Jordan Haskins, 26, was sentenced to probation and sex counseling in May after pleading guilty to eight charges arising from two auto accidents in Saginaw, Michigan. Prosecutors said Haskins described "cranking," in which he would remove a vehicle's spark-plug wires to make it "run rough," which supposedly improves his chances for a self-service happy ending. Haskins's lawyer added, "(Cranking) is something I don't think we understand as attorneys." [MLive.com, 5-9-2017]

-- Le Plat Sal (The Dirty Plate) restaurant in the Marais district of Paris features specialties actually containing dirt -- or as Chef Solange Gregoire calls it, "the mud of the earth that caresses our toes, the sand kissed by the sun, and rocks." Mused a Food Network host in April, "What's left? People are already eating snout-to-tail, leaves-to-roots...." Gregoire extolled her four-star dishes, including pastry crust a la Mont Lachat rock and a Boue Ragout stew simmered with silt from the River Seine. (NPR also noted that the founder of The Shake Shack was "quietly" planning a new American chain, Rock in Roll.) [NPR, 4-1-2017]

-- Goldman Sachs analyst Noah Poponak's 98-page paper (leaked to Business Insider in April) touted the wealth obtainable by capturing the platinum reputed to be in asteroids. The costs to mine the stone (rockets, launch expenses, etc.) might have dropped recently to about $3 billion -- a trifle next to the $50 billion worth of platinum Poponak said a single asteroid might contain. (On the other hand, experts point out, such abundance of platinum might crash the worldwide price.) [Business Insider, 4-6-2017]

-- The Twisted Ranch restaurant in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis, saw crowds swell in March after it revamped its menu with more than two dozen items made with ranch dressing (including ranch-infused Bloody Marys). As one satisfied visitor put it, "Ranch is everyone's guilty pleasure." [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3-29-2017]

Yale University graduate students (well, at least eight of them), claiming "union" status, demonstrated in front of the Yale president's home in April demanding better benefits (beyond the annual free tuition, $30,000 stipends and free health care). Some of the students characterized their action as an "indefinite fast" while others called it a "hunger strike." However, a pamphlet associated with the unionizing made it clear that strikers could go eat any time they got hungry. [Chronicle of Higher Education, 5-9-2017]

(1) Police in Cleveland are searching for the woman whose patience ran out on April 14 awaiting her young son's slow haircut at Allstate Barber College. She pulled out a pistol, took aim at the barber and warned: "I got two clips! I'll pop you." (She allowed him to finish up -- more purposefully, obviously -- and left without further incident.) (2) Barbara Lowery, 24, was arrested for disorderly conduct in Cullman, Alabama, in May after police spotted her standing on a car, stomping out the windshield and smashing the sun roof. She said it was a boyfriend's car, that she thought he was cheating on her, and that she had spent the previous night "thinking" about what to do, "pray(ing) about it and stuff." (However, she said, "I did it anyway.") [WOIO-TV (Cleveland), 4-28-2017] [AL.com (Birmingham), 5-2-2017]

-- The Drone Economy: (1) A Netherlands startup company announced in March its readiness to release drones capable of tracking freshly deposited dog poop (via an infrared glow from the pile) and, eventually, be guided (perhaps via GPS and artificial intelligence) to scoop up the deposits and carry them away. (2) Potentially Unemployed Bees: Researcher-inventor Eijiro Miyako announced in the journal Chem in March that he had created a drone that pollinates flowers (though requiring human guidance until GPS and AI can be enabled). Miyako's adhesive gel lightly brushes pollen grains, collecting just enough to touch down successfully onto another flower to pollinate it. [The Register (London), 3-29-2017] [CNN, 3-9-2017]

-- Social critics and futurists suggest that the next great market for computerization (already underway) will be selling "human improvement" (alas, perhaps merely helping already successful people to even greater heights). Some sports teams are experimenting with "transcranial direct current stimulation" as a way to put athletes' brains into constant alert, and KQED Radio reported in May that about a third of the San Francisco Giants players have donned weak-current headsets that cover the motor cortex at the top of the head. The team's sports scientist (bonus name: Geoff Head!) said players performed slightly better on some drills after the stimulation. (One the other hand, at press time, the Giants were still next-to-last in the National League West.) [KQED, 5-8-2017]

