequently arrested in 2008 for driving on a suspended license, and a cold-case Los Angeles detective, perusing arrest reports, noticed Garcia's unusual chest tattoo, which depicted a scene that reminded the detective of the crime scene in the cold-case murder, with Garcia (street name, "Chopper") having labeled himself as the shooter. Garcia, previously home free, was arrested in his cell and now faces life in prison. [ABC News via KERO-TV (Bakersfield, Calif.), 7-18-2013]

Thanks This Week to Annie Thames, Hallie Webb, Sam Scrutchins, Brenda Myers, and Lynne Adams, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.