They are simply "'spas' designed to attract teenagers," according to one university official -- plush, state-of-the-art "training" complexes built by universities in the richest athletic conferences to entice elite 17-year-old athletes to come play for (and, perhaps, study at?) their schools. The athletes-only mini-campuses include private housing and entertainment (theaters, laser tag, miniature golf) -- but, actually, the schools are in a $772-million-plus "arms' race" (according to a December Washington Post investigation) because soon after one school's sumptuous, groundbreaking facility opens, some other school's more-innovative facility renders it basically second-rate. And of course, as one university official put it, the "shiny objects" have "nothing whatsoever to do with the mission of a university." (Donors and alumni provide much of the funding, but most schools by now also tap students' "athletic fees.") [Washington Post, 12-21-2015]

-- Police in Monticello, Kentucky, charged Rodney Brown, 25, with stealing farm animals and equipment from a home in December -- but offering to return everything if the victim (a man) had sex with him. Brown allegedly took 25 roosters, a goat and some rooster pens and other rooster-care equipment. (Because Brown also supposedly said he'd beat the man up if he called police, a "terroristic threatening" count was added to "promoting prostitution.") [WKYT-TV (Lexington, Ky.), 1-5-2015]

-- Made in Heaven: William Cornelius, 25, and his fiancee, Sheri Moore, 20, were arrested at the Bay City (Michigan) Mall in January, charged with theft. Police found a pair of earrings and a necklace swiped from Spencer Gifts on her, but she refused to "snitch" on Cornelius, who had minutes earlier proposed to her via a Wal-mart loudspeaker and given her a ring, to applause from onlooking shoppers as she accepted. Cornelius, holding $80.93 worth of goods (a watch, an edible thong, a vibrator and "BJ Blast" oral-sex candy), was apprehended at the mall food court, having apparently (according to the police report) "fallen asleep at a table while tying his shoe." [Bay City Times, 1-7-2015]

-- Islam Rising: (1) A geography class at Riverheads High School in Augusta County, Virginia, alarmed some parents in December when students were assigned to copy an Arabic script to experience its "artistic complexity." However, the phrase the teacher presented for copying was the "shahada" ("There is no god but Allah"). District officials called that just a coincidence -- that the phrase was presented only for calligraphy and never translated. (2) A Washington state uncle complained in December that a WolVol toy airplane he bought for his nephew on Amazon.com, instead of making engine noises, recited spoken words -- which a Whatcom County Islamic Society spokesman said was actually a prayer that hajj pilgrims speak when they journey to Mecca. (Wolvol said it would investigate.) [Schilling Show via Fox News, 12-15-2015] [KING-TV (Seattle), 12-28-2015]

-- Wait, What? NPR's "Morning Edition," reporting on the violent tornadoes that hit North Texas on the night after Christmas, interviewed one woman who said she was luckier than her neighbors because of her faith. She was entertaining 10 relatives when she heard the "train-like" sound of the winds approaching and took everyone outside to confront the storm: "We ... started commanding the winds because God had given us authority over ... airways. And we just began to command this storm not to hit our area. We spoke to the storm and said, go to unpopulated places. It did exactly what we said to do because God gave us the authority to do that." [NPR.org, 12-28-2015]

-- The most promising current concussion-prevention research comes from a study of ... woodpeckers (according to a December Business Week report). Scientists hypothesize that the birds' apparent immunity from the dangers of constant head-slamming is because their neck veins naturally compress, forcing more blood into their craniums, thus limiting the dangerous "jiggle room" in which brains bang against the skull. A team led by a real-life doctor portrayed in the movie "Concussion" is working on a neck collar to slightly pinch the human jugular vein to create a similar effect. [Business Week, 12-28-2015]

-- Researchers from the University of York and the University of St. Andrews wrote in the journal Biology Letters in December that they observed wild male parrots using pebbles in their mouths to help grind seashells into powder and hypothesized that the purpose was to free up the shells' calcium in "vomitable" form so that they could pass it to females before mating, to help improve their offspring's health outcomes. [Discovery News via Washington Post, 12-15-2015]

National Pride: (1) Factory worker Thanakorn Siripaiboon was arrested in December in a Bangkok suburb after he wrote a "sarcastic" comment on social media about the dog that belongs to Thailand's king. For the crime of "insulting the monarch," Thanakorn faces 37 years in prison. (2) Michael McFeat, a Scottish man working on contract for a mining company in Kyrgyzstan, was arrested in January after he (on Facebook) jokingly called the country's national dish "horse penis." ("Chuchuk" is indeed a sausage made from horsemeat.) The crime he was charged with carries a five-year prison term. [New York Times, 12-14-2015] [BBC News, 1-4-2016]

