The Formula One circuit is generally thought to attract fans as a showcase of motorcar technology and racing skill, but organizers of the Australian Grand Prix (the first of the 19 races on the annual circuit) threatened a lawsuit in March against Formula One management because the races should also be showcases of noise. Formula One has softened cars' power this year in order to make breakthrough achievements in fuel efficiency, but that also tamped down Formula One's "trademark ear-shattering roar," according to a Business Insider report. Fans are less likely to buy tickets, the organizers fear, if they lose the deafening, 100-decibel vroom that is a "visceral element of the fan experience." [BusinessInsider.com, 3-20-2014]

-- Amelia Boomker, 36, of Bolingbrook, Ill., celebrated her acceptance into the Guinness Book of World Records in March, recognized for donating more than 127 gallons of her own breast milk to critically needy babies in the Midwest. The donations came on top of supplying breast milk for her own four sons, three of whom were born during the 2008-2013 period in which she pumped out her excess for the Indiana Mothers' Milk Bank. [Chicago Tribune, 3-20-2014]

-- Most Commandments Violated: James Chatten, 46, pleaded guilty in January to several Commandment violations stemming from a July incident at the Christian Horizons church in Peterborough, Ontario. Chatten brought a prostitute inside the church, for sex, after hours, and stole money to pay her from a church drawer, then lied to police about being forced to raid the drawer. [Toronto Sun, 1-24-2014]

-- Prodigious Criminality: (1) John Bidmead, 65, was convicted in November at Britain's Exeter Crown Court of possession of child pornography images that totaled, according to police count, 600,000 files -- a low number because detectives said they got tired of counting and that the final number was easily over a million. The prosecutor called it "certainly the largest find in this part of the world." (2) Jason Bourcier, 33, reached a deal with the Virginia Department of Transportation in November to eventually pay down the $200,000 in highway tolls he had ignored for more than three years. He told a judge that, originally, a friend had told him that traveling the Dulles Toll Road to Washington, D.C., was free if the toll collectors had gone home for the evening (not true). (Bourcier told the judge he is now working as a "financial consultant" -- surely after rehabilitating his attention to detail.) [BBC News, 11-25-2013] [WRC-TV (Washington, D.C.), 11-24-2013]

In some cultures, and now in Florida, apparently, the act of urination carries no special modesty protection. A judge ruled in March that video of Justin Bieber expelling for a urine test following his January drag-racing arrest in Miami Beach was a "public record" and had to be released to the press under Florida law. (A perhaps overly generous black box was edited into the video to make it somewhat less explicit.) In the video, only one officer is present, observing, based on protocol that respects the suspect's "privacy" -- though the Florida judge in essence invited the entire world to watch Bieber urinate, as the video quickly made the Internet. [WFOR-TV (Miami), 3-6-2014; WTVJ (Miami), 1-24-2014]

(1) Kentucky state Rep. Leslie Combs, unloading her .380 semi-automatic handgun in her Capitol office in Frankfort in January, accidentally fired a shot into her furniture. Said Combs, "I'm a gun owner. It happens." In fact, she praised herself for being "particularly careful" to point the gun away from people while "unloading" it. (2) In March, an unnamed man was rescued by bystanders who heard screaming from a maze-like storm drain, which runs 12 feet below the street in Lawton, Okla. The man had accidentally dropped a $20 bill through a grate and climbed in after it, wandering underground for two days searching for his way out. (He never found the $20.) [Courier-Journal (Louisville), 1-8-2014] [KSWO-TV (Lawton), 3-6-2014]

The Lakemaid brewery based in Stevens Point, Wis., acknowledged in January that it has been testing drone technology, with an eye to eventually delivering beer to isolated ice fishermen on Lake Waconia, Minn. The brewery reportedly found that a six-bladed drone would be necessary to carry a 12-pack for up to a half-mile. (The Federal Aviation Administration bans commercial drones, but is thought to be reconsidering the rule -- though not just yet, as it quickly ordered Lakemaid to cease the flights.) [WCCO-TV (Minneapolis), 1-31-2014]

As Microsoft founder and current world-class philanthropist Bill Gates prepared for a speech in Vancouver, British Columbia, in March, a circumcision dissident prepared to protest. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested more than $160 million on circumcision programs in developing countries based on overwhelming medical evidence ("as clear as you really can get in medical research," said a University of British Columbia professor) that the procedure makes transmission of HIV much more difficult. Dedicated, intense-pleasure-seeking men (in this case, the Canadian Foreskin Awareness Project) insist that the surgical snipping, especially of babies, denies males the benefit of heightened penile sensitivity. [QMI Agency via CNews, 3-17-2014]

