While "democracy" in most of America means electing representatives to run government, on Nov. 8 in San Francisco it also expected voters to decide 43 often vague, densely worded "issues" that, according to critics, could better be handled by the professionals who are, after all, elected by those very same voters. Except for hot-button issues like tax increases or hardened legislative gridlock, solutions on these "propositions" (e.g., how certain contractors' fees should be structured, which obscure official has primary responsibility for which obscure job, or the notorious proposition asking whether actors in the tax-paying porno industry must use condoms) would be, in other states, left to elected officials, lessening voter need for a deep dive into civics. [CityLab.com, 11-7-2016]

-- Inexplicable: (1) The police chief of Bath Township, Ohio, acknowledged the overnight break-in on Oct. 10 or 11 at the University Hospitals Ghent Family Practice, but said nothing was missing. It appeared that an intruder (or intruders) had performed some medical procedure in a clinical office (probably on an ear) because instruments were left in bowls and a surgical glove and medication wrappings tossed into a trash can (and a gown left on a table). (2) A 35-year-old man was detained by police in Vancouver, British Columbia, in October after a home break-in in which the intruder took off his clothes, grabbed some eggs and began preparing a meal. The homeowner, elsewhere in the house, noticed the commotion and the intruder fled (still naked). [WEWS-TV (Cleveland), 10-27-2016] [CTV News (Vancouver), 10-20-2016]

-- How To Tell If You've Had Too Much To Drink: Ashley Basich, 49, was arrested in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in October and charged with DUI after police found her, late at night, using an industrial forklift to pick up and move a van that she explained was blocking her driveway. Problems: She works for the state forestry department and had commandeered a state-owned vehicle, she had a cooler of beer in the forklift and was operating it while wearing flip-flops (OSHA violation!), and the van "blocking" her driveway was her own. [Wyoming Tribune Eagle (Cheyenne), 11-2-2016]

-- Though most Chicago Police Department officers get no more than five civilian complaints in their entire careers (according to one defense attorney), CPD internal records released in October reveal that some had more than 100, and, of 13,000 complaints over 47 years in which police wrongdoing was conceded, only 68 cases resulted in the officer actually being fired (although the worst police offender, Jerome Finnigan, with 157 complaints over two decades, is now in federal prison). [Associated Press via Chicago Tribune, 10-15-2016]

-- Compelling Explanations: Two men in rural Coffee County, Georgia, told sheriff's deputies in November that they had planned to soon attack a science-research center in Alaska because peoples' "souls" were trapped there and needed to be released (or at least that is what God told Michael Mancil, 30, and James Dryden Jr., 22, causing them to amass a small, but "something out of a movie" arsenal, according to the sheriff). The High Frequency Active Aural Research Facility, run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has long been a target of conspiracists, in that "the study of the Earth's atmosphere" obviously, they say, facilitates "mind control," snatching souls. [WALB-TV (Albany, Ga.), 11-1-2016]

-- Well, Of Course! (1) Motorist Luke Campbell, 28, was arrested near Minneapolis in September and charged with firing his gun at several passing cars, wounding one man (a bus passenger) -- explaining to a bystander that shooting at other vehicles "relieves stress." (2) Briton Mark Wright, 45, caught with illegal drugs taped to his penis following his arrest for burglary, told Newcastle Crown Court in September that he had "hidden" them there to keep them secret from his wife (perhaps identifying one place that she no longer visits). [Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 9-23-2016] [The Chronicle (Newcastle), 9-28-2016]

-- Recent Hospital Bills: (1) Paula D'Amore claimed she deserved a discount from the $7,400 "delivery room" charge for the April birth of her daughter at Boca Raton (Florida) Regional Hospital -- because the baby was actually born in the backseat of her car in the hospital's parking lot. (Nurses came out to assist D'Amore's husband in the final stages, but, said D'Amore, only the placenta was delivered inside.) (2) In October, new father Ryan Grassley balked at the $39.95 line-item charge from Utah Valley Hospital (Provo, Utah) -- for the mother's holding her new C-section son momentarily to her bare chest (a "bonding" ritual). (Doctors countered that C-section mothers are usually drugged and require extra security during that ritual -- but that Utah Valley might rethink making that charge a "line item.") [WPTV (West Palm Beach), 10-31-2016] [CTV News (Toronto), 10-4-2016]

