After certain takeoffs and landings were delayed on Nov. 7 at Paris' Orly airport (several days before the terrorist attacks), a back trace on the problem forced the airport to disclose that its crucial "DECOR" computer system still runs on Windows 3.1 software (introduced in 1992). DECOR's function is to estimate the spacing between aircraft on fog-bound, visually impossible runways, and apparently it must shut down whenever the airport scrambles to find an available 3.1-qualified technician. [Vice.com, 11-13-2015]

Weird Japan (continued): Sony manufactured a robot dog ("Aibo") from 1996 to 2006 for a legion of pet-fanciers, but now that supplies of spare parts and specialized repairers are dwindling, many of the beloved family "canines" are "dying" off. Not to worry, though, for many "surviving" owners are conducting elaborate, expensive -- and even religious -- burials with widely attended funerals for their Aibos. (A March 2015 Newsweek report offered a dazzling photographic array of Aibo funerals.) Aibo support groups proliferate online because, said one repair service director, "(W)e think that somehow, (Aibos) really have souls." [Newsweek, 3-15-2015]

-- Art Basel, the annual weeklong festival for "One-Percenters" in Miami Beach, is scheduled for Dec. 1 to Dec. 6, and among the many excesses is the sale of on-demand caviar, available by text message, to be delivered in person within the hour, at $275 for a 125-gram tin. Miami New Times calls Art Basel "ComicCon for the world's moneyed elite," and among the extravaganzas is an "exotic dance club sheltered inside a greenhouse." Four thousand artists, from 32 countries, are participating. [Miami New Times, 11-17-2015]

-- New World Order: "Crowdsourcing" start-ups (such as GoFundMe and Kickstarter) raise money online for projects such as underappreciated entrepreneurial ventures or families needing help with medical expenses. Day-trading dabbler Joe Campbell went online in November to beg for assistance after being crushed by a bet of the type that many say wrecked the U.S. economy in 2007-08. He held a pessimistic "short" position in his account on KaloBios Pharmaceuticals (KBIO) -- hoping to exploit traders overly optimistic about the company. However, overnight NASDAQ trading awakened him with news that KBIO's price had skyrocketed in frenzied trading and that Campbell now owed his broker $131,000 -- and Campbell's new GoFundMe post stoically asks strangers to please help him pay that off. [Marketwatch, 11-20-2015]

-- Charles Smith, 62, is set to drive municipal buses for Broward County, Florida, until he retires in 2020, even though his record includes 14 accidents in a recent five-year period (not enough for discipline, in that, according to contract rules, not more than four were labeled "preventable" in any two consecutive years). The bus drivers' union president told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that he "can't figure out why" some drivers just get into more accidents than others. Elsewhere in transit news, notorious serial New York "joydriver" Darius McCollum, 50, commandeered yet another bus and was arrested on Nov. 11. He faces jail time, just as he has already served for more than two dozen bus- and train-"borrowing" incidents. (Based on news reports of McCollum over the years, he nonetheless might be a better bus driver than Charles Smith.) [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 11-20-2015] [New York Times, 11-11-2015]

-- The federal government confiscated more property from citizens (through "civil asset forfeiture") in 2014 than burglars did, according to FBI figures publicized by the independent Institute for Justice (and that did not count state and local government seizures, which are not uniformly reported). None of the governments is bound by law to await convictions before exercising seizure rights. (Some of the seized assets must eventually be returned to private-party victims, but news reports abound of suddenly enriched police departments and other agencies being "gifted" with brand-new cars and other assets acquired from suspects never convicted of crimes.) [Washington Post, 11-23-2015]

(1) Carrie Pernula, 38, was arrested in Champlin, Minnesota, in October after a perhaps too-aggressive strategy for quieting raucous neighbor kids. According to the police report, Pernula, at wit's end, apparently, wrote the kids' parents by mail: "(Your) children look delicious. May I have a taste?" (2) Robinson Pinilla-Bolivar, 24, was arrested in Midland, Texas, in November, accused of threatening a woman at knifepoint because (according to the police report) she would not "smell his arm pit." [WCCO-TV (Minneapolis, 10-21-2015] [Midland Reporter-Telegram, 11-18-2015]

