California inventor Matt McMullen, who makes the world's most realistic life-sized female doll, the RealDoll (with exquisite skin texture and facial and body architecture, and which sells for $5,000 to $10,000, depending on customization), is working with engineers experienced in robotics to add animation -- but according to a June New York Times report, faces a built-in problem. As a pioneer Japanese robotics developer observed, robots that become too humanlike tend to disgust rather than satisfy. Hence, the more lifelike McMullen makes his RealDolls, the more likely the customer is to be creeped out rather than turned on -- perhaps forcing the virtuoso McMullen to leave enough imperfection to reassure the customer that it's just a doll. [New York Times, 6-11-2015]

-- A low-caste minor girl was beaten up by several higher-caste women in the village of Ganeshpura, India, in June (in retaliation for the girl's having disrespected a male relative of the women -- by allowing her shadow to partially cover the man). The girl's family managed to get to a police station to file charges, but in some remote villages like Ganeshpura, higher-caste aggressors can intimidate the victims into silence (and in this case, allegedly threatened to kill the girl and members of her family for the shadow-casting). [Press Trust of India via Times of India, 6-16-2015]

-- Yunessan Spa House in Hakone, Japan, recently began offering guests supposedly soothing, skin-conditioning baths -- of ramen noodles (elevating to health status what might be Japan's real national dish). The pork broth that fills the tub is genuine, but because of health department regulations, only synthetic noodles can be used, and it is not clear that the artificial ramen achieves the same (allegedly) beautifying collagen levels as actual noodles. [Metro News (London), 5-12-2015]

-- The federal Medicare Fraud Strike Force obtained indictments of 243 people in June in a variety of alleged scams and swindles, and among those arrested was Dr. Noble U. Ezukanma, 56, of Fort Worth, Texas, who once billed the government for working 205 hours in a single day (October 16, 2012). Other indictees were similarly accused of inflating the work they supposedly did for Medicare patients, but Dr. Ezukanma clearly had the most productive day of the bunch. [Dallas Morning News, 6-18-2015]

-- Republican presidential contender Carly Fiorina, who with her husband earned $2.5 million last year, disclosed that the U.S. tax system required her to file not just a federal return but returns in 17 states, as well, and a June New York Times report chose one state (Michigan) to highlight the Fiorinas' plight. Ultimately, the Fiorinas determined that they owed Michigan income tax of $40, but they had no way of knowing the exact amount until they had completed 58 pages of documents (to rule out various Michigan attempts to collect more because the tax they owed was more justly payable to other states and could thus be excluded). [New York Times, 6-12-2015]

-- Canada's naval vessels stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, currently lack supply-ship services, according to a May Canadian Press report. One of the two supply vessels has been decommissioned, and the other, 45 years old, is floating limply because of corrosion, and work on a replacement will not begin until 2017. Consequently, according to the report, the navy has been forced to order repair parts for the ship by advertising for them on eBay. [Canadian Press via CTV News, 5-18-2015]

A brief Washington Post review in June heralded the new edition of the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, covering "different types of ignorance" in a range of subjects by authors from various countries. Among the valuable conclusions in the book is that while "individual ignorance" may be rational in some cases, it is unlikely that "collective ignorance" advances the society. In any event, the author concluded, "The realm of ignorance is so vast that no one volume can fully cover it all." [Washington Post, 6-16-2015]

Because the walkway in front of a Publix supermarket in Fort Lauderdale had seen its share of Girl Scout cookie sellers, Patrick Lanier apparently thought the venue a natural for his product. On June 4, he plopped down a live, 5-foot-long shark he had just captured, and which he hectored shoppers to buy, asking $100 (and occasionally tossing buckets of water on it to keep it shimmering). He had less success than the cookie-peddlers, and in short order loaded it back into his truck, took it to an inlet and released it. However, he did avoid the police; it is illegal to sell fish without a commercial license. [WSVN-TV (Miami), 6-5-2015]

The New York Court of Appeals ruled in June that, when a body is taken for official autopsy and organs are removed (including the brain), the deceased's family does not necessarily have a right to receive the body with organs re-inserted. "(N)othing in our common law jurisprudence," the judges wrote, mandates "that the medical examiner do anything more than produce the ... body." The family had demanded the entire body back for a "proper" Catholic burial. [New York Daily News, 6-11-2015]

