In March, U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the House Rules Committee, introduced a resolution to recognize "magic" as one of America's "national treasure(s)," backed by a 711-word paean urging all to "support and protect" the storied craft -- which needs to be "understood and promulgated," especially given that, according to Sessions, it "requires only the capacity to dream." Sessions made no link of magic to resolving other congressional business (such as, for instance, ending the string of 64 consecutive failed votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act). [Politico, 3-15-2016] [H.Res. 642]

People With Too Much Money: Residents on London's swankiest street (Kensington Palace Gardens), stymied in efforts to build upward on their relatively small lots, instead plan elaborate "basements" -- extending as far as five stories down, with elevators, swimming pools, gyms, climbing walls, and one even with a "Ferris wheel" for dialing up the resident's daily choice among his several cars. However, embassies are located on the street and have challenged the construction chaos as offending their sovereignty under international law. Recent restrictions limit the basements to one story down, but billionaire entrepreneur Jon Hunt's five stories are grandfathered in (though his "Ferris wheel" appears to have been shelved). [Washington Post, 3-4-2016]

-- Mystery fiction has always been a popular genre, but now, readers who prefer that their crimes be solved by cats have several series of brilliant felines to choose from. As The Wall Street Journal reported in February, the major controversy swirling at "cat fiction" conventions is whether the clever kitties should advance the plot by speaking. "We all talk to our pets," noted one best- selling author, "and most of us imagine the other side of the dialogue." (Among the sets boasting more than a million copies are the "Joe Greys," the "Klepto Cats," the "Cat Shout for Joy" suite, and the recently concluded, 29-volume run of "Cat Who" books, e.g., "The Cat Who Could Read Backwards.") [Wall Street Journal, 2-29-2016]

-- The Glasgow, Scotland, company Osdin Shield announced recently that it had designed for potential sale (for those relaxing, yet secure evenings) a fashionable yet bullet-proof sofa and upholstered chairs sturdy enough to protect against 9mm handguns, shotguns and AK47s -- with special marketing to hotels, embassies and government buildings. [BBC News, 2-25-2016]

-- A Perfect Storm of Vacuousness: In February, British marketing company Havas Helia tapped the "millennial" generation's obsessions with craft beer and data-driven knowledge, announcing the development of 0101 -- a brew created, it said, by social media messages. The company, "finding" that the generation appeared "optimistic," analyzed "thousands" of the generation's messages against 24 human emotions, which it translated to 38 particular emotional states, which were fed into the IBM Watson computer, which selected 10 existing beers, whose recipes were then cribbed to create 0101 (a "cream ale" with honey and two specific kinds of hops, tasting of "optimism, love, imagination, and gentle overtones of excitement"). [IDG News Service (Boston) via PC World, 2-10-2016]

Following a simplistic hack at the Internal Revenue Service that permitted several thousand tax returns to be illegally accessed and refunds commandeered, the agency created an equally porous "fix" merely copied from failed security elsewhere on the IRS website. According to a March Washington Post report, the fix admirably added one level of security (a personal PIN), but nonetheless allowed anyone to change another's PIN using publicly available information. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the Post that "only a handful" of taxpayers were victimized by the faulty fix (but later defined "handful" as "fewer than 200"). [Washington Post, 3-3-2016]

Murders are being committed over hair weaves, reported WMC-TV (Memphis, Tennessee) in March, with one likely explanation being a belief that a person who acquires tufts of human hair surely acquires the fortunes -- good or bad -- of the person who grew the hair. That is especially true of "virgin" hair from India, shorn for religious sacrifices ("tonsuring") before falling into the hands of agents who sell to Western women. Said a Memphis pastor, "A generation back or so," people were being killed over tennis shoes. "Now (it's) hair." [WMC-TV, 3-2-2016]

Infrastructure Blues: (1) A 5-year-old, slow-moving underground fire (beneath a Superfund cleanup site) is within 1,200 feet of a waste site for nuclear weapons near St. Louis, according to a December Associated Press report. The Environmental Protection Agency, of course, said not to worry, that the heat from the fire was not enough to ignite chemicals or trigger an explosion. (2) While America was outraged about the water in Flint, Michigan, the tap water in Crystal City, Texas (100 miles southwest of San Antonio) was suddenly as black and thick "as oil" and "stank," according to a resident. The city's water superintendent said the town had decided to clean residue from the system for the first time in "20 to 30 years." [Associated Press via Los Angeles Times, 1-2-2016] [KSAT-TV (San Antonio), 2-19-2016]

