A highlight of the recent upmarket surge in Brooklyn, N.Y., as a residential and retail favorite, was the asking price for an ordinary parking space in the garage at 845 Union Street in the Park Slope neighborhood: $300,000 (also carrying a $240-a-month condominium fee and $50 monthly taxes). That's similar to the price of actual one-bedroom apartments in less ritzy Brooklyn neighborhoods like Gravesend (a few miles away). [DNAInfo, 3-6-2017]

Saginaw, Michigan, defense lawyer Ed Czuprynski had beaten a felony DUI arrest in December, but was sentenced to probation on a lesser charge in the incident, and among his restrictions was a prohibition on drinking alcohol -- which Czuprynski acknowledged in March that he has since violated at least twice. However, at that hearing (which could have meant jail time for the violations), Czuprynski used the opportunity to beg the judge to remove the restriction altogether, arguing that he can't be "effective" as a lawyer unless he is able to have a drink now and then. (At press time, the judge was still undecided.) [MLive.com, 3-10-2017]

Residents in southern Humboldt County, California, will vote in May on a proposed property tax increase to fund a community hospital in Garberville to serve a web of small towns in the scenic, sparsely populated region, and thanks to a county judge's March ruling, the issue will be explained more colorfully. Opponent Scotty McClure was initially rebuffed by the registrar when he tried to distribute, as taxpayer-funded "special elections material," contempt for "Measure W" by including the phrase "(insert fart smell here)" in the description. The registrar decried the damage to election "integrity" by such "vulgarity," but Judge Timothy Cissna said state law gives him jurisdiction only over "false" or "misleading" electioneering language. [North Coast Journal (Eureka, Calif.), 3-7-2017]

-- News of the Weird has written several times (as technology progressed) about Matt McMullen's "RealDoll" franchise -- the San Marcos, California, engineer's richly detailed flexible silicone mannequins that currently sell for $5,500 and up (more with premium custom features). Even before the recent success of the very humanish, artificially intelligent (AI) android "hosts" on TV's "Westworld," McMullen revealed that his first AI doll, "Harmony," will soon be available with a choice of 12 "personalities," including "intellectualism" and "wit," to mimic an emotional bond to add to the sexual. A recent University of London conference previewed a near future when fake women routinely provide uncomplicated relationships for lonely (or disturbed) men. (Recently, in Barcelona, Spain, a brothel opened offering four "realdolls" "disinfected after each customer" -- though still recommending condoms.) [Forbes, 2-28-2017]

-- Scientists at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center announced that they have digitally stored (and retrieved) a movie, an entire computer operating system and a $50 gift card on a single drop of DNA. In theory, wrote the researchers in the journal Science, they might store, on one gram of DNA, 215 "petabytes" (i.e., 215 million gigabytes -- enough to run, say, 10 million HD movies) and could reduce all the data housed in the Library of Congress to a small cube of crystals. [Wall Street Journal, 3-3-2017]

-- An office in the New York City government, suspicious of a $5,000 payment to two men in the 2008 City Council election of Staten Island's Debi Rose, opened an investigation, which at $300 an hour for the "special prosecutor," has now cost the city $520,000, with his final bill still to come. Despite scant "evidence" and multiple opportunities to back off, the prosecutor relentlessly conducted months-long grand jury proceedings, fought several court appeals, had one 23-count indictment almost immediately crushed by judges, and enticed state and federal investigators to (fruitlessly) take on the Staten Island case. In March, the city's Office of Court Administration finally shrugged and closed the case. [New York Times, 3-8-2017]

A chain reaction of fireworks in Tultepec, Mexico, in December had made the San Pablito pyro marketplace a scorched ruin, with more than three dozen dead and scores injured, leaving the town to grieve and, in March, to solemnly honor the victims -- with even more fireworks. Tultepec is the center of Mexico's fireworks industry, with 30,000 people dependent on explosives for a living. Wrote The Guardian, "Gunpowder" is in "their blood." [The Guardian (London), 3-10-2017]

(1) "Bentley" the cat went missing in Marina Del Rey, California, on Feb. 26 and as of press time had not been located -- despite a posted reward of $20,000. (A "wanted" photo is online, if you're interested.) (2) British snack food manufacturer Walkers advertised in February for a part-time professional chip taster, at the equivalent of $10.55 an hour. (3) An Australian state administrative tribunal awarded a $90,000 settlement after a cold-calling telemarketer sold a farm couple 2,000 ink cartridges (for their one printer) by repeated pitches. [Fox News, 3-8-2017] [Leicester Mercury, 2-23-2017] [The Age (Melbourne), 3-9-2017]

