The upscale clothier Barneys New York recently introduced $585 "Distressed Superstar Sneakers" (from the high-end brand Golden Goose) that were purposely designed to look scuffed, well-worn and cobbled-together, as if they were shoes recovered from a Dumpster. The quintessential touch was the generous use of duct tape on the bottom trim. Critics were in abundance, accusing Barneys of mocking poverty. [USA Today, 8-30-2016] [Daily Mail (London), 8-29-2016]

(1) The British food artists Bompas & Parr are staging (through Oct. 30) a tribute to the late writer Roald Dahl by brewing batches of beer using yeast swabbed and cultured from a chair Dahl used and which has been on display at the Roald Dahl Museum in Great Missenden, England. (2) A 16-year-old boy made headlines in August for being one of the rare survivors of an amoeba -- a brain-eating amoeba -- which he acquired diving into a pond on private property in Florida's Broward County. (By popular legend, Floridians are believed to lack sufficient brain matter to satisfy amoebas!) [The Independent (London), 8-17-2016] [NBC News, 8-24-2016]

-- The Drug Enforcement Administration has schemed for several years to pay airline and Amtrak employees for tips on passengers who might be traveling with large sums of cash, so that the DEA can interview them -- with an eye toward seizing the cash under federal law if they merely "suspect" that the money is involved in illegal activity. A USA Today investigation, reported in August, revealed that the agency had seized $209 million in a decade, from 5,200 travelers who, even if no criminal charge results, almost never get all their money back (and, of 87 recent cash seizures, only two actually resulted in charges). One Amtrak employee was secretly paid $854,460 over a decade for snitching passenger information to the DEA. [USA Today, 8-11-2016, 1-7-2016]

-- Update: In August, the Defense Department's inspector general affirmed once again (following on 2013 disclosures) that the agency has little knowledge of where its money goes -- this time admitting that the Department of the Army had made $6.5 trillion in accounting "adjustments" that appeared simply to be made up out of thin air, just to get the books balanced for 2015. (In part, the problem was laid to 16,000 financial data files that simply disappeared with no trace.) "As a result," reported Fortune magazine, "there has been no way to know how the Defense Department -- far and away the biggest chunk of Congress's annual budget -- spends the public's money." [Fortune, 8-19-2016]

-- In August, the banking giant Citigroup and the communications giant AT&T agreed to end their two-month-long legal hostilities over AT&T's right to have a customer service program titled "Thanks." Citigroup had pointed out that it holds trademarks for customer service titles "thankyou," "citi thankyou," "thankyou from citi" and "thankyou your way," and had tried to block the program name "AT&T Thanks." [NASDAQ.com, 8-25-2016]

-- In July in the African nation of Malawi (on the western border of Mozambique), Eric Aniva was finally arrested -- but not before he had been employed by village families more than 100 times to have ritual sex to "cleanse" recent widows -- and girls immediately after their first menstruation. Aniva is one of several such sex workers known as "hyenas" (because they operate stealthily, at night), but Malawi president Peter Mutharika took action after reading devastating dispatches (reporting hyenas' underage victims and Aniva's HIV-positive status) in The New York Times and London's The Guardian, among other news services. [Washington Post, 7-27-2016]

-- The July 2012 Aurora, Colorado, theater shooter, James Holmes, is hardly wealthy enough to be sued, so 41 massacre victims and families instead filed against Cinemark Theater for having an unsafe premises, and by August 2016 Cinemark had offered $150,000 as a total settlement. Thirty-seven of the 41 accepted, but four held out since the scaled payout offered only a maximum of $30,000 for the worst-off victims. Following the settlement, the judge, finding that Cinemark could not have anticipated Holmes's attack, ruled for the theater -- making the four holdouts liable under Colorado law for Cinemark's expenses defending against the lawsuit ($699,000). [Los Angeles Times, 8-30-2016]

-- Misunderstandings: (1) "Mr. L," 31, a Chinese tourist visiting Dulmen, Germany, in July, went to a police station to report his stolen wallet, but signed the wrong form and was logged in as requesting asylum, setting off a bureaucratic nightmare that left him confined for 12 days at a migrant hostel before the error was rectified. (2) In August at a hospital in Shenyang, China, "Wang," 29, awaiting his wife's childbirth, was reported (by People's Daily via Shanghaiist.com) to have allowed a nurse to wave him into a room for anesthesia and hemorrhoid surgery -- a procedure that took 40 minutes. (The hospital quickly offered to pay a settlement -- but insisted that, no matter his purpose at the hospital, he in fact had hemorrhoids, and they were removed.) [The Guardian (London), 8-8-2016] [Shanghaiist.com, 8-17-2016]

