In February, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that David Bell could not avoid being charged with DUI merely because he had been sober enough to pass all six "field sobriety tests" administered during a traffic stop. It was enough, the court said, that he had admitted drinking that night. A few days later, the Austin American-Statesman reported on Texan Larry Davis' struggle to clear the 2013 DWI arrest from his record -- since he had blown a 0.0 alcohol reading that night and then had voluntarily undergone a blood test for other impairing drugs and come up clean on that. Davis had admitted to "one drink," but allegedly failed a "field sobriety test" (in the opinion of the arresting officer, anyway). (Davis' case is still unresolved, but since he has been declared an "indigent," the state covers his legal expenses.) [Associated Press via WRCB-TV (Chattanooga), 2-21-2014] [Austin American-Statesman, 2-24-2013]

-- Briton Jack Harvey, 42, drew a three-plus-year sentence in Truro Crown Court in February following his guilty plea on drug charges. Earlier, he had insisted that police had planted the drugs they found in his house and car, and even that a stranger (maybe "some filthy woman," he said) must be the owner of that cocaine and heroin that police found taped to his testicles. [WestBriton.co.uk, 2-6-2014]

-- Logical: (1) John Rogers of Geneva, Fla., recently acquitted in a shooting death (using Florida's "stand your ground" defense), convinced a judge in February to return his guns, which police had confiscated when they arrested him. Rogers said he needs the guns for protection because he is particularly vulnerable -- in that he is blind. (2) Rogerio Scotton, challenging federal charges in January that he lied to immigration officials about his "marriage" to a Cuban woman (a "sham," said prosecutors), offered to prove the matrimony's bona fides by showing the couple's conjugal-bed videos in open court. (The judge instructed Scotton to find a "less intrusive" way to make the same point.) [WESH-TV (Orlando), 2-21-2014] [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 1-22-2014]

-- The firm 3D Babies has begun selling (for $800) 8-inch-long fetal sculptures developed from 3-D ultrasound images, computer graphics and 3-D printing technology ("printing" successive layers of material continuously, eventually creating a physical object). (Four-inch and 2-inch models are available for $400 and $200, respectively.) For celebrity hounds who are not planning imminent parenthood, the company sells one fetal sculpture off the shelf: the Kim Kardashian-Kanye West fetus ("Baby North West") for only $250. [FastCoDesign.com, 1-17-2014]

-- Ms. Blondie Bennett (her recently acquired real name), 38, is not just a California model selling provocative "Barbie doll" photos of herself online (featuring her recently augmented 32JJ breast implants). She is at work on a longer-range project to remake herself completely as a human Barbie doll -- to include the popular critique that Barbie represents not only bodily perfection but mindlessness. Bennett said she has had 20 hypnotherapy sessions to "help" her appear more confused and vacant, according to news reports. "I want people to see me as a plastic sex doll, and being brainless is a big part of that." She said she is doing well, in that she recently got lost driving to her mother's house. [Daily Mail, 2-19-2014; Huffington Post, 2-19-2014]

First-World Problems: The designer Giorgio Armani is one of the most recent one-day sponsors of a United Nations project to send safe drinking water to help some of the planet's 768 million people without access to a clean supply. The Tap Project program signs up smartphone users with a reward: that it will donate one day's clean water to a child for anyone who can manage to refrain from picking up his or her phone for 10 consecutive minutes. Tap Project screens even feature a 10-minute countdown clock to help do-gooders remain strong in the face of anxiety over the brief loss of access to Facebook, online games, et al. [TreeHugger.com, 2-26-2014]

-- British litigant Jane Mulcahy was turned down twice recently in her attempts to sue her former divorce lawyers for negligence -- although they had won her case, defeating her husband's contentions. The lawyers were negligent, she said, because they never told her that if she "won" the lawsuit, the marriage would be over. Lord Justice Briggs, in the second appeal, said that Mulcahy's Roman Catholic faith should have tipped her off that "divorce" ended the marriage. [The Independent (London), 1-10-2014]

-- Clients Richard and Sandra Weiner filed a lawsuit in Paterson, N.J., in January against their former real estate agent, Robert Lindsay, who they said had a blatant conflict of interest while offering the Weiners' house for sale. The agent allegedly, purposely, high-balled the asking price so that the house would remain unsold longer -- so that two agents (Lindsay and Jeannemarie Phelan) could meet there frequently, using a duplicate key to bypass the lockbox recorder, and have sexual liaisons. The agents denied the charge, but Coldwell Banker terminated their services. [Courthouse News Service, 12-20-2013]