Richard Wright of Canada's Prince Edward Island was busy in March handing out $50 and $100 bills to strangers during a visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia, urging the recipients to "thank God" for the gift and to pass it along to others if they could not use it themselves. Wright's spree was soon broken up as Mounted Police detained him for a "wellness check," which led to his transfer to a mental-health facility. Wright's daughter Chelsea told reporters that her dad worked hard for his money, had no mental-health issues and simply wanted to help people, and a friend described him as a "generous individual wrapped up in the acts of kindness." However, at press time, Wright was still hospitalized. [Yahoo News, 3-24-2014]

-- Yo No Quiero: The Phoenix suburb of Maryvale was "overrun," according to February reports, with several "packs" of up to 15 Chihuahuas each, roaming neighborhoods, frightening schoolchildren. Coincidentally, two months earlier, in Hobart, Australia, the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals announced that it was overwhelmed by massive recent donations of Chihuahuas, most from one couple. Said a spokesman, "We were up to our knees in little Chihuahuas." [KSAZ-TV (Phoenix), 2-13-2014] [Australian Broadcasting Corp. News, 12-19-2014]

-- Pennywise: England's Manchester Evening News reported in March that local police had handled 19 cases of "clown-related" crimes in the area in 2013, ranging from a clown in the town of Bury peering into the windows of at least two homes, to a boy's report in Rochdale that a clown holding balloons had tried to grab him on the street. The secretary of Clowns International lamented the "stupid people" who damage the reputation of the clowning "profession." [Manchester Evening News, 3-9-2014]

Classic Recurring Themes: (1) Travis Rice, 21, and an accomplice were seen on surveillance video breaking into Arion Motors in Plantation, Fla., in March -- video that revealed Rice, at a key moment, yanking something from his pocket and not noticing that a card had fallen to the floor. The card, of course, was his state identification card, and further "investigation" revealed Rice's Facebook bragging about the break-in and theft of license plates and car keys. (2) Carlos Ruiz, 42, was arrested in Haddon Township, N.J., in February after he violated a cardinal rule by returning to the scene of the crime. He had stolen valuables including a sound system from a home, and had gotten away, but was captured a half-hour later when he returned for the sound system's remote control. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 3-18-2014] [NJ.com (Newark), 2-20-2014]

Christopher Miller, 40, was arrested in March a few blocks from a Stride Rite shoe store in Ocean County, N.J., minutes after it had been robbed by a man resembling Miller. Police said Miller had just been released from New Jersey's South Woods State Prison after serving 15 years for robbing the same Stride Rite store and apparently had taken a bus from the prison directly to the store in order to rob it again. [WBFF-TV (Baltimore) via KBOI-TV (Boise, Id.), 3-25-2014]

Thanks This Week to Perry Levin, Mark D'Amelio, Jan Wolitzky, Kelly Egnitz, Alissa Grosso, and Teri Darcy, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

"The trucks full of paperwork come every day," wrote The Washington Post in March, down a country road in Boyers, Pa., north of Pittsburgh, and descend "into the earth" to deliver federal retiree applications to the eight "supermarket"-sized caverns 230 feet below ground where Office of Personnel Management bureaucrats process them -- manually -- and store them in 28,000 metal filing cabinets. Applications thus take 61 days on average to process (compared to Texas' automated system, which takes two). One step requires a record's index to be digitized -- but a later step requires that the digital portion be printed out for further manila-foldered file work. OPM blames contractors' technology failures and bizarrely complicated retirement laws, but no relief is in sight except the hiring of more workers (and fortunately, cave-bound paper-shuffling is a well-regarded job around Boyers). [Washington Post, 3-22-2014]

-- In February, officials in Sudan seized at least 70 female sheep that had male sexual organs sewn on -- the result of livestock smugglers trying to circumvent export restrictions. (Ewes are valued more highly, and their sale is limited.) Authorities had been treating the inspections as routine until they spotted one "ram" urinating from the female posture. [BBC News, 2-10-2014]

-- Karma: Michael Schell, 24, and Jessica Briggs, 31, were arrested on several charges in Minot, N.D., in February when police were called to a convenience store because Schell and Briggs had commandeered a restroom and were having noisy sex. The store is part of the Iowa-based chain of 400 serving the Midwest that go by the name Kum & Go. [Minot Daily News, 2-12-2014]

