In the public libraries of Seattle (as in most public libraries), patrons are not allowed to eat or sleep (or even appear to be sleeping) or be shirtless or barefoot or have bad body odor or talk too loudly -- because other patrons might be disturbed. However, in Seattle, as the Post-Intelligencer reported in September, librarians do permit patrons to watch hard-core pornography on public computers, without apparent restriction, no matter who (adult or child) is walking by or sitting inches away at the next screen (although librarians politely ask porn-watchers to consider their neighbors). Said a library spokesperson: "(P)atrons have a right to view constitutionally protected material no matter where they are in the building, and the library does not censor." [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 9-8-2013]

-- Japan and Korea seem to be the birthplaces in the quest for youthful and beautiful skin, with the latest "elixir" (as usual, based on traditional, centuries-old beliefs) being snail mucus -- applied by specially bred live snails that slither across customers' faces. The Clinical Salon in central Tokyo sells the 60-minute Celebrity Escargot Course session for the equivalent of about $250 and even convinced a London Daily Telegraph reporter to try one in July. (Previously, News of the Weird has informed readers of Asian nightingale-feces facials and live-fish pedicures.) [Daily Telegraph, 7-13-2013]

-- Unclear on the Concept: Among people earnestly devoted to palmistry (the foretelling of the future by "expert" examination of the inner surface of the hand), a few in Japan have resorted to what seems like cheating: altering their palm lines with cosmetic surgery. According to a July Daily Beast dispatch from Tokyo, Dr. Takaaki Matsuoka is a leading practitioner, preferring an electric scalpel over laser surgery in that the latter more often eventually heals over, obviously defeating the purpose. He must be careful to add or move only the lines requested by the patient (e.g., "marriage" line, "romance" line, "money-luck" line, "financial" success line). [TheDailyBeast.com, 7-12-2013]

-- Iran's INSA news service reported in January that officials in Shiraz had acquired a finger-amputation machine to perhaps streamline the gruesome punishment often meted out to convicted thieves. (A masked enforcer turns a guillotine-like wheel to slice off the finger in the manner of a rotary saw.) Iran is already known for its reliance on extreme Islamic Sharia, which prescribes amputations, public lashings and death by stoning, and Middle East commentators believe the government will now step up its amputating of fingers, even for the crime of adultery. [Daily Telegraph (London), 1-28-2013]

-- Smiting Skeptics: Measles, despite being highly contagious, was virtually eradicated in America until a small number of skeptics, using now-discredited "research," tied childhood vaccinations with the rise of autism, and now the disease is returning. About half the members of the Eagle Mountain International Church near Dallas have declined to vaccinate their children, and as of late August, at least 20 church members have experienced the disease. The head pastor denied that he preaches against the immunizations (although he did tell NPR, cryptically, "(T)he (medical) facts are facts, but then we know the truth. That always overcomes facts."). [NPR, 9-1-2013]

-- Outraged Jewish leaders complain periodically about Mormons who, in the name of their church, posthumously baptize deceased Jews (even Holocaust victims) -- beneficently, of course, to help them qualify for heaven. Church officials promised to stop, but in 2012 reports still surfaced that not all Mormons got the memo. Thus inspired, a "religious" order called the Satanic Temple conducted a July "pink mass" over the Meridian, Miss., grave of the mother of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, Rev. Fred Phelps Jr. -- posthumously "turning" her gay. (Westboro infamously stages small, hate-saturated demonstrations denouncing homosexuals and American tolerance.) Ten days later, Meridian prosecutors charged a Satanic Temple official with misdemeanor desecration of a grave. [Huffington Post, 7-24-2013] [New York Times, 3-2-2012]

-- Australia's chief diplomat in Taipei, Taiwan, said in August that he was suing local veterinarian Yang Dong-sheng for fraud because Dr. Yang backed out of euthanizing the diplomat Kevin Magee's sick, 10-year-old dog. Instead, Dr. Yang "rescued" the dog, who is now thriving after he patiently treated her. Magee's lawsuit claims, in essence, that his family vet recommended euthanization, that he had paid for euthanization, and that "Benji" should have been put down. Dr. Yang said the fee Magee paid was for "medical care" and not necessarily euthanization. (Benji, frolicking outside when a reporter visited, was not available for comment.) [Taipei Times, 8-17-2013]

-- In August, a prosecutor in Houston filed aggravated rape charges against a 10-year-old girl ("Ashley") who had been arrested in June and held for four days in a juvenile detention center. A neighbor had seen Ashley touching a 4-year-old boy "in his private area," according to a KRIV-TV report -- in other words, apparently playing the time-honored, rite-of-passage game of "doctor." [KRIV-TV (Houston), 8-21-2013]