(1) Recent alarming headlines: "UK woman who urinated on Trump golf course loses case" (London). "Fish thief on unicycle busted by DNR (Department of Natural Resources)" (Battle Creek, Michigan). And, from the Northwest Florida Daily News (Fort Walton Beach), all on the same day (5-16-2017): (1) "Man throws fork at woman in fight over dog poop." (2) "Senior citizen punches husband for taking Lord's name in vain." (3) "Two people busted for creating fake football league, lawmen say." (4) "Man denies defecating in parking lot despite officer witnessing deed." [Associated Press (London) via U.S. News & World Report, 4-5-2017] [MLive.com (Battle Creek, Michigan), 5-5-2017] [via Orlando Sentinel, 5-17-2017]

Clearing the Conscience: (1) In February, a 52-year-old man who, arrested for DUI and taken to a police station in Germany's Lower Saxony state, wound up spontaneously confessing to a 1991 cold-case murder in Bonn. Police confirmed that, after reopening the files, they found details matching the man's account, though the man himself was "not quite clear" why he had confessed. (2) A game warden in Titus County, Texas, reported in December arresting a man for possessing a shotgun (the man's third arrest as a convicted felon with a firearm). The warden had spotted the weapon only because the man "out of the blue" approached him and asked if he wanted to inspect his hunting license (which, it turns out, was in order). [The Local (Berlin), 3-2-2017] [Beaumont Business Journal, 12-16-2016]

A 22-year-old Los Angeles makeup artist who calls himself Vinny Ohh has, according to his several TV and YouTube appearances and much social media presence, transformed himself into a "genderless," extraterrestrial-looking person via around 110 bodily procedures (so far), costing him at least $50,000. He says his appearance is merely an "all-in" representation of how he feels inside. (The "genderless" Vinny has yet to specify a pronoun preference.) [Metro News (London), 3-6-2017]

The impending retirement from public life of Britain's Prince Philip, announced in May, has likely quashed any slight chance he will visit the Imanourane people on Tanna (in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu) -- tragic, of course, because Tanna's Chief Jack and his followers continue to believe Philip descended from their own spiritual ancestors and has thus dominated their thoughts for the last seven decades. In fact, when Tanna was in the path of Cyclone Donna in May 2017, the Imanourane were quickly reminded of Philip's continuing "powers." (Philip has never visited, but Tannans have long prayed over an autographed photograph he sent years ago.) [Reuters, 5-6-2017]

The story of Kopi Luwak coffee has long been a News of the Weird staple, begun in 1993 with the first reports that a super-premium market existed for coffee beans digested (and excreted) by certain Asian civet cats, collected, washed and brewed. In June (2013), as news broke that civets were being mistreated -- captured and caged solely for their bean-adulterating utility -- the American Chemical Society was called on for ideas how to assure that the $227/pound coffee beans had, indeed, been expelled from genuine Asian civets. Hence, "gas chromatography and mass spectrometry" tests were finally developed to assure drinkers, at $80 a cup in California, that they were sipping the real thing. [USA Today, 9-11-2013]

Officials in charge of a Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal heritage site recently installed "speed bumps," similar to those familiar to Americans driving residential streets -- but on a pedestrian walkway, with row upon row of risers to resemble a washboard. A Western travel writer, along with editors of People's Daily China, suggested that officials were irked that "disorderly" tourists had been walking past the ancient grounds too rapidly to appreciate its beauty or context. [Daily Telegraph (London), 5-4-2017]

