A few still-primitive cultures inexplicably celebrate such female adornments as the stacking of metal neck rings and the inserting of saucer-size disks into pierced earlobes. For "civilized" society, there is the annual Paris Fashion Week in September, when renowned designers outfit brave, otherwise-gorgeous models in grotesque clothing. Among the ensembles witnessed by a New York Times critic this year: a hat resembling steroid-enhanced stalks of peas; a shoe appearing to sprout twig-studs; "a flexible cage covered in doughnuts of black satin"; and a pillow clutch with (for some reason) its own porthole. [New York Times, 9-30-2013]

-- News of the Weird first reported successful "stool implants" among family members in 2007 (to cure infections such as C. difficile by introducing the donor's "good" microbes to overcome an imbalance of "bad" bacteria in a relative's intestine). In 2012, however, two University of California, Davis, neurosurgeons boldly extended the cutting-edge treatment for three patients with a highly malignant brain tumor unresponsive to treatment. The doctors tried infusing bowel bacteria directly into the tumor, but the patients died, nonetheless. Although the patients had given fully informed consent, the school in August 2013 pressured Drs. J. Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph Schrot to resign for having violated internal and FDA procedures. [Sacramento Bee, 7-22-2012] [KOVR-TV (Sacramento), 8-25-2013]

-- It is well known that hospitals charge for medical supplies far in excess of what the products would cost at drugstores, but an August New York Times investigation of "saline drips" vividly demonstrated the disconnect. Though Medicare reimburses $1.07 for a 1-liter plastic bag of saltwater (supplied by a subsidiary of Morton Salt), White Plains (N.Y.) Hospital charged patients' insurance companies like Aetna $91 per bag. Other hospitals decline to charge per-bag, listing only "IV therapy" of, for example, $787 for hooking up the drip. [New York Times, 8-27-2013]

-- From the world's cosmetic-surgery capital (South Korea, where one woman in five has had at least one procedure) comes the "Smile Lipt" offered by Aone Plastic Surgery in the city of Yongin, designed to produce a permanent smile (associated with success). The Smile Lipt turns downward-drooping lip corners upward, to allow a persistent smile resembling that of Batman's nemesis, The Joker. [BusinessInsider.com.au, 8-17-2013]

-- Among the more repugnant paraphilias covered in News of the Weird is toilet-peeping -- men who set up underneath the seats in public outhouses (sometimes wearing a raincoat) and wait for a user to answer nature's call. In August, Kenneth Enlow, 52, pleaded guilty after a woman found him the month before in a privy in White Water Park in Tulsa County, Okla., "standing with his head and shoulders out of the hole ... covered in feces," according to a deputy. Enlow's initial explanation was that his girlfriend had knocked him unconscious with a tire iron and dumped him there. [KOTV (Tulsa), 7-9-2013]

-- Another Hard-Working Lawyer: The Dayton Daily News reported in September that an audit of Dayton lawyer Ben Swift (the highest-paid court-appointed public defender in Ohio, at $142,900 in a recent year) revealed several invoices demanding government payment for workdays of more than 20 hours, and in one case, 29. Swift's attorney said his client was guilty only of bad record-keeping. [Associated Press via WBNS-TV (Columbus), 9-12-2013]

-- Patients with gargantuan tumors, but intimidated by the cost of treatment, create the possibility that by the time they can afford an operation, the tumor itself will be heavier than the post-surgery patient. A 63-year-old man in Bakersfield, Calif., finally had surgery in August, after 14 years' waiting during which his set of tumors grew to 200 pounds. Bakersfield surgeon Vip Dev noted that the sprawled tumors dragged the floor when the man sat and that the surgery was complicated by the patient's shape, which could not be accommodated by the hospital's MRI and CT scan machines. [KGET-TV (Bakersfield), 8-27-2013]

-- In 2010, Chinese agencies stepped up "birth tourism" packages for rich pregnant women to book vacations in America timed to their due dates -- to exploit the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of citizenship to anyone born here and thus giving the Chinese children future competitive advantages against non-Americans who must apply for U.S. visas. A September USA Today report indicated that more Chinese mothers now prefer to land in the U.S. territory of Northern Mariana Islands (where birth also bestows citizenship), to the consternation of Islands officials, who would prefer traditional Chinese tourists instead of the "birthers." (Historians agree that the 14th Amendment birth right was aimed at assuring citizenship for freed slaves.) [USA Today, 9-10-2013]