-- U.S. Rep. Robert Andrews announced his retirement in February, after 23 years of representing his New Jersey district, and in "tribute," The Washington Post suggested he might be the least successful lawmaker of the past two decades, in that he had sponsored a total of 646 pieces of legislation -- more than any of his contemporaries -- but that not a single one became law. In fact, Andrews has not accomplished even the easiest of all bill-sponsoring -- to name a post office or a courthouse. [Washington Post, 2-4-2014]

-- November election returns for the city council of Flint, Mich., revealed that voters chose two convicted felons (Wantwaz Davis and Eric Mays) and two other candidates who had been through federal bankruptcy. Davis never publicized his 1991 second-degree murder plea, but said he talked about it while campaigning. (The Flint Journal acknowledged that it had poorly vetted Davis' record.) [Flint Journal, 11-6-2013]

-- The Internal Revenue Service reportedly hit the estate of Michael Jackson recently with a federal income tax bill of $702 million because of undervaluing properties that it owned -- including a valuation on the Jackson-owned catalog of Beatles songs at "zero." The estate reckoned that Mr. Jackson was worth a total of $7 million upon his death in 2009, but IRS placed the number at $1.125 billion. (In 2012 alone, according to Forbes magazine, Mr. Jackson earned more than any other celebrity, living or dead, at about $160 million.) [Los Angeles Times, 2-7-2014; Forbes, 11-18-2013]

-- The North Somerset office of Britain's National Health Service issued a formal apology in January to Leanda Preston, 31, who had accused it of "racism" because of the pass phrase she received to access the system for an appointment to manage her fibromyalgia. Preston, who is black, had received the random, computer-generated pass phrase "charcoal shade," which she complained was "offensive," demonstrating that NHS therefore lacked "decency" and "common sense." [Weston Mercury, 1-20-2014]

A Florida appeals court tossed out an $80,000 anti-discrimination settlement in February because the beneficiary's teenage daughter could not refrain from bragging about it -- even though the terms of the settlement required confidentiality. Gulliver Proprietary School in Miami had offered the sum to former headmaster Patrick Snay to make Snay's lawsuit go away, but Dana Snay almost immediately told her 1,200 Facebook friends that "Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. Suck it." Wrote the court, "(Snay's) daughter did precisely what the confidentiality agreement was designed to prevent." [Miami Herald, 2-26-2014]

A controversial landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2005 for the first time allowed a city to force unwilling owners to sell private property not for a school or police station or other traditional municipal necessity, but just because a developer promised to improve the neighborhood. Consequently, longtime residents such as Susette Kelo were forced off their land because the city of New London, Conn., had hopes of a prosperous buildup anchored by a new facility from the drugmaker Pfizer. The Weekly Standard magazine reported in February that, nine years down the road, Pfizer has backed out, and the 90-acre area of New London in which Kelo and others were bulldozed off of is waist-high in weeds -- an even worse blight than that which New London sacrificed private property rights in order to prevent. [The Weekly Standard, 2-10-2014]

Plastic surgeons have performed beard implants before, but only for men with facial scarring or for female-to-male transgenders. Recently, New York city surgeons report an uptick in business by men solely to achieve the proper aesthetic look. According to the New York City website DNAinfo, the procedure is the same as for hair transplants -- and takes eight hours to do, at a cost of about $7,000. Said veteran plastic surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, "Whether you're talking about the Brooklyn hipster or the advertising executive, the look is definitely to have a bit of facial hair." [DNAinfo New York, 2-25-2014]

Cable's TLC channel (formerly, The Learning Channel) recently completed its fifth season of "My Strange Addiction," mostly starring a host of compulsives who apparently cannot refrain from eating that which should not be eaten (mattress stuffing, diapers, plastic bags, makeup -- plus the engaging Heather Bell, who eats paint, to her a "thicker version of warm milk"). The full-body-suited "Living Dolls" (reported here two weeks ago) led off the season -- the first time News of the Weird and "My Strange Addiction" had shared a subject since Ms. Jazz Sinkfield exhibited her 24-inch fingernails (on each finger, totaling almost 20 feet of superfluous nail) in Season 2 (and in News of the Weird in 2012) and the 22-procedure breast-enhancer Sheyla Hershey appeared in Season 3 (and in News of the Weird in 2010). [Daily Mail (London), 1-2-2014] [Wikipedia, My_Strange_Addiction]

