Redneck Geek: Edward Teller, the famous theoretical physicist known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb" for his work on the World War II-era Manhattan Project, died in 2003, but his daughter Rene told The Free Press of Kinston, N.C., in November that she had recently discovered two of her father's precious mementos at a thrift shop near Kinston during a road trip to visit relatives. "(Father's) work was so demanding" she said, that he needed "recreational activities" and tried "the things you'd suspect," like chess. However, the two mementos were awards Teller had won at tractor pull competitions. "He'd show up at major tractor pulls" riding just a Cub Cadet mower, Rene said, and "leave the competition in the dust." (Teller's secret, she said, was using "nuclear fusion-based engines," which sponsors ultimately had to ban.) [Kinston Free Press, 11-12-2013]

(Ed. OK, I was hoaxed, and I still don't understand why. Don't hoaxes have to have a point? And no, if you're going to say that the physics was inaccurate here and that that was a tip-off, no, the physics could be wrong in a perfectly good story, and I'd be fine with it. The junk shop exists. It's famous for having all kinds of odd stuff. I still don't see why I should've been on the lookout for this story like I've avoided dozens hundreds of hoaxes/exaggerations in 26 years at this game. But there it is. Guilty!)

-- "It will be sort of my unique factor," said indulgent customer Lucy Luckayanko, describing her then-upcoming $3,000 eyeball jewelry implant from New York City's Park Avenue Laser Vision -- the insertion of a piece of platinum between the sclera (the white part) and the clear conjunctiva. Actually, said the shop's medical director, Dr. Emil Chynn, to WNEW-TV in November, it's "pretty safe." [WNEW-TV (New York City, 11-20-2013]

-- Restaurant Startups: (1) Japan's "cat cafes" allow the pet-starved to relax while dining by caressing house kittens that roam the facilities, but similar eateries have opened recently featuring owls (the Fukurou Sabou in Tokyo, Owl Family in Osaka). (The owls are not caressable and easily spooked by excessive noise.) (2) Liu Pengfei's Five Loaves and Two Fish restaurant in Fuzhou, China, is losing money rapidly despite overflow dining crowds, according to a December China Daily report, because he allows customers to pay only what they wish. (They must also wash out their bowls.) "I want to continue," he said, "as I believe the feeling of trust is contagious." [News Limited (Sydney), 11-5-2013] [China Daily, 12-4-2013]

-- It may be a cliche of domestic conflict, but physicists recently, earnestly, tackled the dynamics of toilet bowl "splash back." A stream delivered by a standing male, because it travels five times farther than a seated male's, produces a splash easily reaching seat and floor -- even without factoring in the "well-known" Plateau-Rayleigh instability -- the inevitable disintegration of a liquid stream "six or seven inches" after its formation. Short of recommending that men be seated, the researchers (speaking to a November conference) suggest "narrowing the angle" by "standing slightly to one side and aiming downwards at a low angle of impact." [BBC News, 11-6-2013]

-- The Human-Rodent Connection: University of British Columbia researchers, intent on judging whether blocking dopamine D4 receptors can reduce the urge to gamble in subjects other than humans, claimed in October to have devised a test that works on the dopamine receptors of rats -- especially those with a gambling problem. With a slot machine-like device dispensing sugar pellets, the researchers claimed they offered rats measured risks and even determined that rats are more likely to take risks immediately following a close loss (as are humans). [Science Daily, 10-29-2013]

Seven years ago, Michael Spann, now 29, suddenly doubled over in pain that felt like he "got hit in the head with a sledgehammer," and began crying blood. Despite consulting doctors, including two visits with extensive lab work at the venerable Cleveland Clinic, the Antioch, Tenn., man told Nashville's The Tennessean in October that he is resigned to an "idiopathic condition" -- a disease without apparent cause. Spann's main wish now is just to hold a job, in that fellow workers, and customers, tend not to react well to a man bleeding from the eyes (even though his once-daily episodes have become more sporadic). [The Tennessean, 10-17-2013]

