The conflicted double life of Israeli Orthodox Jew Shadar Hadar, 34, might be as formidable to manage as that of an international spy. Though deeply and defiantly religious, he typically around midnight "trades his knitted white yarmulke" for a "wavy blond wig and pink velvet dress" and takes the stage as a nascent drag queen, according to an August Associated Press dispatch from Jerusalem. His gayness has alienated his ex-wife (who bars him from seeing their daughter, now 11) and is only grudgingly accepted by his parents. As a bridge of sorts in his life, he has rejected the usual raunchy drag queen personas and adopted instead that of a female rabbinic adviser, musing from the stage on optimistic teachings of Breslov Hasidic ultra-Orthodox Judaism. [Associated Press via Huffington Post, 8-1-2013]

-- Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium, whose construction was financed in 1964 by borrowing $25 million (and untold more as part of a subway expansion to service the stadium), was demolished in 2004 and is but a memory to the city's sports fans. However, nine years later, the city is still paying for it (though next year will retire the $25 million bond and nine years from now, the city hopes, will retire the stadium/subway bond). The city's deputy controller told PhillyMag.com in June, profoundly, "When issuing a bond to build a facility, the debt payment on that bond should not outlast the facility." [PhillyMag.com, 6-14-2013]

-- Inexplicable: The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety's solution to its legendary long lines at driver's license stations was to create "In Line Online" registration, which it introduced recently. Online registrants were beside themselves, however, when they arrived on time across the state, only to learn that In Line Online merely entitled them to a reserved place in the line for making future appointments to take their driver's test. A spokesman acknowledged that In Line Online might have some kinks and thus would be closed temporarily. [KFOR-TV, 8-15-2013]

-- Toronto is facing such a crippling backlog of challenges to parking tickets, reported the Toronto Star in August, that more than 73,000 citations from last year were still unresolved and that many cases were proceeding even less hurriedly. Mahmood-Reza Arab, a computer programmer who was ticketed for parking too close to a hydrant in 2005 and who has dutifully met all deadlines for making a proper challenge, was recently scheduled (again) for trial before a judge -- this month (September 2013). A spokesman said the "normal" wait time for a court date is "only" 18 months. [Toronto Star, 8-13-2013]

-- "Rules Are for the Benefit of Us All": Adhering to "federal regulations," the Denver Housing Authority ordered the immediate ejection of the family of Sandra Roskilly (her mother and autistic son) -- because Roskilly had been shot dead in a random homicide in August. The mother, who shared the apartment with Roskilly for 10 years, said she was told that once the head of household is no longer present (no matter the reason), the apartment must be forfeited. Said Roskilly's astonished brother, "(T)here was no question in my mind that my mother would at least be able to finish out the lease." [KMGH-TV, 8-19-2013]

-- Artist John Knuth creates "broad swaths of color that appear to be meticulous impressionistic abstractions," reported a Gizmodo.com writer in July, but in a video made for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Knuth revealed that he makes colors with paint harvested from the vomit of about 200,000 houseflies. Knuth raises the flies from maggots, then feeds them sugar mixed with watercolor pigments, then coaxes the flies to regurgitate -- and then captures and uses the result. Of Knuth's accompanying high-minded explanations of his purpose, Gizmodo wrote, "Once you decide to make paintings from fly barf, you pretty much forfeit any other subtext you'd like your audience to appreciate." [Gizmodo.com, 7-15-2013]

-- Suspicion Confirmed: A British "art critic" created the "Colne Valley Sculpture Trail" in West Yorkshire by inviting patrons to walk a 3-mile path past derelict buildings and discarded objects that the critic suggested, in a formal leaflet, were purposeful art objects designed to be provocative. (In reality, they were random junk.) An abandoned bathtub (titled "Wash Behind the Ears") evoked "contradictory concepts of filth and cleanliness ... in a countryside setting," the critic wrote. A collapsed wall was built by fictitious artist Karen Braithwaite, who then destroyed it "with some sense of violence," "suggest(ing) a sense of bereavement, the turf above almost seeming to weep." The author spoke to BBC News in July but insisted on remaining anonymous. [BBC News, 7-28-2013]

-- Notwithstanding the city of Detroit's various problems, residents still expect its police force to behave sensibly, but in July, a police commander's office blundered, releasing to all officers a document concerning an order of form-fitting bulletproof vests. Each individual officer's height and weight were on the email, but so were female officers' bra cup sizes (which were initially necessary to assure body-armor fit so as not to restrict mobility -- but obviously were no one else's business). [WJBK-TV (Detroit), 8-12-2013]

-- In August, prosecutors in Broward County, Fla., accused two Lauderhill police officers of an improper 2012 traffic stop, charging both patrolmen in the squad car with demanding favors from two female motorists. Officer Franklin Hartley allegedly demanded oral sex from the passenger, and his partner, Thomas Merenda, according to the charge, "asked the victim to punch him in the 'nuts,' meaning genital area." Said Merenda's lawyer, of the charge: "outrageous, outlandish and absurd." [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 8-9-2013]

America's military veterans, whom the country supposedly champions wholeheartedly and insists should be properly compensated for their service and the disruption to their lives, must navigate as many as 613 government forms from 18 different agencies to receive what they are due by law, according to a July study released by the American Action Forum. The principal agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, purports to have been making great progress over the last few years, but earlier this year acknowledged that, still, about 70 percent of claims (covering 600,000 veterans) have been waiting longer than 125 days for yes-or-no decisions. [Fox News, 7-2-2013]

Finding an aberrant sexual behavior not previously mentioned in News of the Weird is an exhausting task, but British psychologist Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University, has succeeded: the eproctophile (a person sexually aroused by the passing of gas). Griffiths told LiveScience.com in July that he plans to study other rare "paraphilic disorders," including "fire fetish, a blindness fetish and dacryphilia, or arousal by tears, weeping or sobbing." [LiveScience.com, 7-31-2013]

A computer virus called "Ransomware" has been freezing computers since 2012, the FBI acknowledged, making much work for tech support, but likely never causing the victim to be arrested until Jay Matthew Riley, 21, of Woodbridge, Va., came along. The virus tricks people into thinking the FBI has discovered that they had inadvertently viewed child pornography and locks their computer, but since the viewing was probably accidental, "allows" them to avoid arrest by paying a $300 fine to unfreeze the computer. Riley apparently did have child porn (inadvertently gathered or not) on his computer and, frightened by the virus, gratuitously inquired at a local police station whether there were warrants for his arrest. No, they said, but in the course of conversation, he consented to a search and was arrested. [Washington Post, 7-25-2013]

Creative Alternate-Site Surgery: Doctors from the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Washington announced in September 2010 that they could just as well handle certain brain surgeries by access not in the traditional way through the top of the skull, but by drilling holes in the nose and, more recently, the eye socket. (Since classic brain surgery requires that the top of the skull be temporarily removed, the breakthroughs mean fewer complications.) These innovations follow on the inroads in recent years in performing kidney-removal and gall-bladder surgery not by traditional abdominal incisions but through, respectively, the vagina and the anus. [Science Daily, 9-29-2010]

Thanks This Week to Peter Smagorinsky, Kevin Leaptrot, Sandy Pearlman, and Gary DaSilva, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

-- 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.