-- A 49-year-old man was partly exonerated by a court in southern Sweden in September when he convinced the judge that he had a severe anxiety attack every time he received an "official" government letter in the mail (known as "window envelopes" in Sweden). Thus, though he was guilty of DUI and several other minor traffic offenses while operating his scooter, the judge dropped the charge of driving without a license because the man never opened the string of "frightening" letters informing him that operating a scooter requires a license. [The Local (Stockholm), 9-3-2016]

-- Jacob Roemer, 20, was arrested in Negaunee Township, Michigan, after a brief chase on Oct. 29 following an attempted home invasion. The resident had confronted him, chasing Roemer into the woods, where a State Police dog eventually found him lying on the ground unconscious and bloody, after, in the darkness, running into a tree and knocking himself out. [Marquette Mining Journal, 10-30-2016]

-- (1) The most recent case in which an unlucky cannabis grower came to police attention occurred in Adelaide, Australia, in August when a motorist accidentally veered off the road and crashed into a grow house, collapsing part of a wall. Arriving police peered inside and quickly began a search for the residents, who were not at home. (2) The latest market price for a coveted automobile license plate is apparently the equivalent of $9 million -- the amount paid by Dubai developer Balwinder Sahni at government auction recently for plate number "5." [The Advertiser (Adelaide), 8-1-2016] [CNN Money (Dubai), 10-31-2016]

For not the first time in history, a fire broke out this year in a hospital operating room caused by the patient's passing gas during a laser procedure. The patient at Tokyo Medical University Hospital, in her 30s, suffered burns across her legs in the April incident, which was finally reported in the Japanese press in October when the hospital completed its investigation. [Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo), 10-30-2016]

-- (1) Asher Woodworth, 30, was charged with misdemeanor traffic obstruction in the Portland, Maine, arts district in October as he stood in a street after covering himself with branches of evergreen trees. A friend described Woodworth as a performance artist contrasting his preferred "slow life" with the bustle of downtown traffic. (2) Aldeburgh Golf Club in England saw fit in September to issue a special rule allowing a no-stroke ball "drop" for players plagued by neighbor Peter Bryson's cat Merlin's habit of snatching about six balls a day from the 14th fairway. [Portland Press Herald, 10-26-2016] [BBC News, 9-19-2016]

Anthony Johnson, 49, was convicted in October (2012) in Hartford, Connecticut, of stealing an improbably large amount of money -- as much as $70,000 a weekend, off and on for five years -- by crawling on the floor of darkened theaters and lifting credit cards from purses that movie-watching women had set down. The FBI said Johnson was careful to pick films likely to engross female viewers so that he could operate freely, and that he was often able to take the cards, leave the theater, and make cash-advance withdrawals from ATMs before the movie had ended. [Hartford Courant, 10-22-2012]

New York City officially began licensing professional fire eaters earlier this year, and classes have sprung up to teach the art so that the city's Fire Department Explosives Unit can test for competence (if not "judgment") and issue the "E29" certificates. In the "bad old (license-less) days," a veteran fire eater told The New York Times in October, a "bunch of us" performed regularly for $50 a throw, largely oblivious of the dangers (though some admit that almost everyone eventually gets "badly burned"). For authenticity, the Times writer, a fire eater who dubbed herself Lady Aye, completed the licensing process herself ("as sexy as applying for a mortgage"), but declined to say whether she is awaiting bookings. [New York Times, 10-30-2016]

-- A major streetlight in the town of Pebmarsh Close, England, went out of service when a truck hit it a year ago, and despite pleas to fix it from townspeople -- and Essex county councillor Dave Harris -- no action has been taken. In October, Harris staged a "birthday party" on the site, formally inviting numerous guests, and furnishing a birthday cake -- to "celebrate" the "age" of the broken streetlight. (The shamed county highway office quickly promised action.) [Essex County Gazette-Standard, 10-24-2016]

-- Prominent British radio host Dame Jenni Murray suggested in October that the U.K. scrap traditional "sex education" courses in school and instead show pornographic videos for classes to "analyze it in exactly the same way as (they analyze Jane Austen)" in order to encourage discussion of the role of sex. Younger students might explore why a boy should not look up a girl's skirt, but older students would view hard-core material to confront, for example, whether normal women should "shave" or make the typical screeching moans that porno "actresses" make. Dame Jenni said simply condemning pornography is naive because too much money is at stake. [The Independent (London), 10-12-2016]

