China's public-park restrooms have for years suffered toilet-paper theft by local residents who raid dispensers for their own homes (a cultural habit, wrote Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, expressing taxpayer feelings of "owning" public facilities), but the government recently fought back with technology. At Beijing's popular Temple of Heaven park, dispensers now have facial-recognition scanners beside the six toilets, with pre-cut paper (about 24 inches long) issued only to users who pose for a picture. (Just one slug of paper can be dispensed to the same face in a 9-minute period, catastrophic for the diarrhea-stricken and requiring calling an attendant to override the machine.) [South China Morning Post, 3-2-2017; BBC News, 3-20-2017]

-- The church-state "wall" leaks badly in Spindale, North Carolina, according to former members of the Word of Faith Fellowship (reported in February by the Associated Press). Two state prosecutors (one a relative of the church's founder), in nearby Burke and Rutherford counties, allegedly coached Fellowship members and leaders how to neutralize government investigations into church "abuse" -- coaching that would violate state law and attorney ethical standards. Fellowship officials have been accused of beating "misbehaving" congregants, including children, in order to repel their demons. (Among the Fellowship's edicts revealed in the AP report: All dating, marriages and procreation subject to approval; no wedding-night intimacy beyond a "godly" cheek kiss; subsequent marital sex limited to 30 minutes, no foreplay, lights off, missionary position.) [Associated Press via Winston-Salem Journal, 3-6-2017]

-- Babies born on the Indonesian island of Bali are still today treated regally under an obscure Hindu tradition, according to a February New York Times report, and must not be allowed to touch the earth for 105 days (in some areas, 210). (Carrying the infant in a bucket and setting that on the ground is apparently acceptable.) Each birth is actually a re-birth, they say, with ancestors returning as their own descendants. (Accidentally touching the ground does not condemn the baby, but may leave questions about negative influences.) [New York Times, 2-19-2017]

-- Catholic priest Juan Carlos Martinez, 40, apologized shortly after realizing, as he said, he had gone "too far" in celebrating March's Carnival in a town in the Galicia area of Spain -- that he acted inappropriately in dressing as Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner, reclining on a red satin sheet on a parade float carrying men dressed as classic Playboy "Bunnies." Despite apparent public support for Father Martinez, his Archbishop asked him to attend a "spiritual retreat" to reflect on his behavior. [The Local (Barcelona), 3-10-2017]

-- In March, vibrator customers were awarded up to $10,000 each in their class-action "invasion of privacy" lawsuit against the company Standard Innovation, whose We-Vibe model's smartphone app collected intimate data (vibrator temperature and motor intensity) that could be associated with particular customers -- and which were easily hackable, and controllable, by anyone nearby with a Bluetooth connection. The Illinois federal court limited the award to $199 for anyone who bought the vibrator but did not activate the app. [The Guardian (London), 3-14-2017]

-- The company British Condoms is now accepting pre-orders for the iCon Smart Condom, with an app that can track, among other data, a man's "thrust velocity," calories expended "per session," and skin temperature, as well as do tests for chlamydia and syphilis. Projected price is about $75, but the tech news site CNet reported in March that no money will be collected until the product is ready to ship. [CNet News, 3-2-2017]

The U.S. House of Representatives, demonstrating particular concern for military veterans, enhanced vets' civil rights in March by removing a source of delay in gun purchases. A 2007 law had required all federal agencies to enter any mentally-ill clients into the National Instant Criminal Background Check database for gun purchases, but the new bill exempts veterans (including, per VA estimates, 19,000 schizophrenics and 15,000 with "severe" post-traumatic stress syndrome). (An average of a dozen veterans a day in recent times have committed suicide with guns.) [Huffington Post, 3-16-2017]

Police and prosecutors in Williamsburg, Virginia, are absolutely certain that Oswaldo Martinez raped and killed a teenage girl in 2005, but, though he was quickly arrested, they have -- 12 years later -- not even put him on trial. Martinez, then 33, is still apparently, genuinely (i.e., not faking) deaf, illiterate and almost mute, and besides that, the undocumented Salvadoran immigrant has such limited intelligence that test after test has shown him incapable of understanding his legal rights, and therefore "incompetent" to stand trial. (Police made multiple "slam dunk" findings of Martinez's DNA on the victim's body and also linked Martinez via a store camera to the very bottle of juice left at the crime scene.) [Washington Post, 3-13-2017]

On the morning of March 20 in Winter Park, Florida, Charles Howard, standing outside his home being interviewed live by a WFTV reporter, denied he had committed a crime in a widely reported series of voicemail messages to a U.S. Congressman, containing threats to "wrap a rope around your neck and hang you from a lamp post." He boasted that "proof" of his having done nothing wrong was that if he had, he would have already been arrested. "Three minutes later," according to the reporter, agents drove up and arrested Howard. [WFTV (Orlando), 3-20-2017]

-- Hey, How About a Little "Remorse": (1) Royce Atkins, 23, told the judge in Northampton County (Pennsylvania) in March that he was so sorry he did not stop his car in 2015 and help that 9-year-old boy he had just hit and killed. However, Atkins had earlier been jailhouse-recorded viciously trash-talking the boy's family for "reacting like they're the victims. What about my family? My family is the victim, too." (Atkins got a four-year sentence.) (2) In February, in a Wayne County (Michigan) court during sentencing for a DUI driver who had killed a man and severely injured his fiancee, Judge Qiana Lillard kicked the driver's mother out of the courtroom for laughing at the victim's sister who was tearfully addressing the judge. (Lillard sentenced the mother to 93 days for contempt, but later reduced it to one day). [Lehigh Valley Live, 3-32017] [CBS News, 2-28-2017]

Among the facts revealed in the ongoing criminal proceedings against U.S. Navy officials and defense contractor Leonard ("Fat Leonard") Francis, who is charged with arranging kickbacks: In 2007, Francis staged a party for the officials at the Shangri-La Hotel in the Philippines during which (according to an indictment unsealed in March) "historical memorabilia related to General Douglas MacArthur were used by the participants in sexual acts." [Washington Post, 3-14-2017]

(1) A 23-year-old Albuquerque woman performed cartwheels instead of a standard field sobriety test at a DUI stop in February, but she did poorly and was charged anyway. On the other hand, student Blayk Puckett, stopped by University of Central Arkansas police, helped shield himself from a DUI by juggling for the officer. (2) Oreos fans sampling the limited-edition Peeps Oreos in February expressed alarm that not only their tongues and saliva turned pink, but also their stools (and leaving a pink ring in the bowl). A gastroenterologist told Live Science it was nothing to worry about. [Albuquerque Journal, 2-21-2017] [KTHV-TV (Little Rock), 3-7- 2017] [Live Science, 3-6-2017]

Yasuomi Hirai, 26, was arrested in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, in June (2013) after being identified in news reports as the man who had crawled "dozens of meters" in an underground gutter solely to gain access to a particular sidewalk grate near Konan Women's University -- so that he could look up at skirt-wearers passing over the grate. After one pedestrian, noting the pair of eyes below, summoned a police officer, Hirai scurried down the gutter and escaped, but since he had been detained several months earlier on a similar complaint, police soon arrested him. [Japan Daily Press, 6-13-2013] [Kotaku.com, 6-21-2013]

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]