Thirty thousand spiders, led by members of the British Tarantula Society, gathered in Coventry on May 18 for the annual BTS exhibition, with a Socotra Island blue baboon spider taking Best in Show for first-time entrant Mike Dawkins. According to news reports, judges ignore spiders' personalities and make their selections by objectifying the body -- seeking "shiny coats, correct proportions, an active demeanor and proper stance" (which means that "all eight legs should be upright and perfectly poised"). Veteran judge Ryan Hale said winning does not necessarily make a spider more valuable, but is likely to enhance the keeper's reputation in the tarantula-training community.

-- Susan Coppinger, 47, was promoted by the city of Boston in January to a job paying $38,800 in the Inspectional Services Department -- even though a month earlier she had been arrested for bank robbery. In fact, police said it was her second robbery of the same Santander Bank in nearby Quincy. Apparently, the city's human resources office does not monitor mugshots on MassMostWanted.com, but in April, the city finally secured Coppinger's resignation.

-- For panicking drivers headed in an emergency to University Hospital in Tamarac, Florida, ready to turn left into the ER because of bleeding, shortness of breath, etc., the city still requires patiently waiting for the traffic light to turn green -- no matter what -- and has a $158-per violation red-light camera perfectly aimed, according to a WPLG-TV investigation reported in March. The station noted that the traffic magistrate handling appeals serves at the pleasure of the city and so far has not relented on tickets involving even provable emergencies.

-- Alarmed that its internal rating system revealed that some employees actually perform better than others, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced in May that it was scrapping the system. Agency director Richard Cordray expressed dismay that the system failed to reveal worker disparities that matched up on the basis of age, race, union status and longevity with the agency, and said that until they find a system that proves, for example, that union members work just as well (or badly) as non-members, all employees will be paid as if they were doing excellent work.

-- Weird Japan: When Ayano Tsukimi, 64, moved from Osaka back to her home village of Nagoro, she found a population of only 37 people and set out to "replace" those who had died or moved away -- by creating life-size stuffed dolls, with unsettling facial features, which she positions around town as if to suggest a larger population. Tsukimi estimates that she has created about 350 "inhabitants," and, reported Global Post in May, "imagines a future where she's outlived all her neighbors and only dolls remain."

-- Food trucks are ubiquitous in many urban areas, bringing ethnic foods to street corners, and now in the New York City neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Soho, art impresarios bring stage presentations to the insides of 24-foot trucks parked on the street. Typically, ticket-holders (fewer than 20) climb in for a 30-minute play, followed by a 15-minute "intermission" a few steps away at a neighborhood bar, and then it's back in the truck for another half-hour. One art-truck producer blamed outlandish New York City real estate prices for the turn to mobile sites.

-- China's pre-eminent (and perhaps most terrifying) performance artist, He Yunchang, 48, acknowledged to Agence France-Presse in May that he will do "anything" to advance "art" -- as long as it does not kill him. Mr. He most famously removed part of a rib on opening day of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 (on the "lucky" date of 8-8-08) and in 2010 assembled 25 people to vote on whether he should be slashed from collarbone to knee and left bloody on a bed. (Cutting won, 12-10, with three abstentions, and a doctor reluctantly made the incision.) A gallery owner in Australia told AFP that He's "pain" and "discomfort" "have a transcendent quality" and are "silent rebukes" to Chinese people who endure hardship just for money -- ironically believing money will protect them from suffering.

-- The Itella postal service of Finland announced in April that it would soon sell stamps featuring 33 designs honoring the late Finnish homoerotic artist Touko Laaksonen, better known as "Tom of Finland." None were to be "hardcore" images, although a more-explicit companion exhibit will open soon at Finland's Postal Museum. (Finland, however, is not among Europe's leaders in progressive treatment of gays.)

Dan Greding, working on contract with the city of Santa Barbara, California, was busy at work one February day installing signs on street lamps warning that only "75 Minute Parking" was permitted. On one block, three signs were called for, but the last one required Greding to drill into concrete, insert screws and wait for the concrete to dry -- which apparently took more than 75 minutes, and a passing police officer ticketed his truck. Greding's first appeal of the citation was denied, but a second appeal was pending at press time.