"Marine mammologist" Dara Orbach's specialty is figuring out how bottlenose dolphins actually fit their sex organs together to copulate. When dolphins die of natural causes, Orbach, a post-doctoral fellow at Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University, is sent their genitals (and also those of whales, porpoises and sea lions) and fills each one with silicone to work from molds in understanding the sex act's mechanics. Dolphins' vaginas are "surprising" in their "complexity," she told Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News in April, for example, with the ability to twist inner folds to divert the progress of any sperm deposited by undesirable mates. [CBC News, 4-26-2017]

-- Compared to busy coastal metropolises, Indiana may evoke repose, and entrepreneur Tom Battista is suggesting the state's largest city capitalize on the sentiment by reserving a destination site on a low-lying hill overlooking the chaotic merge lanes of two interstate highways -- affording visitors leisurely moments watching the frantic motorists scrambling below. He plans three rows of seats and a sunshade for the relaxed gawkers to take in the "ocean"-like roar and imagine overwrought drivers' rising blood pressure (while their own remains soothingly calm). [WTHR-TV (Indianapolis, 4-25-2017]

-- Several treatments are available to combat the heart arrhythmia "atrial fibrillation," but all require medical supervision, which John Griffin, 69, said he tried to acquire at the emergency room at New Zealand's Waikato Hospital in April, only to be met with delay and frustration. Griffin went home that day, took notice of his neighbor's 8,000-volt electric security fence and, with boots off, in a fit of do-it-yourself desperation, nudged it with his arm. He got quite a jolt, he said, but he walked away, and his heart returned to natural rhythm. The medical director of the Heart Foundation of New Zealand said that Griffin was lucky and sternly warned against the "procedure." [New Zealand Herald, 5-2-2017]

Medical researchers have been frustrated for years at failures in getting certain cancer-fighting drugs to reach targeted areas in women's reproductive tracts, but doctors in Germany announced in April a bold technique that appeared to work: sending the drugs via sperm cells, which seem to roam without obstruction as they search for an egg. The process involves coating active sperm cells with an iron adhesive and magnetically steering them to their internal targets. [Phys.org, 4-14-2017]

-- Sean Clemens, now awaiting trial in Liberty, Ohio, in the death of an 84-year-old woman, allegedly confessed his guilt to a co-worker after telling the man that something was bothering him that he needed to tell someone about -- but only if the co-worker would "pinkie-swear" not to tell anyone else. (The co-worker broke the code.) [WKBN-TV (Youngstown), 4-25-2017]

-- In the course of pursuing claims against Alaskan dentist Seth Lookhart for Medicaid fraud, government investigators found a video on his phone of him extracting a sedated patient's tooth -- while riding on a hoverboard. (He had apparently sent the video to his office manager under the title "New Standard of Care.") Lookhart had been indicted in 2016 for billing Medicaid $1.8 million for patient sedations unnecessary for the procedures they received. [Alaska Dispatch News, 4-21-2017]

In April, Tennessee state representative Mike Stewart, aiming to make a point about the state's lax gun-sales laws and piggybacking onto the cuddly feeling people have about children's curbside lemonade stands, set up a combination stand on Nashville's Capitol Hill, offering for sale lemonade, cookies -- and an AK-47 assault rifle (with a sign reading "No Background Check," to distinguish the private-sale AK-47 from one purchased from a federally licensed dealer). (In fact, some states still regulate lemonade stands more than gun sales -- by nettlesome "health department" and anti-competitive rules and licensing, though Tennessee allows the stands in most neighborhoods as long as they are small and operated infrequently.) [WKRN-TV (Nashville), 4-5-2017]

(1) The Wall Street Journal reported in February that among the most popular diversions when Syrian households gather to escape the country's bombs and bullets is playing the Hasbro war board game Risk (even though the game's default version contains only five armies -- not nearly enough to simulate the many Syrian factions now fighting). (2) The parliament of Australia's New South Wales, entertaining a February citizen petition to cut societal "waste," admitted that the petition's required 107,000 signatures (already on a USB stick) would, by rule, have to be submitted in hard copy (4,000 pages), even though the pages would immediately be electronically scanned into a format for data storage. [Wall Street Journal, 2-16-2017] [Sydney Morning Herald, 2-26-2017]