-- At Hong Kong's traditional "Hungry Ghost" festival in August, in which people burn fake money on top of ancestors' graves to support their afterlife styles, a weaker economy and inflation seem to have upped the ante for the gifts. An August Wall Street Journal dispatch noted that the denominations of burnable "currency" sold in stores have appreciated, including one "valued" at one trillion Hong Kong dollars (US$130 billion). (Some festival-goers asked, sensibly, about how the ancestor could expect change from such a bill if he needed to make a small afterlife purchase.) [Wall Street Journal, 8-20-2013]

-- The family of the great Native American Olympic athlete and Oklahoma native Jim Thorpe (1888-1953) was so disappointed that the then-governor of Oklahoma would not properly honor Thorpe on his death that one faction of his family moved the body to Pennsylvania, where he had no discernible ties but where municipal officials eagerly offered to name a town after him. Since then, Jim Thorpe, Pa. (current population, 4,800), has withstood legal challenges seeking to return the body to Oklahoma, including a recent federal court decision upholding the entire town as a Native American "museum." One grandson said that Thorpe spoke to him at a sweat lodge in Texas in 2010, telling him to leave the body in Jim Thorpe, with "no more pain created in my name." [Associated Press via NBC News, 9-5-2013]

-- Anthony Alleyne appeared in News of the Weird in 2003 for turning his Hinckley, England, home into a replica of the command center of Star Trek's starship Enterprise (including transporter control, warp core drive, infinity mirror, etc.). When he later tried to sell it, he learned that, somehow, potential buyers failed to value the house as much as Alleyne imagined. In September 2013, Alleyne was back in the news as Leicester Crown Court sentenced him to 34 months in prison for viewing child pornography -- a diversion that he blamed on years of depression following marital difficulties and of course the brutal real estate market. [BBC News, 9-6-2013]

-- The Raelian sect initially made News of the Weird in 1998 when "Bishop" Brigitte Boisselier ran a human-cloning start-up planning to charge $200,000 to make identical twins. Raelian's core belief is that humanity descended from extraterrestrials arriving on spaceships whose inhabitants explained to Raelian founder Claude Vorilhon that life's purpose is to experience sexual pleasure. Recently, a Raelian "priestess," Nadine Gary, has turned the sect's attention to counseling victims of the anti-pleasure female genital mutilation, which, though horrifyingly painful, remains traditional among some African societies, and enlisted a prominent U.S. surgeon to undo the procedure, pro bono. Wrote London's The Guardian, in an August dispatch from the surgeon's San Francisco clinic, "(J)ust 12 minutes of delicate scalpel work (to restore the clitoris) removes a lifetime of discomfort." [The Guardian, 8-24-2013]

-- The story of Kopi Luwak coffee is by now a News of the Weird staple, begun in 1993 with the first reports that a super-premium market existed for coffee beans digested by certain Asian civet cats, collected, washed and brewed. In June, news broke that civets were being mistreated -- captured from the wild and caged solely for their bean-adulterating usefulness. In August the American Chemical Society reported that a "gas chromatography and mass spectrometry" test had finally been developed to assure buyers that their $227-a-pound Kopi Luwak beans had, indeed, been excreted by genuine Asian civets. (Thus, Kopi Luwak drinkers, at up to $80 a cup in California, can sip their brews without fear of being ripped off.) [USA Today, 9-11-2013]

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

LEAD STORY -- More Bang

American Exceptionalism: Which is more characteristically American -- that a Texas company could invent an ordinary rifle that mimics a machine gun or that America's incomparable legal minds could find a loophole in existing anti-machine-gun laws to permit it to be manufactured and sold? The Slide Fire company's weapon can spray bullets "like a fire hose" from a legal, semiautomatic gun by simple application of muscle, yet an official opinion of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives acknowledges that the agency is powerless to regulate it because of the wording in 1934 and 1986 legislation that otherwise restricts private ownership of machine guns. One gun shop owner told London's Daily Mail in September that the Slide Fire rifle is "not as easy" to use as a machine gun, but still, "(I)t's fairly idiot-proof." [Daily Mail, 9-13-2013]

(1) In July, a New York City judge tossed out Joseph Lozito's lawsuit against the police -- even though two officers had stood by in February 2011, out of harm's way, while a man attacked Lozito as part of a four-murder crime spree. The judge ruled that it was not clear enough that Lozito was in danger when the officers began to ignore him (while they were inside a subway motorman's booth). (2) In September, a federal jury in New York City upheld an employment agency worker's claim that she (an African-American) was racially harassed by her boss. The supervisor, Rob Carmona, had insisted that he could not be liable for race-based harassment because, he, too, is African-American and thus entitled to use the "n-word." [New York Daily News, 7-26-2013] [New York Post, 9-3-2013]