(1) Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., disclosed in March that in 2015 it received 8,670 noise complaints -- but that 6,500 came from the same person (thus averaging 18 per day, every day). (2) Buddhist monk Julian Glew, 45, was arrested in September in Humberside, England, and later sentenced to 11 weeks in prison after he slashed (by his count) 162 tires in his neighborhood because, he said, he was angry that he had stepped on an insect and needed to be jailed. [Associated Press via WTOP Radio (Washington), 3-9-2016] [Hull Daily Mail, 1-20-2016]

http://wtop.com/dc/2016/03/reagan-airport-says-1-person-filed-6500-noise-complaints/

Needed Training Wheels: Timothy Broad, 30, was convicted in February of a November Clacton, England, convenience store robbery and jailed for more than three years. The balaclava-wearing Broad had pedaled away from the store with the money but managed to fall off his bicycle three separate times, in short order, in the process losing both the balaclava (from which his DNA was recovered) and all the cash. [Clacton Gazette, 2-15-2016]

-- Once again, public service personnel were disciplined for violating rules even though perhaps saving a life. In March, a captain and a sergeant in the Falmouth Volunteer Fire Department near Fredericksburg, Virginia, were suspended for rushing an infant girl (who was having a seizure) to the hospital in their fire engine despite rules requiring that they wait for an ambulance (which they ascertained was still 10 to 15 minutes away). The firefighters administered oxygen and delivered the girl safely to the ER 13 minutes after the 911 call, though she had suffered another seizure in the hospital's parking lot. Said the grateful father, "My wife and I feel terrible for the fallout ... to these two gentlemen." [WTTG-TV (Washington, D.C.), 3-6-2016]

-- India (especially in Bihar state) has been plagued by legendary school-cheating scandals -- with parents last year even seemingly re-creating the scene of the siege of the Alamo by using tall ladders en masse to climb the walls of a testing center to pass cheat sheets to students. In February, on recruiting day for prestigious army jobs in Bihar, wary officials administered written tests in a field with all aspirants sitting cross-legged and clad only in underpants, balancing exam papers on their thighs. Officials thus avoided needing to frisk the large number of applicants. [Agence France-Presse via The Guardian (London), 3-1-2016]

In October (2011), a court in Ottawa, Ontario, sentenced pornography collector Richard Osborn, 46, to a year in jail on several charges but dismissed the more serious child porn counts. Judge Robert Fournier ruled that Osborn's hard-core images of Bart and Lisa Simpson and Milhouse were not illegal, on the ground that he could not be certain of the characters' ages. (Baby Maggie Simpson was not involved in sex.) Judge Fournier was clearly exasperated at Osborn's perversions, among them his homemade video of swimsuit-clad youngsters, interspersed with shots of Osborn himself masturbating, aided by a Cabbage Patch doll with cut-open mouth. Finally, a disgusted Judge Fournier halted the presentation of evidence. "Enough," he said. "We are not paid to sit here and torture ourselves." [Ottawa Sun, 9-26-2011, Ottawa Citizen, 10-6-2011]

University of Oregon professor Mark Carey produced a 10,300-word journal article in January proposing a new sensitivity to Earth's melting icecaps: a "feminist glaciology framework" to "generate robust analysis of gender, power and epistemologies" with a goal of more "just and equitable" "human-ice interactions." The jargonized, densely worded tract suggests that melting icecaps can be properly understood only with more input from female scientists since, somehow, research so far disproportionately emphasizes climate change's impact on males. (The New York Post reported that the paper was funded by a National Science Foundation grant of $412,930.) [Progress in Human Geography, 1-8-2016] [New York Post, 3-8-2016]

Trying to put (as a critic charged) "lipstick on a pig," Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder boasted in March that the lead-in-the-water crisis plaguing the city of Flint for months now had actually spurred job growth. Though Snyder has been heavily criticized for tight-fisted budgeting that enabled the crisis, 81 temporary workers have been recently hired -- to hand out bottled water so that residents would not have to hydrate themselves with poisoned municipal water. [PoliticsCentral.org, 3-3-2016]