Smithsonian magazine detailed in August the exhaustive measures that military officials have taken to finally block relentless Richardson's ground squirrels from tunneling underneath Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana and interfering with the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles on 24/7 standby. For example, officials had to use trial-and-error to plant underground screens deeper into the ground than the squirrels cared to dig. A day after that report was published, a bus driver in Gothenburg, Sweden, crashed into a tree (with six passengers requiring hospital treatment) after swerving to avoid a squirrel in the road. On the same day, a New York Times reporter disclosed that his own news monitoring for 2013 revealed that squirrels have caused 50 power outages in 24 states in the U.S. since Memorial Day after invading electric company substations. [Smithsonian blog, 8-30-2013] [The Local (Stockholm), 9-1-2013] [New York Times, 8-31-2013]

-- In July, the Czech Republic approved Lukas Novy's official government ID photo even though he was wearing a kitchen colander on his head. Novy had successfully explained that his religion required it since he is a "Pastafarian" -- a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (a prank religion pointing out that all deities' power and wisdom comes from followers' faith rather than from tangible proof of their existence). [Daily Mail (London), 8-1-2013]

-- In August, a judge in Voronezh, Russia, accepted for trial Dmitry Argarkov's lawsuit against Tinkoff Credit Systems for violating a credit-card contract. Tinkoff had mailed Argarkov its standard fine-print contract, but Argarkov computer-scanned it, changed pro-Tinkoff provisions into pro-Argarkov terms, and signed and returned it, and Tinkoff accepted it without re-reading. At least at this stage of the lawsuit, the judge appeared to say that Argarkov had bested Tinkoff at its own game of oppressive, fine-print mumbo-jumbo. [Kommersant (Moscow) via Daily Telegraph (London), 8-8-2013]

He Had a Different Dream: Barely two months before the 50-year commemoration of the March on Washington, Park Police arrested Christopher H. Cleveland and charged him with shooting "upskirt" photos of unsuspecting women lounging on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. According to the officers, Cleveland (who said he was unaware that the photos were illegal) had a computer in his car that contained at least 150 PowerPoint slide presentations of at least 30 images each of his multitude of female photo victims. [Washington Post, 9-5-2013]

While the morbidly obese struggle with their health (and society's scorn), those who eroticize massive weight gain are capturing increased attention, according to a July (2010) ABC News report. Commercial and personal websites give full-bellied "gainers," such as New Jerseyan Donna Simpson, and their admiring "feeders" the opportunity to express themselves. Simpson became a 602-pound media sensation in March (2010), when she began offering pay-per- view video of herself to an audience of horny feeders. Wrote another gainer-blogger, "Lately, I've been infatuated with the physics of my belly ... how it moves with me." When he leans to one side, he wrote, "I feel a roll form around my love handle." One sex researcher called it a "metaphor of arousal." In the end, though, as a medical school professor put it, "The fetish may be in our heads, but the plaque is going to be in (their) arteries." [ABC News, 7-1-10]

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

Beginning in 2011, about three dozen people in Tokyo have been meeting every Sunday morning at 6 a.m. on a mission to scrub down, one by one, the city's grungiest public rest rooms. "By 7:30," according to an Associated Press reporter who witnessed an outing in August, the team had left behind a "gleaming public toilet, looking as good as the day it was installed." Explained the hygiene- intense Satoshi Oda (during the week, a computer programmer), the mission is "for our own good" -- work that leader Masayuki Magome compares to the training that Buddhist monks receive to find peace. (In fact, to fulfill the group's motto, "Clean thyself by cleaning cubicles," the scouring must be done with bare hands.) A squad supporter spoke of a sad, growing apprehension that the younger generation no longer shares the Japanese cultural conviction that rest rooms should always be clean and safe. [Associated Press via WTVY-TV (Dothan, Ala.), 8-28-2013]

Colleagues were stunned in May when ABC News editor Don Ennis suddenly appeared at work wearing a little black dress and a red wig and declaring that he had begun hormone therapy and wanted to be called Dawn Ennis. As co-workers accommodated his wishes (which did not seem so unusual in contemporary professional society), Ennis began to have second thoughts, and by July had blamed his conversion on "transient global amnesia," brought on by marital difficulties, and had returned to work as Don. Apparently the primary lingering effect is that he must still deal with Dawn's hormone-induced breasts. [New York Post, 8-6-2013]

-- Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a mirror that makes a person appear happy even when not. A built-in camera tracks facial features in real time, then tweaks the image to turn up the corners of the mouth and to create the beginnings of a smile in the eyes. Of what practical use would such a mirror be? Other Japanese researchers, according to a Slate.com report in August, believe that happy-face mirrors in retail stores would improve shoppers' dispositions and lead to more sales. [Slate.com, 8-7-2013]

-- A home ownership boom in China has led to heavily attended housing fairs, in which builders compete zealously to sell their homes, leading to offbeat schemes to draw attention. Among the latest, according to China Daily, is one that dresses female models in bare-backed evening wear, with sample floor plans and other housing information painted onto their skin, and sends them wandering through the crowds. [News Limited (Sydney), 8-13-2013]

-- SyFy Channel's recent original movie "Sharknado" briefly became a media sensation in July with a storyline involving large schools of oversized sharks lifted from the ocean by waterspouts and deposited, alive (and angry!) on land to wreak havoc. But as the website Mother Nature News subsequently reported, animals actually have been lifted to land in that fashion in the past. Previous documented news reports of the phenomenon include airborne fish (mudfish in the Philippines, perch in Australia); frogs (in Odzaci, Serbia, in 2005); jellyfish (Bath, England, in 1894); worms (Jennings, La., in 2007); and, according to an 1887 New York Times story, eight alligators in Silverton Township, S.C. [MNN.com, 7-28-2013]

-- Two macaques escaped from the Straussberg Adventure Park in eastern Germany in July, apparently on the run from the jealous bullying of "Cornelius," the resident alpha male. When park officials recaptured the two, they reported that (even though everyone seems to be against "bullying" these days) "Fred" and "Richard" would have to be castrated. It was not punishment, the officials explained; it was to calm them and reduce the overall "hormone imbalance" in the park, since males greatly outnumber females. [Spiegel Online, 8-1-2013]

The Costa Rican government announced recently that it would close all its zoos, effective March 2014, and free animals either to the wild or to safe "retirement" shelters. Since the country is known for its expansive biodiversity (500,000 unique organisms, despite occupying barely more than 1/100th of 1 percent of Earth's area), it is time, the environment minister said, to allow the organisms to interact instead of imprisoning them. Costa Rica is also one of only four countries to ban the exploitation of dolphins. [Global Post (Boston), 7-22-2013]

-- In July, following sustained criticism, Thomson Reuters business information company suspended an advance-release service for the crucial monthly "consumer confidence index" that has been known to signal stock markets to abruptly "buy" (driving up prices) or "sell" (sending them lower). The University of Michigan prepares and distributes the index promptly at 10 a.m. Eastern time on its release date, but Thomson Reuters offers two advance peeks. It pays the school about $1 million a year to see the index at 9:55 a.m., to share with its best customers. The suspended program gave an even earlier tip-off -- at 9:54:58 -- and high-frequency trading firms paid $6,000 more a month for those two seconds, which allowed their computer robots to execute hundreds of thousands of trades before other professional traders had access to the index. [New York Times, 7-8-2013]

-- First-World Problems: Self-indulgent New York City parents have been hiring "play-date" coaches for their preschool youngsters, apparently out of fear that the kids' skill set for just having fun might not impress admissions officers at the city's elite private schools. The CEO of one consulting outfit told the New York Post in July that $400 an hour gets expert monitoring of a 4-year-old in small groups, evaluating, for example, how the child colors in a book, shares the crayons, holds a pencil and follows the rules of Simon Says. [New York Post, 7-19-2013]

-- An unidentified school in the West Coast Conference recently self-reported a violation of controversial NCAA rules that restrict privileges for student-athletes, ordering a member of its women's golf team to pay back $20 after she washed her car using a hose (and water) belonging to the school but which were not available to other students. (A University of Portland coach said he heard about the violation at a conference meeting, and Yahoo Sports, seeking confirmation, reported that an NCAA spokesman soft-pedaled the illegality, calling the school's action a "miscommunication.") [Yahoo Sports, 5-29-2013]

The question in a vandalism case before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston in July was whether Ronald Strong's messy bowel movement in a federal courthouse men's room in Portland, Maine, was "willful" or, as Strong claimed, an uncontrollable intestinal event. Three rather genteel judges strained to infer Strong's state of mind from the condition of the facility. A cleaning lady had described scattered feces as "smeared," but Judge Juan Torruella took that to mean not "finger smears," he wrote, but "chunks," "kind of like chunky peanut butter." Two other judges, outvoting Torruella, seemed skeptical that feces could have landed two feet up the wall unless Strong had intended it. (Even so, Judge Torruella was unimpressed, implying that if he were intending to smear feces in a men's room, he surely would sully the mirrors, but that all mirrors were found clean.) [Salon.com, 7-26-2013]