Author Richard Brittain, 28 (and a former champion at the popular British Scrabble-like "Countdown" TV show), pleaded guilty in Scotland's Glasgow Sheriff Court in November for his 2014 response to an unfavorable literary review by an 18-year-old supermarket worker posting on an Internet site. Brittain had acknowledged some criticisms of his book "The World Rose" in a blog, but said other critics had compared him to Dickens, Shakespeare and Rowling. However, he confessed, when he read the clerk's review, he searched for her online, found where she worked, traveled 500 miles to the store and knocked her out with a wine bottle to the back of the head. (She was treated and released at a hospital.) [Daily Mail, 11-10-2015]

-- Recurring Theme: The job market in Wayne County, Michigan, is apparently tough to crack, which led John Rose, 25, to the county sheriff's office looking for a job. He finished the paper application in November and was awaiting his interview when deputies called him back. As he walked through the door, he was arrested, since a routine check had turned up numerous outstanding charges in Kentucky including multiple counts of rape, sexual abuse and sodomy. [Detroit News, 11-13-2015]

-- Not Ready for Prime Time: A crew of masked home invaders struck an Orlando, Florida, family in October and were preparing a haul of about $100,000 in cash and property when one of the perps got testy with the family's barking dog. "Back up, Princess," the masked man said, inadvertently revealing that he was on a first-name basis with the dog and therefore a family acquaintance. The victims, piecing together other clues, identified Christopher Jara, who was soon arrested. [WESH-TV (Orlando), 10-29-2015]

-- Inexplicable: He was a "well-traveled professional with close to seven figures in the bank," according to a November New York Times profile, who had recently, gradually given $718,000 to two Manhattan psychics who had vowed to help reunite him with a former love (even though she is dead and, said one, reachable only if he built an 80-mile bridge of gold past her "reincarnation portal"). Though the psychics have been identified, a private investigator said the very personality problems that made the man a victim will also make him a "terrible witness" in court. [New York Times, 11-15-2015]

-- Readers' Choice: Massachusetts became perhaps America's most religiously advanced state in November when its Registry of Motor Vehicles implicitly granted official recognition to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (whose adherents believe, generally, that hard evidence of God's existence is no stronger than that of FSM's existence). Ms. Lindsay Miller of Lowell proudly displayed her driver's license, whose photo is of Ms. Miller wearing a metal colander on her head -- since a "religious" head covering is the only type permitted in official ID photos. (FSM'ers are known as "Pastafarians.") (As News of the Weird has reported, the Czech Republic issued at least one official "colander" ID in 2013, and in January 2014, Pastafarian Christopher Schaeffer took his seat on the Town Council of Pomfret, New York, decked out in his finest colander-ware.) [Associated Press via KRON-TV (San Francisco), 11-13-2015]

At a George Washington University men's basketball game on March 5 (2011), accounting department professor Robert Kasmir was honored at halftime for being one of the elite financial donors to the university, but he failed to make it to the end of the game. He was ejected from the Smith Center arena in the second half for harassing a referee. [GW Hatchet (George Washington University), 3-5-2011]

Thanks This Week to Lisa Robinson and Joel Sullivan, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

The manager of the agency in Louisville, Kentucky, responsible for, among other things, development planning, zoning changes and historic landmarks revealed in November that his headquarters has a "boogers" problem and ordered users of the third-floor men's room to stop hocking them onto the walls adjacent to the urinals. According to an internal memo cited by InsiderLouisville.com, Metro Planning and Design Services manager Joe Reverman called the mucus buildup "a very serious situation" and had his executive administrator post signs instructing restroom users on the basics of proper disposal of "anything that comes out of or off a person's body." [InsiderLouisville.com, 11-18-2015]

-- The 1968 Cy Twombly "blackboard" painting sold for $70.5 million at New York City's Sotheby's auction in November (higher than experts' estimate of $60 million). The painting consists of six horizontal lines of continuous circular swirls (white chalk on a "blackboard") -- perhaps the same swirls that might be made by an extremely bored, aggressive first-grader given a supply of chalk and the absence of the teacher. [Artnet News, 11-11-2015]

-- The Baltimore-based "experimental music" creators Matmos announced the release of their new album, "Ultimate Care II," consisting entirely of "music" made by a Whirlpool washing machine (the Ultimate Care II model). According to a November report in Time magazine, the machine's 38-minute wash cycle will be "sampled and processed" to lighten the original sound. (Matmos previously "played" canisters of helium on stage at Radio City Music Hall and a cow's uterus at the San Francisco Art Institute.) [Time.com, 11-9-2015]