-- As Americans know, Canada's health care system, funded largely by taxes, is dramatically less expensive than America's -- well, unless you're a dog. The Canadian news service CTV reported in February that increasingly, pet owners in Winnipeg, Manitoba, are making the 120-mile car trip to Grand Forks, N.D., because U.S. veterinarian prices are significantly lower than comparable services by Canadian vets. One Winnipeg family, facing a $650 teeth-cleaning plus blood work for Jackson, their Shitzu, took him on the road trip to Grand Forks, where the bill came to $205. [CTV News, 2-13-2014]

-- The Internal Revenue Service might have second thoughts about suing William Berroyer to recover a $60,000 tax underpayment since, by the time Berroyer was finished with them, the federal government had been ordered to write Berroyer (now age 66) checks totaling nearly 15 times that much. Berroyer, who was on his way out of the IRS office in Hauppauge, N.Y., after his first meeting in 2008, tripped over a phone cord and fell against a filing cabinet, injuring himself so severely that he required a 17-day hospital stay and rehabilitation and alleged long-term confinement to a wheelchair. [New York Post, 1-20-2014]

-- In February, after a 43-year-old rape victim in Cowlitz County, Wash., missed court hearings, prosecutors, needing her testimony, filed for a rare "material witness" warrant to assure her availability -- by asking the judge to jail her. She acknowledged her anxieties, but promised to do better if the judge would dismiss the warrant. She pointed out that prosecutors were seeking to lock her up against her will -- to force her to testify that a rapist had once locked her up against her will (in addition to committing other indignities). (The sympathetic judge dismissed the warrant, but the woman has since missed another court date.) [The Daily News (Longview, Wash.), 2-21-2014]

Unclear on the Concept: (1) Michael Williams, 53, was arrested in Sumter, S.C., in February after his debit card was rejected as payment at the Applebee's restaurant. Police were called when Williams' backup form of payment was a "U.S. currency" bill in the denomination of $1 trillion. (2) Dyonta Rose, 29, in police custody the night of Feb. 22 in Dallas for possession of narcotics, fled the police cruiser still wearing his handcuffs. Rose was tracked down a short time later when he called 911 to ask for an ambulance because his handcuffs were cutting off circulation in his arm. [The State (Columbia, S.C.), 2-21-2014] [KMOV-TV (St. Louis), 2-25-2014]

(1) Twenty-two people were killed just north of Baghdad in February (and 15 injured) from a devastating suicide-bomb blast. The 37 were Sunni militants attending a class on how to be suicide bombers when the teacher's vest accidentally exploded. (2) An 86-year-old man, celebrating his selection in November by the Howard Stern radio show to be treated to a fancy meal followed by a menage-a-trois session with prostitutes at Nevada's famed Bunny Ranch, called it "the greatest day of my life." However, he failed to make it through dinner, as he choked to death on a piece of steak. [New York Times, 2-10-2014] [New York Daily News, 12-14-2013]

Thanks This Week to Paul Peterson, Mel Birge, Russell Bell, Tim Kirby, Sam Scrutchins, and Milford Sprecher, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

The Drug Users Resource Center in Vancouver, British Columbia (heralded previously in News of the Weird for a vending machine dispensing 25-cent crack-cocaine pipes to discourage addicts from committing crimes to fund their habit), launched a program in August to supply alcoholics with beer-brewing and wine-making ingredients to discourage them from drinking rubbing alcohol, hand-sanitizer and mouthwash. The DURC "co-op" sells, for $10 monthly, brewing mix in a pre-hopped beer kit, but eventually, an official said, co-op members will brew from scratch, including boiling, mashing and milling. A civic leader told Canada's National Post that the program has already begun to reduce crime in areas frequented by alcoholics. [National Post, 2-19-2014]

-- Rape-prevention activists estimate that local governments have backlogs of untested evidentiary "rape kits" that total up to 400,000 nationally -- signifying free crimes for rapists, lost justice for victims, and ruined reputations for men wrongly arrested. (As TV police dramas emphasize, many rape victims are reluctant to submit to the indignity of swabbing and photographing so soon after being violated and comply only because detectives assure them of the rape kit's importance.) Memphis, Tenn., has an inventory of 12,000, and the state of Texas at least 16,000 -- dating back to the 1980s. However, the cost of testing (about $500 each) is daunting for many city budgets, according to a February report by the Rape Kit Action Project in New York. [CBS News, 2-23-2014]