In May, police in Anglesey, North Wales, called for a hostage negotiator to help with two suspects (aged 21 and 27) wanted for a series of relatively minor crimes and who were holed up on the roof of a building. However, the building was a one-story community center, and the men (whose feet were dangling over a gutter about 8 feet off the ground) had refused to come down. Even as a crowd gathered to watch, the men managed to hold out for 90 minutes before being talked down. [South Wales Evening Post, 5-15-2015]

Marijuana is purported to make some heavy users paranoid, and the January arrest of alleged Bozeman, Montana, dealers Leland Ayala-Doliente, 21, and Craig Holland, 22, may have been a case in point. Passersby had reported the two men pacing along the side of Golden Beauty Drive in Rexburg, Idaho, and, when approached by a car, would throw their hands up until the vehicle passed. When police finally arrived, one suspect shouted: "We give up. We know we're surrounded. The drugs (20 pounds of marijuana) are (over there)." According to the Idaho Falls Post Register, they were not surrounded, nor had they been followed by undercover officers -- as the men claimed. [Post Register, 1-29-2015]

The South Pacific island of Pitcairn (pop. 48, all descendants of the crew of the legendary "Mutiny on the Bounty" ship and their Tahitian companions) made News of the Weird in 2002 when British judges were brought in (and jails built) to conduct trials on the island's rampant sex abuse of children -- said to involve most men and girls on the island. (Nine men were convicted, but none served a lengthy sentence.) Pitcairn has resumed being an island paradise, and in May its laconic governing council voted on a sex issue: It legalized gay marriage, even though, according to a June Associated Press report, no one had asked, and only one person had ever identified as gay. One resident told the AP that, well, gay marriage "is happening everywhere else, so why not?" [Associated Press via Daily Telegraph (London), 6-22-2015]

Ingrid Paulicivic filed a lawsuit in September (2010) against Laguna Beach, California, gynecologist Red Alinsod over leg burns she bafflingly acquired during her 2009 hysterectomy -- a procedure that was topped off by the doctor's nearly gratuitous "name-branding" of her uterus with his electrocautery tool. Dr. Alinsod explained that he carved "Ingrid" in inch-high letters on the organ only after he had removed it and that such labeling helps in the event a woman requests the return of the uterus as a souvenir. He called the branding just a "friendly gesture" and said he did not know how the burns on Paulicivic's leg occurred. (Update: In 2012, a court in Orange County, California, ruled that Alinsod's regimen did not constitute malpractice.) [The Smoking Gun, 9-13-2010] [PRLOG.org, 3-18-2014]

Thanks This Week to Hap McUne and Paul Flagler, 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).

Gregory Reddick, 54, and his employer, SJQ Sightseeing Tours, filed a lawsuit in June against New York City for "harass(ing)" them and hampering their ability to rip off tourists, specifically, interfering with their "right" to sell tickets for $200 or more for trips on the Staten Island Ferry -- which is actually free to ride. Reddick was wearing an (unauthorized) "Authorized Ticket Agent" jacket when arrested, and according to a New York Post account, believes he operates legally because he misunderstands a technicality in a 2013 court case. Prosecutors, who described the waterfront tourist-exploitation scene as "the wild west," found Reddick with seven dates of birth, five aliases and six Social Security numbers. [gothamist.com, 6-5-2015]

-- Doctors at a hospital in Dongyang, China, removed 420 kidney stones from a single patient in June (a "Mr. He"). One of the surgeons told reporters that a soy-heavy diet of tofu was probably to blame. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most stones removed from one kidney during surgery (in India in 2009 in a three-hour operation) is (this is not a misprint) 172,155. [Qianjiang Evening Post via BBC News, 6-8-2015]

-- In May, the Museum of Modern Arts in Krakow, Poland, began showing a video of naked men and women entering a room and playing a game of tag -- then revealing that that particular room was actually a building in a Holocaust gas-chamber facility in Auschwitz. The idea, apparently, was to bring three affected nations (Poland, Germany and Israel) together, and among the sponsors of the exhibit was the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, despite criticism that the work was somewhat "repulsive and offensive." (A similar project opened in Tartu, Estonia, in February, but was closed almost immediately after objections from Jewish-advocacy organizations.) [Jerusalem Online, 6-5-2015]