-- The sex life of the anglerfish, according to a Wired.com interview in November with evolutionary biologist Theodore Pietsch, is as dismal as any on planet Earth. According to Wired: "Boy meets girl, boy bites girl, boy's mouth fuses to girl's body, boy lives the rest of his life attached to girl, sharing her blood and supplying her with sperm." Only 1 percent of males ever hook up with females (because the ocean floor is dark), said Pietsch. The rest starve to death as virgins. [Wired.com, 11-8-2013]

-- Professor Pietsch may know his anglerfish, but Marlene Zuk of the University of Minnesota knows her insects, including the mating mechanics of damselflies, crickets and cockroaches, which she described for The New York Times in November. The damselfly male's penis is a Swiss Army knife-like contraption (necessary to access the female's well-hidden eggs). The cricket easily produces sperm, but then awaits its draining through a "long stem" "for several minutes" to achieve fertilization. Cockroaches, Professor Zuk wrote, mate by "blind trust" as they hook up back-to-back and, with no neck, cannot even glance over a shoulder to check on their work. [New York Times, 11-30-2013]

-- Elephant Whisperer: Nirmala Toppo, 14, is apparently the one to call if wild elephants overrun your village, especially in India's Orissa and Jharkhand states, which are still home to hundreds of marauding pachyderms. Her latest pied-piper act, in June, emptied a herd of 11 out of the industrial city of Rourkela. Said Toppo: "First I pray and then talk to the herd. I tell them this is not your home. You should return where you belong." Somehow, the elephants followed her for miles away from the town, according to an October BBC News dispatch. [BBC News, 10-29-2013]

The daunting problems that faced the launch of the HealthCare.gov website in October were merely symptoms of the federal government's often snail-like pace at integrating digital innovations common to everyday America. A December New York Times report revealed that The Federal Register (the daily journal of the U.S. government) still receives original content from some agencies on virtually obsolete 3.5-inch floppy disks -- and (because of unamended legal requirements) its work-order authorizations from some agencies on disks hand-delivered inside the Washington Beltway by courier. Contractors can be frustrated as well since, though they operate with top-of-the-line digital efficiency internally, they must sometimes downgrade to interface with their government clients. [New York Times, 12-6-2013]

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) An already-distinctive man (367 pounds) was arrested in Everett, Wash., for a December grocery store shoplifting because he was also wearing an easily noticed purple sock and over two hours later was still wearing it when police caught up to him and questioned him. (2) A 23-year-old woman was arrested in Crestview, Fla., in November for shoplifting a "toy" from an adult store -- before inquiring about a job there. She had professed her innocence until shown the surveillance video, when she said (according to the police report), "Oh, my God. Look at what I'm doing. ... I'm gonna cry." [The Herald (Everett), 12-4-2013] [Daily News of Northwest Florida, 11-15-2013]

In October, an Ohio judge turned down a petition by Donald Miller Jr., asking to be ruled "alive." "You're still deceased as far as the law is concerned," Probate Judge Allan Davis told him because state law requires challenges to his declaration of death (obtained by Miller's wife in 1994) to be filed within three years. Said Judge Davis, "I don't know where that leaves you." [The Courier (Findlay, Ohio), 10-8-2013]

Escape From L.A.: Hundreds of Los Angeles' down-and-out live not just underneath local freeways but inside their concrete structures, according to a June (2009) Los Angeles Times report. The largest "home" is a gymnasium-sized cavern under the Interstate 10 freeway in the suburb of Baldwin Park. That space is nearly inaccessible, requiring squeezing through a rusty grating, traversing a narrow ledge and descending a ladder to reach "a vast, vaultlike netherworld, strewn with garbage and syringes," with toys and rattles and a cat carcass visible on an upper platform only marginally harder for rats to reach. Authorities fear the area, but every few years, state officials try to seal the entrance (which the homeless quickly unseal as soon as the officials leave). [Los Angeles Times, 5-29-2009]

Thanks This Week to Kevin Kohler, Jim Colucci, Frank Smith, and Gerald Sacks, and 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).