(1) Hernando County (Fla.) Sheriff's detective James Smith happened across longtime fugitive James Dixon, 53, in March and detained him, even though Dixon claimed he was actually one of his own twin brothers, Gary Dixon. On a hunch, Det. Smith called out to "Gary," "Hey, James!" -- and "Gary" quickly turned his head to see what Smith wanted. Smith said "Gary" then put his head down and acknowledged that he was really James. He was held for extradition on a 30-year-old Michigan warrant. (2) Colton Green was arrested in Decatur, Ill., in March, shortly after a nearby Circle K gas station was robbed. Police said it was not a challenging collar, in that Green was on probation and wearing an ankle monitor whose GPS trail placed him at the Circle K at the time of the robbery. [Tampa Bay Online, 3-21-2014] [Illinois Home Page, 3-20-2014]

(1) A self-described "devil"-possessed Stephanie Hamman, 23, was arrested in Church Hill, Tenn., in March after driving her car through the front door of the Providence Church, then summoning her husband on the phone, and when he arrived, stabbing him in the chest for "worshipping the NASCAR race" that he had been devoted to on TV that day. (2) Police were called to a Taco Bell in Tega Cay, S.C., in March after one customer became irate that another had audibly belched in the dining area yet had not said "excuse me." The enraged man jostled the burper with a chair and grabbed at his throat, but no arrest was made. [Times-News (Kingsport, Tenn.) via KnoxNews.com (Knoxville), 3-17-2014] [WSOC-TV (Charlotte, N.C.), 3-17-2014]

Thanks This Week to Royal Byre, Perry Levin, George Rubin, Neil Gimon, Jim Peterson, and John McGaw, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Kevin Walters, 21, staged an emotional, though unsuccessful, one-man, chained-to-the-door protest in March to prevent the closing of a commercial rest stop along the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway near Des Plaines, Ill. Ultimately, the Des Plaines Oasis, housing shops and fast-food restaurants, will be demolished as part of a highway-widening project. Walters told WBBM Radio that his poignant attachment to the oasis was because his parents had told him it was where he was conceived as they returned home from a 1992 Phil Collins concert. [WBBM, 3-14-2014]

-- In tribe-controlled areas of India, children who disrespect their families by marrying outside their castes are still, occasionally, put to death despite strong national laws. However, enlightenment is advancing, and Mr. Sidhnath Sharma recently filed a lawsuit instead against his caste-straying son for "destroying the family tradition" and "lowering his father's prestige." Sharma, a lawyer in Patna, India, is demanding that the son pay a monthly royalty of the equivalent of $163 for the son's now-unauthorized use of the father's name. [The Hindu, 1-25-2014]

-- Fighter jets from France were forced in February to accompany the hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane commandeered by the co-pilot, who had diverted the plane to Geneva in order to apply for asylum. The Swiss air force would normally have taken over the mission in its own air space, but the incident occurred at 4:30 a.m., and Swiss air force pilots were likely still asleep, as they work only "regular office hours," beginning at 8 a.m. (French military officials said they are accustomed to covering for Switzerland.) [The Local (Paris), 2-18-2014]

-- Sweden's foul-smelling canned herring (surstromming) inexplicably raises passions among some traditionalists -- which is why it was big news in February when a man found a bulging tin whose contents had been fermenting for about 25 years and reckoned he needed help to "disarm" it, lest it "explode" and damage his cabin. Ruben Madsen of Sweden's Surstromming Academy agreed to attend the can-opening and assured the man that spewing, not explosion, was the likely outcome. [The Local (Oslo), 2-10-2014]

-- In 2010, News of the Weird reported on the enthusiastically obese Donna Simpson, who ate meals in front of her webcam so that "chub chasers" could watch her (pay-per-view) growing larger before their eyes. Now comes a South Korean, Ms. Park Seo-yeon, 34, not at all overweight, also on pay-per-view, breaking bread with friend-challenged people desperate to avoid eating alone, however forced the circumstances. Reuters reported that Park's "gastronomic voyeurism" earns her, some months, the equivalent of more than $9,000 for her series of two-to-three-hour meals, featuring real-time chatting. [Reuters via Yahoo News, 1-26-2014]

Pastor Allen Parker conducts services in the nude, for the nude, according to a February report on WWBT-TV (Richmond, Va.). Parker's White Tail Chapel is located on a similarly named nudist resort in Ivor, Va., and even in winter, when disrobing visitors are scarce, the chapel is open for congregants. (In summertime, when naked people abound, the chapel's services are often standing-room-only.) Baring the body to Christ is hardly unusual, Parker reminded, since that's the way we all come into the world. [WWBT-TV, 2-20-2014]

-- After a Feb. 11 explosion at a natural gas well in Greene County, Pa., killed one worker, burned for four days and caused massive traffic jams and other inconveniences, the public relations response of well-owner Chevron was merely to give away vouchers for pizza and soda at local hangout Bobtown Pizza. Environmentalists were outraged at Chevron's "let them eat cake/pizza" attitude, but CBS News found quite a few locals who supported Chevron's response. (For one thing, Bobtown's pizza is apparently highly regarded.) [CBS News, 3-7-2014]