-- Evidently, many Chinese wives who suspect their husbands of affairs have difficulty in confronting them, for a profession has risen recently of "mistress dispellers" whose job instead is to contact the mistress and persuade her, sometimes through an elaborate ruse, to break off the relationship. For a fee (a New York Times dispatch said it could be "tens of thousands of dollars"), the dispeller will "subtly infiltrate the mistress's life" and ultimately convince her to move on. A leading dispeller agency in Shanghai, translated as the "Weiqing International Marriage Hospital Emotion Clinic Group," served one wife by persuading the mistress to take a higher-paying job in another city. [New York Times, 7-29-2016]

-- Flooding from rains in August tore down a basement wall of the Connellsville (Pennsylvania) Church of God, wrecking and muddying parts of the building and threatening the first-floor foundation, but under the policy written by the Church Mutual Insurance company, flooding damage is not covered, as rain is an "act of God." (Church Mutual apparently uses a standard insurance industry definition and thus recognizes, contrary to some religious beliefs, that not everything is caused by God.) [WTAE-TV (Pittsburgh), 8-31-2016]

-- In 2005, India enacted a landmark anti-poverty program, obligating th government to furnish 100 days' minimum-wage work to unskilled laborers (potentially, 70 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people). Programs often fail in India because of rampant corruption, but a recent study by a Cambridge University researcher concluded that the 2005 law is failing for the opposite reason --anti-corruption measures in the program. Its requirement of extreme transparency has created an exponential increase in paperwork (to minimize opportunities for corruption), severely delaying the availability of jobs. [Phys.Org News, 7-21-2016]

(1) Vegetarian Deb Dusseau of Portland, Maine, celebrating her 10-year anniversary of "all vegetables, all the time," reported to a tattoo artist in August and now sports, on her right arm, wrist to shoulder, an eggplant, peppers, mushrooms, peas, greens, onions, a radish and multiple tomatoes -- drawn in an "old seed catalog" motif. (2) Pro baseball player Brandon Thomas (of the independent Frontier League's Gateway Grizzlies in St. Louis, Missouri) hit a bases-loaded home run on Aug. 21 -- over the fence, into the adjacent parking lot, where the ball smashed the windshield ... of his own car. [Bangor Daily News, 8-29-2016] [Sports Illustrated, 8-22-2016]

Horse showjumping is a long-time Olympics sport, but since 2002, equestrians have been performing in "horseless" showjumping, in which horse courses are run by "riders" on foot (who, by the way, do not straddle broomsticks!). According to an October (2012) Wall Street Journal report, an international association headed by retired pro equestrian Jessica Newman produces at least 15 shows a year, with from 40 to 130 competitors, galloping over jumps that vary from 2 to 4 feet high (5 feet in "Grand Prix" events), with the "riders" graded as if they were on horses (timed, with points off for contacting the rails). Explained Newman, about the shows' success, "It's just fun to be a horse." [Wall Street Journal, 10-8-2012]

The recently concluded Olympics included a few of the more obscure athletic endeavors (such as dressage for horses and steeplechase for humans), but U.S. colleges compete in even less-heralded "sports," such as wood chopping, rock climbing, fishing and broomball. University of Alabama, 2015 national football champions, dominates also in the 280-school bass-fishing competition, and New York's Paul Smith College's 5,000-student campus raucously cheers its championship log-splitting team (against seven other schools). And Ohio State whipped another football powerhouse, Nebraska, in ice-based broomball. [Wall Street Journal, 8-22-2016]

-- We now have computer or cellphone apps to, for example, analyze the quality of one's tongue-kissing; alert you when your zipper is inadvertently down; make a refrigerator also be a stereo and photo album; notify you when you need to drink more water; check the male-female ratio at local bars so, if you're on the prowl, you can plan your evening efficiently; and reveal whether your partner has had someone else in bed while you were away (via differential contours of the mattress). And then, in August, the creators of the new "South Park" virtual reality game announced that they had figured out how to release a "fart" smell that is crucial to game-players when they put on the VR mask. [New York Times, 7-10-2016] [New York Post, 7-24-2016] [Daily Telegraph (London), 4-14-2016] [AdWeek, 8-26-2016]

-- Inexplicable: Pizza Hut announced in August that it had finally mastered the technology to turn its cardboard delivery boxes into customers' workable disk-jockey turntables and will make them available shortly in five stores in the United Kingdom. (Each box has two record decks, a cross-fader, pitch and cue controls, and the ability to rewind.) Music stars P Money and DJ Vectra are featured, and the boxes will sync via Bluetooth to phones and computers. [Daily Mirror (London), 8-23-2016]