-- Busy Being Superheroes: In separate incidents on successive September days, people dressed as Batman and Captain America rescued a cat from a burning house in Milton, W.Va., and Superman came to the aid of Wonder Woman in Hollywood, Calif. (The West Virginia pair were performing at a function when they noticed nearby smoke, and Superman and Wonder Woman were posing for tourists' tips when a passerby got belligerent.) In July, another Superman tackled a shoplifter on the streets of Sheffield, England, where he was appearing at a fundraiser. (However, less elegantly, two Captain Americas and a Spider-Man brawled briefly in May over access to a contested, lucrative Hollywood street corner.) [WCHS-TV (Charleston, 9-8-2013] [KABC-TV (Los Angeles), 9-6-2013] [Daily Telegraph (London), 7-4-2013] [KCBS-TV (Los Angeles), 5-30-2013]

-- Our Freedom to Doze Off, Now in Danger: The training technology company Mindflash recently revealed a feature for iPads that prevents student inattentiveness during an online course. Facial recognition software notices a user looking away (or, worse, falling asleep) and thus pauses the course at that point until the eager learner re-engages the screen. (Mindflash assured reporters that the program has more serious uses, such as treatment of autism and Alzheimer's disease.) [Bloomberg Business Week, 8-15-2013]

-- For people who believe that "rave" parties' music is too faint, an August event at England's Liverpool International Music Festival offered a solution: The DaDaFest program featured an ear-crushing sound level especially staged for deaf people's dancing -- since they can "hear" only by the vibrations saturating their bodies; the non-deaf should bring earplugs. Among the performers: deaf DJ Troi "Chinaman" Lee, who claims he easily feels distinctions in his mix of hip hop, R&B, reggae, dance and electro swing. [BBC News, 8-23-2013]

-- In an epic failure, according to Madrid's El Pais newspaper, a 20-story condominium building ("InTempo," likely the tallest residential edifice in the European Union) in the resort town of Benidorm, Spain, was hastily upsized to a planned 47 stories, but a series of architectural mistakes and developer bankruptcies has left it limping, still 65 percent unsold. Most notably, El Pais discovered in 2012 that the then-current design made it impossible to build an elevator shaft to go past the 23rd floor because of space limitation. (The architects resigned, and unconfident developers were forced to turn to financing from one of the shakier banks in the country's feeble economy.) [El Pais, 7-26-2013] [New York Daily News, 8-9-2013]

-- In a YouTube video, reported by the political website RawStory.com in August, well-known tea party activist Jerome Corsi elaborates on the biblical importance of child-bearing and implores followers to "(hold) the line" on the principle that "(s)ex is about the procreation of children." "(S)ex is not about fun," he says. "If you want to have fun, read a book, go to a movie." [RawStory.com, 8-28-2013]

-- Evidently, Surgery Is Kinda Boring: A 36-year-old patient is suing California's Torrance Memorial Medical Center, claiming that anesthesiologist Patrick Yang decorated her face with stickers while she was unconscious and that an aide took photos for laughs, later allegedly uploading them to Facebook. Dr. Yang and the aide were later disciplined but remained in good standing. Some hospitals (not Torrance Memorial yet) prohibit cellphones in operating rooms at all times. [Los Angeles Times, 9-4-2013]

-- According to his road manager, pioneer 1970s musician Sly Stone (of Sly and the Family Stone) has a lot of "real interesting ideas," including once trying to hire "ninja chicks and clowns" for his security entourage. Stone's latest brainstorm, reported London's The Guardian in August: form a musical group of albinos, which Stone says "could neutralize all the racial problems" that plague society. "To me," he said, "albinos are the most legitimate minority group of all." [The Guardian, 8-29-2013]

-- In the concluding race in September of the Rally de Misiones in Campo Viera, Argentina, it was important for drivers to complete the laps even if they had no chance of winning, but near the end, driver Sebastian Llamosas experienced a throttle malfunction and began coasting, still about a half-mile from the finish line. However, in a move reminiscent of actor Slim Pickens jumping on the atomic bomb in "Dr. Strangelove," Llamosas's quick-thinking partner Mauricio Sainz jumped onto the open engine and accelerated the car by hand while Llamosas steered the final distance. [La Voz (Cordoba, Argentina), 9-3-2013]

