A 61-year-old Texas man admitted to a hospital not long ago appearing to be falling-down-drunk, even though denying having had even a single drink, was discovered to be unintentionally manufacturing beer in his stomach. With "auto-brewery syndrome," stomach-based yeast automatically ferments all starches (even vegetables or grains) passing through, converting them into ethanol. Normally, natural stomach bacteria control the yeast, but if, for example, antibiotics had inadvertently eliminated the bacteria, the yeast would prevail. The case was reported in a recent International Journal of Clinical Medicine. [NPR, 9-17- 2013]

-- Update: As several additional states debate permitting marijuana use by a doctor's prescription, Irvin Rosenfeld presented his own experience in August to a packed house at Kentucky's state capitol. Rosenfeld suffers from painful bone tumors (diagnosed, with a poor prognosis, in 1963) and began smoking dope in the federal government's Compassionate Investigational Drug program in 1982 -- since then consuming 130,000 government-supplied joints (12 per day, carefully measured), which he said absolutely had prolonged his life. "I didn't ask for my bone disease," he said. "All I asked for is the best medicine possible." [WLKY-TV (Lexington, Ky.), 8-20-2013, 8-21-2013]

-- While Congress struggled recently to pass a budget or an increase to the national debt limit, one program made it through rather easily, according to a September New York Times report: farm subsidies for inactive "farmers." The subsidies were renewed, based on a 2008 law, virtually assuring that more than 18,000 in-name-only farmers (who received $24 million last year) will not be cut off. Included, according to a 2012 Government Accountability Office report, were recipients at 2,300 "farms" that had not grown a single crop in five years (including 622 without a crop in 10 years). [New York Times, 9-10-2013]

-- "Close Enough for Government Work": The security contractor USIS, which does $2.45 billion worth of background checks for the National Security Agency and other departments (and had cleared file-leaker Edward Snowden and the Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis), gets paid only for completed files. However, full background checks often require months of work, and at some point, reported The New York Times in September, when USIS needed cash, it would "flush" still-open files, treating them as completed, and submit them for payment -- as happened with the files of Snowden and Alexis. In both cases, reported the Times, subsequent, crucial information failed to make it into the flushed files. [New York Times, 9-28-2013]

(1) In separate incidents of suspected thefts in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in January (all within about a month), police arrested John Lennon Ribeiro Siqueira, John Lennon Fonseca Ferreira and John Lennon Camargos Gomes. (2) Convicted for drug possession in May in Rockland County, N.Y.: Mr. Genghis Khan, 23. (3) Charged with carjacking in July in Hilo, Hawaii: Mr. Alkapone Cruz-Bailes, 19. (4) Mr. Beezow Doo-doo Zoppitybop-bop-bop, featured in News of the Weird after his December 2011 drug arrest in Madison, Wis., was arrested in August on drug charges in Washington County, Iowa. [Daily Mail (London), 2-5-2013] [Nyack Patch, 5-7-2013] [KHNL-TV (Honolulu), 7-20-2013] [Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee), 8-17-2013]

-- The missing element in obtuse doctoral dissertations in science is that they cannot be danced to, according to writer John Bohannon and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which has established an annual "Dance Your Ph.D" video competition, and this year's finalists were being selected at press time. Sarah Wilk was an entrant, featured in a Wall Street Journal report using glowing green balls and a flaming Hula-Hoop to help illustrate her "Odd-Z Transactinide Compound Nucleus Reactions Including Discovery of 260-Bh." So was Peter Liddicoat, using a chorus line of a juggler and a ballerina and others for "Evolution of Nanostructural Architecture in 7000 Series Aluminum Alloys During Strengthening by Age-Hardening and Severe Plastic Deformation." [Wall Street Journal, 9-24-2013]