-- Lame: (1) Steven Scholz was sued for $255,000 in Oregon City, Oregon, in July after he allegedly fired on a family's house (15 gunshots) and traumatized their young son inside. Scholz explained that he thought the Biblical Rapture had just occurred and that he was the only survivor. (2) Aman Bhatia, 27, was charged with battery and lewd molestation in July after allegedly groping six women at Disney World's Typhoon Lagoon water park. Despite witnesses telling police that Bhatia was positioning himself for furtive groping, Bhatia claimed that his glasses were broken and thus he was not aware that women were in his path. [The Oregonian, 7-29-2016] [WKMG-TV (Orlando), 7-6-2016]

-- In July, Ryan Bundy (a leader of the Malheur federal land occupation protest in Oregon in January), exercising his philosophy as a "sovereign," wrote his judge that he rejects the federal court's jurisdiction over him in his upcoming trial, but that he would agree to co-operate -- provided the government pays him $1 million cash. Bundy (who signs court documents "i; ryan c., man") said for that sum, he would act as "defendant" -- or, as a bonus, if the judge prefers, as "bailiff," or even as "judge." (Bundy's lawyer, not surprisingly, is Bundy.) [KOIN-TV (Portland), 7-28-2016]

-- Recurring Theme: People with too much money have been reported over the years to have paid enormous sums for "prestigious" license plates, usually the lowest-numbered. In China, the number 8 is regarded as lucky, and a man identified only as "Liu" obtained Shanghai province's plate "88888" -- for which he paid the equivalent of $149,000. Shanghaiist.com reported in June that "Lucky" Liu was forced into annoying traffic stops by police eight times the first day because officers were certain that the plate was bogus. [Shanghaiist, 6-29-2016]

-- Greenland's first "world-class tourist attraction," opening in 2020, offers visitors a "stunning view" of the rapidly melting ice sheets from the area's famous, 250,000-year-old Jakobshavn Glacier. The United Nations-protected site is promoting a "tourist" vista that some call "ground zero for climate change" -- and which others hope won't be completely melted by 2020. [Mother Nature Network, 7-12-2016]

-- Third-grade teacher Tracy Rosner filed a lawsuit against the county school board in Miami in July (claiming to be the victim of race and national origin discrimination) after being turned down for a job that required teaching Spanish -- because she doesn't speak Spanish. (Rosner said "non-Hispanics" like her are a minority among Miami schoolteachers and therefore that affirmative-action-style accommodations should have been made for her.) [Miami Herald, 7-25-2016]

-- An Idaho man took his pregnant daughter, 14, and the man who raped her, age 24, to Missouri last year to get married (because of that state's lenient marriage-age law) -- asserting that it is the rapist's "duty" to marry a girl he gets pregnant. The father now says he was wrong, but an Idaho judge nonetheless sentenced him to 120 days behind bars for endangering his daughter. (The rapist received a 15-year sentence, and the pregnancy ended in miscarriage.) [Idaho State Journal (Pocatello), 5-31-2016]

The Tykables "baby store for adults" opened in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, recently and so far has outlasted attempts to shut it down (as being, allegedly, inappropriate for the community). Part of the business model is selling adult diapers for medical needs, but a major clientele is adults with a fetish to be treated like helpless babies -- with diapers, clothing, accessories and furniture (oversized high chairs, playpens and cribs). (Though the owner controls store access and has blocked out window views, critics are still uncomfortable explaining the store to their children.) [CBS News, 6-8-2016]

(1) Overenthusiastic Insurance Fraud: A 30-year-old woman, "LTN," has so far escaped prosecution in Hanoi, Vietnam -- because her insurance fraud caper already cost her a third, each, of her left hand and left foot. Those are the parts police said she paid a friend the equivalent of $2,000 to chop off to claim a $157,000 disability- policy payout, according to an August dispatch by Agence France-Presse. (2) Husband Who Needs to Believe: Police in Hartselle, Alabama, arrested Sarah Shepard for soliciting a hit man to kill her husband, Richard (after police set up an undercover sting, even working with Richard to stage his fake death to convince her that the job was completed). Now, Richard is trying to help Sarah. In August, he asked her judge to reduce her bail, certain that she had been "entrapped" because, for one thing, she could hardly manage a grocery list, much less a murder. [Agence France-Presse via The Guardian, 8-25-2016] [WAFF-TV (Huntsville, Ala.), 8-16-2016]