American chef Dan Barber staged a temporary "pop-up" restaurant in London in March at which he and other renowned chefs prepared the fanciest meals they could imagine using only food scraps donated from local eateries. A primary purpose was to chastise First World eaters (especially Americans) for wasting food, not only in the kitchen and on the plate, but to satisfy our craving for meat (for example, requiring diversion of 80 percent of the world's corn and soy just to feed edible animals). Among Barber's March "WastED" dishes were a char-grilled meatless beetburger and pork braised in leftover fruit solids. [TreeHugger.com, 3-3-2017]

(1) Smoking Kills: A 78-year-old man in Easton, Pennsylvania, died in February from injuries caused when he lit his cigarette but accidentally set afire his hooded sweatshirt. (2) Pornography Kills: A Mexico City man fell to his death recently in the city's San Antonio neighborhood when he climbed up to turn off a highway video sign on the Periferico Sur highway that was showing a pornographic clip apparently placed by a hacker. [NJ.com, 2-28-2017] [Metro News (London), 3-6-2017]

Oops! An officer in Harrington, Delaware, approaching an illegally parked driver at Liberty Plaza Shopping Center in March, had suspicions aroused when she gave him a name other than "Keyonna Waters" (which was the name on the employee name tag she was wearing). Properly ID'ed, she was arrested for driving with a suspended license. [WMDT-TV (Salisbury, Md.), 3-6-2017]

(1) In his third try of the year in January, Li Longlong of China surpassed his own Guinness Book record by climbing 36 stairs while headstanding (beating his previous 34). (Among the Guinness regulations: no touching walls and no pausing more than five seconds per step.) (2) The online live-stream of the extremely pregnant giraffe "April" (at New York's Animal Adventure Park) has created such a frenzy, and exposed the tiny attention spans of viewers, that, as of March 3, they had spent a cumulative 1,036 years just watching. (Erin Dietrich of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, 39 weeks pregnant herself, mocked the lunacy by livestreaming her own belly while wearing a giraffe mask.) (By press time, Erin had delivered; April, not.) [Huffington Post, 3-10-2017] [BBC News, 3-3-2017]

Maryland state troopers stopped when they caught sight of a drummer working out all alone on the side of traffic-packed Interstate 695 near Windsor Mill Road in Baltimore on May 21 (2013), at about 10:30 a.m. As the troopers later reported, the man had run out of gas and, rather than just sit around in his car, had set up his full drum kit on the shoulder and practiced while he awaited assistance. After a utility truck arrived, with gasoline, the drummer packed up and went on his way. [Baltimore Sun, 5-21-2013]

Perhaps there are parents who (according to the Cinepolis movie chain) long to watch movies in theaters while their children (aged 3 and up) frolic in front in a "jungle-gym" playground inside the same auditorium. If so, the company's two "junior" movie houses (opening this very week in San Diego and Los Angeles) may bring a new dimension to "family entertainment." Another view, though, is that the noise (often "screaming"), plus the overhead lighting required for parents to monitor their tykes' equipment-usage, plus the planned $3-per-ticket surcharge, will soon create (according to the Guardian critic) a moviegoing "apocalypse." [The Guardian (London), 3-8-2017]

(1) The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January granted IBM's 2010 application for a patent on "out-of-office" email message software (even though such messages have, of course, been ubiquitous for two decades) after the company finally convinced examiners that its patent had enough software tweaks on it to qualify. (Critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, laughed at the uselessness of the tweaks.) (2) Also in January, the office granted Daniel Dopps a patent for "adhesive vaginal lipstick," which his Mensez Technologies claims can cause the labia minora to tighten so strongly as to retain menstrual fluid until the woman can deal with buildup in privacy. [Ars Technica, 3-1-2017] [News Limited via Fox News, 2-21-2017]