A Swedish TV show, "Biss och Kajs," found itself in the spotlight in November -- in Russia, where government-run television apparently used it to send a political message to Ukraine by highlighting the program's theme of teaching children about bodily functions. The episode Russia chose featured three bulkily-costumed actors sitting around talking -- with one dressed in yellow, one in brown, and the other unmistakably as a large, nude human posterior. ("Biss och Kajs" is highly regarded in Sweden; "biss" and "kajs" refer, respectively to the yellow and brown functions.) Ukraine (against Russia's wishes) is considering a trade agreement with the European Union, and, the Russian station director said, pointedly, "There you have European values in all their glory." [BBC News, 12-3-2013]

-- The Bank of England, arguing before the U.K.'s Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards in October, warned against limiting the bonuses that bankers have come to expect from their lucrative deals -- because that might encroach on their "human rights." The Bank suggested it is a human rights violation even to ask senior executives to demonstrate that they tried hard to comply with banking laws (because it is the government's job to prove violations). [Huffington Post U.K., 10-8-2013]

-- (1) A young woman, accosted by a robber on Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill in October, told the man she was a low-paid intern -- but an intern for the National Security Agency, and that within minutes of robbing her, the man would be tracked down by ubiquitous NSA surveillance. She said, later (reported the Washington Examiner), the man just "looked at me and ran away (empty-handed)." (2) A 29-year-old cafeteria worker at Sullivan East High School in Blountville, Tenn., swore to police on the scene in October that she was not the one who took money from a co-worker's purse, and she voluntarily stripped to near-nakedness to demonstrate her innocence. "See? I don't have it," she said. Moments later, an officer found the missing $27 stuffed in the woman's shoe. [Washington Examiner, 10-15-2013] [Associated Press via Times Free Press (Chattanooga), 10-19-2013]

-- Katarzyna Dryden-Chouen and her husband Clive, busted in a London police raid last year with a marijuana grow operation that had netted an estimated (equivalent) of $450,000, insisted to a jury in October that their massive haul was not for sale but for "personal" use -- in that they worship the Hindu god Shiva, and truly believed that the world would end soon and that they needed a sizable offering to burn. (Actually, the jury bought it. "Distribution" charges were dismissed, but the couple still faces jail for their cultivation activity.) [The Citizen (Gloucester, England, 10-23-2013] [Daily Mail, 11-11-2013]

-- The Seattle City Council voted in October to seize a waterfront parking lot by eminent domain from the 103-year-old owner after negotiations to buy the property on the open market broke down. The state is funding a six-year tunnel-digging project in the area, and the city has decided it needs the property for not-yet-specified uses --except that in one part of the property, the city said it plans to operate a parking lot. [KCPQ-TV (Seattle), 10-22-2013]

-- (1) Larry Poulos was stopped on an Arlington, Tex., street in September, bleeding from a head wound and complaining that he had just been robbed by two men. A friend of Poulos later corroborated that, but police also learned that the money Poulos had been carrying was the proceeds of his having robbed a credit union earlier that evening. He was treated for his wounds and then arrested. (2) At least 44 health workers were struck with a suspected norovirus in September at a Creative Health Care Management convention in Huron, Ohio. (Noroviruses are sometimes called the "Norwalk" virus, named after one notable outbreak in 1968 in Norwalk, Ohio, about 12 miles from Huron.) [Dallas Morning News, 9-5-2013] [Sandusky Register, 9-18-2013]

-- "Masculine" Values: Breakaway former officials of the Boy Scouts of America met in Nashville, Tenn., in September to establish a Scouts-type organization that can freely discourage homosexuality, with one leader promising Fox News that the result would be "a more masculine" program. Another prominent attendee, also quoted in the Fox News dispatch, described his sorrow at the BSA's embrace of gay boys. Since this issue broke, he said, "I've cried a river." [Fox News, 9-8-2013]