-- More Texas Justice: After 37 years in prison, Jerry Hartfield goes to court in April for a retrial of his 1977 conviction (and death sentence) for murder in Bay City, Texas. Actually, the 1977 conviction was overturned, but before Hartfield could demand his release (he is described in court documents as illiterate with an IQ of 51), the then-governor commuted the sentence to life in prison in 1983. It was only in 2006 that a fellow inmate persuaded Hartfield that the commutation was illusory -- since there was, at that point, no "sentence" to commute. Hartfield's lawyers call Texas' treatment a blatant violation of his constitutional right to a "speedy" trial, but prosecutors suggest that it is Hartfield's own fault that he has remained in prison the last 30 years. [Associated Press via Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2-14-2014]

-- Congressional wisdom has prevented the federal government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from using competitive bids to decide how much to pay for medical devices -- and among the most steeply overpriced products are "vacuum erection systems" ("penis pumps") that invigorate seniors' lives. CMS pays an average of $360, while the Department of Veterans Affairs, which also buys the pumps but by competitive bid, pays about $185. In a January report, the Health and Human Services inspector general estimated the government could save $18 million a year (and beneficiaries another $4.5 million) if CMS could use competitive bidding. [Washington Times, 1-13-2014]

-- Frances Wadsworth-Jones' jewelry design show ("Heaven Sent") at the Museum of London runs until April, with centerpiece brooches that resemble bird droppings. Why, she was asked, would a woman want to wear jewelry suggesting that a pigeon soiled her lapel? "The stain is very intimate," said the artist. It's "something that you wouldn't want, and you're turning it into something beautiful." Wadsworth-Jones' pieces have sold for as much as the equivalent of $4,000. [BBC News, 1-12-2014]

-- In December, the New York City parks department, responding to alarmed visitors at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, built a wooden fence to shield the sculpture "Bear Eats Man" so that parents might examine the structure before children start asking them awkward questions. The sculpture by Ms. Thordis Adalsteinsdottir is of a bear clutching, and about to bite, a man -- who appears in shock and sports an erection that art aficionados have justified as possibly representing the man's involuntary reflexive shock, according to a New York Times report. [New York Times, 12-27-2013]

-- Inexplicable: (1) Three suspects fled with about 30 pieces of jewelry from a burglary at Timothy's Fine Jewelry in Broomfield, Colo., in January, but not before creating a puzzling scene on the surveillance video. Crushing the glass cases with sledgehammers, they moved quickly around the store, all the while constantly telling each other, "I love you, brother." (2) Glenn Rundles, 32, was captured only days after robbing two women at knifepoint in East Post Oak, Texas, in January -- despite a wanted poster called by some the "worst police sketch ever," a "cartoon" of a comically round-faced man (displayed at http://huff.to/1cXWT3p). [KCNC-TV (Denver), 1-21-2014] [Huffington Post, 1-30-2014]

-- Suspicion Confirmed: After Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Donna Jane Watts ticketed Miami Police Department officer Fausto Lopez in 2011 for speeding to an off-duty job at 120 mph, naturally some in law enforcement began harassing her as a "rat," according to a February Associated Press report. One provocation stood out -- other officers' accessing Watts' driver record by claiming to be on official business. Watts identified those officers' employers and recently filed a lawsuit under the federal Driver Privacy Protection Act, which provides penalties of up to $2,500 for each of the more than 200 unauthorized searches by 88 officers from 25 police agencies. [Associated Press via msn.com, 2-11-2014]

Christopher Schaeffer likely became the first public officeholder in the U.S. sworn in as an openly declared "Pastafarian" -- an adherent of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- when he took his seat on the Town Council of Pomfret, N.Y., in January. Schaeffer was wearing the traditional Pastafarian religious head covering (a colander). [Huffington Post, 1-7-2014]

(1) Timothy Margis, 38, had risen professionally to become the director of Public Safety of Concordia University in River Forest, Ill. He is also the man who was fired in February after admitting that he had committed a "lewd act" in a colleague's office (which police later explained involved masturbating into a woman's shoe). (2) Catherine Dajnowski, 40, was arrested in February in Boca Raton, Fla., after she had climbed into a shopping cart in the parking lot of a Publix supermarket and would not allow a Publix employee to return it to the store. Dajnowski called 911 three times from the cart, demanding that police come make the employee leave her alone -- the third time during which a sheriff's deputy was standing right beside the cart. [OakPark.com, 2-20-2014] [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 2-21-2014]

DIY Pervert: Andrew Stoodley pleaded guilty in February in England's Stroud Magistrates Court for invading the privacy of a neighbor woman whom he had admitted photographing surreptitiously about 100 times. ("She is a very beautiful woman," he said, "and I enjoy looking at her.") The worst episode, committed in July 2013, involved Stoodley dangling first a mirror, using a stick and string, outside her curtainless bedroom window at night and later, said the prosecutor, a cellphone camera "up and down (outside the window) like a yo-yo for 20 minutes." [StroudLife.com, 2-12-2014]

