In November, lawyer Michael Petersen of Appleton, Wisconsin, was ordered by county judge Philip Kirk (in a sentence for contempt of court) to inform every client he acquires in the following 12 months that Petersen is a "crook," "cheat," "thief" and "liar." Kirk concluded that Peterson had lied about a plea deal with the prosecutor and created phony documents for backup, leading a client to plead guilty to armed robbery when the prosecutor said there was never such a deal. According to the Appleton Post Crescent, Kirk (after dressing down Petersen in colorful language) told him, "I want you to have as much business as a pimp in a nursing home." [Appleton Post Crescent, 11-19-2015]

-- Pastor Thom Miller, 60 (of the United Christian Ministries International in Mansfield, Ohio), told an international news crew recently that he had "married" his 19-year-old pregnant girlfriend (Reba Kerfoot), but that some in his congregation disapprove -- because Miller is already married (though his incumbent wife, Belinda, 44, apparently does approve). Said Belinda, "Thom is the love of my life and Reba is the blessing of my life, so it all works." Said Miller, "Sexually I have no preference and look forward to my time alone with both wives." (Bonuses: (1) Miller was an enforcer for organized crime in Cleveland until he "found God" in prison. (2) He is annoyed that Ohio recognizes same-sex marriage but not polygamy. (3) The local Mansfield News Journal was apparently scooped on the story but is now catching up.) [Mansfield News Journal, 12-1-2015]

-- Mexican artist Renato Garza Cervera's work usually involves realistic-looking figures created to startle (e.g., a "piggy bank" as a scowling hog of a man down on all fours), but his recent "gang member" floor rugs seem a career peak. Rejecting bear rugs and lion rugs, Cervera's "Of Genuine Contemporary Beast" project features exquisitely constructed, life-size, snarling, naked, heavily tattooed men's bodies (as if skinned) as rugs, representing "modern" beasts -- Salvadorean gang members. Actually, Cervera told Vice.com he intended sympathy: "Societies always invent new beasts in order to make others responsible for their problems." [Vice.com, 9-3-2015]

-- Las Vegas police continue to investigate Kimberly Knight after a video surfaced on her fetish pornography website purporting to be of a medical doctor performing a breast-enlargement procedure and then immediately having sex with the patient. KTNV-TV has questioned Knight on the authenticity of the claims, and she seemed to back off slightly, describing the surgeon as a "medical student," then characterizing the whole thing as a "mistake." As of early December, Knight had not been charged with a crime. [KTNV, 11-7-2015]

-- Justice! In September, federal judge Cathy Seibel ordered the town of Liberty, New York (100 miles from New York City), to stand trial for failure to teach police and prosecutors proper free-speech law -- thus giving plaintiff Willian Barboza revenge for his arrest for writing a "crude" message on the speeding ticket he paid three years ago. Seibel ruled that Barboza's phrase (urging intercourse upon the manure-like town) posed no "imminent" threat and, besides, was obviously just a complaint about government services. Seibel also raised the possibility that money damages will come from the prosecutor's own pocket. [Associated Press via Yahoo News, 9-16-2015]

-- Dr. Bilgin Ciftci was fired in October from Turkey's Public Health Institution and later charged with violating one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's favorite laws -- against "insulting" the president (which carries a maximum four-year prison term) -- because Ciftci had joined a Turkish Facebook thread that was denouncing Erdogan with facial images comparing him to the "Lord of the Rings" character Gollum. The judge, admitting his unfamiliarity, appointed a five-person group of experts to advise him whether the Erdogan-Gollum comparison was "insulting." ("The Lord of the Rings" film director Peter Jackson immediately protested that the images depict not Gollum but his benign alter ego Smeagol, making the comparison obviously uninsulting.) [Washington Post, 12-2-2015; The Guardian (London), 12-3-2015]

-- Scientists from Australia's University of Queensland have developed "swimsuits" to act as diapers for six giant loggerhead turtles as they study their diets by examining their feces. "To our great surprise," said one researcher, they "worked perfectly." The suits were easy to put on, comfortable for the sea turtles to wear (according to the researchers, not the turtles), looked great (ditto), and we were "able to collect the entire fecal sample," he bragged to a London Daily Telegraph reporter in Sydney. [Daily Telegraph, 10-2-2015]

-- After all, leeches are interesting and thus someone has to study them, and Mark Siddall, curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History, is that person. These leeches are easily found, but only in the rear ends of hippopotamuses, he noted, and told Wired.com in August that if a creature can exploit a niche others cannot, it has a monopoly on food. "The only part on the hippo that's vascularized enough to get a good blood meal (is) the rectal region." (Making life worse for these leeches, they lack the strong jaws of other leeches and must instead use a nose-like organ that, writes Wired, it "snakes" into the vascular tissue.) [Wired.com, 8-28-2015]

Damon Matthews, 19, surrendered to police in Bay City, Michigan, in November and confessed to robbing a 7-Eleven. His sister had convinced Matthews that police would soon arrive to apprehend him because, even though he wore a ski-mask "disguise," Matthews is 7-foot-4 and a former high school classmate of the clerk. It was left unreported why Matthews thought the mask would help him. [The Smoking Gun, 12-1-2015]

-- Once again, someone minding his own business here became royalty elsewhere. This time, it was a 32-year-old Vancouver, British Columbia, man with a wife and baby, working as a gardener -- until he learned that a 6,000-person tribe in Ghana wanted him for their king. Thus, Eric Manu, a nephew of the king who died in 2013, was asked in July 2015 to come take over (part-time, at least), and by tradition, Manu's Canadian wife will join him as queen ("mother of all mothers"). Eric said the couple will do whatever they can to improve lives in their village. [Global News (Vancouver), 11-20-2015]

-- Achan Agit presents a worst-case scenario for the weirdness in how some state governments over-regulate professions, and she is currently suing the Iowa Board of Cosmetology Arts & Sciences for burdening her right to make a living. As Forbes.com reported in October, Achan was a war refugee from what is currently South Sudan and is now a permanent resident of the United States -- and skilled in braiding hair, which she learned from elders when she was 5. However, a licensed braider in Iowa (maximum penalty if caught unlicensed: prison, plus a $10,000 fine) needs a high school diploma or equivalent and 2,100 hours of cosmetology coursework -- more than the combined training for dental assistants, bus drivers, EMTs, child care workers and security guards -- and for which Iowa's 27 cosmetology "schools" might charge up to $22,000. [Forbes.com, 10-28-2015]

-- Undignified Death: On Dec. 2, a 48-year-old woman in Alicante, Spain, who according to neighbors had suffered from depression and was likely trying to commit suicide, leaped from her seventh-floor balcony -- but failed. She was hospitalized in stable condition after landing on an elderly gentleman sitting on a bench (who did not survive the collision). [The Local (Madrid), 12-3-2015]

Scientists Just Wanna Have Fun: A team of whimsy-loving researchers at the University of Osaka (Japan) Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences has produced a strain of mice prone to "miscopying" DNA -- making them susceptible to sometimes-unexpected mutations, such as the recently born mouse that tweets like a bird. Lead researcher Arikuni Uchimura told London's Daily Telegraph that he had expected to produce, instead, a mouse with an odd shape, but the "singing" mouse emerged. Previously, the team produced a mouse with dachshund-like short limbs. [Daily Telegraph, 12-10-2010]

Thanks This Week to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

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.