(1) A traffic officer in Guelph, Ontario, pulled over a 35-year-old motorist on July 11 traveling 67 mph (108 km/h) in a 45 mph zone -- at night on a stretch with no highway lights and no headlights on his vehicle. The stopped driver was given citations even though he pointed out that he was watching the road with a flashlight on his head, held in place by straps. (2) Twenty-three local-government bureaucrats in Boscotrecase, Italy, were disciplined in July after being caught shirking duties, including by falsifying the time clock. It was unclear whether the 23 included the two "mystery" workers photographed punching in for work while wearing cardboard boxes on their heads. [Guelph Today, 7-13-2016] [The Local (Rome), 7-12-2016]

James Davis, 73, was ordered by the town of Stevenson, Alabama, to dig up his wife's body from his front yard and re-bury it in an actual cemetery. The front yard, he pleaded, is where she wanted to be, and this way he can visit her every time he walks out the door. Davis, who is challenging the order (in 2012) at the Court of Appeals, said he feels singled out, since people in Stevenson "have raised pigs in their yard," have "horses in the road here" and "gravesites here all over the place." [Associated Press via Washington Post, 8-19-2012]

News of the Weird has recently learned that Steven Wayne Hillier, of Australia, listed as a Classic Middle Name murderer in 2010, was found not guilty on retrial.

The phenomenal Japanese singer Hatsune Miku (100 million YouTube hits) is coming off of a sold-out, 10-city North American concert tour with high-energy audiences (blocks-long lines to get in; raucous crowd participation; hefty souvenir sales), except that "she" isn't real. Hatsune Miku is a projected hologram on stage singing and dancing (but her band is human), and her May show in Dallas, according to a Dallas Observer review, typically ignited frenzied fans who know the show's "every beat, outfit ... and glow stick color-change." Her voice, a synthesized "vocaloid," is crafted in pitch, timbre and timing to sound human. (The latest PlayStation brings Hatsune Miku into the home by virtual reality.) [Dallas Observer, 5-16-2016]

-- Make Up Your Mind, Feds: On Aug. 11, the federal government's Drug Enforcement Agency famously refused to soften the regulation of marijuana, leaving it (with heroin) as a harsh "Schedule I" drug because, citing Food and Drug Administration findings, it has "no medical use." However, as the Daily Caller pointed out, another federal agency -- Department of Health and Human Services -- obtained a U.S. patent in 2003 for marijuana-derived cannabinoids, which HHS pointed out have several medical uses (as an antioxidant and for limiting neurological damage following strokes). [Daily Caller, 8-17-2016]

-- Priorities: (1) "A dog has better protection than our kids," lamented an Oregon prosecutor in May because, unlike the pet law, the "child abuse" law requires proof the victim experienced "substantial" pain -- which a young child often lacks vocabulary to describe. (Simply showing welts and bruises is insufficient, the Court of Appeals has ruled.) (2) That same Oregon Court of Appeals ruled in June that Thomas Wade, 44, was not guilty of a crime when in 2013 he unzipped his pants, reached inside, and at that point cursed the woman he had confronted in a public park. "Distasteful," wrote the Court, but it was an exercise of Wade's free speech right. [The Oregonian, 5-21-2016] [The Oregonian, 6-10-2016]

-- Texas! In August, Houston defense lawyer Jerry Guerinot announced his retirement from death-penalty cases, leaving him with a perfect record (for that area of his practice): He lost every single time. Twenty-one clients received the death penalty, and 10 have been executed (so far). He made no excuses, pointing out that "gang members, serial killers and sociopaths" were entitled to representation, too, and that he has taken more than 500 noncapital cases to trial (with, presumably, more success). [Associated Press via Fox News, 8-13-2016]

(1) Tourism officials in Iceland recently posted "hundreds" of signs at visitor attractions showing a squatting person in silhouette, with a small pile on the ground underneath -- and the familiar diagonal line (indicating "don't"). Critics of the signs reluctantly admit Iceland's chronic shortage of public restrooms. (2) In a YouTube clip released in July, a Disney fan posted shot after shot of "rude" Chinese tourists at Shanghai Disneyland, coaxing their small children to urinate in public rather than in restrooms. (3) The Tourism Bureau of Japan's Hokkaido island recently rewrote its etiquette guide for visitors to underscore the inappropriateness of "belching or flatulence" in public. [Daily Mail (London), 7-20- 2016] [Daily Mail (London), 7-19-2016] [Agence France-Presse via Yahoo News, 4-28-2016]