-- In November, Sweden's National Housing Board, in charge of building codes, ordered the country's famous Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi (built anew annually out of fresh ice blocks) to install fire alarms. "We were a little surprised when we found out," said a spokeswoman (who acknowledged that the hotel's mattresses and pillows could catch fire). [The Local (Stockholm), 11-14-2013]

-- Conscience-Cleansing: Greg Gulbransen of Oyster Bay, N.Y., announced in September that he was about to sue the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for dragging its feet in implementing the Gulbransen-inspired 2007 federal legislation that he said would save lives, especially those of toddlers. The unimplemented law would force car manufacturers to install rear-facing cameras as standard equipment, a cause Gulbransen embraced after accidentally, fatally, backing over his own toddler in the family's BMW SUV. [OpposingViews.com, 9-25-2013]

-- An exhaustive American Civil Liberties Union report in November showed that more than 3,200 people are serving life sentences in the U.S. for non-violent offenses (about 80 percent for drug crimes). Most were sentenced under "three-strikes"-type laws in which the final straw might be for trivial drug possession, for instance, or for a petty theft such as the $159-jacket shoplifting in Louisiana, or the two-jersey theft from a Foot Locker. Said the jacket thief, Timothy Jackson, "I know that for my crime I had to do some time but . . . I have met people here whose crimes are a lot badder with way less time." Added his sister, "You can take a life and get 15 or 16 years," but her brother "will stay in jail forever. He didn't kill the jacket!" [The Guardian (London), 11-13-2013]

-- (1) Douglas Yim, 33, was convicted in September of murdering a 25-year-old man in Oakland, Calif., in 2011 after an evening of teasing by the man, who mocked Yim's certainty about the existence of God. (2) A 27-year-old yoga fanatic in St. Austell, England, drowned in a pit in May during a well-publicized attempt to create an "out-of-body experience" to get as close to death as possible but without going over the line. [San Francisco Examiner, 9-4-2013] [Cornish Guardian (Cornwall), 10-30-2013]

-- Recurring Themes: (1) Lawrence Briggs, 18, was arrested in Marshalltown, Iowa, in November after he walked out of a Sports Page store with $153 worth of merchandise he did not pay for. Moments earlier, he had filled out an application to work at Sports Page, and when surveillance cameras exposed him, managers called him in for an "interview," and police made the arrest. (2) Troy Mitchell, 47, was arrested after allegedly robbing the Valley First Credit Union in Modesto, Calif., on May 14th. While he was standing at the teller's window, another employee of Valley First saluted him ("Hi, Troy") because he remembered Mitchell from April 3rd, when he had applied for a car loan. [Times Republican (Marshalltown), 11-5-2013] [The Record (Stockton, Calif.), 10-23-2013]

-- Australian Marcus Einfeld (a prominent lawyer, federal judge, and Jewish community leader) was once so revered that one organization named him a "living treasure," but he fell into total disrepute in 2006 by deciding to fight a simple speeding ticket. By March 2009, Einfeld had been sentenced to two years in prison for perjury and obstructing justice for lying in four elaborate detailed schemes to "prove" that he was not driving that day. His original defense (that he had loaned the car to a friend who then passed away) was accepted by the judge, but dogged reporting by Sydney's Daily Telegraph revealed that Einfeld lied, and lied to cover up each successive lie. Encouraged, reporters went on to uncover Einfeld's bogus college degrees and awards and a double-billing fraud against the government. (The speeding ticket would have cost about $80.) [The Australian, 3-20-2009]