-- Why live with a cat if one cannot take it out for some wine together? The Apollo Peak in Denver and the Pet Winery in Fort Myers, Florida, serve a variety of the real grape to humans and nonalcoholic proprietary drinks for the kitties to enjoy tableside (or underneath). "Pinot Meow" ($12) in Denver and "Meow and Chandon" ($15) in Fort Myers, are specialties -- basically watered catnip, according to a February New York Times report (so the felines can also get buzzed). The wine outing is the human's preference, of course, with a loftier cachet than the "happy hour" most cats might prefer (say, a "sardine bar"). [New York Times, 2-15-2017]

-- "I tried the $5,000 hamburger, and it was absolutely worth it," wrote the apparently straight-faced CNBC reviewer Robert Frank in February, describing his meal at the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay restaurant Fleur. (The burger included Waygu beef, foie gras and truffles, and was served with a similarly inexplicably priced wine.) Other recent consumer challenges: an $18 cup of coffee at Brooklyn's Extraction Lab; a $100 bottle of Norwegian iceberg water (Svalbardi.com); a $2,000 pizza at New York City's Industry Kitchen (caviar, truffles, gold flakes); and a $25,000 taco at the Grand Velas Los Cabos resort in Mexico (caviar, brie, Kobe beef, langoustine lobster, rare tequila -- and once again with the gold flakes). [CNBC, 2-23-2017] [WABC-TV (New York City), 2-8-2017] [Fox Business, 3-3-2017] [Industry Kitchen, 12-17-2016] [Houston Chronicle, 3-9-2017]

Anglers fighting to preserve choice spots on the fishing pier on Sebastian Inlet, north of Vero Beach, Florida, have taken to tossing lead weights and other items at "competitors," especially those who approach the pier to fish directly from their boats. Such territory marking by the "piersters" includes, according to a February report in Florida Today, perhaps a version of classic mammal behavior, like strategic urination and hurling their feces at the waterborne invaders. [Florida Today, 2-20-2017]

-- Illinois has problems: a $130 billion unfunded pension crisis, 19 months without a budget, the lowest credit rating and highest property taxes in the country, and the murder rate in Chicago. However, at least the state house of representatives is not standing by idly. In February, it moved to designate October 2017 as Zombie Preparedness Month (basically, adding "zombie invasion" to the list of mobilizations for any natural disaster and urging residents to stockpile food and supplies for up to 72 hours). [Wall Street Journal, 3-7-2017]

-- Lawyers for former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. have convinced federal officials that his bipolar disorder was "caused" by the stress of being a congressman and thus that he is entitled to "total disability" worker compensation for an "on-the-job" injury -- and thus to about $100,000 a year, tax-free, according to a February Chicago Tribune report. (Jackson, 51, also receives Social Security disability payments.) Lawyers said his disorder (often attributed to genetic factors) surfaced during an investigation into Jackson's looting of his campaign treasury for luxury goods and vacations (charges eventually settled with a guilty plea). Jackson dated his onset to June 2012, meaning that his last 72 House votes came while "totally" disabled. [Chicago Tribune, 2-23-2017]

-- A councilman in Overtornea, Sweden, introduced a bill (a "motion") that workers be given paid "sex breaks" during the business day in order to improve well-being and, thus, job performance. The primary beneficiaries would be married, fertile couples, but all workers would receive the benefit. And employers, said Councillor Per-Erik Muskos, would have to "trust" their employees because some surely would "cheat" (by not having sex!). [International Business Times, 2-21-2017]

-- Not Clever Enough: Daniel Crowninshield, 54, pleaded guilty in federal court in Sacramento in 2016 to illegally manufacturing assault weapons that had no serial numbers -- despite efforts to circumvent the law by claiming that his customers actually "made" their own weapons using his equipment. Crowninshield (known as "Dr-Death" online), an expert machinist, would take a "blank" metal casting and, using special equipment and computer programs, create the firing mechanism for a numberless AR-15 -- provided the customer presses a button to start the process. "Pressing the button," Crowninshield figured, made the customer the creator, not a buyer or transferee of the gun, and thus exempt from federal law. In February, Judge Troy Nunley, unimpressed, sentenced Crowninshield to three years and five months in prison.