The government of the Netherlands, seeking to boost the economy while simultaneously improving highway skills, enacted legislation in December to allow driving instructors to be paid in sexual services provided the student is at least 18 years old. Though prostitution is legal, the transport minister cautioned that the "initiative" for the new arrangement must be with the instructor so that the country gains better-trained drivers as a result. [CNN, 12-21-2015]

(1) In November, the president of Mauritania, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, in the stands but "bored" with his country's "Super Cup" soccer final that had been tied, 1-1, for a long stretch, ordered officials on the field to stop play abruptly and proceed to a game-ending 10-kick "shootout." (The Tevragh-Zeina team won.) (2) Jorge Servin, Paraguay's head of indigenous affairs, was fired in November after he apparently kneed an indigenous woman in the stomach as she protested her people's treatment by the government. (3) The head of Croatia's human rights committee, Ivan Zvonimir Cica, posing alongside President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic to commemorate International Human Rights Day in December, had his pants inexplicably come loose and fall to his ankles. [NBC News, 12-1-2015] [BBC News, 11-28-2015] [Huffington Post, 12-9-2015]

Most Recent Net-Cash-Loss Theft: The manager of the Nandos Riccarton restaurant in Christchurch, New Zealand, is pretty sure that he knows who swiped the contents of the store's tip jar that December evening (based on surveillance video), but the man denied the theft and walked out. The manager told police there was less than $10 in the jar at the time -- but also that the man had paid his $14.90 tab for food, yet hurried off without eating it. [Stuff.co.nz (Wellington), 12-21-2015]

Approaching Maximum Capacity: The Smoking Gun website suggested in December that the Fairbanks, Alaska, counterfeiting arrest of Chelsea Sperry, 31, might have set a woman's "record" for orifice-concealed contraband. Her vaginal inventory included 16 counterfeit bills (face value $890), one genuine $10 bill (in a different orifice), two baggies of meth, another containing seven morphine pills, two baggies of heroin and 40 empty baggies (apparently anticipating further sales, although it was not reported why the empty baggies -- and the $10 bill -- were not stored openly, for example, in her pocket). [The Smoking Gun, 12-11-2015]

London Fashion Week usually brings forth a shock or two from cutting-edge designers, but a September (2011) creation by Rachel Freire might have raised the bar: a floor-length dress made from 3,000 cow nipples (designed to resemble roses). Initial disgust for the garment centered on implied animal abuse, but Freire deflected that issue by pointing out that the nipples had been discarded by a tannery and that her use amounted to "recycling." Freire, 32, distracted by the animal-abuse angle, was spared having to explain the other issue -- why anyone would want to wear a dress made with cow nipples. [Ecouterre.com. 26-2011]

(1) A tractor-trailer driver with a load of bottled water tried to make it over a historic bridge in Paoli, Indiana, on Christmas Day, with the obvious outcome when 35 tons of water starts across a limit-6-tons span. The driver told police she saw the 6-ton sign but did not know how that "translated" to pounds. (2) Among the activists denouncing a proposed solar-panel farm at a December Woodland (North Carolina) Town Council meeting were a husband and wife certain that vegetation near the panels would die because the panels would (the husband said) "suck up all the energy from the sun." His wife (described as a "retired science teacher") explained that the solar panels prevent "photosynthesis" (and also, of course, cause cancer). The council voted a moratorium on the panels. [WDRB-TV (Louisville, Ky.), 12-25-2015] [Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald, 12-8-2015]

-- Paul Stenstrom of Tarpon Springs, Florida, is among the most recent Americans to have discovered the brightest side of federal bankruptcy law, having lived in his mortgaged home basically free of charge from 2002 until 2013 by using the law to stave off foreclosure. Even though none of his 15 petitions was ever approved, he followed each one immediately with another petition, and it was not until 2013 that one judge finally declared Stenstrom a "serially abusive filer," barring further petitions for two years -- at which point his bank was able to conclude the foreclosure. Upon expiration of the two-year period in September 2015, Stenstrom quickly filed another bankruptcy petition -- to keep from being evicted from the townhouse on whose rent he is four months behind. [Tampa Bay Times, 11-21-2015]