-- A senior federal administrative law judge recently claimed (and then, for good measure, repeated and emphasized) that, in his experience, "3-year-olds and 4-year-olds" do not need the help of lawyers to advocate for them in immigration proceedings. Teaching those kids their rights, Judge Jack Weil said, "takes a lot of time" and "a lot of patience," but there is no need for government to provide lawyers. (Weil, a U.S. Department of Justice employee, was contesting an American Civil Liberties Union claim at a recent deposition in an immigration case in Seattle.) [Washington Post, 3-3-2016]

-- Homeless people frequently store their few possessions in commandeered shopping carts, but New Yorker Sonia Gonzalez, 60, became a legend recently on Manhattan's West Side by maneuvering a stunning, block-long assemblage of more than 20 carts' worth of possessions along the sidewalks. Among the contents: an air conditioner, a laundry hamper, shower curtain rods, a wire shelving unit, wooden pallets, suitcases and, of course, bottles and cans. She moved along by pushing carts two or three at a time, a few feet at a time, blocking entrances to stores in the process. (The day after a New York Post story on Gonzalez's caravan, Mayor DiBlasio ordered city workers to junk everything not essential, leaving her with about one cart's worth.) [New York Post, 3-9-2016, 3-10-2016]

Mexico's latest female accessorizing craze is shellacking tiny dead scorpions onto fingernails, using the second-most venomous species of the arachnid, selling briskly at the Miss Unas parlor in Durango. In fact, while in town (according to a London Daily Mail dispatch from Durango), shoppers may check out the Raices restaurant, which pioneered tacos filled with still-wriggling scorpions (that had been soaked in surgical alcohol to neutralize the venom). [Daily Mail, 3-8-2016]

Power of Prayer: (1) Businessman Induvalu Suresh cut off, and donated, the little finger of his left hand recently at the Hindu pilgrimage site Tirupati, India, as homage to the gods for the granting of bail to prominent India leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, who are charged with fraudulent business practices in a case heavily politically weighted. (2) In October, a regional court in Nizhegorodsky, Russia, decided that the Russian Orthodox Church could pay off part of a debt for its new boiler spiritually. According to an Associated Press dispatch from Moscow, the church can settle the remaining debt, equivalent to $6,585, to the boiler company by paying $2,525 in rubles and the remainder by prayer. [Times of India, 1-9-2016] [Associated Press via Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2-16-2016]

-- In a suburb of Newcastle, Australia, in February, workers using a crane extracted a 1-ton snake-like mass of sewage (mostly "wet wipes" unwisely flushed down toilets) from an underground pipe -- with the gummed-together sludge reaching a height of more than 20 feet when the crane finally yanked the whole thing up. Said a representative of the water company, "(Y)ou'll flush the toilet, and the wet wipe will disappear," and you think (wrongly) it's therefore "flushable." [Australian Broadcasting Corp. News, 2-25-2016]

-- Making Canada Great Again: Syrian refugees arriving at the airport in Vancouver, British Columbia, have been warmly greeted personally in a video by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but in March some were inadvertently booked into the same hotel that was hosting the fifth annual VancouFur convention of "furries." Anthropomorphic, full-suited tigers, dogs, bears, foxes, etc., roamed the hotel, leading London's The Independent to report that the child refugees loved every minute, playing with the furries and posing for pictures. [The Independent, 3-9-2016]

The Cash Economy: China's Peoples Daily reported in January that Mr. Cai Zhanjiang (described as "tuhao," or "uncultured but still well-off") had just purchased a new truck from a dealer by driving another truck to the showroom and unloading 100,000 renminbi (about $15,300 U.S.) entirely in small bills -- a stash weighing about a half-ton. Shanghaiist.com also noted a story from June 2015 in which a man (likely also tuhao) bought a new vehicle with the equivalent of $104,670 -- almost all in coins. [Shanghaiist, 1-14-2016]

(1) The Tennessee senate voted in February to make its official state rifle the .50-caliber Barrett M82 rifle (big in the sniper community, with a range of 1.1 miles). (2) The Lance Toland Associates insurance company of Georgia said in February that it has issued Taurus handguns to each of its 12 employees as a required-carry for apparently dangerous aircraft insurance work. (3) University of Houston recommendations for faculty on the imminent extension of the right to open-carry firearms on state campuses included admonitions that professors "be careful discussing sensitive topics" and "not 'go there' if you sense anger." [Times Free Press (Chattanooga), 2-24-2016] [Associated Press via WNCN-TV (Goldsboro, N.C.), 2-21-2016] [USA Today, 2-24-2016]