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

Is the signature smell of Texas A&M University more "Italian lemon, bergamot and iced pineapple" (that open into "a body of vivid florals, raw nutmeg and cinnamon") or more "bat feces" and "chilifest stink"? The two commentaries were contrasted in a November Wall Street Journal report on the introduction of Masik Collegiate Fragrances' Texas A&M cologne (one of 17 Masik college clients) at around $40 for a 1.7-ounce bottle. Louisiana State University's scent conjures up, insisted one grad, the campus's oak trees, but so far has pulled in only $5,500 for the school. (To a football rival of LSU, the school's classic smell is less oak tree than "corn dog.") The apparent gold standard of fan fragrance is New York Yankees cologne, which earned the team nearly $10 million in 2012. [Wall Street Journal, 11-9-2013]

-- Among America's most prolific "fathers" (in this case, perhaps better considered "egg-fertilizers") are Nathaniel Smith, age 39, who claimed on TV's "Divorce Court" in September that he is the father of 27, and the late Samuel Whitney, whose grown stepdaughter Lexie Woods learned that he claimed 54 before he died in July at age 87. Smith (known in Dayton, Ohio, as "Hustle Simmons") insisted that he is a fine father (doesn't smoke or drink, keeps contact with most of the kids, has "only" 21 child-support orders out), and besides, he told WHIO-TV, "I know of people who have even more than me." (Among Whitney's belongings, said Woods, were a "pile" of birth certificates and a stash of maximum-strength Viagra. "He was a likable man, a ladies' man.") [WHIO-TV, 9-10-2013] [Arizona Republic, 8-24-2013; New York Daily News, 8-27-2013]

-- Latest Collateral Damage: (1) In October, a 28-year-old man, reeling from a domestic argument in Port Richey, Fla., put a gun to his head and, against his girlfriend's pleas, fired. As a neighbor across the street stood on her porch, the suicide bullet left the victim's head and made three wounds on the neighbor's leg, sending her to the hospital. (2) About a week later, on the Norwegian island of Vesteroy, a moose hunter missed his target but hit an obscured cottage in the distance, wounding a man in his 70s as he answered nature's call. He was airlifted to Ullevaal University Hospital in Oslo. [Tampa Bay Times, 10-17-2013] [NewsInEnglish.no (Oslo), 10-25-2013]

-- In November, barely two weeks after a small plane carrying 10 skydivers left no survivors when it crashed on the way to an exhibition near Brussels, Belgium, nine skydivers were able to dive for safety when two planes headed for a tandem jump collided near Superior, Wis. News stories did not address how experienced skydivers escaped one plane but not the other. [WCCO-TV (Minneapolis), 11-2-2013; CNN, 10-19-2013]

-- Animal Sacrifice -- in America: In September, Orthodox Jewish communities once again staged traditional kaparot, in which chickens are killed in a prescribed way for the purpose of "transferring" a believer's latest sins over to the chicken (whose death banishes the sins). (In many such ceremonies, the chickens are donated for food, but protesters in Los Angeles criticized rogue practitioners who simply tossed carcasses into the trash.) In November, Miami-Dade County animal services found a severely injured chicken with a family's 4-by-6 photograph protruding from its chest, having been haphazardly "implanted," along with a note containing several hand-written names, apparently a casualty of local Santeria services. [Los Angeles Times, 9-11-2013] [WSVN-TV (Miami), 11-18-2013]

-- Some Americans still believe that stock market sales are typically made human-to-human, but the vast majority of buys and sells now are made automatically by computers, running pattern-detecting programs designed to execute millions of trades, in some cases, less than one second before rival computer programs attempt the same trades. In September, a Federal Reserve Board crisis involved, at most, seven milliseconds' time. The Fed releases market-crucial news typically at exactly 2 p.m. Washington, D.C., time, tightly controlled, transmitted by designated news agents via fiber optic cable. On Sept. 18, somehow, traders in Chicago reportedly beat traders elsewhere to deal an estimated $600 million worth of assets -- when theoretically, access to the Fed's news should have been random. (In other words, the drive to shave milliseconds off the "speed of light" has become quite profitable.) [CNBC, 9-24-2013; Mother Jones, 9-24-2013]