-- Bright Ideas: In October, once again, police (this time in Liyang in eastern China) arrested a man whom they accused of stealing women's underwear, prolifically, with a device likened to a fishing rod, enabling him to reach into windows and extract goodies. The suspect, 32, admitted to a three-year scheme, and in his van police found 285 bras and 185 panties. [The Guardian (London), 10-24-2015]

-- In December, Carlos Aguilera, 27, became the most recent brain-surgery patient to assist doctors by remaining conscious during the 12-hour operation -- and playing his saxophone to help assure surgeons that their removal of a tumor was not affecting his speech, hearing or movement. The operation, at Spain's Malaga Regional Hospital, was supposedly Europe's first, but News of the Weird has reported two in the United States, including on a guitar- strumming man in 2013 at UCLA Medical Center. [Daily Telegraph (London), 12-17-2015]

-- Least Competent Criminals: (1) Nurse's aide Candace McCray, 36, is the most recent theft suspect to have worn some of the purloined jewelry when meeting police detectives investigating the theft. An assisted-living resident in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, had described her missing gems, and McCray was questioned as someone with access to the woman's room. (2) Joshua Jording, 26, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, became the most recent burglary suspect caught on surveillance video during the crime wearing a shirt with his name on it (which was later found in Jording's home, along with a stash from the Dec. 2 burglary). [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 8-17-2015] [Associated Press via Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12-9-2015]

-- More Core Failings of Carjackers: (1) Albert Luna, 19, was arrested in Coachella, California, in December and charged with swiping the keys while a Federal Express driver was unloading a package. The driver reported that Luna later walked away when he could not figure out how to drive the truck. (Bonus: The arrest report noted that during the entire episode, Luna was naked.) (2) Kyle Blair, 25, was arrested in Surrey, British Columbia, in November when he approached a car at an intersection and attempted to pull the driver out. For one thing, the two men in the car were later described as "big, burly" guys, but more important, they were plainclothes police officers on a stakeout. [The Smoking Gun, 12-9-2015] [Canadian Press, 11-10-2015]

-- Syrian refugees (mostly, Muslims) may pose a humanitarian and political crisis for Germany, but the Virginia Care company of Recklinghausen, Germany, said they are good for its business: sales of fake hymens, for women to convince Muslim grooms to believe they were wedding-night virgins. The non-chaste Virginia Care buyer inserts a packet of two membranes (about $54) that will burst by penetrative sex, releasing blood coloring. (The "blood" is available either in "original" dark brownish red, which parents are said to expect, or "advanced" brighter red, thought to be more satisfying to husbands.) [Daily Mail (London), 12-15-2015]

-- Mendel Epstein (Lakewood, New Jersey) is not the only rabbi suspected of being overaggressive as he helps desperate wives obtain religiously proper divorces, but he will be headed to prison for 10 years after a federal court found that he used beatings, stun guns and, once, an electric cattle prod to convince reluctant husbands they should sign the papers. Orthodox Jewish wives cannot remarry properly without obtaining a "get," and Rabbi Epstein was apparently very "convincing." (According to trial evidence, he used the services of four thugs.) "Over the years," Epstein confessed in court, "I guess I got caught up in my tough-guy image." [WCAU-TV (Philadelphia), 12-15-2015]

-- Another Way to Tell If You're Really, Really Drunk: Her passengers had run away, leaving Elena Bartman-Wallman, 23, behind the wheel but oblivious on a December afternoon in Aleknagik, Alaska, and her car's tires had started to smoke. She had lodged her foot against the accelerator, facing the wrong way on the road, with her wheels spinning continuously, and by the time police arrived (to discover Bartman-Wallman passed out), the front tires had melted down to the rims. [Alaska Dispatch News, 12-28-2015]

-- Though New York City's waiting list for subsidized housing stands at over 300,000, the agency still has only nominal ability to evict a tenant who once qualified but subsequently became wealthier, and the latest "beneficiary" of those rules, according to a November WPIX-TV report, is a household that reported earning $497,911 in a recent year. Initially, one housing authority official declared it beneficial that such a mixture of income levels occupy subsidized housing -- so that struggling families would not have only other struggling families for neighbors -- but public pressure has made the authority reconsider. [WPIX-TV, 11-25-2015]

-- Almost No Longer Weird: (1) When a woman leaped to her death on Dec. 12 from an apartment building in New York City, she of course landed on top of another woman, 71, who was left in critical condition. (2) In December, Russia's independent RT news site, culling a story from the country's rural far eastern coast, reported the most recent case of a "declared dead" man awakening in a morgue. After a harrowing few hours, the man returned to the site of the party -- to find his friends "still drinking but (by) this time commemorating him." [New York Post, 12-13-2015] [Khasanskiye Vesti via RT.com (Moscow), 12-31-2015]