In rural China, the black market for female corpses -- even already-buried corpses -- thrives still (as mentioned years ago by News of the Weird). According to legend dating back 30 centuries, men who die as bachelors will spend eternity alone, and thus their families arrange "ghost weddings," in which a corpse (presumably freshly buried) is stolen and relocated alongside the man. (Perhaps more important to the surviving family is the other part of the legend -- that any bachelor corpse will "return" to haunt the family.) [Daily Telegraph (London), 2-27-2016]

An option for suicide "with elegance and euphoria" is how Lithuanian-born Ph.D. candidate Julijonas Urbonas (London's Royal College of Art) described his "Euthanasia (Roller) Coaster," currently (2011) on the drawing board. Urbonas' model of "gravitational aesthetics" would be a one-third-mile-long, 1,600-foot-high thrill ride engineered to supply 10 Gs of centrifugal force (a spin at about 220 mph) to induce cerebral hypoxia, forcing blood away from the head and denying oxygen to the brain. Euphoria (and disorientation and anxiety, but not pain) would likely precede the brain's shutdown. Urbonas insisted that users would have the option through the first two minutes of the three-minute ride to rethink their decision and bail out (or else to push the final "FALL" button). [2016 Update: The Coaster remains a "concept"; rendering suicide "euphoric" is still not a societal priority.) [Discovery News, 9-19-2011]

Updated March 21, 2016: This column originally contained a story revealed to be a hoax that has been removed.

Seattle's ambitious Office of Arts & Culture has allocated $10,000 this year to pay a poet or writer to create a work while present on the city's Fremont Bridge drawbridge. The office's deputy director told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in January that the city wants to encourage "public art" and that the grant will oblige the recipient to create a work of prose or poetry from the bridge's northwest tower, to help the people of Seattle understand the function of art in the city. (The artist will not be "in residence," for the tower has no running water.) [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1-14-2016]

The dominant-submissive lifestyle soared to higher-brow status in February when The New York Times reported on the recent marriage of the celebrated composer of "moody, queasy" works (and compulsive dominant) Georg Friedrich Haas to Mollena Williams, who blogs introspectively about her own kinky bondage as "The Perverted Negress." Friedrich had introduced himself to her on a dating site with the note, "I would like to tame you," and credits her acceptance for his improved productivity -- because, he said, "I am not (any longer) disturbed by unfulfilled thoughts." Although Williams-Haas is a black woman submitting to a white man, she explained that, "To say I can't play my personal psychodrama out just because I'm black, that's racist." [New York Times, 2-24-2016]

-- Exasperated, Columbia County (Pennsylvania) District Judge Craig Long felt the need to post a sign outside his courtroom in January informing visitors that they should not wear pajamas to court. However, even Judge Long acknowledged that his admonition was not enforceable and that he was merely trying to encourage minimal standards. [WNEP-TV (Moosic, Pa.), 1-29-2016]

-- "Microaggression": In its brand-new communications stylebook this year for city workers, San Diego officials noted that the city's then-upcoming Presidents' Day announcements should, to be bias-free and inoffensive, never refer to America's "Founding Fathers" -- even though they were all males -- but only to "founders." [Pacific Justice Institute press release, 2-8-2016]

-- The roadside billboard giant Clear Channel Outdoor Americas announced in February that it would soon be recording the cellphone locations of drivers who pass the company's signs in 11 cities in order to give advertisers more information on how to pitch products to people with those particular travel patterns and behaviors. Clear Channel asserts that no individual identifications would be sought, but privacy advocates fret about potential abuses, and even a Clear Channel executive acknowledged that the program "does sound a bit creepy." (On the other hand, as Clear Channel pointed out to The New York Times, cellphone users' locations and characteristics are already being extensively monitored by advertisers.) [New York Times, 2-28-2016]

-- "Medical" marijuana will take on a new meaning soon if the Food and Drug Administration approves Foria Relief cannabis vaginal suppositories for relieving menstrual pain (from the California company Foria). Currently, the product is available only in California and Colorado, at $44 for a four-pack. The company claims the inserts are targeted to the pelvic nerve endings, but International Business Times, citing a gynecologist-blogger, noted that the only studies on the efficacy of Foria Relief were done on the uteruses of rats. [International Business Times UK, 2-2-2016]