-- At a World Cup qualifier match in October in Quito, Ecuador, police arrived during the game to question star player Enner Valencia about an unpaid alimony complaint, and he saw them waiting on the sideline. Local media reported that Valencia then faked an on-field injury near the end of the match to "necessitate" being taken away by ambulance, thus outmaneuvering the police. (He settled the complaint in time for the next match.) [Daily Telegraph (London), 10-7-2016]

-- The security firm Trend Micro disclosed in October its "surprise" to find, in the course of a routine investigation, that firms in several crucial sectors (nuclear power, electric utilities, defense contractors, computer chip makers) send critical alert messages via old-style wireless pagers wholly unsecured against hacking. In fact, Trend Micro said the enormously popular WhatsApp message-exchange app has better security than the alert systems of nuclear power plants. (Infrastructure engineers defended the outdated technology as useful where internet access was unavailable.) [ArsTechnica.com, 10-25-2016]

-- Life Imitates Art: Security experts hired by the investment firm Muddy Waters (which is being sued for defamation by St. Jude Medical Inc. over claims that St. Jude's cardiac implant device can be hacked) disclosed in an October court filing that they agree the devices are anonymously and maliciously hackable. They found that a popular control device (Merlin@Home) could be remotely turned off, or jiggered to carry a dangerous electrical charge from up to 100 feet away. (A similar incident was part of a plot in Season 2 of the "Homeland" TV series, as the means by which the ailing U.S. vice president was assassinated.) [Bloomberg Markets, 10-24-2016]

New York's prestigious Bronx High School of Science enrolls some of the "best and brightest" students in the city -- some of whom (perhaps rebelling against the "nerd" label) for the last two years have held unauthorized, consensual fistfights (a "fight club") in a field near the school, according to an October New York Daily News report. Students at the school (which has produced eight Nobel Prize winners and eight National Medal of Science honorees) then bombarded the Daily News reporter by telephone and Facebook with acrimonious, vulgar messages for placing the school in a bad light. [New York Daily News, 10-12-2016]

Nathan Lawwill, 32, from Lansing, Michigan, was arrested in Tunisia in October after emigrating as a recent Muslim convert, speaking little Arabic -- which did not restrain him (a one-time Christian) from now being the Islamic Messiah, the "gift to Muslims," "Mahdi to Muslims and Messiah to the Jews." "I am going to be the center of the world very quickly," he wrote on Facebook. He and his brother Patrick were found by police on Oct. 25 "unwashed," and were detained on suspicion of terrorism. [The Daily Beast, 10-27-2016]

(1) Ms. Cana Greer, 29, was arrested in Sacramento, California, in October when police responded to a call to help her remove handcuffs she had accidentally engaged while fooling around with a friend. Police, routinely checking her ID, discovered an outstanding felony burglary warrant. As per procedure, officers took her to a fire station for removal of the cuffs -- to make room on her wrists for their own handcuffs. (2) A woman unnamed (because she has not been charged with a crime) almost produced major havoc at the Shuttle Car Wash in Titusville, Florida, in October when, while cleaning her car, she attempted to vacuum gas out of her trunk, causing the vacuum to explode. [Sacramento Bee, 10-19-2016] [WKMG-TV (Orlando), 10-14-2016]

Mr. Nigel Hobbs, 71, passed away in Dawlish, England, in April, and an October coroner's inquest heard that his body was found by a neighbor "swaddled" in bed linen and wearing numerous "homemade" dresses and his face covered by stockings pulled tight (but with eye holes). Underneath the coverings, his face was wrapped in polyethylene, including his mouth but not his nose, and cotton or wool was stuffed into his ears and mouth. The coroner assumed the cause of death was accidental asphyxiation. [Mid-Devon Advertiser, 10-19-2016]

Joining some classic cases of sentencing overkill that have populated News of the Weird through the years: In October in San Marcos, Texas, jurors apparently had enough of recidivist drunk driver Jose Marin, 64, who had just racked up conviction No. 8 and so sentenced him to spend the next 99 years in prison and (perhaps more horrifyingly) sober. And in Fresno, California, Rene Lopez, 41, convicted of raping his daughter over a four-year period beginning when she was 16, was sentenced by a Fresno Superior Court judge to prison until the year 3519 (1,503 years from now). [KXAN-TV (Austin), 10-13-2016] [Associated Press via Los Angeles Times, 10-22-2016]