-- London's Metropolitan Police called it the biggest case of voyeurism they had ever seen after a judge sent George Thomas, 38, to prison for four years in December for his six-year spree of furtively photographing women. Thomas, a former manager for the Ernst & Young accounting firm, filmed more than 3,500 people, including children and even babies, with cameras in his and others' homes and the restrooms of coffee shops and workplaces. (And, of course, sooner or later, amidst the recovered stash, police found at least one shot of Thomas' face, inadvertently captured as he was setting up one of the cameras.) [The Independent, 12-22-2015]

Enterprising reporters get stories by earning the trust of their sources, which Simon Eroro of the Post-Courier (Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea) obviously did. At a banquet in November (2011), the News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch's empire) awarded Eroro its "Scoop of the Year" honor for reporting on militant tribal fighters of the Free West Papua movement -- a scoop he had to earn by (to prove his sincerity) undergoing a ritual circumcision, with bamboo sticks. (Some of the rebels still wear penis gourds whose size varies with the status of the wearer.) [Daily Telegraph, 11-7-2011]

In December, Canada's supportive organization The Transgender Project released a biographical video of the former Paul Wolscht, 46 and the father of seven children with his ex-wife, Marie, describing his new life as not only a female but a 6-year-old female, Stephoknee Wolscht. She told the Daily Xtra (gay and lesbian news site) that not acting her real age (even while doing "adult" things like working a job and driving a car) enables her to escape "depression and suicidal thoughts." Among the trans-age's favorite activities are (coloring-book) coloring, creating a play-like "kingdom," and wearing "really pretty clothes." Stephoknee now lives with the couple who adopted her. [The Independent (London), 12-16-2015]

Thee, Not Me: American "millennials" (those aged 18 to 29) continue a "long-standing tradition," The Washington Post wrote in December, describing a Harvard Institute of Politics poll on their views on war. Following the recent Paris terrorist attacks, about 60 percent of U.S. millennials said additional American troops would be needed to fight the Islamic State, but 85 percent answered, in the next question, that no, they themselves were "probably" or "definitely" not joining the military. [Washington Post, 12-10-2015]

(1) Police in St. Petersburg reported the December arrest of a 12-year-old boy whose rap sheet listed "more than 20" arrests since age 9. He, on a bicycle, had told an 89-year-old driver at a gas station that the man's tire was low, and when the man got out to check, the boy hopped in the car and took off. (2) A driver accidentally plowed through two small businesses in Pensacola in December, creating such destruction that the manager of one said it looked like a bomb had hit (forcing both -- a tax service and a casket company -- to relocate). The driver told police he was attempting to "travel through time." [WTSP-TV (St. Petersburg), 12-15-2015] [WEAR-TV (Pensacola), 12-23-2015]

(1) Breen Peck, 52, an air traffic controller who has been having career troubles in recent years, was arrested during a traffic stop on New York's Long Island in December when officers found illegal drugs in his car. "That's meth," he said. "I'm an air traffic controller." "I smoke it to stay awake." (2) In a "she-said/he-said" case, wealthy Saudi businessman Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was acquitted of rape in December in England's Southwark Crown Court, apparently persuading jurors of "reasonable doubt" about his DNA found in the alleged victim's vagina. Perhaps, his lawyer said, Abdulaziz was still aroused after sex with the other woman in the apartment and accidentally fell directly upon the alleged victim lying on a sofa. [New York Post, 12-11-2015] [The Independent, 12-16-2015]

-- Christopher Manney was fired from the Milwaukee Police Department in 2014 after shooting a black suspect to death in a case bearing some similarity to 2015 shootings that produced "Black Lives Matter" protests -- not fired for the shooting (adjudged "not excessive force") but for improper actions that preceded the shooting (not announcing a valid reason for a pat down and conducting a not-by-the-book pat down). Two days before the firing, he had filed a disability claim for post-traumatic stress disorder from the shooting and aftermath, and in November 2015 the city's Annuity and Pension Board, following city law, approved the claim. Thus, Manney, despite having been subsequently fired, retired with full disability, with basically the same take-home pay he was receiving when fired. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 11-5-2015; WITI-TV (Milwaukee), 10-16-2015]