In an enterprise somewhat resembling "American Idol," amateur performers in China become self-supporting online not by soliciting money directly, but through virtual gifts from enthralled fans, with performers getting a cut of each sale. Beijing's YY.com hosts original performances, and two of the site's favorites, Mr. Earth and Ms. Cloud, earned the equivalent of about $160,000 last year from their universe of 1.8 million fans (according to a November Wall Street Journal report). In an ancillary industry (led by 9158.com), hard-core fans can purchase access (think "virtual limousines," shown "arriving" at a "concert"), giving them bragging rights. (A simple "applause" icon after a song costs about a penny.) [Wall Street Journal, 11-11-2015]

The exasperated drug enforcement chief of Indonesia told reporters in November (following confiscation of a massive quantity of methamphetamine from China) that the ordinary death penalty was insufficient for drug runners, who should instead be forced to overdose on their own shipments. Budi Waseso also mused that crocodiles would make better prison guards than humans because crocs can't be bribed and later added tigers and pirhanas to the proposed guard roster. Even so, Waseso's boss reiterated that the government is committed to rehabilitation over punishment. [Australian Broadcasting Corp. News, 11-13-2015][Jakarta Globe, 11-22-2015]

Watch Your Language: (1) Recently added to the list of words and phrases to be officially discouraged on campus, according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's website: "political correctness." The phrase is said to be a "microaggression" that might make some students feel uncomfortable or unsafe if they hear it or read it. (2) In November, the University of Vermont held a (voluntary) three-day "retreat" open only to students who "self-identify as white," so that they can study the implications of "white privilege" in society (e.g., "what does it mean to be white?" and "how does whiteness impact you?"). [CampusReform.org, 10-21-2015] [CampusReform.org, 11-18-2015]

The Queens (New York) Redbird Tourist Information Center was finally ordered to close in July following an extraordinarily unsuccessful seven-year run in which, possibly, not a single tourist ever walked through the door. The New York Post, interviewing neighbors in Kew Gardens, found no one who ever saw a visitor, and the center's lone staff member said she recalled only lunchtime drop-ins from jury duty at the criminal court building down the block. [New York Post, 7-10-2015]

Marshall University (Huntington, West Virginia), seeking a "star free agent" for its medical faculty, hired neurosurgeon Paul Muizelaar in July despite controversy from his previous work at the University of California, Davis. There, Dr. Muizelaar and colleagues, in a daring experiment, introduced live bowel bacteria into the brain -- on lab rats -- supposedly to stimulate the immune system when other remedies had faltered. However, Dr. Muizelaar, emboldened, also introduced the bacteria into brains of a man and two women who had highly malignant glioblastoma tumors (each patient having consented). However, two died within weeks, and although the third survived more than a year, UC Davis found numerous protocol violations. Dr. Muizelaar's new supervisor told the Associated Press that he nonetheless felt lucky to land him because "not everybody wants to move to Appalachia." [Associated Press via Charleston Gazette-Mail, 7-4-2015]

Deputy sheriff Michael Szeliga of St. Petersburg, Florida, in Fort Lauderdale for a weekend training session in July, was to receive a commendation at the formal banquet, for exemplary DUI enforcement, presented by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. (This is News of the Weird; you've already guessed the outcome.) He, escorted by two fellow deputies, arrived for dinner "staggeringly drunk" (though he did not drive), according to an internal affairs investigation, and he was ordered to go sleep it off. (Szeliga wrote an apology and was transferred out of DUI work. Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said Szeliga was a good deputy but that the incident was "one of the most ridiculous things" he'd ever heard of.) [WFLA-TV (Tampa), 11-5-2015]

Social science professor Dr. Jeff Justice resigned from the faculty at Tarleton State University (Stephenville, Texas) in October to head off an investigation into whether he supplied alcohol to students and proselytized at least one to undergo a self-mutilation practice. Justice admitted, post-resignation, that he was a devotee (since age 13) of the "Sundance" ritual, in which he would hang from a tree in his backyard by hooks connected to stakes in his bare chest and that he demonstrated it to some students but apparently interested none. He attributed the incidents to "severe depression." (Bonus: He had won a Faculty Excellence award in 2015.) [Texan NewsService (Tarleton State University), 10-14-2015]

Kaleb Alexander, 25, was shot and killed in October as he emerged from a United Dairy Farmers convenience store in Columbus, Ohio, still with his gun defiantly drawn after he had just then robbed the clerk. A Columbus police SWAT team was waiting outside the store because Alexander had robbed the store the previous two nights, as well, and somehow must have thought that the police would not catch on to his cunning robbery strategy. [Columbus Dispatch, 10-15-2015]