-- U.S. students may be clever, but they apparently badly trail Chinese students in the genius of cheating on exams (and especially on the use of cheat-enabling technology). The government's newest anti-fraud weapon, employed recently in the city of Luoyang during the crucial university-determining tests, is a six-propeller drone that can hover above a cavernous exam hall, trying to pinpoint the locations inside in which designated ace test-takers are radio-transmitting correct answers to their clients, whose tiny earbuds are worn deep in ear canals. Cheating students also use beverage-bottle cameras, ordinary-appearing eyeglasses that can scan and transmit images, and fingerprint film (to fool fingerprint scanners that otherwise would root out test-taking "ringers"). [Quartz, 6-2-2015]

-- France's daily La Provence reported in May that at least one enterprising drug dealer in Marseilles had begun distributing "loyalty cards" to its best customers, offering a 10-euro discount on future sales after that customer's card was full (all 10 squares stamped from previous sales). Said one buyer, "I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I was at a pizzeria or something." The card also expressed thanks for the patronage and reminded the customer of operating hours (11 a.m. to midnight). [The Local (Paris), 5-21-2015]

-- Rehab Will Be Difficult: Laquanda Newby, 25, was charged with three counts of child abuse on June 7 at the county courthouse in Richmond, Virginia, after police spotted her car with two children locked inside on a day in which the temperature reached the 90s. Newby had parked at the courthouse that day in order to attend her hearing on charges that on May 26, she had locked her kids in a hot car while she was out on errands. [WTVR-TV (Richmond), 6-8-2015]

Two students at Florida's Valencia College filed a federal lawsuit in May against the school and three instructors for forcing them to undergo "transvaginal probes" as part of their sonography (ultrasound) curriculum. According to the lawsuit, the school insisted that students learn the probing on each other because, as an instructor said, "Experience is the best teacher." The plaintiffs also charged that some instructors and a student leader (dubbed the "TransVag Queen") made inappropriate, sexualized comments about bodies during the demonstrations. Though the school defended the practice initially, it ordered the live probes halted about a week after the lawsuit was filed and announced lessons would in the future be conducted on simulators. [CNN, 5-19-2015; Orlando Sentinel, 5-26-2015]

-- Luis Cruz, 46, sought pre-trial release in Springfield, Massachusetts, in June -- even though he had been charged with heroin distribution and even though his rap sheet, counting his record in Florida, was 52 pages long. His court-appointed lawyer, Anna Levine, was not deterred, arguing that bail was not necessary to assure that her client would appear for trial because none of the 52 pages, she said, contained an arrest for failure to appear. Said Levine, earnestly, "It's a 52-page record for showing up." [The Republican (Springfield), 6-10-2015]

-- "(J)ust one of those spur-of-the-moment crazy things," explained John Paul Jones Jr., in May after he had intentionally driven his pickup truck through his living room in Senoia, Georgia. He told a reporter that he had been on the phone with his wife and gotten angry, and "one thing led to another." Fortunately, Jones is a contractor, and has been out of work for a while and thus figures he can keep busy fixing his mess. The house "needed some work," he said, "needed air conditioning." Jones said the truck fared well, with just a few scratches. [WGCL-TV (Atlanta), 5-17-2015]

Teachers Just Wanna Have Fun: Some parents of Encinal High School students, in Alameda, California, demanded an investigation in June after learning from a counselor at an after-school program that students had been "assigned" the extra-credit project of rummaging through their parents' bedrooms looking for sex toys (and bringing in a "selfie" holding one). Administrators told parents that the "assignment" was not a requirement of the course but could not ascertain how many students actually presented show-and-tells to the class. [KPIX-TV (San Francisco), 6-3-2015]

Cirilo Castillo Jr., 45, was arrested in February in Edinburg, Texas, but a charge was not filed until June, apparently because prosecutors were awaiting Castillo's recovery from a broken leg. He had been found in a barn after trying to have sex with a horse -- three years after having been convicted of a similar crime (and warned, at that time, to stay away from the Edinburg farm). The broken leg happened, prosecutors said, because in the February incident, the horse kicked him. [MySanAntonio.com, 6-10-2015]

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Nashville, Tennessee, police arrested Mashara Mefford in June and charged her with breaking into one of their marked cruisers. She was discovered by an officer after she had locked herself inside and could not figure out how the locks worked. (2) Dene Temple and Stephen Fidler pleaded guilty and were sentenced in June for burglarizing the Sichuan Garden Chinese restaurant in Brighton, England. Police, called to the restaurant, caught the men attempting to hide inside the walk-in freezer. There was "no doubt," said a supervising officer, that the men would have frozen to death if not for being spotted by police. [WTVF-TV (Nashville), 6-17-2015] [Crawley News (Queensway, England), 6-19-2015]