Suspicions Confirmed: (1) A New York Times reporter, describing in June the rising prices of prescription pharmaceuticals, noted that a popular pain reliever (probably describing oxycodone) was available on the Paterson, New Jersey, black market for $25 a pill, while heroin was going for $2 a baggie. (2) The economic growth rate in Ireland for 2015 was revised -- upward -- in July. Growth of its gross domestic product was originally estimated at 7.8 percent, but subsequently -- adding the paper value of several "inversions" (U.S. companies "moving" to Ireland to reduce U.S. taxes) -- Ireland found that it was actually growing at 26.7 percent. [New York Times, 6-14-2016] [New York Times, 7-13-2016]

(1) Investigators revealed in July that an off-duty Aurora, Colorado, sheriff's deputy had justifiably fired his gun to resist a parking lot mugging -- and that, furthermore, one of the bullets from Deputy Jose Marquez's gun had gone straight into the barrel of one of the handguns pointed at him. The investigators called the shot "one in a billion." (2) Matthew Lavin, 39, drew internet acclaim in July after he was gored through his left thigh while "running with the bulls" in the annual spectacle in Pamplona, Spain. Interviewed in his hospital bed by Madrid's The Local, he called it "the best time ever" and said he looked forward to another run next year. [Denver Post, 7-13-2016] [The Local (Madrid), 7-13-2016]

Gary Durham, 40, was shot to death during a heated road-rage incident in Plant City, Florida, on Aug. 10. Durham had served 10 years in prison after an aggressive road-rage episode in 2001 in which he pursued another driver and knocked him to the ground, causing the man to hit his head, fatally, on the pavement. (Included in Durham's 2002 sentence was an order to take anger management classes.) [Tampa Bay Times, 8-11-2016]

-- The Borough Council of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, was surprised to learn in June that, because of an existing local ordinance, dogs were not permitted in its brand-new Pompton Lakes dog park, created with great fanfare in an area of Hershfield Park. The council vowed to fix the problem. (2) In June, a police watchdog agency in Dublin, Ireland, asked officers ("gardai") across the country to try to carry out house raids at "reasonable hours" so that they do not disturb the occupants. (In one complaint, gardai staged a 3:15 a.m. raid to search for evidence of stolen vehicle accessories.) [The Record (Hackensack), 6-13-2016] [Irish Independent, 6-12-2016]

-- A 9-year-old girl named Irina won a contest in Berezniki, Russia, in August for letting mosquitos bite her more often that they bit other contestants. It is the signature event of the annual Russian Mosquito Festival, and her 43 hits were enough to earn her the title of "tastiest girl." The annual Great Texas Mosquito Festival in Clute, Texas (south of Houston), apparently has nothing comparable. [Washington Post, 8-15-2016]

(1) The Elanora Heights Public School (a primary school in Sydney, Australia) recently banned clapping during student assemblies in an effort to help pupils with noise anxieties. To show audience approval, students are asked to "punch the air," "pull (on their) faces" or "wriggle about." (2) In July, The Nairobian newspaper reported the remarkable career of "Rosemary," reputed to be the Kenyan capital's oldest prostitute -- still going strong at 64 after more than 5,000 clients. She said she could make it through 40 on a good day, but never missed church on Sunday. [Sky News (London), 7-20-2016] [The Nairobian, 7-16-2016]

Didn't Think Ahead: (1) In July, Joshua Jacobs, 30, accidentally knocked down a traffic sign at 12:45 a.m. in Vero Beach, Florida, and, spotting a sheriff's deputy, sped away. The deputy gave chase -- especially, he said, given the fully-grown marijuana plant resting in the bed of the pickup. Jacobs was arrested. (2) Jeremy Watts, 30, and Jessica Heady, 24, were charged with aggravated burglary (a PlayStation and other electronics from a man's home) in Clarksville, Tennessee, in August. The pair had offered the haul to a Cash America Pawnshop, but did not realize that the home they had burglarized was the pawnshop manager's. [TCPalm.com (Stuart, Fla.), 8-2-2016] [Leaf Chronicle (Clarksville), 8-3-2016]

Researchers writing in the journal Animal Behaviour in July (2012) hypothesized why male pandas have sometimes been seen performing handstands near trees. They are urinating, the scientists observed, and doing handstands streams the urine higher on the tree, presumably signaling their mating superiority. A San Diego Zoo researcher involved in the study added that an accompanying gland secretion gives off even more "personal" information to other pandas than the urine alone. [Live Science, 8-28-2012]