The 9-1-1 call at 1:50 a.m. on May 29 came from a man who said he was lost on Deen Still Road near Polk City, Florida, and being chased by wild hogs. A sheriff's deputy fairly easily "rescued" Andrew Joffe, 24, but then discovered that Joffe (a) had an active arrest warrant and (b) was in possession of a GPS device that he admitted stealing from a car that evening. The Polk County sheriff told reporters that it was "unusual" for an absconding thief, with a warrant, to bring himself to deputies' attention like that, but acknowledged with a wink that "it does get pretty dark out on Deen Still Road in the middle of the night."

(1) Gregory Schwartz, 40, was arrested in Clairemont, California, in March and charged with crawling under a ladies' restroom stall door at a Big Lots store to molest a shopper. (Schwartz was dressed as a Barbie doll.) (2) Jeremy Grinnell, 42, pleaded guilty in May in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to having propped up a ladder under a couple's bedroom window in November and climbed up to watch them having sex. (At the time, Grinnell was a local pastor and assistant professor at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary.) (3) Police in Ypsilanti, Michigan, identified a suspect in May to end a six-months'-long reign of disgust in which someone frequently defecated on the same slide in Prospect Park -- even, amazingly, on the coldest days of the season.

(1) A 51-year-old man drowned in Adelaide, Australia, in February, the latest person to inadvisedly jump into the water to retrieve a low-price belonging -- this time, his toy boat that had gone awry. (2) A man and woman, both age 40, died in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in February -- discovered in their car in a closed garage where the engine had been running, but the car had run out of gasoline. Thus, the partially clad couple appeared to be the most recent to have suffocated in that manner while having sex.

In April, police in Ottawa, Ontario, arrested a 62-year-old man as the one who had been indecently exposing himself to visitors in Mooney's Bay Park. Detained was Donald Popadick, whose family name (according to diligent journalism by the National Post) is present in only three Canadian households and is perhaps derived from the Serbian name Popadic. (Popadick's arrest was made by Sgt. Iain Pidcock.)

Thanks This Week to Wayne Saddler, David Swanson, David MacDonald, Andrew Hastie, Lynn Marshall, Steve Dunn, Rick Sabadka, Peter Trobridge, and Paul Baez, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Vanellope, Rydder, Jceion and Burklee head the latest annual list of the most common baby names on the Social Security Administration register of first-time-appearing names. There were 63 Vanellopes (girls), but only 10 each for Rydder and Jceion, the most popular debut names for boys. Other notables were Hatch (eight times) and Psalms (seven). (In other "name" news, among the finalists in April's "Name of the Year" contest sponsored by Deadspin.com were the actual monikers Curvaceous Bass, (Dr.) Eve Gruntfest, Chillie Poon and the winner -- Shamus Beaglehole. [Nameberry via MSN.com, 5-15-2014] [NameoftheYear.com]

To celebrate today's 25th anniversary of the weekly distribution of News of the Weird by Universal Uclick, Chuck Shepherd recalls a few of his favorite stories (among the more than 25,000 covered).

-- (1989) In the mid-1980s, convicted South Carolina murderer Michael Godwin won his appeal to avoid the electric chair and serve only life imprisonment. In March, while sitting naked on a metal prison toilet, attempting to fix a TV set, the 28-year-old Godwin bit into a wire and was electrocuted. [Orlando Sentinel, 3-8-89]

-- (1991) Dee Dee Jonrowe, leading the Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon in January in northern Minnesota, took a wrong turn and went 300 yards before recognizing her error. The mistake cost her team only a few minutes, but stopping to calculate her location allowed the dogs an unsupervised rest, and by the time she was ready to go, two of her dogs had begun to copulate. She was forced to wait on them for 25 minutes and lost the lead. [Duluth News Tribune, 1-17-91]

-- (1991) In March, Florence Schreiber Powers, 44, a Ewing, New Jersey, administrative judge on trial for shoplifting two watches, called her psychiatrist to testify that Powers was under stress at the time of the incidents. The doctor said Powers was unaware of her actions "from one minute to the next," for the following 20 reasons: a recent auto accident, a traffic ticket, a new-car purchase, overwork, husband's kidney stones, husband's asthma (and breathing machine that occupies their bedroom), menopausal hot flashes, an "ungodly" vaginal itch, a bad rash, fear of breast and anal cancer, fear of dental surgery, son's need for an asthma breathing machine, mother's and aunt's illnesses, need to organize her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, need to cook Thanksgiving dinner for 20 relatives, purchase of 200 gifts for Christmas and Chanukah, attempt to sell her house without a real estate agent, lawsuit against wallpaper cleaners, purchase of furniture that had to be returned, and a toilet in her house that was constantly running. She was convicted anyway. [Trentonian, 3-27-91]