(1) The world's first constantly flowing (and free!) "wine fountain" opened in Abruzzo, Italy, in October, to help draw tourists and pilgrims who make the trek south from the Vatican to view the cathedral where remains of the disciple Thomas are kept. Operators said they hope the fountain will not become a home to "drunkards." (2) In September, the world's first (legal) beer pipeline opened, pumping 12,000 bottles' worth an hour from the Halve Maan brewery in Bruges, Belgium, to its bottling plant two miles away (and thus sparing visitors to the historic city the sight of tanker trucks cluttering the cobblestone streets). The pipeline was partly funded by private citizens offered "free beer for life" for their donations. [The Local (Rome), 10-12-2016] [New York Times, 9-17-2016]

Awesome Achievement: William Todd, traveling by bus, faced a nine-hour layover in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 9 (2012) -- and with time on his hands, managed to (allegedly) commit at least 11 felonies, one after another, while he waited: shooting up a restaurant, setting it on fire, robbing four people at a bar, carjacking, breaking into a law office and defecating on a desk, trolling hotel rooms seeking theft opportunities, and stealing a taxicab and robbing the driver. He was finally captured at Opryland, where he had hidden by submerging himself in water up to his nose. [WSMV-TV (Nashville), 4-9-2012]

Kids as young as 6 who live on a cliff top in China's Atule'er village in Sichuan province will no longer have to use flexible vine-based ladders to climb down and up the 2,600-foot descent from their homes to school. Beijing News disclosed in October, in a report carried by CNN, that a sturdy steel ladder was being built to aid the 400 villagers after breathtaking photographs of them making the treacherous commute surfaced on the internet earlier this year [http://cnn.it/2f2PCon] [CNN, 10-26-2016].

Sentenced to six years in prison for sex with teenage girls (September): former Youth Pastor David Hayman, 38 (Hackensack, New Jersey). Sentenced to six months in jail for sending inappropriate texts to teenage boys (August): former Youth Pastor Brian Burchfield (Shawnee, Oklahoma). Charged and awaiting trial for impregnating a 15-year-old girl (October): Youth Pastor Wesley Blackburn, 35 (New Paris, Pennsylvania). Sentenced to 10 years in prison for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl (September): former Youth Pastor Brian Mitchell, 31 (North Olmsted, Ohio). Charged and awaiting trial for luring teenagers into prostitution (October): Youth Pastor Ron Cooper, 52 (Miami). Sentenced to 90 days in jail as part of a sex assault case involving a 13-year-old girl (September): former Youth Pastor Christopher Hutchinson, 37 (Parker, Colorado). [The Record (Hackensack), 9-23-2016] [KFOR-TV (Oklahoma City), 8-24-2016] [Associated Press via Washington Post, 10-15-2016] [Cleveland.com, 9-8-2016] [WFOR-TV (Miami), 10-19-2016] [KMGH-TV (Denver), 9-30-2016]

Researchers in Poland reported in August the "survival" of a colony of ants that wandered unsuspectingly into an old nuclear weapon bunker and became trapped. When researchers first noticed in 2013, they assumed the ants would soon die, either freezing or starving to death, but, returning in 2015 and 2016, they found the population stable. Their only guess: New ants were falling into the bunker, "replacing" the dead ones. Thus, ants condemned to the bunker slowly starve, freezing, in total darkness, until newly condemned ants arrive and freeze and starve in total darkness -- and on and on. [Science Daily (8-30-2016) via WeirdUniverse.net (9-16-2016)]

Jackson County, Michigan, judge John McBain briefly gained notoriety in October when a Michigan news site released courtroom video of a December 2015 hearing in which McBain felt the need to throw off his robe, leap from the bench and tackle defendant Jacob Larson, who was resisting the one court officer on hand to restrain him. Yelling "Tase his ass right now," McBain is shown holding on until help arrived -- with Larson perhaps undermining his earlier courtroom statements claiming it was his girlfriend, and not he, who was the aggressor in alleged stalking incidents. [MLive.com, 10-13-2016]

