The ecology-conscious city (having recently encouraged routine composting of dinner leftovers) is now considering environment-friendly public urinals such as the PPlanter created by engineer Brent Bucknum. Users urinate into a ceramic basin and flush the waste with run-off hand-washing water into a bed of bamboo plants. Bucknum claims minimal maintenance and an odor-free experience, but on the other hand, only a user's midsection area is blocked from public view -- a concession necessitated by San Francisco's sour experience with lockable public toilets, which shielded sex acts and crime. (A less-elaborate structure -- the open-air, similarly privacy-challenging "pPod" -- is currently being readied for deployment in the city's Dolores Park.) [Mother Nature Network, 2-28-2014] [KTVU (Oakland), 3-6-2014]

-- Branko Bogdanov, 58, his wife, Lela, 52, and daughter Julia, 34, were arrested in March and charged in a 10-year shoplifting enterprise run out of their upscale Northbrook, Ill., home, which they allegedly used as a base while prowling stores in states as far away as Florida, stealing high-end toys and jewelry, which they resold on eBay and to their fences. Police estimate the Bogdanovs swiped as much as $7 million worth on their forays -- many items being stashed in Lela's customized flowing skirts with hidden pockets. [Associated Press via Yahoo News, 3-5-2014]

-- A trauma victim arriving at a hospital emergency room but requiring specialized intensive care would usually be transferred promptly to a qualified "trauma center," whose success rate with such patients is believed to be 25 percent better than that of ordinary hospitals. However, a recent study from Stanford University researchers found that, among 636 hospitals observed, there was a greater reluctance to make the transfer -- if the patient was fully insured. (That is, the authors suggest, there is a tendency for hospitals to hang onto insured patients, even though their outcomes might be worse, but not to similarly hang onto the uninsured -- who are more likely to be properly transferred.) [NPR, 2-19-2014]

-- Latest Female Beauty Products: Cosmetic surgery is expensive, but beauty-conscious Japanese girls and women (especially those obsessed with a more "Western" look) have low-priced workarounds to choose from -- as uncovered in January by the fashion blogger Liz Katz: (1) the $63 Face-Slimmer Exercise Mouthpiece (insert it for three minutes a day, make vowel sounds and watch a "saggy" mouth turn taut); (2) the Beauty Lift High Nose nostril clip, which emits electronic vibrations to raise the proboscis's profile; (3) an altogether different but similarly painful-appearing Nose Straightener (insert for 20 minutes a day for added "perkiness"). [LizKatz.com (1-4-2014]

-- Technological Know-How at Work: Hard-core pornography fans are split (according to a January report on Salon.com) on whether they want male actors to use condoms, but California's Falcon Studios has the technology to serve both audiences. Falcon's actors wear them, but in some movies those condoms might be digitally "removed" during post-production. The major downside, said one renowned director, is the prohibitive cost -- about $100,000 to re-digitize the estimated 90,000 frames in a typical "low-budget" porno film. The Falcon president said he is trying an alternative -- using clever lighting during filming to de-emphasize the condom's presence. [Salon, 1-25-2014]

-- Security and law enforcement agencies are looking beyond traditional biometric identification techniques (such as the accurate but obtrusive fingerprint and iris scans and unobtrusive yet questionably accurate facial-recognition) and, based on recent laboratory research, are now considering earwax and underarm odors. Work by Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center shows that ear secretions may reveal personal identity, ethnicity, health status and sexual orientation, among other information, and researchers at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain) said their work demonstrates that recognizable patterns in body odor remain stable even through disease and diet change (although admitting that even the best odor technology is far inferior to a dog's nose). [Science Daily, 2-12-2014] [Phys.org Science News, 2-4-2014]

-- Farming continues to be a noble but grueling existence for rural residents of China, who work for the equivalent of only about $1,300 a year, but in one village (Jianshe, in southwest Sichuan province), farmers have established a co-operative capitalist model, and in January officials delivered residents their annual dividend in cold cash -- the equivalent of about $2.1 million to split among 438 households. Authorities unloaded banknotes in stacks that constituted a 7-foot-high wall of money, requiring villagers to pull 24-hour shifts to guard it. [BBC News, 1-15-2014]