John Anderson, the town administrator of Derry, N.H. (pop. 34,000), was accused by police in August of indecent exposure and lewdness after, naked, inviting a DirecTV salesman into his home and performing unspecified conduct in front of the man. Anderson was previously town manager of Boothbay Harbor, Maine. [Union Leader (Manchester, N.H.), 8-16-2013]

In January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers confiscated a live, bejeweled beetle that a woman was wearing as an "accessory" on her sweater as she crossed into Brownsville, Texas, from Mexico. Blue jewels were glued onto the beetle's back, which had been painted gold, and the mobile brooch was tethered by a gold chain attached to a safety pin. Even though the woman orally "declared" the animal, the beetle was confiscated because she had not completed the bureau's PPQ Form 526, which is necessary to bring insects into the country. Reportedly, such jewelry is not that rare in Mexico. A spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was, of course, appalled. [Brownsville Herald, 1-21-10; The Guardian (London), 1-22-10]

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

Loco Parentis: First-time mother Amy Webb proudly notates dozens of data points about her child each day and obsessively tracks their detailed progression by computer on spreadsheets, according to the provocative first-person account she wrote for Slate.com in July. In categories ranging from ordinary vital signs, to the kid's progress in sound-making, to dietary reactions, to quantity and quality of each poop, stats are kept 24/7 (even with a bedside laptop to facilitate nighttime entries). She began tracking her own health during pregnancy, but then decided, "Why stop now?" when her daughter was born. Webb's pediatrician rated the kid's health as "A-minus," but the parents' as "C," adding: "You guys need to relax. Leave the spreadsheets (out)." Webb and her husband remain confident that their extreme tracking optimizes their chances of raising a healthy daughter. [Slate.com, 7-9-2013]

-- Dr. Timothy Sweo said later that he was only trying to make his diagnosis of lumbar lordosis "less technical" for patient Terry Ragland when he described her condition as "ghetto booty." The shape of her spine makes her buttocks stick out more, he said, and he prescribed pain medication as there is no cure, per se. Nonetheless, Ragland felt insulted and filed a complaint against Dr. Sweo with the Tennessee Department of Health in July. Said she, "I couldn't believe he said that." [WREG-TV (Memphis), 7-12-2013]

-- An Anglican parishioner complained in August about the "blasphemous" bumper sticker she saw on the car of Rev. Alice Goodman of Cambridge, England, but Rev. Goodman immediately defended it as not irreligious (although, she conceded, perhaps "vulgar"). The sticker read "WTFWJD?" which is a play on the popular evangelical Christian slogan "WWJD?" -- "What Would Jesus Do?" ("WTF" is a vulgar but omnipresent acronym on the Internet.) Rev. Goodman pointed out that even Dr. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, seemed not to be shocked by her sticker when he saw it. [Daily Telegraph, 8-8-2013]

-- The wife of Valentino Ianetti was found dead in Stanhope, N.J., in 2010 with 47 stab wounds, leading police to immediately suspect her husband, who was at home with her. However, after three years' incarceration, Ianetti, 63, won release in August by finally convincing prosecutors that his wife actually committed suicide. Although the case is still officially "under investigation," the medical examiner concluded that 46 of the wounds were superficial - - "hesitation" cuts perhaps self-inflicted as the wife built up the courage to administer a final thrust. Also, the wife was found with a heavy dose of oxycodone in her system and likely felt little pain from any of the 47 wounds. [Star-Ledger (Newark), 8-16-2013]

-- Germany's center-left Social Democrats posted about 8,000 campaign placards in July that it proudly hailed as "eco-friendly" and biodegradable to attract the support of environment-concerned voters. However, 48 hours later, at the first rainfall, the posters became waterlogged and, indeed, biodegraded. Reported Hamburg's Spiegel Online, "None of the campaign workers could have guessed ... how quickly the environmentally friendly process ... would begin." [Spiegel Online, 8-2-2013]

-- Actually, That's Why She's in Trouble: In August, a federal judge in Seattle sentenced Alicia Cruz, 31, to four years in prison for violating court-ordered drug treatment stemming from a 2011 conviction for stealing the identities of more than 300 people. Cruz had won a second chance (drug treatment, instead of prison) by convincing the judge that she was no longer a crook -- that this time, she would abandon her identity-theft life and go straight. Added Cruz, "I'm a different person now." [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 8-9-2013]