Blow Against the Empire: Bank of America (BA) had the tables turned in June (2011) after the company wrongfully harassed an alleged mortgage scofflaw in Naples, Florida. BA had attempted to foreclose on homeowners Warren and Maureen Nyerges even though the couple had bought their house with cash -- paid directly to BA. It took BA a year and a half to understand its mistake -- that is, until the Nyergeses sued and won a judgment for expenses of $2,534, which BA contemptuously ignored. The Nyerges obtained a seizure order, and two sheriff's deputies, with a moving truck, arrived at the local BA branch on June 3 (2011) to load $2,534 worth of furniture and computers from the bank's offices and lobby. After an hour on the phone with higher-ups, the local BA manager wrote a check for $2,534. [Naples Daily News, 6-3-2011]

Thanks This Week to Gerald Sacks, Kathryn Wood, and William Parker, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Researchers studying the human-brain-eating Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea reported in a June journal article that they have identified the specific "prion" resistance gene that appears to offer complete protection against mad cow disease and perhaps other neurodegenerative conditions such as dementias and Parkinson's. The tribe customarily dined on relatives' brains at funerals (although has abandoned the practice) and consequently suffered a major 1950s epidemic that wiped out 2 percent of the tribe annually. According to the lead researcher, survivors, with the specific resistance gene, demonstrated "a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans." [Reuters, 6-10-2015]

-- Spouses often disagree politically and vote accordingly, but occasionally one runs for office against the other -- as is the case in Bremerton, Washington, where incumbent Councilmember Roy Runyon is being challenged by his wife, Kim Faulkner. Both were mum as to reasons and in fact filed their registration papers together at the same time in May. Said Runyon: "We're different people. She might have a different approach." [Kitsap Sun (Kitsap, Wash.), 5-14-2015]

-- India's media reported in April yet another birth defect in which the surviving baby is treated as a representation of Hindu holiness. A four-armed, four-legged child (medical explanation: remains of an underdeveloped conjoined twin) is worshipped as the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Lord Ganesha, and pilgrims journey from all over India to the birthplace, Dumri-Isri in Jharkhand state. (In a nod to modernity, one witness told a reporter that initially he had thought a photograph of the child was "Photoshopped," but now has seen the baby with his own eyes.) [OneIndia.com (Bangalore), 4-23-2015]

-- The law of turkey-baster insemination took a turn in Virginia in April when mother Joyce Bruce was unable to keep sperm-provider Robert Boardwine out of her son's life. Bruce relied on a state statute that seemed to allow her sole parenthood if the pregnancy was based on assisted-reproduction medical technology. However, the Court of Appeals of Virginia declared that a "kitchen implement" is not "medical technology" and, considering Boardwine's genuine interest in fatherhood, ruled that he was entitled to joint custody and visitation rights. [CNN, 4-21-2015]

-- Another "Human Right": In April, London's Daily Mail spotted Anna Broom of Gillingham declaring that despite her various disorders that keep her from working, she nonetheless imagines a first-class wedding with champagne, horse-drawn carriage and Mexico honeymoon -- all at government expense -- because that would be her "human right." She told a reporter that a small ceremony at a government office would not boost her confidence, but that her "dream" wedding would be just the thing to get her back on a job search. [Daily Mail, 4-16-2015]

-- The most recent exposition of people who tattoo their eyeballs, at the International Tattoo Festival in Caracas, in February, featured the phenomenon's founder, Mr. Luna Cobra, who said it all started when he tried to create "bright blue" eyes, as in the 1984 film "Dune." (Pigment is injected, permanently, so that it rests under the eye's thin top layer, the conjunctiva.) Asked what the process feels like, devotee Kylie Garth told BBC News, "It was mentally intense," resembling an eye poke, pressure and "a bit of sand" -- but "no pain." Mr. Cobra urged young people to get their jobs before trying eye tats, since "you're going to look frightening forever to the majority of people you encounter." [Washington Post, 2-4-2015]