Clumsy: (1) The surveillance video of The Shambles bar in Chicago showed that an attempted break-in one night in January went awry when the unidentified perp removed the front entrance lock but gave up and fled seconds later when he couldn't open the door -- which he was shown furiously pulling on, oblivious that it was a "push" door. (2) Robert Williams, 42, was charged with robbing a PNC Bank in Laurel, Md., in February after starring in the surveillance video by twice spilling his entire loot ($20,650) on the bank's floor. After he finally gathered the bills and fled in a pickup truck, police punctured the tires, and when Williams tried to run, he slipped on the ice, slashing his head open. [DNAinfo.com (Chicago), 1-15-2014] [WRC-TV (Washington), 2-20-2014]

In December, a 38-year-old man, apparently fed up with his girlfriend's demands that he continue accompanying her at a shopping mall in Xuzhou, China, threw himself off a seventh-floor balcony, to his death. A witness reported the man yelling that the girlfriend already had "more shoes than she could wear in a lifetime, and it was pointless buying any more." Following increasingly heated exchanges, the man dropped her shopping bags and leaped over the railing. [Hexun.com via New York Daily News, 12-9-2013]

Thanks This Week to Les Budden and Andres Velasco, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Norway's prison system is regarded as among the most inmate-friendly in the world, but convicted mass murderer Anders Breivik is still not impressed. Breivik, serving 21 years for the 2011 bomb-and-gun attacks that killed 77 people, may already enjoy amenities unheard of for a comparable American murderer, but he sent wardens 12 demands in November, including an upgrade of his manual typewriter and his PlayStation 2 (to a PS3, with better access to game selection). He also demanded that his weekly government "allowance" (equivalent of $49) be doubled, and said if the "torture" of his living conditions is not relieved, he would be forced into a hunger strike. (Breivik threatened a similar strike in 2012, citing "inhumane" conditions such as cold coffee, lack of skin moisturizer and insufficient butter for his bread.) [Los Angeles Times, 2-18-2014] [BBC News, 11-9-2012]

-- Following alarming reports, the Ohio attorney general's office began working with the Ohio Veterinary Medical Association in December to be vigilant for pet owners who might be commandeering their dogs' and cats' pain killers -- for their own use. Worse, other reports suggested some owners were deliberately injuring their pets just to obtain the drugs. [Dayton Daily News, 12-11-2013]

-- The Super Bowl may be the "holy grail" for Las Vegas sports gambling, but outside the United States, horse-racing, soccer and, surprisingly, pro tennis dominate. Tennis provides bettors with 19,000 matches a year (compared to 1,200 NBA games, 2,400 Major League Baseball games and fewer than 300 NFL games), with betting on 400,000 individual games and even on individual points, of which there are nearly 2.5 million, according to a January New York Times dispatch from Melbourne, Australia. In January's Australian Open, a routine fourth-round women's match between players ranked ninth and 28th in the world attracted more than $4 million in wagers -- on just the first set. [New York Times, 1-22-2014]

-- Grrrrr! (1) In Chedzoy, England, in January, the border collie spaniel Luce was "re-homed" after Royston Grimstead, 42, learned that she had chewed completely through a wheel arch on his $120,000 Aston Martin. Said Grimstead, "(S)he had this guilty look on her face." (2) A magistrates court in Aberystwyth, Wales, convicted Ms. Rhian Jeremiah, 26, of criminal damage in January for biting into the roof of a Fiat 500 during an alcohol-fueled incident last year. Said the car's owner, "I could hear metal crunching" (but, said Jeremiah's lawyer, "not quite like" the scene in a James Bond movie featuring the character "Jaws"). [Yahoo News, 2-4-2014] [BBC News, 1-10-2014]

-- When a brand-new, exhaustively itemized medical coding system debuts in October (planned long before "Obamacare," by the way), doctors will find, for example, dozens of separate numbers to describe dealings with a patient's big toe (left one, right one, with or without nail damage, blisters, abrasions, critter bites, fractures, dislocations, sprains, amputation, etc.). Among the odder listed "origins of injury," reported The New York Times in December, are codes for "burning water skis" and injuries incurred in opera houses, or while knitting, or as a manifestation of sibling rivalry. The current system has about 17,000 codes, but the new one totals 68,000 for diagnoses plus 87,000 for procedures. [New York Times, 12-31-2013]