Are We Safe? As News of the Weird chronicled in 2010 and 2011, Iraqi police (either corrupt or sincerely unsophisticated) continued to purchase worthless bomb "detectors" to use at checkpoints in Baghdad, instilling residents with a false sense of security, with the result that hundreds of people died in supposedly safe neighborhoods. Briton James McCormick, the most successful con man/seller, is serving a 10-year sentence for the "ADE 651" (which, somehow, Baghdad police continued to buy long after the U.S. had warned of the scam). Since then, more bogus detectors have been peddled to Thailand and other governments. In November 2015, London's The Independent, in a dispatch from the Egyptian resort Sharm el-Sheikh, reports that luxury hotels' security officers are now using similar bogus detectors to reassure tourists frightened by the recent terrorism-suspected Russian plane crash in Egypt. [The Independent, 11-10-2015]

Mental health practitioners, writing in the January (2011) issue of the journal Substance Abuse, described two patients who had recently arrived at a clinic in Ranchi, India, after allowing themselves to be bitten by cobras for recreational highs. Both men had decades-long substance-abuse issues and decided to try what they had heard about on the street. One, age 44, bitten on the foot, experienced "a blackout associated with a sense of well-being, lethargy and sleepiness." The other, 52, reported "dizziness and blurred vision followed by a heightened arousal and a sense of well-being," and apparently was so impressed that he returned to the snake charmer two weeks later for a second bite. [Substance Abuse, January 2011]

Thanks This Week to Christine Van Lenten and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Professional patients now help train would-be doctors, especially in the most delicate and dreaded of exams (gynecological and prostate), where a becalming technique improves outcomes. One "teaching associate" of Eastern Virginia Medical School told The Washington Post in September that the helpers act as "enthusiastic surgical dummies" to 65 medical colleges, guiding rookie fingers through the trainer's own private parts. The prostate associate might helpfully caution, "No need for speed here," especially since he will be bending over for as many as nine probings a day. A gynecological teaching associate, mentoring the nervous speculum-wielder, might wittily congratulate pupils on having a front-row sight line the "GTA" will never witness: an up-close view of her own cervix. [Washington Post, 9-3-2015]

American Sharia: (1) U.S. parents have a right to home-school their kids, but are subject to varying degrees of regulation, with Texas the most lax, and one El Paso family will have a day before the Texas Supreme Court after one of its kids was reported declining to study because education was useless since he was waiting to be "raptured" (as described in the Bible's Book of Revelation). (2) U.S. courts increasingly allow customers to sign away state and federal rights by agreeing to contracts providing private arbitration for disputes rather than access to courts -- even if the contract explicitly requires only religious resolutions rather than secular, constitutional ones. A November New York Times investigation examined contracts ranging from Scientology's requirement that fraud claims by members be resolved only by Scientologists -- to various consumer issues from home repairs to real estate sales limited to dockets of Christian clerics. [Associated Press via Dallas Morning News, 11-1-2015] [New York Times, 11-3-2015]

-- First-World Spending: According to estimates released by the National Retail Federation in September, 157 million Americans "planned to celebrate" Halloween, spending a total of $6.9 billion, of which $2.5 billion would be on costumes, including $350 million dressing up family pets. [National Retail Federation press release, 9-23-2015]

-- At a ceremony in Kabul in November, prominent Afghan developer Khalilullah Frozi signed a $95 million contract to build an 8,800-unit township and was, according to a New York Times dispatch, toasted for his role in the country's economic rebirth. However, at nightfall, Frozi headed back to prison to resume his 15-year sentence for defrauding Kabul Bank of nearly $1 billion in depositors' money. Because he remains one of Afghanistan's elite, arrangements were made for him to work days but spend his nights in prison (in comfortable quarters). Said one Western official, laconically, "(I)f you have stolen enough money, you can get away with it." [New York Times, 11-4-2015]

Before the terrorist murders gripped Paris, President Francois Hollande and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani had been trying to arrange a formal dinner during Rouhani's planned visit to the city to celebrate the two countries' role in the recent accord limiting Iran's nuclear development. France's RTL radio news reported that "dinner" is apparently more vexing than "nuclear weaponry" -- as Rouhani demanded an alcohol-free meal, which was nixed by Hollande, who insisted that the French never dine without wine. [Washington Times, 11-11-2015]