-- With property values sky-high in posh London boroughs like Chelsea and Kensington, some super-wealthy residents desiring to expand -- and who might ordinarily be forced to build up higher -- are building down, constructing elaborate, multistory basements instead. CNN reported in January that additions are underway (one covering five floors below ground) for subterranean home theaters, gyms, golf simulators, bowling alleys and even swimming pools. [CNN, 1-24-2014]

-- Costs of Spain's Economic Collapse: (1) London's Daily Mail reported in March that Spain might have as many as 2,900 recently abandoned "villages" (swaths of land with clusters of houses) deserted by owners forced into cities to find work during the current recession -- and that speculators were buying entire villages at single-house prices and turning them into vacation retreats. (2) A formal association of sex workers in Barcelona has introduced a four-hour "introduction to prostitution" class for women transitioning from other occupations due to layoffs. Course topics include tax-return help (prostitution is not illegal in Spain) and marketing, as well as sex tricks. [Daily Mail, 3-10-2014] [The Guardian, 3-3-2014]

-- News of the Weird has reported recently on the staggeringly large amounts of money to be made by financial trading firms that can execute buys and sells even a split-second before another firm. The Wall Street Journal reported in January that the "race to zero" ("zero" being trades executed at the speed of light) now involves sophisticated lasers beamed between trading hubs (initially, East Coast data centers, but eventually linking nearly all U.S. stock exchanges) so that a firm's automatically enacted trades (by self-actuating computer programs) can be further reduced from the current 0.004-second "lag" time. [Wall Street Journal, 2-12-2014]

A more ornate, dedicated subset of cross-dressers -- the "living dolls" or "maskers" -- was captured for a British TV documentary in January (and likely to appear on U.S. television soon). "Secrets of the Living Dolls" follows ordinary men (one, a forklift operator by day; another, divorced and 70, whose daughter knows he's a "doll" but otherwise maintains a "don't ask, don't tell" relationship) who come alive several nights a month when they don expensive ($800 to $1,800), tailored, head-to-toe silicone bodysuits that feature breasts and genitalia, to party as young, glamorously dressed women. Two of the men lamented the dolls' lack of full acceptance into the transvestite or transgender communities -- though much of that distrust may stem from dolls' use of masks (perhaps similar to the backlash faced by clowns). [The Daily Beast, 1-7-2014; Daily Mail (London), 1-6-2014]

Christopher Fulton turned himself in in Midwest City, Okla., in March after seeing a surveillance photo of the robbery of an IBC Bank. He told police he indeed must be the robber, that he saw his body in the bank photo -- although he insisted that his mind had no recollection of it. Police were about to arrest Fulton, anyway, because the robber's holdup note was written on a blank check with the account holder's name and address (Fulton's mom's) scratched out, except that police-lab technology easily read through the scratch-outs. [KOCO-TV (Oklahoma City), 3-4-2014]

(1) A plaintiff in an auto-accident lawsuit, who is claiming an injury that has impaired her inclination for "social activities," was ordered by a judge in Nova Scotia to prove her loss by showing a reduction in the time she spent on Facebook. Justice Glen McDougall ruled that Joanne Conrod must disclose her log-in and log-out information but need not reveal her complete Facebook profile. (2) Arizona-based Christian "exorcist" Bob Larson, who claims to have performed more than 20,000 demon-expulsions, recently branched out by allegedly (in front of CNN's Anderson Cooper) cleansing a client in Norway -- via the Internet-enabled phone application Skype. (Given the fragility of computer operating systems, critics -- including "mainstream" exorcists -- find it puzzling that a demon could not disable Larson's.) [Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News, 1-30-2014] [CNN, 1-24-2014]

Thanks This Week to Simone Mishulovin and Tony Pappas and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

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.