Clare Lally, weary of her three-flight front walk, demanded a wheelchair ramp on her government-subsidized house in Duntocher, England, for her daughter, 7, who has suffered from bulbar palsy since birth, and the West Dunbartonshire Council came through promptly. A front-yard-dominating concrete platform was built in January (costing the equivalent of $67,000), consisting of a 10-level "snake"-style series of ramps with steel railings. Not only does navigating the "snake" take time, but Lally now complains that the ramp has been taken over by neighborhood kids as a skateboard run. [Daily Record, 2-13-2014]

Higher-Intellect Confrontations: (1) Following an evening of heavy drinking, according to police in Russia's Sverdlovsk region in January, a former schoolteacher, 52, was charged with fatally stabbing his host, 67, during a dispute over whether poetry or prose is the more important literary form. (2) One Russian man shot another (nonfatally, with rubber bullets) in the town of Rostov- on-Don in September in an argument over theories of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (3) Nadja Svenson, 22, was charged on Christmas Eve in Londonderry, N.H. (a night with clear skies, apparently), with stabbing her father in the chest during bickering over the position of the Big Dipper. [RT.com, 1-30-2014] [RIA via Reuters, 9-16-2013] [Union Leader (Manchester), 12-26-2013]

The lukewarm prosecution of two Steubenville (Ohio) High football players for an August 2012 rape was foundering until Internet hacker Deric Lostutter, 26, raised the incident's profile, but now Lostutter faces a vindictive prosecution and the possibility he could serve a prison sentence five times longer than the wrist-slap detention the now-convicted rapists served. When Lostutter took interest, many Steubenville students and residents had been hoping to quiet the case or even blame the victim, but (according to November reporting by Rolling Stone) apparently one Steubenville High official managed to convince the FBI that Lostutter's hacking of the official's personal emails was a greater national threat than the rapes and provoked a SWAT raid on Lostutter's modest farmhouse. (Besides the football players, the city's school superintendent was indicted for tampering with evidence and three other officials for false statements and failing to report child abuse.) [Rolling Stone, 11-27-2013]

The first-ever skydive by Makenzie Wethington, 16, in Chickasha, Okla., in January was a catastrophe -- a tangled parachute that opened "halfway" with the girl unable to reach the emergency chute. She fell into a spiraling free fall from 3,500 feet and landed with a thud, but somehow survived. Mackenzie had shattered vertebrae, a split-in-half pelvic bone, two broken ribs, tooth loss and various internal injuries. Said her sister Meagan, to incredulous doctors and nurses, "She, obviously, she hit the ground, but she did not hit the ground. God's hand caught her." [Associated Press via Dallas Morning News, 1-28-2014]

An alcohol-hammered Troy Prockett, 37, was arrested in January near Hudson, Mass., after his car spun out of control on Interstate 290 and he fled on foot, pursued by state troopers who followed him to a tree, which he had climbed to about 30 feet up. Playing innocent, Prockett asked if the troopers had yet "caught the guy who was driving." The driver was still loose, Prockett said, even though only one set of footprints led to the tree (but, Prockett explained, that was because the real driver was carrying him piggyback!). Finally, as firefighters were arriving to climb after him, Prockett (according to the troopers' report) "rambled on about being an owl." [WCVB-TV (Boston), 1-9-2014]

Not Ready for Prime Time: Andre Bacon, 21, was arrested in February in the Cragin neighborhood in Chicago after, police said, he tried to carjack a woman who was about to get in the car in her garage. The woman gave up her keys, but ran out and closed the door as she left, locking Bacon in the garage with no way out. Police arrived minutes later to find Bacon sitting meekly in the driver's seat. [Chicago Tribune, 2-2-2014]

RiDQulous: The headline read "Man Arrested Allegedly Trying to Sell Stolen Brains at Dairy Queen." David Charles, 21, was charged in Indianapolis in January with arranging the deal involving 60 jars of mental patients' brains (some from the 1800s) stolen from the Indiana Medical History Museum. The buyer (actually, an undercover cop) had agreed to meet at the restaurant. [Indianapolis Star, 1-1-2014]

Driver Leon Humphreys, upset at the minor traffic ticket he had received, demanded in December (2002) that magistrates in the town of Bury St. Edmunds, England, allow him to employ the ancient tradition of "trial by combat" -- in which he would fight someone from the DMV (in England, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) over the righteousness of the ticket using samurai swords, Gurkha knives or heavy hammers. Despite Humphreys' insistence that the tradition is still valid under European human rights legislation, the magistrates declined and in fact upped his fine and court costs 12-fold. [Daily Telegraph (London), 12-2-2002]

Thanks This Week to Garon Evans, Rebekah Kogelschatz, Ken Hill, and William Carter, 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).