Bill Bailey (a former nine-year employee of the water-irrigation network near Grand Junction, Colorado) was awarded unemployment benefits in December for being wrongfully fired. The company claimed Bailey was insubordinate and that any complaints he had were merely because he is "too sensitive" to workplace "fun" and unable to "forgive and forget" his supervisors' team-building spirit. According to an administrative law judge, the "fun" included, among other things, detonating unannounced, ear-splitting PVC "potato guns" (using golf balls and other items) on the job and Bailey's boss's placing his own feces in a bag inside Bailey's lunch pail. (At one point in the hearing, during the boss's mirthful, carefree descriptions of the "fun," the judge felt the need to advise him of his Fifth Amendment right.) (Following the judge's decision, Bailey's two supervisors resigned.) [Grand Junction Sentinel, 1-28-2016, 2-16-2016]

The Agony and Tediousness of "Peeling": The Canadian supermarket chain Sobeys has recently been selling pre-cut avocado halves, sealed in plastic packages. Said a spokesman, the product "eliminates the guesswork ... if you are not familiar with peeling and seeding a fresh avocado." Also, recently, Whole Foods began selling peeled mandarin oranges, sealed in "recyclable" plastic, at $5.99 a pound (but withdrew the product in March, with an apology and promise to sell the oranges only in their "natural packaging: the peel"). [Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News, 3-17-2016] [LAist.com, 3-3-2016]

-- The Most "Florida" Story: State officials have notified retired pro wrestler Mary Thorn of Lakeland that, according to the law, her pet alligator ("Rambo"), age 15, having grown to 6 feet in length, may no longer be kept at home unless she provides at least 2 1/2 acres of roaming space. She made a public plea in March, warning that confiscating Rambo would kill him, as he is super- sensitive to sunlight (having been raised inside her home) and must wear clothes and sunscreen when outside (though Thorn pointed out that he is "potty-trained" and wags his tail when needing to answer nature's call). (At press time, the investigation of Rambo was still ongoing.) [The Ledger (Lakeland), 3-16-2016]

-- The Most "Georgia" Story: David Presley (of Walton County, about 40 miles from Atlanta), 32, for some reason attempted to blow up his riding lawn mower in March -- by placing three pounds of the chemical mixture Tannerite in it and then shooting the mower with a semiautomatic rifle. Although he was standing 30 yards away, shrapnel still hit him, severing his leg just below the knee. [Athens Banner-Herald, 3-23-2016]

-- The Most "Canada" Story: Ms. Philicity Lafrenier, 25, was charged with several break-and-enter and theft crimes in March in Prince George, British Columbia, after leading police on a half-mile chase as she made her getaway on an ice floe on the Nechako River. When police caught up, she attempted to dispose of items she had stolen (even though still on the ice) by burning them in a small fire, but an officer and a police dog jumped in the water to subdue her.) [Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News, 3-15-2016]

-- "Wall of Sound," Updated: Police, finally armed with a warrant after months of neighbors' complaints about loud music, raided Michael Baker's small one-bedroom apartment in Croydon, England, in March and confiscated 34 loudspeakers that allegedly Baker had been using at high volume at "all hours." After entering the home with the aid of a locksmith, police left Baker with only a CD player and a pair of earphones. [Croydon.gov.uk, 3-8-2016]

-- Nicholas Ragin finally got his conviction overturned in March, but it took 10 years before the U.S. Court of Appeals declared that his "right to counsel" had been violated because his lawyer slept during various parts of Ragin's conspiracy and racketeering trial. (His sentence had 20 more years to run.) One juror later recalled that lawyer Nikita Mackey slept "almost every day, morning and evening" for "30 minutes at least." Once, according to court documents, after the trial judge called Mackey's name loudly, only belatedly getting a response, Mackey "jumped up and sort of looked around and was licking his lips ... and looked sort of confused and looked around the room." (The prosecutor said she intends to retry Ragin.) [WYFF-TV (Geenville, S.C.), 3-14-2016] [The Independent (London), 3-13-2016]

In March, Foreign Policy magazine noted that someone had created a "hot male migrants" account on the photo-sharing application Instagram: "Someone is going through photos of migrants and refugees, saving ones of men thought of as hot." (Many of the men, of course, have survived harrowing journeys and even lost friends and family members while fleeing Syria and other war-torn lands. Wrote one Instagram user, of a man who had turned her head, "He's gorgeous. Am I going to hell for thinking that?") [Foreign Policy, 3-11-2016]

-- North Carolina State University scientists, in a "proof of concept" study published in March, claim they have found a promising alternative for eliminating certain infections -- even when no known antibiotic will work. The solution, the researchers write, is to genetically modify maggots (which are well-known to feed naturally off of infected tissue) to gobble up the infections and release, as "waste," human growth hormone (as they showed in the study could be done with a strain of green bottle fly maggots). [Science Daily, 3-23-2016]

-- Felicia Burl, 33, who crashed her car (killing her passenger) after running a red light, fled on foot and later tried to foil DNA evidence against her to avoid charges. While in lockup, Burl, with a 29-conviction rap sheet, knew a mouth swab was upcoming and tried to contaminate it by -- as police later learned -- having two other women spit into her mouth just before the test. She was convicted anyway, and a court in Stamford, Connecticut, is expected to order a 10-year sentence at Burl's next hearing. [Stamford Advocate, 3-15-2016]

Massachusetts state troopers initially found a few drug items in a search of the vehicle of Carrie Tutsock, 24, at a traffic stop in March along Interstate 91 near Hatfield, Massachusetts, but Tutsock and her two companions proceeded to worsen the situation. The troopers seemed satisfied with finding three drug pipes, a couple of syringes and several baggies of drugs, and began to write their report as a "possession" case, but en route to the state police barracks, a trooper said he overheard one suspect whisper to another, "I don't think they found all the stuff in the car." The police searched it again and this time found three digital scales with white residue, along with another 230 baggies of heroin, and the charges were upped to "intent to distribute." [MassLive.com, 3-17-2016]

(1) Convicted triple-murder inmate Kon Georgiou, housed in Australia's Goulburn Jail, was charged in February with hiding a cellphone in his rectum, but managed to hold out for 12 days (almost 300 hours) before finally "releasing" the evidence. Guards, certain it was a phone on the X-ray (and not the residue from recent surgery that Georgiou claimed), had confidently resisted "going in" after it. (2) At an estate sale in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in February, a couple in Wilmington bid successfully on Delaware license plate number "14," which went for $325,000. According to WCAU-TV's report, paying exorbitant sums for low license plate numbers "is a Delaware thing" (and has been mentioned in News of the Weird previously). [The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 2-24- 2016] [Wilmington News Journal, 2-16-2016]

An official release of San Francisco's Department of the Environment in July (2010) apparently cleared up a matter of controversy (according to a report in SF Weekly): Human semen is one "organic waste product" not required to be disposed of in special "compost" bags under the city's mandatory composting law. (However, "snot" must be properly bagged.) [SF Weekly, 7-16-2010]

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.