-- Steven Cohen, eager to make a point that his country of residence, France, is more oppressive to artists than his native South Africa, staged a one-man demonstration at the Eiffel Tower in September. Wearing a bird outfit, tights and a garter, he had for some reason tethered a live chicken to his exposed penis with a long ribbon. After Cohen was arrested for indecent exposure, his lawyer complained that her client had been kept in custody too long for such a minor charge. "France," she exclaimed, "is throwing artists in prison." [The Local (Paris), 9-11-2013]

-- Use What You Have: (1) Abbott Griffin, 57, was arrested in Toledo, Ohio, in August and charged with robbing a Circle K convenience store, during which he had allegedly grabbed the clerk and bashed him repeatedly with a Bible. (2) One resident of a shelter in Seattle was charged in August with assaulting another in a dispute over TV-set volume, using a tub of butter-substitute. (3) Ms. Honesty Keener, 37, was convicted in Gloucester County, N.J., in August of a 2011 break-in during which she demanded money from the female resident under threat of rubbing her open sores over the resident's skin. [Toledo Blade, 8-31-2013] [KOMO-TV (Seattle), 8-27-2013] [South Jersey Times, 8-23-2013]

-- New Kinds of Field Sobriety Tests: (1) Deaaron Hearn, 22, was arrested in Iowa City, Iowa, in October after the traffic officer told him to summon a friend to drive his car home, and Hearn responded by reaching into his pocket, clumsily placing a $20 bill to his ear, and attempting a phone call. (2) In October, with her two children waiting in the car at a Holyoke, Mass., Shell gas station, Brenda Diaz, 26, allegedly attacked the store's Slushie machine, naked (before police arrived to taser, pepper-spray and arrest her). [Iowa City Press-Citizen, 10-4-2013] [WWLP-TV (Springfield, Mass.), 10-7-2013]

-- Surely, most shoplifting occurs because the thieves wish merely to obtain goods without paying. Occasionally, as with the arrest of Christopher Wiener, 26, in Fargo, N.D., in July, an alternative theory suggests itself and raises the question: Would it be more embarrassing to be seen actually purchasing an artificial vagina (from the Romantix adult bookstore) than to be arrested for shoplifting it? [Fargo Forum via Grand Forks Herald, 7-3-2013]

"We Treat Them Like Family": (1) Deborah Cipriani, 55, of North Ridgefield, Ohio, runs from her home America's only rescue center for skunks, and naturally, she told London's Daily Mail in October, some of her companions like to sleep with her in bed (which is reportedly fine with partner Kevin). (2) Diane Westcott and her husband (also named Kevin), of Layton, Utah, have four cats and a dog, but since 2003 also at least one goose, who of course also sleeps with her. "Gladys" wears diapers because, as Diane explained (with understatement), it is "not possible" to potty train a goose. [Daily Mail, 10-7-2013] [KSTU-TV (Salt Lake City), 10-5-2013]

(1) A 68-year-old hiker with a broken ankle was killed in Mansfield, Australia, in August following his "successful" lift from the bush by an Ambulance Victoria helicopter. Moments after he was raised, airborne, about 30 yards off the ground, he fell to his death. (2) A 52-year-old man was killed in an explosion in Rowan County, Ky., in July when he lit a cigarette while hooked up to an oxygen supply. The man had already survived three explosions under the same circumstances. [Australian Broadcasting Corp. News, 8-31-2013] [WKYT-TV (Lexington, Ky.), 7-25-2013]

Leading Economic Indicator: Rising prices of synthetic fertilizers and organic foods have intensified the collection of bird droppings on 20 climatically ideal islands off the coast of Peru where 12-inch-thick seabird guano coats the land. In the 19th century, China fought with Peru on the high seas for the right to mine the guano, which at that time was 150 feet high in places. Said an official of the Peruvian company that controls guano production (to a New York Times reporter in May (2008)), "Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it." The exceptionally dry climate means that 12,000 to 15,000 tons of guano are available yearly. [New York Times, 5-30-2008]

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.