-- Skeptics feared it was just a matter of time, anyway, until the "political correctness" movement turned its attention to dignity for thieves. San Francisco's SFGate.com reported in November on a discussion in an upscale neighborhood about whether someone committing petty, nonviolent theft should be referred to by the "offensive" term "criminal" (rather than as, for example, "the person who stole my bicycle," since "criminal" implies a harsher level of evil and fails to acknowledge factors that might have caused momentary desperation by a person in severe need). [SFGate.com, 11-2-2015]

-- Reginald Gildersleeve, 55 and free on bond with an extensive rap sheet, was waving a gun as he threatened a clerk and tried to rob a store in Chicago on Halloween night -- until a customer (licensed to carry) drew his own gun and, with multiple shots, killed Gildersleeve. Closer inspection revealed Gildersleeve's weapon to be merely a paintball gun, leading the deceased man's stepson to complain later that "Some people (the licensed shooter) don't actually know how to use guns. They go to firing ranges, but it's not the same ... as a bullet going into flesh. ... Someone's got to answer for that." [USA Today, 11-2-2015]

-- U.S. and European entrepreneurs offer extreme "games" in which liability-waiving "players" volunteer for hours of kidnapping, pain and death threats, but the cult-like, under-the-radar "McKamey Manor" in Southern California (said to have a waiting list of 27,000) is notable for the starkness of its threats of brutality -- and the absence of any "safe word" with which a suddenly reluctant player can beg off. (Only Russ McKamey himself decides if a player has had enough.) The "product" is "100 percent fear," he said. "We're good at it," he told London's The Guardian in an October dispatch from San Diego (whose reporter overheard one of McKamey's thugs promise, "I'm going to tear that girl (player) apart" and "No one is leaving with eyebrows today"). [The Guardian, 10-30-2015]

-- In October, the student newspaper of Toronto's Ryerson University reported a mighty scandal that upset the student body: The school's executive offices' restrooms routinely supply two-ply toilet paper while most other campus buildings offer only one-ply. Following up on the hard-hitting Ryerson Eyeopener's expose, The Canadian Press noted that the universities of Guelph, Ottawa and Toronto comfort all toilet-users' bottoms the same. Ryerson officials defensively noted that older plumbing in many of their buildings cannot handle two-ply paper. [Inside Higher Education, 11-2-2015]

Nicholas Allegretto, 23, was convicted of shoplifting in Cambridge, England, in October (in absentia, because he is still at large). The prosecutor knows Allegretto is his man because, shortly after the February theft, police released a surveillance photo of Allegretto leaving the store with the unpaid-for item, and Allegretto had come to a police station to complain that the suddenly public picture made him look guilty. In fact, he claimed, he intended to pay for the item but had gotten distracted (and besides, he added, his body language often looks somewhat "dodgy," anyway). [Cambridge News, 10-1-2015]

-- Lowering the Bar in Zero Tolerance: The 6-year-old son of Martha Miele was given an automatic three-day out-of-school suspension at Our Lady of Lourdes in Cincinnati in October after, emulating actions of his favorite Power Rangers characters, he pretended to shoot a bow and arrow at another student. Principal Joe Crachiolo was adamant, insisting that he has "no tolerance for any real, pretend or imitated violence." An exasperated Martha Miele confessed she was at a loss about how a 6-year-old boy is supposed to block out the concept of a super-hero fighter (and instead imagine, say, a super-hero counselor?). [WLWT-TV (Cincinnati, 11-2-2015]

-- Cavalcade of Fetishes: (1) Among the approximately 100 arrests Seattle police made in an October drug sting were of a man, 63, and woman, 58, accused only of retail theft of $150,000 worth of goods -- including about 400 pairs of jeans. Police said the couple "ordered" items from shoplifters and seemed to have an "insatiable appetite for denim." (2) In November, police in Bethel, Connecticut, arrested Nelson Montalvo, 50 -- accused of taking about 30 items of underwear from one particular home. Montalvo's motive is being investigated, but police said his modus operandi was to remove items, cut holes in them and return them to the home. [Associated Press via Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 10-16-2015] [Connecticut Post, 11-5-2015]

Name in the News: Sought as a suspect in a convenience store killing in Largo, Florida, in December (2010) (and an example of the highly revealing "Three First Names" theory of criminal liability), Mr. Larry Joe Jerry -- who actually has four first names: Larry Joe Jerry Jr. (He was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to 42 years in prison.) [St. Petersburg Times, 12-2-2010] [Bay News 9 (St. Petersburg), 7-12-2013]

Thanks This Week to Eric Wainwright, and to the News of the Weird Board 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).