-- (1) Klaus Eder, a 25-year veteran team trainer for Germany, working its World Cup soccer qualifier match with Austria on Sept. 8, had a rough time despite the players' 3-0 win. Rushing onto the pitch during the game to treat player Marcel Schmelzer, Eder first tore a muscle in his left leg and then, as he fell to the ground, broke a finger. (Schmelzer's injury was comparatively minor.) (2) Dallas police officer Antonio Quintanilla was the victim in an August incident, but handled it by the book -- even though what the perp had done was urinate off a balcony at 3 a.m., onto Quintanilla's head. (Because the bladder-reliever did not know that Quintanilla was a cop, he was given a nonarrest citation.) Quintanilla also calmly helped a colleague investigate the crime scene -- locating the "wet and humid areas where the urine had fallen," according to the police report. [Press Association (London) via The Guardian, 9-8-2013; Bundesliga.com, 9-7-2013] [Dallas Observer, 8-5-2013]

A 35-year-old man was charged with sexual assault in Solvesborg, Sweden, in July, for allegedly following a 50-year-old woman home, apparently intending to flash her. After she made it safely inside before he could expose himself, she noticed some noise at the front door and found that the man had stuck his penis through the door's mail slot. [The Local (Stockholm), 9-11-2013]

One of the world's best-known strategists on the game of checkers passed away in November (2008). Richard Fortman was Illinois state champion six times and in the 1970s and 1980s published a seven-volume handbook on rules and tactics. Many people now considering the game would be astonished to know that, as in chess, there are masters and grandmasters, international rankings, that experts actually study historical opening moves and endgames, and that some play, move-by-move, via the U.S. Mail. A New York Times obituary noted that Fortman played as many as 100 games simultaneously, and won games blindfolded. Until the end, according to his daughter, Fortman spent "hours each day" playing checkers online. [New York Times, 11-30-2008]

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

"With its neatly cut lawns and luscious tropical vegetation," wrote a BBC News reporter in July, Miracle Village, Fla., is an "idyllic rural community" of 200 residents -- about half of whom are registered sex offenders, attracted to the settlement near Lake Okeechobee because laws and ordinances elsewhere in Florida harshly restrict where they can live (e.g., not within a half-mile of a school or park). Incumbent residents might have been apprehensive in 2009 when a pastor started the local rehabilitation ministry (one even called it a "nightmare on Elm Street"), but since then, no one could recall a single impropriety involving an offender, and lately, 10 to 20 more applications arrive each week (screened to keep out diagnosed pedophiles and those with a history of drugs or violence). [BBC News, 7-30-2013]

-- Dana Carter's debut as principal of Calimesa Elementary School in California's San Bernardino County was quite inauspicious, as parents quickly objected to his August policy of requiring kids to drop to one knee when addressing him. One parent said her daughter was forced to kneel while awaiting his attention and then to rise only when he lifted his arms. Carter said he would discontinue the policy and insisted he had instituted it for "safety" and not because he imagined himself as royalty. [KCBS-TV (Los Angeles), 8-20-2013]

-- Many consumers already distrust food imports from China, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture nonetheless announced recently (and "quietly," according to NPR) that it would exempt four Chinese companies altogether from USDA inspections of their processed chicken exports. The changes are part of the department's money-saving streamlining that also cuts back domestic regulation -- proposals that have already drawn criticism from the Government Accountability Office because they would replace many on-site USDA inspectors with employees of the food-processing plants themselves. [NPR, 9-5-2013]

-- It was a tough sell for performance artists Doug Melnyk and Ian Mozdzen to defend their controversial show at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival in July. (Wrote one reviewer: "What I saw (on the stage) were not one, not two, but three mayonnaise enemas. (I) do not need to see any more mayonnaise enemas for the rest of my lifetime.") Explained Melnyk, to a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reporter in July, if all you're trying to do is "figure out what people want and you make it for them, that's not art. ... (Y)ou're just a shoemaker." [Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 7-20-2013]

-- In August, the Mother Nature Network website showcased an array of camping gear seemingly designed for the daintiest of those ostensibly "roughing" it. The Blofield outdoor couch inflates in minutes to produce a facsimile of a Las Vegas lounge sofa. The Rolla Roaster's 42-inch-long steel fork assures elegance (and evenness) in marshmallow-roasting. For fashion-conscious backwoods women, Teva makes high-heeled hiking sandals ($330). The mother of all Swiss army knives, by Wenga, has so many gadgets that it suggests a parody of a Swiss army knife. To be a camper is to sleep in a tent, though, and why not the trailer-mounted Opera tent, including hardwood floors and a wine cooler? [Mother Nature Network, 8-9-2013]