-- Once again, in May, lawyers went to court trying to persuade a judge that some rights under the U.S. Constitution be extended to intelligent apes (here, chimpanzees, as "autonomous and self-determining beings" at least as perceptive as, for example, severely mentally ill people, who retain rights while institutionalized). Lawyers are once again asking for a writ of habeas corpus (now available only to humans) to take Hercules and Leo out of a lab and into a sanctuary. (Adding to the discussion, in the week after the court hearing, a Harvard professor and colleagues, writing in the journal Current Anthropology, hypothesized that chimps could cook foods if given the chance. Tests revealed that they resist raw food when they are able to place it into a device that made it taste better -- which in theory makes them more intelligent than children who eat cookie dough.) [Associated Press via Toronto Star, 5-27-2015] [New York Times, 6-3-2015]

-- Baffling Perversion: Some men are compelled to express unrequited love for women by ejaculating onto them or into their beverages. The Minnesota legislature is working to upgrade its law (since a recent defendant, John Robert Lind, was acquitted of adulterating his co-worker's coffee on the ground that current law requires actually touching the victim). However, Lind (who admitted a total of six climaxes against the co-worker) is an amateur compared to Tetsuya Fukuda, 40, who was finally apprehended in April, at which time he admitted "more than 100" semen attacks on women on trains near Kinshicho, Japan, dating back to 2011. He told police, "I get excited when in close contact with a woman on a crowded train." [St. Paul Pioneer-Press, 3-11-2015] [Asahi Shimbun via Gawker.com, 4-10-2015]

-- News of the Weird has remarked on modern, over-the-top versions of the centuries-old tradition in China of making funerals entertaining, to attract mourners and thereby signify that the deceased did not die "faceless." In the recent past, festive song-and-dance acts were hired, and soon, in the competition for attendees, some families took to hiring strippers to perform -- even "obscene" acts, "severely pollut(ing)" the culture, according to a critic. In April, the Ministry of Culture, previously somewhat tolerant because of sensitivity for the families, formally denounced the practice and began detaining the traveling performers. [Wall Street Journal, 4-23-2015]

-- Backyard firing ranges are legal in Florida (as News of the Weird reported last year), and in March a Florida House committee voted to keep it that way, shooting down legislation to outlaw them even in urban and residential areas. (Firing on private property is legal except if shooting over a public right-of-way or an occupied dwelling, and "negligent" gunfire, though illegal, is only a misdemeanor.) In 2014, one Florida legislator, originally from Alaska, said even in that liberty-conscious state, residents in urban Anchorage do not have rights that Floridians have. [BayNews9.com (St. Petersburg), 3-25-2015]

-- Convicted "satanic cult" day care operators Dan and Fran Keller were finally unconvicted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in May -- 23 years after being found guilty based in part on toddlers' fantastical testimony (encouraged by counselors) telling impossible tales of molestation. Still, however, the judges could not bring themselves to rule the Kellers "not guilty," thus preserving children's narratives of the Kellers videotaping orgies, serving blood-laced Kool-Aid, kidnapping them to Mexico and more -- yet somehow releasing them, unscarred, each day to parents at pickup time in Austin. (The Kellers spent 22 years behind bars.) [American-Statesman (Austin), 5-20-2015]

-- The South Pacific islanders on the Vanuatu island of Tanna believe that 2016 will be the year that the man they inexplicably worship as a god -- Britain's Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh -- will finally visit them. One highly regarded islander told a London Daily Telegraph correspondent in New Zealand that the cult is starved for a visit, since Philip's only contact since the 1940s has been via gifts (one, the most treasured, an autographed photo). Legendary Vanuatuan "Chief Jack" was convinced that Philip was a descendant of island royalty. [Daily Telegraph, 4-25-2015]

Biologists Studying Rare Species Have to Be Fast: Researchers learned from reports in early 2010 of a new monkey species in Myanmar, with a nose so recessed that it habitually collects rainfall and constantly sneezes. However, according to an October (2010) National Geographic dispatch, by the time scientists arrived to investigate, natives had eaten the monkey. (The sneezing alerts hunters.) Similarly, researchers studying a rare species of Vietnamese lizard learned of a sighting in November (2010), and a two-man team from La Sierra University in Riverside, California, rushed to Ba Ria-Vung Tau province. However, on arrival they found the lizards being routinely served in several restaurants' lunch buffets. [National Geographic, 10-27-2010] [CNN, 11-10-2010]

Thanks This Week to Nathaniel Oxford, Sam Scrutchins, Nate Tracy, and Kathryn Wood, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.