-- (1991 and before) Gary Arthur Medrow, 47, was arrested in March in Milwaukee (the latest of his then-30-plus arrests over 23 years) for once again causing mischief by telephoning a woman and trying to persuade her to physically pick up another person and carry her around a room. In the latest incident, after repeatedly calling, he told her another woman had been impersonating her, had been in an accident, and had been seen carrying someone away (and that Medrow needed evidence that she could or could not do that). He had previously talked cheerleaders, motel workers and business executives into lifting and carrying. [Milwaukee Sentinel, 3-18-91]

-- (1992) A 38-year-old man, unidentified in news reports, was hospitalized in Princeton, West Virginia, in October with gunshot wounds. He had been drinking beer and cleaning his three guns -- and had accidentally shot himself with each one. He said the first shot didn't hurt, the second "stung a little," and the third "really hurt," prompting him to call for help. [Associated Press via Newsday, 10-11-92]

-- (1994) In Toronto in March, Sajid Rhatti, 23, and his 20-year-old wife brawled over whether Katey Sagal, who plays Peg Bundy on "Married With Children," is prettier than Christina Applegate, who plays her daughter. First, the wife slashed Rhatti in the groin with a wine bottle as they scuffled, but she dressed his wounds and the couple sat down again to watch another episode of the show. Moments later, the brawl erupted again, and Rhatti, who suffered a broken arm and shoulder, stabbed his wife in the chest, back and legs before they begged neighbors to call an ambulance. [Canadian Press via Edmonton Journal, 3-18-94]

-- (1995) From the Riley County police blotter in the Kansas State University newspaper, Sept. 2: 1:33 p.m., disturbance involving Marcus Miles; 2:14 p.m. (different address), "unwanted subject" (police jargon for acquaintance who wouldn't leave) in the home, Marcus Miles told to leave; 4:08 p.m. (different address), Marcus Miles accused of harassment; 6:10 p.m., "unwanted subject" call against Marcus Miles. Nov. 14: 6:47 p.m., "unwanted subject" in the home, Marcus Miles told to leave; 7:36 p.m. (different address), "unwanted subject" call against Marcus Miles. Nov. 20: 2:05 a.m. (different address), "unwanted subject" charge against Marcus Miles; 2:55 a.m. (different address), disturbance involving Marcus Miles; 3:07 a.m. (different address), "unwanted subject" charge against Marcus Miles; 4:11 a.m. (different address), "unwanted subject" report made against Marcus Miles. [K State Collegian, 9-7-95; 11-14-95, 11-20-95]

-- (1996) A pre-trial hearing was scheduled in Lamar, Missouri, on Joyce Lehr's lawsuit against the county for injuries from a 1993 fall in the icy, unplowed parking lot of the local high school. The Carthage Press reported that Lehr claimed damage to nearly everything in her body. According to her petition: "All the bones, organs, muscles, tendons, tissues, nerves, veins, arteries, ligaments ... discs, cartilages, and the joints of her body were fractured, broken, ruptured, punctured, compressed, dislocated, separated, bruised, contused, narrowed, abrased, lacerated, burned, cut, torn, wrenched, swollen, strained, sprained, inflamed and infected." [Carthage Press, 1-9-96]

-- (1999) From a May police report in The Messenger (Madisonville, Kentucky), concerning two trucks being driven curiously on a rural road: A man would drive a truck 100 yards, stop, walk back to a second truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the first truck, stop, walk back to the first truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the second truck, and so on, into the evening. He did it, he told police, because his brother was passed out drunk in one of the trucks, and he was trying to drive both trucks home, at more or less the same time. (Not surprisingly, a blood-alcohol test showed the driver, also, to be impaired.) [The Messenger, 5-7-99]

-- (2002) The Lane brothers of New York, Mr. Winner Lane, 44, and Mr. Loser Lane, 41 (their actual birth names), were profiled in a July Newsday report, made more interesting by the fact that Loser is successful (a police detective in South Bronx) and Winner is not (a history of petty crimes). A sister said she believes her parents selected "Winner" because their late father was a big baseball fan and chose "Loser" just to complete the pairing. [Newsday, 7-22-02]