-- In November, as anti-Muslim tensions arose in several U.S. cities following the Paris terrorist attack, two chapters of the Satanic Temple church (San Jose, California, and Minneapolis) offered to protect Muslims who feared a backlash. The Minneapolis group offered "just big dudes walking you to where you need to be," for example, grocery shopping -- an offer "of genuine compassion for our fellow human beings." (The offer was subsequently rescinded by the Minneapolis church's executive ministry, reasoning that they are "not a personal security service.") [City Pages (Minneapolis), 12-22-2015]

In November, a 62-year-old customer at Ancient City Shooting Range in St. Augustine, Florida, was hit in the lower abdomen area by another shooter, 71, because the victim was standing behind the target ("for some reason," was all a fire-rescue spokesman would say). The shooter thought the man was elsewhere on the property. [Jacksonville.com, 11-27-2015]

Oops! (1) Jasper Harrison, 47, working inside the storage unit in Edgewater, Florida, where he grows his marijuana, heard a helicopter overhead on Dec. 9, panicked, and called 911 to turn himself in to pre-empt what he presumed was a SWAT raid. Actually, the helicopter belonged to a local news station headed elsewhere, but police later arrested Harrison based on the 911 call. (2) Lloyd Franklin, 34 and suspected in a North Carolina double murder, fatally shot himself in a Bensalem, Pennsylvania, motel room in November when police knocked on the door. However, cops actually had come to arrest another man in the room on a parole violation. [Orlando Sentinel, 12-10-2015] [KYW-TV (Philadelphia), 11-8-2015]

-- Elaine Williams, 47, was arrested in December in North Forsyth, Georgia, and charged with trying to buy a baby for her daughter, 14, via an ad on Craigslist. Williams said her daughter said she "wanted a baby and would get one with or without (my) help." (Bonus: Williams lives near Jot Em Down Road.) [Forsyth County News, 12-7-2015]

-- Easily Disrespected: Two foreign students at the liberal arts Oberlin College complained in a recent school publication that the cafeteria selections -- supposedly "inclusive" of world cultures -- were actually denigrating other cultures by offering inferior versions of national dishes. Vietnamese student Diep Nguyen wrote that the correct "banh mi" sandwich should be a "crispy baguette with grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs" and not, he complained, "ciabatta bread, pulled pork and coleslaw." Said Japanese student Tomoyo Joshi, sushi with "undercooked rice and lack of fresh fish is disrespectful." (Cafeteria managers told The Washington Post they were proud of their commitments to other cultures, to local farming, sustainable foods and animal-treatment concerns.) [Oberlin Review, 11-6-2015] [Washington Post, 12-21-2015]

(1) A customer had to be dragged from a burning sex shop by firefighters in the notorious Reeperbahn "sin" section of Hamburg, Germany, in November when he refused orders to evacuate. He had shut himself inside a private booth to watch a film ("Throbbin Hood") and was heard complaining (while coughing from smoke inhalation), "I haven't finished yet." (2) Police in Richmond, Virginia, announced in December that high school math teacher Kenneth Johnson III turned himself in for several recent residential shoe thefts. Each time, the shoes taken from homes were returned to their owners but with "bodily fluids" added. [Daily Mail (London), 11-25-2015] [WTVR-TV (Richmond, 12-5-2015]

Road to Nowhere: The "Bridge to Nowhere" played an outsize role in politics a decade ago as an example of uncontrolled government spending (before Congress killed it). (Ketchikan, Alaska, planned a sleek international airport on nearby, uninhabited Gravina Island, but needed a sleek $450 million bridge to get there.) These days, reported Alaska Dispatch News in November, the original 3.2-mile, $28 million access road on Gravina Island, built to access the bridge, now just ends in a "scrub forest." One optimistic state official said the road gets "more use all the time" -- boaters come for "hunting and fishing, berry picking, things like that. It's actually a nice road." [Alaska Dispatch News, 11-16-2015]

A prison guard is "the greatest entry-level job in California," according to an April (2011) Wall Street Journal report highlighting its benefits over those of a typical job resulting from a Harvard University education. Starting pay is comparable; loans are not necessary (since the guard "academy" actually pays the student); and vacation time is more generous (seven weeks, five paid). One downside: The prison system is more selective: While Harvard accepts 6.2 percent of applicants, the guard service takes fewer than 1 percent of its 120,000 applicants). [Wall Street Journal, 4-30-2011]

Thanks This Week to Rich Heiden, Rachael Bock, and Stuart Worthington, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.