-- Toilets are always a favorite protest symbol, most recently employed by David Labbe, disputing a zoning decision by officials in Augusta, Maine, preventing the sale of his house to Dunkin' Donuts (for, he said, three times what he paid), and he has begun lining his property with discarded toilets. Augusta-native Labbe says he has given up on his city and his neighbors (who fear traffic problems if a Dunkin Donuts opens). (On the same day, coincidentally, toilets made news in Los Angeles, where YoYo Li was about to open the city's first toilet-themed restaurant, patterned after several in Taiwan in which diners squat at tables and eat off commode-shaped serving vessels.) [Portland Press Herald, 10-14-2013] [Los Angeles Times, 10-14-2013]

-- In November, Michael Brown, 19, became the most recent person with poor decision-making skills forced to report to a police station (this, in College Station, Texas) in the middle of the night to ask that officers please remove the handcuffs he had been playing around with. (Following the officers' mandatory records check, it was learned that Brown had an arrest warrant for criminal mischief, and following a mandatory search, that he also had two ounces of marijuana in his pocket.) [The Eagle (Bryan-College Station), 11-14-2013]

-- Can't Possibly Be True: Twice again, in November, men wrongfully convicted of major, chilling crimes, who were finally freed after serving long sentences, claimed upon release that they were -- somehow -- not bitter. Ryan Ferguson was released in Missouri after serving almost 10 years for a murder he surely knew nothing about (convicted because a prosecutor withheld exculpatory evidence). Derrick Deacon was freed in New York after nearly 25 years -- served because the eyewitness (who finally recanted) had identified Deacon out of fear of retaliation by the Jamaican gang member she actually saw. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 11-13-2013] [New York Post, 11-21-2013]

-- It was Linda Ducharme's turn in the spotlight in November as one of a seemingly increasing number of people who commit to bethrothing themselves to inanimate objects ("objectophiles," "mechaphiles"). The Gibsonton, Fla., woman's spouse is a Ferris wheel called the Sky Diva, and their relationship was chronicled on the Logo TV channel's show "What!?" (Most famously, Erika La Tour Eiffel of San Francisco staged her 2008 wedding to the Eiffel Tower.) [WTSP-TV (St. Petersburg, Fla.), 11-13-2013] [Daily Telegraph (London), 6-4-2008]

-- Many men have fallen for underage-sex stings (tricked by NBC's "To Catch a Predator" or by law enforcement nationwide), but perhaps Cliff Oshman, 64, of Daytona Beach is the first to have brought his wife and young daughter along to meet the girl he was seducing. Oshman was arrested in October, and as usual, the "victim" did not exist except as the persona of an undercover cop. [Orlando Sentinel, 10-5-2013]

-- Dwarfs formerly could volunteer to be playfully treated in American nightclubs, but such venues now appear limited to Europe. (1) A club in the German coastal town of Cuxhaven might be in trouble following a September incident in which a 42-year-old dwarf accidentally fell off of a podium before engaging in the club's contest, "Lilliputian Action," in which customers chase an elusive dwarf. (2) London's Hippodrome Casino has reportedly run a series of ads seeking dwarfs (maximum height: 4 feet, 9 inches) for a special crew of bouncers and door guards to be unveiled in December. [The Local (Berlin), 9-24-2013] [Heart Radio (London), 11-19-2013]

A formal investigation into the strange death of British intelligence code-breaker Gareth Williams concluded in November with a police judgment that the death was an accident, despite the body's having been discovered inside a zippered and padlocked garment bag in an otherwise unused bathtub in his London apartment. An earlier inquest into the 2010 death had unsatisfactorily failed to rule out foul play, setting up the police examination, but two facts stood out, according to the officer in charge: The key to the padlock was found within easy reach of the bag, and, according to experts, even though no usable fingerprints or DNA was found in the apartment, it had not been "deep-cleaned" (as might be expected in a death with intel-op implications). [New York Times, 11-14-2013]

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