[Department of Justice press release, 2-16-2017]

"Life's full of peaks and valleys, man," Californian Georgiy Karpekin told a reporter, but Jan. 18 seemed all valley. Karpekin has both a pickup truck and a car, and as he was leaving Sacramento City College that day during violent storms, a falling tree crushed the truck. When he got home, he learned that the same storm had taken down another tree -- on top of his car. (Karpekin, insured and uninjured, called himself "the luckiest guy.") [KTXL-TV (Sacramento), 1-19-2017]

Miami defense lawyer Stephen Gutierrez caused quite a spectacle on March 8 when, representing a man accused of arson, he rose to address jurors, and his pants appeared to catch fire. He insisted afterward that a malfunctioning e-cigarette caused smoke to billow from his pocket, but observers had a field day with metaphors and "stunt" theories. [Miami Herald, 3-8-2017]

-- Despite an exaggerated, widely read headline in London's Daily Mail, the recent death of a 50-year-old man in Japan was indeed pornography-related. The man was a hoarder of porn magazines, living alone with an unimaginably large collection, and when he suffered a fatal heart attack sometime early this year, he collapsed atop the piles, where his body was found in February. (The Daily Mail headline had him "crushed" to death under a six-ton stack, but the Mail conceded below the headline that he might have just fallen.) [Daily Mail, 3-3-2017; Gizmodo.com, 3-6-2017]

Chengdu, China, barber Liu Deyuan, 53, still provides traditional "eye-shaving," in which he holds the lid open and runs a razor across its inner surface. Then, using a thin metal rod with a round tip, he gently massages the inside of each lid. Liu told Chengdu Business Daily in April (2013) that he had never had an accident (though the reporter balked at volunteering for him), and a highly satisfied customer reported afterward that his eyes felt "moist" (surely the easiest part of the story to accept) and his vision "clearer." [South China Morning Post, 4-15-2013]

In February, two teams of South Korean researchers announced cancer-fighting breakthroughs -- by taking lessons from how two of medicine's most vexing, destructive organisms (diarrhea-causing salmonella bacteria and the rabies virus) can access often-unconquerable cancer cells. In journal articles, biologist Jung-joon Min of Chonnam National University described how his team "weaponized" a cancer-fighting invader cell with salmonella to stir up more-robust immune responses, and nanoparticle expert Yu Seok Youn's Sungkyunkwan University team coated immunizing cells with the rabies protein (since the rabies virus is remarkably successful at invading healthy cells) to reach brain tumors. [ArsTechnica, 2-9-2017] [Science Magazine, 2-10-2017]

-- Gemma Badley was convicted in England's Teesside Magistrates' Court in February of impersonating British psychic Sally Morgan on Facebook, selling her "readings" as if they were Morgan's. (To keep this straight: Badley is the illegal con artist, Morgan the legal one.) [The Gazette (Middlesbrough), 2-21-2017]

-- Michigan is an "open carry" state, and any adult not otherwise disqualified under state law may "pack heat" in public (except in a few designated zones). In February, an overly earnest Second Amendment fan, James Baker, 24 (accompanied by pal Brandon Vreeland, 40), believed the law was an invitation to walk into the Dearborn police station in full body armor and ski mask, with a semi-automatic pistol and a sawed-off rifle (and have Vreeland photograph officers' reactions). (Yes, both were arrested.) [Detroit Free Press, 2-6-2017]

-- Wells Fargo Bank famously admitted last year that employees (pressured by a company incentive program) had fraudulently opened new accounts for about 2 million existing customers by forging their signatures. In an early lawsuit by a victim of the fraud (who had seven fraudulent accounts opened), the bank argued (and a court agreed!) that the lawsuit had to be handled by arbitration instead of a court of law because the customer had, in the original Wells Fargo contract (that dense, fine-print one he actually signed), agreed to arbitration for "all" disputes. A February Wells Fargo statement to Consumerist.com claimed that customers' forgoing legal rights was actually for their own benefit, in that "arbitration" is faster and less expensive. [Consumerist, 3-1-2017]

Ex-Colombo family mobster and accused hitman "Tommy Shots" Gioeli, 64, recently filed a federal court lawsuit over a 2013 injury at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City. He fell and broke a kneecap while playing ping-pong (allegedly because of water on the floor), awaiting sentencing for conspiracy to commit murder. The New York Post also noted that the "portly" Gioeli, who was later sentenced to 18 years, was quite a sight at trial, carrying his "man purse" each day. [New York Post, 2-7-2017]