-- (2004) The New York Times reported in February on a Washington, D.C., man whose love of music led him, in the 1960s, to meticulously hand-make and hand-paint facsimilie record album covers of his fantasized music, complete with imagined lyric sheets and liner notes (with some "albums" even shrink-wrapped), and even more incredibly, to hand-make cardboard fascimilies of actual grooved discs to put inside them. "Mingering Mike," whom a reporter and two hobbyists tracked down (but who declined to be identified in print) also made real music, on tapes, using his and friends' voices to simulate instruments. His 38 imagined "albums" were discovered at a flea market after Mike defaulted on storage-locker fees, and the hobbyists who found them said they were so exactingly done that a major museum would soon feature them. [New York Times, 2-2-04]

-- (1988) And finally, there was ol' Hal Warden, the Tennessee 16-year-old who was married at 15 and granted a divorce from his wife, 13. Hal had previously been married at age 12 to a 14-year-old (and fathered children with both), but the first wife divorced Hal because, she told the judge, "He was acting like a 10-year-old." [The precise citation is inaccessible, but various marital reports on the Wardens are available, e.g., Associated Press, 2-21-1987]

Thanks, as usual, to the past and present members of the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

In April, Anton Purisima filed a claim in Federal District Court in New York City that the Lowering The Bar blog calculated was for the largest monetary demand ever made in a lawsuit -- "$2,000 decillion" (or 2 followed by 36 zeroes, which of course is many times more money than exists on planet Earth). Purisima's lawsuit names Au Bon Pain, Carepoint Health, Kmart, the New York City Transit Authority and LaGuardia Airport among the parties allegedly causing him so much distress (by fraud, civil rights violations and even "attempted murder"). Lowering The Bar also noted that "$2,000 decillion" could also have been accurately nominated as "$2 undecillion" or even "two octillion gigadollars." [Purisima v. Au Bon Pain, et al, Case No. 1:14 CV 2755 (SDNY, 4-11-2014) via Lowering The Bar, 5-13-2014]

Only in Florida -- (1) Calvin Rodriguez was arrested in Port St. Lucie, Florida, in May as the man who had been using a shaved key to steal a series of cars from parking lots. His spree came to an abrupt halt as he sped away from police in a stolen Honda Civic only to crash into a huge alligator in the road. (2) On May 1st, a wildlife trapper called to Pine View School in Osprey, Florida, south of Sarasota, removed four alligators (one of which was 8 feet long) from the campus while classes were in session (but without disruption). (3) Beachcombers in the Gulf of Mexico town of Redington Beach, Florida, were treated on May 17th to the sight of a full-grown elephant treading water about 20 yards offshore. (The animal had made its way to the water after being unloaded for a commercial birthday party appearance.) [WPTV (West Palm Beach), 5-15-2014] [Sarasota Herald Tribune, 5-2-2014] [WTSP-TV (St. Petersburg), 5-19-2014]

Democracy in Action -- (1) During a regional session of Spain's parliament in February, a photographer from the newspaper El Diario Montanes captured a shot of legislator Miguel Angel Revilla looking at a picture of a nude woman (in a magazine otherwise concealed inside a folder). (He explained later that he was of course just reading the articles.) (2) In May, U.S. Rep. Joe Garcia of Florida was captured on a C-SPAN camera during a House Judiciary Committee hearing casually eating his earwax. In the sequence, described on a Time magazine blog, he dug into his ear, inspected the results, placed them in mouth, then went "back for seconds." (Rep. Garcia explained later that he was actually dealing with a "hangnail.") [Daily Mail (London), 2-25-2014] [Time.com, 5-14-2014]

-- One of the leading theories as to the cause of a radiation leak at a nuclear waste dump near Carlsbad, New Mexico, in February is the facility's recent, unanticipated switch to "organic" kitty litter. Previously, an inorganic variety had been used to absorb liquid in the waste drums shipped to the facility from bomb-making plants that had been temporarily storing the waste pending creation of a permanent nuclear waste storage site. [Associated Press via SFGate.com (San Francisco), 5-13-2014]� -- First Things First: Trustees of the University of Illinois announced in March that, based on an unreported number of suggestions by students, it would expand the student health insurance plan soon to fix an apparently glaring oversight: the absence of coverage for student sex-change surgery (which, according to the school, would increase students' premiums by only $2 a semester). [Associated Press via Crain's Chicago Business, 3-6-2014]