-- A July direct-mail campaign by Canada's Conservative Party, intended to show concern for the disabled population, might have fallen short, according to a Toronto Star report. The first wave of brochures, "Supporting Jobs for All Canadians" (meaning the disabled as well), featured the well-known wheelchair symbol and a message in a series of Braille dots. However, the brochure was useless to blind recipients, who could neither see the dots nor read them, as the dots were printed on a flat surface. [Toronto Star, 7-26-2013]

-- By her own admission, Joan Hoyt, 61, of St. Louis, has difficulty writing, is easily distracted, needs frequent breaks, and "reads about 2 1/2 times slower than her peers" -- yet wants to be a lawyer. She filed a lawsuit recently against the Law School Admission Council for special accommodations to take the standardized admissions test after the council offered to grant her "only" 156 extra minutes for the exam. She also demanded a room by herself with a "white noise" machine and the ability to bring a computer and food and drinks to the exam. (States have made similar accommodations for bar exams -- but those applicants have already successfully endured the intellectual rigors of law school.) [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9-5-2013]

-- Is oral sex permitted in Orthodox Judaism? If so, must any lubricant used be kosher (or is kosher required only for substances ingested into the body)? These questions were not answered by California's Trigg Laboratories, which decided recently to vie for a kosher label for eight lines of Ecstasy lubricant under its Wet label -- and, following an inspection by the Rabbinical Council of California, was granted it. Many authorities believe that nonkosher products can be used if, like lipstick, they are "applied" but not ingested. [The Guardian (London), 7-17-2013]

-- Because We Can, That's Why: Two onetime roommates at the University of Michigan announced in August that they have developed a smartphone app to accommodate the questionable number of people who seek an easy way to share leftover food on restaurant plates (to save it from wasteful discarding). Using smartphones' location service, one diner could offer to clean another's plate or have a stranger rush to his own table for scraps. "We're not gonna make millions," one of the developers told NPR in July. [NPR, 7-29-2013]

Jian Yang, 33, a media executive in Singapore, told Reuters in September that he was concerned about the diminishing respect the Mattel Corp. is giving Barbie, reducing production in favor of trendier dolls like those modeled after the "Twilight" characters. Yang is apparently protective of his collection of more than 6,000 Barbies that dominate his row house -- which he estimates has cost him the equivalent of nearly $400,000 since he took up the obsession at age 13. He said his parents have come to accept his passion, but acknowledged that he had a few "ex-girlfriends" who felt "insecure" around his supermodels. Yang also owns about 3,000 non-Barbies, and on his last trip to New York bought 65 more. [Reuters, 9-2-2013]

It is now well-known how America's wounded warriors are victimized by the huge backlog of unaddressed Department of Veterans Affairs disability claims, with waits of many months or years. Nonetheless, the department is so proud of shrinking the backlog that it has begun to issue bonus checks to bureaucrats who meet the department's numerical goals in case-reduction (according to data from the Office of Personnel Management reported in the Washington Post in August). However, another Washington Post story, in September, reported that backlog reduction likely resulted merely from quickly approving the easier cases -- while the roster of serious or complicated cases continued to grow, along with appeals of decisions too-hastily made by the bonus-clutching department employees. [Washington Post, 8-25-2013, 9-10-2013]

(1) A 40-year-old woman was killed in a near-head-on collision in August in Spring Lake, Fla., while joy-riding on a back road at night on her dirt bike. She was accidentally hit by her husband, who was also joy-riding, in his all-terrain vehicle, and who also died. (2) A 50-year-old man in Berne, N.Y., was killed in August when, driving an all-terrain vehicle, he virtually decapitated himself on nearly invisible wire strung across a road as one of a series of booby traps he had installed to protect his marijuana plants. [Tampa Bay Times, 8-17-2013] [Albany Times Union, 9-1-2013]

About 20 percent of Japan's adult-video market is now "elder porn," with each production featuring one or more studly senior, and Shigeo Tokuda, 76, among the most popular. He told Toronto's Globe and Mail in October (2010) that he still "performs" physically "without Viagra," in at least one role a month opposite much younger women. His wife and adult daughter learned only two years ago, by accident, of his late-onset career (which began at age 60 when a filmmaker hired him for his "pervert's face"). Tokuda figures the "elder porn" genre will grow with Japan's increasing senior population. [Globe and Mail, 10-3-10]

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