Arrested in October and charged with kidnapping a 4-year-old girl in Lakeland: a truck driver, Mr. Wild West Hogs. Arrested in West Palm Beach in August and charged with trespassing at a Publix supermarket (and screaming at employees), Mr. Vladimir Putin. And in August, at the dedication of a new unit at Tampa General Hospital's pediatric center, longtime satisfied patients attended, including Maria Luva, who told guests her son, now 8 years old, was born there: Ywlyox Luva. [Associated Press via TampaBay.com, 10-12-2016] [WPEC-TV (West Palm Beach), 8- 30-2016] [Tampa Bay Times, 8-12-2016]

In 1921, researchers for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife stated categorically in a journal that "the one predatory animal" inspiring practically nothing "good" is the mountain lion, but recent research in the journal Conservation Letters credits the animal for saving the lives of many motorists by killing deer, thus tempering the current annual number (20,000) of driver-deer collisions. Even killing deer, mountain lions still trail pussycats as predators; researchers in Nature Communications in 2013 estimated that "free-ranging (U.S.) domestic cats" kill at least 1.4 billion birds and 6.9 billion small mammals annually. [Washington Post, 7-21-2016] [Audubon.org, 1-30-2013]

On the way to the police station in Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 19, after being arrested for, among other things, being a felon in possession of a gun, Raymond Brooks, 25, asked an officer (apparently in all seriousness) whether, after he got booked at the station, he could have his gun back. (The police report did not specify whether the officer said yes or no.) [The Vindicator (Youngstown), 10-20-2016]

-- Sovereigns! The director of the Caribbean Cultural Center at the University of the Virgin Islands, facing foreclosure of her home by Firstbank Puerto Rico, decided she was not really "Chenzira Davis-Kahina" but actually "Royal Daughter Sat Yah" of the "Natural Sovereign Indigenous Nation of ... Smai Tawi Ta-Neter-Awe," and she and her equally befuddlingly named husband have sued the bank for $190 million in federal court (and begun the flood of incomprehensible paperwork). The couple's law of "Maat" conveniently holds that attempts by federal marshals to seize their property would double the damages to $380 million. [Virgin Islands Daily News, 8-22-2016]

-- "Emotional Support" Animals: Daniel, age 4 -- and a duck -- accompanied a woman in her 20s in October on a flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Asheville, outfitted in a Captain America diaper and red shoes to protect its feet, occasionally (if inadvisedly) giving the woman a peck on the mouth. Reporting the event was author Mark Essig, who has written favorably about pigs but admitted he'd never before been on a flight with "companion poultry" and mused whether Daniel, gazing out a window, experienced an "ancestral" yearning to fly. [Citizen-Times (Asheville), 10-17-2016]

-- The Art of Smuggling: At press time, Leston Lawrence, 35, an employee of the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa, was awaiting a court decision on charges that he stole $140,000 worth of thick gold coins ("pucks") that, over time, were taken from the mint in his rectum. The mint's "highest security measures" never turned up a puck on or in Lawrence; he was arrested after the mint investigated a tip that he had sold an unusual number of them for someone of his pay grade. [Washington Post, 9-21-2016]

Mayor Paul Antonio of Toowoomba, Australia (pop. 100,000), admitted he had picked an uphill fight, but still has recently been handing out cards to men on the street asking them to help the city (in unspecified ways) become completely free of pornography. Though the city has several tax-paying sex businesses (even a strip club and a brothel), Antonio's message (augmented by public confessions of men burdened by their porn habits) is directed at the internet's ease of access to images of male "dominance and power" over females. [Australian Broadcasting Corp. News, 10-11-2016]

Tiny Thrills: (1) The town of Warley, England, announced it has applied to the Guinness people for the honor of having the world's smallest museum. The Warley Community Association's museum, with photos and mementoes of its past, is housed in an old phone booth. (So far, there are no "hours"; visitors just show up and open the door.) (2) The recent 100th anniversary of America's National Park Service drew attention to the park in Guthrie, Oklahoma -- 10 feet by 10 feet, behind the post office and dating from the original Land Office on the spot in 1889. (According to legend, the city clerk, instead of asking the government for land "100 foot square (100 feet by 100 feet)," mistakenly asked for "100 square feet.") [Conde Nast Traveler, 10-17-2016] [KFOR-TV (Oklahoma City), 4-8-2016]