-- James "Sonny" McCullough, the mayor of the New Jersey shore town of Egg Harbor (pop. 4,240), announced in August that he was selling his waterfront home -- because real estate taxes were too high (more than $31,000 a year) following a recent re-assessment and that he could no longer afford it. The mayor, 71, told The Press of Atlantic City that he had planned to live the rest of his life in the home, but was not even certain he could afford to live anywhere in Egg Harbor. [MyCentralJersey.com (Somerville), 8-21-2013]

A lawyer and former spokesman for the judiciary of Kenya filed a petition in July with the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, seeking a retrial of Jesus Christ and naming as defendants the state of Israel, King Herod, various Jewish elders, the former emperor of Rome (Tiberius), and of course Pontius Pilate. Dola Indidis claims that the proceedings before Roman courts did not conform to the rule of law at the time. (Indidis' claim had been dismissed by the High Court in Nairobi, and a spokesperson for the ICJ said the court has no jurisdiction in such a case, for it is not one between governments.) [Jerusalem Post, 7-30-2013]

No Profiling, Please: In August, minutes before a scheduled mixed martial arts fight in Immokalee, Fla., the Florida Department of Business & Professional Regulation canceled it as "unsanctioned." Contestant Garrett Holeve, 23, who has Down syndrome, was to fight David Steffin, 28, who has cerebral palsy, and both had trained intensively for eight weeks and were outraged by the decision. Said Holeve's father of his son's reaction, "(T)hat hurts his feelings and angers him." "Their decision is pretty arbitrary (and) discriminatory." [WINK-TV (Fort Myers), 8-5-2013]

Researchers can accurately estimate a person's economic status just by learning which environmental toxins are in his body, concluded a University of Exeter (England) research team recently, using U.S. data. Although "both rich and poor Americans are walking waste dumps," wrote the website Quartz, reporting the conclusions, poorer people's typical food leaves lead, cadmium and the banned bisphenol-A, whereas richer people more likely accumulate heavy metals (mercury, arsenic, thallium) from aquatic lean protein (and acquire oxybenzone from the active ingredient in sunscreens). Previous research was thought to show that richer Americans ate healthier (for example, eating fruits and vegetables instead of canned foods), but the Exeter research shows they merely house different toxins. [Quartz (qz.com), 8-5-2013]

In May, a Brazilian cancer-fighting foundation, AAPEC, published a series of photos of its new mascot that it hopes will call attention to the dread of testicular cancer, and the initial worldwide reviews demonstrate that, indeed, people may never, ever forget their first glance at "Mr. Balls." AAPEC described its character as a "friendly snowman in the shape of testicles" -- friendly in the sense of a buck-toothed humanoid with a puffy-cheeked smile and the body of a huge scrotal sac dotted with small curly hairs and rough skin. As photos of the genial "Senhor Testiculo" circulated in June, he was variously described as "disturbing," "horrifying," "terrifying" and "a nightmare." [AAPEC.org.br via Buzzfeed, 5-8-2013]

Recurring Themes: (1) Vade Bradley, 39, was arrested on arson charges in Hayward, Calif., in August after burning down an apartment house carport, totally destroying six vehicles. He was siphoning other people's gasoline in the carport when he decided to light a cigarette. (2) Richard Boudreaux was charged in January with burglarizing Kenney's Seafood (where he previously worked) in Slidell, La., when he became the most recent perp to fail to outflank surveillance cameras. He had thought to wear a bucket over his head as he moved through the store -- except he had waited until well inside (within camera range) before actually putting it on. [Contra Costa Times, 8-2-2013] [Times-Picayune, 1-15-2013]

Computer hardware engineer Toshio Yamamoto, 49, this year (2010) celebrates 15 years' work tasting and cataloguing all the Japanese ramen (instant noodles) he can get his hands on (including the full ingredients list, texture, flavor, price and "star" rating for each), for the massive 4,300-ramen database on his website, expanded recently with "hundreds" of video reviews and with re- reviews of many previously appearing products (in case the taste had changed, he told journalist Lisa Katayama, writing in April (2010) on the popular blog Boing Boing). Yamamoto said he had always eaten ramen for breakfast seven days a week, but cut back recently to five. "I feared that, if I continued at (the seven-day) pace, I would get bored." Thanks This Week to David Swanson and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.