-- A then-married couple, both graduates of elite California law schools, were convicted of felonies and went to jail briefly two years ago for a criminal scheme inexplicably tawdry -- and in February 2016 lost a resultant civil lawsuit for $5.7 million to the scheme's victim. A woman at their child's school had referred to the lawyers' son as "slow," enraging Kent Easter (University of California at Berkeley) and then-wife, Jill (UCLA), who retaliated by planting drugs and paraphernalia in Kelli Peters' car and then, a man identified via circumstantial evidence as Kent (with an accent as if from India), called in a DUI tip to police, resulting in Peters' arrest. According to Peters, neither perpetrator has ever expressed remorse, and although Kent admitted to "stupidity," he now complains that Peters does not deserve her windfall (like a "Powerball winner," he said). [Orange County Register, 2-6-2016]

-- The online-pornography colossus Pornhub's charity fundraising promotion during February benefited the Moclips Cetological Society ("Save the Whales") in honor of World Whale Day on Feb. 13. Its news release celebrated whales' sexuality -- that they, like humans, do not limit their horniness to procreation. The company said it would, from Feb. 8 to Feb. 29, donate a penny for every 2,000 videos played on its ubiquitous free websites. (That offer might appear modest, but a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter noted, over the first two days, the world's porn consumers had played 532 million videos -- earning the charity $2,660.) [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2-10-2016]

Vicky Leyton, 72, announced her retirement recently in Benidorm, Spain, over health concerns, but the lady's 30-year run in her one-of-a-kind, "Sticky Vicky" magic show can hardly be forgotten by the 6 million fans who have witnessed it. Trained as a ballerina but emulating magicians who pull rabbits out of top hats, Vicky extracted an impressive array of items, also -- from the body cavity that is occasionally the subject of News of the Weird stories. One review in Spain's El Pais newspaper described a typical inventory: fluffy flags, flowers, ping-pong balls, sausages, eggs, a string of razor blades, a bottle and a light bulb (that was aglow!). [The Local (Madrid), 2-22-2016]

Additional Details Needed: (1) Andrew McNeil, 34, was arrested in Lincoln, Nebraska, in January and charged with disturbing the peace. According to the police report (and lacking follow-up reporting by local news outlets), McNeil was found around 11 p.m. naked and "covered in sawdust." (2) Rob Moore, 32, was arrested for misdemeanor drug possession in Marathon, Florida, in February, but he had only come to police attention when an officer heard him banging on the trunk of his car from the inside. Without follow-up reporting, Moore's story was that he was looking for something in the trunk, fell in, and couldn't get out. [KETV (Omaha), 1-22- 2016] [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 2-4-2016]

-- Perps Who Needed to Hit the Gym: (1) Anthony Nemeth, 26, seeking pain medication but lacking a prescription, leaped over the pharmacy counter of a Walgreens in Bradenton, Florida, in February and demanded a supply. Customer David West, 25, standing at the counter with his girlfriend, ended the "robbery" with four quick punches, sending Nemeth to the floor. (West is a competitive boxer and reportedly a former state champion.) (2) Wheelchair-user Betty Jeffery, 76, was briefly the victim of a purse-snatching in Pitsea, England, in February. She appeared vulnerable, but in fact is a former national arm-wrestling champion and slugged the young female thief in the face, slowing her down and leading her to drop the purse as she fled. [WFLA-TV (Tampa), 2-17-2016] [Braintree & Witham Times, 2-18-2016]

-- Didn't Think It Through: (1) Simon Chaplin, 62, thought he had cleverly evaded police near Hebron, England, recently (thus avoiding a speeding ticket) by employing a do-it-yourself, James Bond-style smokescreen device on his Peugeot sedan, facilitating a smoggy getaway. Initially, baffled police officers were forced to hang back, but of course as the haze broke, they merely followed the smoke trail up ahead and caught Chaplin (who was convicted in Swansea Crown Court in February). (2) The man who tried to vandalize a cafe in the Richmond suburb of Melbourne, Australia, in February, got away, but surveillance video showed that, in dousing the outside of the building with fire accelerant, he had also doused his own shoes and was spotted running off with his feet on fire. [Daily Mail (London), 2-16-2016] [9News.com (Melbourne), 2-18-2016]

Unclear on the Concept: A Singaporean army draftee caused a public stir in March (2011) when he was photographed by a visitor as he underwent physical training in army fatigues but with his maid following behind him carrying his backpack on her shoulders. (Army officials told reporters the draftee had since been "counsel(ed).") [BBC News, 4-5-2011]