-- In April, India's Delhi High Court judges declined to halt the local government's program of posting pictures of deities on the walls of buildings in order to discourage public urination (that surely no one would soil his lord). The plaintiffs pointed out that the campaign was so clearly ineffective that perhaps the deities' images were even making the problem worse -- that "evidence" so far shows that confronting the images might even compel some people to relieve the "pressure on the bladder." [India Today, 4-12-2014]

-- An unnamed 60-year-old Buddhist monk was arrested in Nantou County, Taiwan, in April after a convenience-store manager said he was caught red-handed swiping packets of beef jerky. "I don't know why," he told police, "but lately I had this craving for meat." He also had trouble with honesty, initially denying his guilt before finally confessing to the officer that "I have let Lord Buddha down." (Buddhists traditionally are strict vegetarians.) [Taipei Times, 4-13-2014]

-- The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in 2013 that it was not necessarily illegal for teachers to send students sexually oriented text messages -- that the state law banning the practice violated "free speech." As a result, in February 2014, prosecutors in Tarrant County dropped their case against a junior-high teacher who had exchanged 688 text messages with a 13-year-old female student over a six-day period in 2012, on topics such as "sexual preferences and fantasies" and whether either of them ever walked naked around the house. The messages would be illegal, the Court had ruled, only if they led to a meeting or an offer of sex. [KTBC-TV (Austin), 2-24-2014]

-- Despite a 1971 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court declaring that governments could not punish people who are merely "annoying," dozens of towns (according to a March Wall Street Journal report) continue to regard the behavior as criminal. (The justices decided the word is too "vague" to give fair warning of which behaviors are illegal, but an Indiana deputy attorney general told the Journal that anyone with "ordinary intelligence" knows what is annoying.) New York has such a law, as do Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Cumberland, Maryland -- among the 5,000 mentions of forms of "to annoy" in a computer search of municipal ordinances. (Britain's House of Lords in January blocked a proposed anti-annoyance law.) [Wall Street Journal, 3-29-2014] [BBC News, 1-8-2014]

-- Among the discretionary punishments authorized to Georgia judges is banishing an offender from the county in which he committed the crime. Complained driver Ricardo Riley (who as of February is barred from Walton County), "I didn't commit no murder, I'm not a sex offender, I'm not a criminal. I just got a speeding ticket." Judge Brad Brownlow, perhaps irritated at Riley's request to reduce the original $250 fine, instead piled on punishments -- including banishment. Walton County is just outside the Atlanta metro area, and Riley, from adjacent Gwinnett County, has friends and co-workers who live in Walton -- but whom he can no longer visit. [WSB-TV (Atlanta), 2-6-2014]

The U.S. Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration, in his latest report on agency employee bonuses in April (covering late 2010 through 2012), disclosed that $2.8 million of the high-performance prizes went to employees with discipline problems -- including about 1,150 workers who owe about $1 million in back federal taxes. The inspector general acknowledged that the bonuses "appear to create a conflict" regarding the "integrity" of the program. (The Treasury Department pointed out somewhat proudly that the Department's rate of tax delinquencies is only about one-eighth the delinquency rate of the United States as a whole.) [Associated Press via WTOP Radio (Washington, D.C.), 4-23-2014]

The Asia Pacific branch of the worldwide advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather finally apologized in May for a recent "Bounce Back" ad in India for Kurl-On mattresses (whose general theme proclaims mattresses so comfortable that users "bounce" up after landing on them). Previous versions had lauded Steve Jobs (for "bouncing back" from his mid-career firing by Apple) and Mahatma Gandhi (for "bouncing back" to become a spiritual leader). In the problematic ad, the Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai (who was nearly killed in 2012 by Muslim extremists) is shot in the head in a cartoon but "bounces back" after landing on a Kurl-On mattress. [Yahoo News, 5-15-2014]

-- Ethan Couch, 17, was convicted of DUI manslaughter last year after killing four people, but benefited at sentencing from a counselor's testimony describing him as a victim of "affluenza" -- a condition in which children of wealthy families hopelessly feel "entitlement" and are prone to irresponsibility. In April, the Vernon, Tex., hospital providing Ethan's court-ordered rehabilitation announced that Ethan's "wealthy" parents would nonetheless be billed only for about 6 percent of the cost of treating the "affluenza" -- $1,170 of an anticipated $21,000 monthly tab -- with Texas taxpayers picking up the remainder. [KDFW-TV (Dallas-Fort Worth), 4-11-2014]