French artist Abraham Poincheval told reporters in February that in his upcoming "performance," he will entomb himself for a week in a limestone boulder at a Paris museum and then, at the conclusion, sit on a dozen bird eggs until they hatch -- "an inner journey," he said, "to find out what the world is." (He apparently failed to learn that from previous efforts, such as the two weeks he spent inside a stuffed bear or his time on the Rhone River inside a giant corked bottle.) He told reporters the super-snug tomb has been thoroughly accessorized, providing for breathing, eating, heart monitor and emergency phone -- except, they noted, nothing on exactly how toileting will be handled. [The Guardian (London), 2-21-2017]

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "bioacoustic research" team recently reported recording and listening to about 2 million underwater sounds made over a four-month period by various species of dolphins ("whistles," echolocation "clicks," and "burst pulses") and can, they believe, distinguish the sounds to match them to a particular dolphin species (among the five most prevalent) -- with 84 percent accuracy. The team built a computer algorithm to also make estimating dolphin populations much easier. [Hakai Magazine, 2-16-2017]

-- Compelling Explanations: (1) Oklahoma state Rep. Justin Humphrey, justifying his proposed bill to require a woman seeking an abortion to first identify the father, told a reporter in February that the father's permission is crucial because, after all, the woman is basically a "host" who "invited that (fetus) in." (2) After the North Dakota House of Representatives voted yet again in January to retain the state's Sunday-closing "blue laws," Rep. Bernie Satrom explained to a reporter: "Spending time with your wife, your husband, making him breakfast, bringing it to him in bed" is better than going shopping. [The Intercept, 2-13-2017] [Valley News Live (Fargo) , 2-1-2017]

-- Small-Town Government: The ex-wife of Deputy Sheriff Corey King of Washington County, Georgia (largest town: Sandersville, pop. 5,900), filed a federal lawsuit in January against King after he arrested her for the "crime" of making a snarky comment about him on Facebook (about his failure to bring the couple's children their medicine). King allegedly conspired with a friendly local magistrate on the arrest, and though the prosecutor refused the case, King warned the ex-wife that he would still re-arrest her if she made "the mistake of going to Facebook with your little (excrement) ... to fuss about." [WMAZ-TV (Macon), 2-7-2017]

In a first-person profile for the Chicago Tribune in February, marketing consultant Peter Bender, 28, recalled how he worked to maximize his knowledge of the products of company client Hanes -- and not just the flagship Hanes underwear but its Playtex and Maidenform brands. In an "empathy" exercise, Bender wore bras for three days (a sports bra, an underwire and a lacy one) -- fitted at size 34A (or "less than A," he said). "These things are difficult," he wrote on a company blog. "The lacy one," especially, was "itchy." [Chicago Tribune, 2-21-2017]

"Fecal transplants" (replacing a sick person's gut bacteria with those of a healthier one) are now almost routine treatments for patients with violent abdominal attacks of C. diff bacteria, but University of California researcher Chris Callewaert says the concept also works for people with particularly stinky armpits. Testing identical twins (one odoriferous, the other not), the researcher, controlling for diet and other variables, "cured" the smelly one by swabbing his pit daily with the sweat of the better-smelling twin. The Callewaert team told a recent conference that they were working on a more "general" brew of bacteria that might help out anyone with sour armpits. [New Scientist, 2-10-2017]

Stephen Reed, the former mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty on the eve of his January trial on corruption counts stemming from the approximately 10,000 items of "Wild West" and "Americana" artifacts worth around $8 million that he had bought with public funds during 28 years in office. For some reason, he had a single-minded obsession with creating a local all-things-cowboy museum, and had purchased such items as a stagecoach, stagecoach harnesses, a "Billy the Kid" wanted poster, a wagon wheel and a totem pole. Somehow, he explained, as he was leaving office after being voted out in 2009, the items he had purchased (theoretically, "on behalf of" of Harrisburg) had migrated into his personal belongings. [Washington Post, 1-26-2017]

Caribou Baby, a Brooklyn, New York, "eco-friendly maternity, baby and lifestyle store," recently (2013) hosted gatherings at which parents exchanged tips on "elimination communication" -- the weaning of infants without benefit of diapers. Parents watch for cues, such as a certain "cry or grimace" that supposedly signals the need to hoist the tot onto a potty. The little darlings' public appearances sometimes call for diapers, but can also be dealt with behind a tree, they say. Said one shocked parent, "I have absolutely been at parties and witnessed people putting their baby over the sink." (Update: The maternity store is now called Wild Was Mama, and "elimination communication" meetings are not mentioned.) [New York Times, 4-19-2013]