-- Injudicious: (1) James Degorski, 41, serving life in prison for a cold-blooded mass murder during a botched restaurant robbery in Palatine, Ill., in 1993, was awarded $451,000 by a jury recently after a prison guard punched him in the face, necessitating complex surgery. Said a parent of one of Degorski's victims, "If broken bones are worth a half-million, how much are (the seven victims') lives worth?" (2) Former star soccer goalie Bruno Fernandes de Souza, 28, serving 22 years in prison in Brazil for the murder of his girlfriend and feeding of part of her body to his dogs, was granted work-release in March by prison officials -- with the "work" assignment being to play soccer for a Brazilian pro team that, upon learning of the rehabilitation law, signed him to a contract and urged his release. [ABC News via WHAS-TV (Louisville), 3-10-2014] [Daily Mail (London), 3-12-2014]

(1) Among the filings published in November by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was Google's 2012 application covering a throat tattoo -- actually a mobile skin "microphone" with lie-detecting capability, presumably to encourage truthfulness from people as they speak. The application explains how to couple an electronic skin tattoo to a mobile device, using "flexible substrate." (2) Among the "secrets" revealed recently on a BBC television special on South America's beauty-queen obsession was one by Ms. Wi May Nava, first runner-up for Miss Venezuela 2013. Nava had a patch of plastic mesh sewn onto her tongue to create so much pain when she ate that she was forced to stick to liquids. [The Register, 11-8-2013] [Gawker, 2-6-14]

-- An Iowa administrative law judge ruled in February that it might be reasonable to accidentally damage a stubborn vending machine that ate your money -- but not by commandeering a forklift, raising the vending machine 2 feet off the concrete floor, and slamming it to the ground to dislodge the reluctant candy bar (a Twix). Consequently, Robert McKevitt, fired recently over the incident by Polaris Industries in Milford, Iowa, was deemed not entitled to worker compensation. (McKevitt admitted picking up the machine with the forklift, but said he just shook it and then set it down gently.) [Des Moines Register, 2-19-2014]

-- In November, a New York appeals court approved a Rockland County judge's jury instructions, which had resulted in the jury's absolving Brittany Lahm of fault when she flipped her car on the New York Thruway, killing one passenger and injuring others. Lahm was driving friends home from the beach when one passenger unexpectedly unfastened Lahm's bikini top, leading her to stretch her arms to re-tie it, which caused her to lose control of the car. The judges ruled that the jury could (and ultimately did) consider that Lahm faced an "unforeseen emergency" and was not negligent. (The only fatality in the crash was the original unfastener.) [Associated Press via WABC-TV (New York City), 11-25-2013]

Among the websites whose stunning visual sophistication lies in stark contrast to their marginal importance in the world is "Carpets for Airports," apparently still the go-to site for viewing and judging air terminal floor coverings around the world. Singapore's carpet consists of an indescribably erratic, "psychologically terrifying" design, while Lima's Jorge Chavez International Airport's is "muted" and "calming" -- appropriate for the nervous traveler about to experience an Andes mountains take-off. The least ambitious of all, so far, is Denver's "featureless" non-pattern -- settled on in 2001 after religious fundamentalists objected to the evolution-enabled images on its original carpeting. [BBC News, 2-25-2014; CarpetsForAirports.com]

Florida Selfies: (1) Spencer Toner, 79, was arrested for indecent exposure in a McDonald's parking lot in January in Bonita Springs, Fla., after a complainant said Toner was watching pornography on a laptop computer and masturbating (a downside of McDonald's early-on, company-wide adoption of Wi-Fi). Toner had demanded earlier that the complainant give him privacy. (2) In December, Francis Bianco, 76, was arrested shortly after noon for indecent exposure in the parking lot of a Winn Dixie grocery store in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. Bianco protested, claiming he was merely urinating (apparently, thought to be not as offensive). (3) William Gibson, 50, was charged with "lewd and lascivious" behavior in front of a store in Jensen Beach, Fla., in November after he began (according to the police report) "fluffing" his genitals and performing other genital-related activities. [WBBH-TV (Fort Myers), News-Press, 1-24-2014] [WZVN-TV (Fort Myers), 12-16- 2013] [TCPalm.com (Stuart, Fla.), 11-15-2013]

Thanks This Week to Cindy Hildebrand and Jessica Binns, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.