The enormous compensation CEOs of large corporations receive is justified in part by their bringing prosperity to their shareholders, but last year (an excellent one for most investors), two of the nation's best-paid chief executives "earned" handsome raises despite presiding over losses: Philippe Dauman of Viacom Inc. (paid $44.3 million, stock lost 6.6 percent) and Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric (an 88 percent raise to $37.3 million, stock lost 6.7 percent). CEO Steven Newman of Transocean earned only $14.2 million, according to a June Wall Street Journal report, but that was a 2.2 percent boost -- for stewardship that resulted in one of 2014's biggest flops -- Transocean's 59.9 percent loss for its shareholders. [Wall Street Journal, 6-25-2015]

-- The Japanese, especially, report a decline of intimacy (for instance, a recent estimate found that about a quarter of 30-year-olds had never had sex with another person) -- convenient for a Kyoto research institute's announcement in June that it had developed a huggable, human-sized, featureless pillow (resembling Casper the Friendly Ghost), with skin-like texture, to serve as an embraceable intimacy substitute. For people with actual lovers, the "Hugvie" (retailing for the equivalent of $80) has a mouth slot for a cellphone to enable running sweet talk with a remote "companion." [phys.org, 6-5-2015]

-- Redneck Marketing Challenges: (1) Scotty and Beverly Franklin of Springfield, Missouri, are trying to tempt cowboys to actually wear leather boots retrofitted to be open-toed sandals. KHOU-TV (Houston) reported that the Franklins would sandal-up your favorite pair for $75. (2) One of the more reviled consumer products of 2015 is a gun-shaped iPhone case, which so alarms police that it suddenly in early July became hard to find, even at the online Japan Trend Shop, which previously offered models from $5 to $49. Asked one officer, "Why would you want to make yourself look like a threat (to cops)?" [KHOU-TV (Houston), 6-23-2015] [CNN Money, 7-1-2015]

In a recent BBC documentary, the son of renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking (Tim, now 36) revealed that his dad is "hugely competitive" and showed him "no compassion at all" when he was growing up. Tim said two of his few avenues of coping with such a famous, oblivious father were when he used to race around in his dad's specialized (and expensive) wheelchair (pretending it was a go-kart) and, for those deliciously awkward moments, adding cuss words to his father's synthesized speech software. [Mother Nature Network, 6-17-2015]

-- Jihadists governing ISIS' Euphrates province recently outlawed the popular hobby of breeding pigeons and threatened violators with flogging and imprisonment. The ban was initially thought to be aimed at frustrating pigeon-messaging to the outside world, but the published prohibition mentions other justifications -- the hobby's frivolity (wasting time that could better be spent praying) and the special offense to God (because pigeons are "uncovered," with exposed genitals). [Daily Mail, 6-2-2015]

-- God Is Love: (1) In a June YouTube video reported by various news sites, Tempe, Arizona, pastor Steven Anderson (Faithful Word Baptist Church) prayed for God to "rip out the heart" of Caitlyn Jenner, for whom Anderson expresses "a perfect hatred" for announcing she was no longer Bruce. (2) On his "700 Club" TV program in June, Pat Robertson patiently explained to a grieving mother why God could have allowed her 3-year-old son to die of illness -- that God saw the big picture and knew, for instance, that the kid could have become a serial killer or contracted a hideous disease, and that she should be relieved that God took him early. [YouTube via RawStory, 6-10-2015] [Mediate, 6-9-2015]

Esteban Rocha, 51, was arrested in June in Placerville, California, and charged with exposing himself to a woman -- about 25 minutes after Rocha had left the Placerville Police Department, where he had dutifully gone to register his location so that police could keep track of him. [Sacramento Bee, 6-23-2015]

Sweden has unemployment issues, like most countries, but, still, the Oliver & Eva sex shop was not prepared for the deluge when the nation's Employment Service website posted its opening to hire a "sex toy tester." Until the service was forced to pull the announcement, applications were coming in at the rate of one every 20 seconds, with 14,000 emails greeting the employer the first morning. The sex shop emphasized that the tester must be "driven," "methodical" and "with patience" and a knowledge of Microsoft Excel. [The Local (Stockholm), 6-25-2015]

News of the Weird tracks the "armed and clumsy," who can't avoid shooting themselves accidentally, but then there are these guys: (1) Adam Hirtle, 30, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, checked into a hospital on June 10 after intentionally shooting himself in the foot with a .22-caliber handgun -- twice, "curious" to see how it felt (with and without his boot to compare pain levels). (2) Jeremiah Raber, 38, recently commenced a crowdfunding campaign for a kids' sports version of his "Nutshellz" jockstrap -- according to Raber the strongest such apparel in the world, made from breakthrough "Dyneema" (supposedly half the weight of Kevlar but twice as strong). Recently, using a ".22 long rifle," Raber had business partner Matt Heck shoot him directly in the delicate area, but according to Raber, he felt just a "tap." [Denver Post, 6-11-2015] [Riverfront Times (St. Louis), 5-11-2015]

(1) A 79-year-old woman in Markgroeningen, Germany, hit a ditch coming down a hill and flipped through a wall into the second floor of a storage depot, resulting in only minor injuries (June). (2) A woman driving 100 mph on a freeway near Leicester, England, lost control of her car, which somehow wound up in a tree about 20 feet above the roadway. She and a passenger climbed down and walked away (May). (3) A car speeding over a ramp sailed off a road in Durban, South Africa, crashing back-end-first through the roof of a one-story home, resting with the front end pointing straight up. Neither driver nor resident was hurt (July). [NBC News, 6-1-2015] [Leicester Mercury, 5-26-2015] [ER24 via BBC News, 7-2-2015]

One Flaw in the Game Plan: Gary Elliott, 19, was arrested shortly after someone had ripped a hole in the ceiling of Al's Army Navy store in Orlando, Florida, and -- expertly shimmying down a rope, then back up -- made off with about 70 guns in a bag. ("It must be Spider-Man," was proprietor Neal Crasnow's first thought.) However, minutes after the burglary, Elliott came to a police officer's attention on the street, bleeding, carrying the large bag -- and pedaling away on his "getaway" vehicle, which was a genuine tricycle (yes -- three wheels!). [Orlando Sentinel, 7-1-2015]

(1) While a custom fitting is being prepared, Alyeska Pipeline is "servicing" a leak in the trans-Alaska Pipeline by sending an employee twice a day in June to mop up the oil with rags. (2) A man was spotted and photographed on a riverbank in Nanyang, China, carefully (and oblivious to onlookers) bathing his inflatable doll. (3) In May, at the very moment police in Akron, Ohio, had begun (with a warrant) searching the home of Andrew Palmer, 46, for evidence of drug-dealing, a UPS driver appeared at the door to make a routine delivery -- of four pounds of marijuana. [Alaska Dispatch News, 6-23-2015] [Shanghaiist, 5-14-2015] [Cleveland.com, 5-16-2015]

Fine Points of the Law: Things looked grim for Carlos Simon-Timmerman, arrested by U.S. border agents in Puerto Rico for bringing a child-sex video home from a holiday in Mexico. The star of "Little Lupe the Innocent" looked very young, and federal prosecutors in April (2010) called an "expert witness" pediatrician, who assured the jury, based on the girl's underdevelopment, that she was a minor. However, Simon-Timmerman's lawyer had located "Lupe" via her website, and she cheerfully agreed to fly in from her home in Spain with her passport and other documents to prove, at a dramatic point in the trial, that she was 19 (and "legal") when the video was made. Simon-Timmerman was acquitted. [New York Post, 4-24-2010]

Thanks This Week to Josh Levin and Steve Sidell and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

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.