In March, an electrician on a service call at a public restroom in Usuki, Japan, discovered a crawlspace above the urinal area, which had apparently been a man's home (with a space heater, gas stove and clothing). Investigators learned that Takashi Yamanouchi, 54, a homeless wanderer, had been living there continuously for three years -- and had arranged everything very tidily, including the 300-plus plastic two-liter bottles of his urine. (It was unclear why he was storing his urine when he resided above a public restroom.) [Rocket News, 4-24-2017]

Not Ready For Prime Time: (1) In March, WTTG-TV in Washington, D.C., broadcast surveillance video of a 7-Eleven armed robbery in the city's northeast sector -- since some footage offered a clear picture of the suspect's face. Moments into the robbery, the man peered upward, caught sight of the camera and, shocked, reached for his apparently forgotten ski mask on top of his head, where (better late than never) he pulled it into place. (2) In November, three teenagers were arrested after stealing superfast Dodge cars in the middle of the night from a dealership in St. Peters, Missouri. (After driving less than a mile, police said, the three had lost control of their cars, crashing them, including "totaling" two 700-horsepower Challenger Hellcats.) [WTTG-TV, 3-28-2017] [KTVI (St. Louis), 11-16-2017]

News that was formerly weird but whose patterns more recently have become so tedious that the stories deserve respectful retirement: (1) On May 5, an elderly woman in Plymouth, England, became the most recent to drive wildly afield by blindly obeying her car's satellite navigation system. Turning left, as ordered, only to confront a solid railing, she nonetheless spotted a narrow pedestrian gap and squeezed through, which led to her descending the large concrete stairway at the Mayflower House Court parking garage (until her undercarriage got stuck). (2) Police in East Palestine, Ohio, said the 8-year-old boy who commandeered the family car and drove his sister, 4, to the local McDonald's for a cheeseburger on April 9 was different from the usual underaged drivers in that he caused no problems. Witnesses said he followed traffic signals en route, which the boy attributed to learning from YouTube videos. [DevonLive.co.uk, 5-5-2017] [WFMJ-TV (Youngstown), 4-12-2017]

Imminent Swirling Vortex of Damnation: Land developers for the iconic Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (the inspiration for the hotel in Stephen King's "The Shining") announced recently (2013) that they need more space and thus will dig up and move the hotel's 12-gravesite pet cemetery (another Stephen King trope). Neighbors told the Fort Collins Coloradoan in September (2013) that they feared the construction noise more than the potential release of departed spirits (though an "Animal Planet" "dog psychic" who lives in Estes Park volunteered her services to calm the pets' souls). (Update: Apparently, it worked.) [Fort Collins Coloradoan via USA Today, 9-26-2013]

It is legal in China to sell electric "building shakers" whose primary purpose apparently is to wreak aural havoc on apartment-dwellers' unreasonably noisy neighbors. Models sell for the equivalent of $11 to $58 -- each with a long pole to rest on the floor, extending ceiling height to an electric motor braced against the shared ceiling or wall and whose only function is to produce a continuous, thumping beat. Shanghaiist.com found one avenger in Shaanxi province who, frustrated by his miscreant neighbor, turned on his shaker and then departed for the weekend. (It was unclear whether he faced legal or other repercussions.) [Shanghaiist.com, 4-14-2017] [Oddity Central, 4-17-2017]

-- Mats Jarlstrom is a folk hero in Oregon for his extensive research critical of the short yellow light timed to the state's red-light cameras, having taken his campaign to TV's "60 Minutes" and been invited to a transportation engineers' convention. In January, Oregon's agency that regulates engineers imposed a $500 fine on Jarlstrom for "practicing engineering" without a state license. (The agency, in fact, wrote that simply using the phrase "I am an engineer" is illegal without a license, even though Jarlstrom has a degree in engineering and worked as an airplane camera mechanic.) He is suing to overturn the fine. [The Oregonian, 4-25-2017]

-- Last year, surgeons at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), for only the second time in history, removed a tumor "sitting" on the peanut-sized heart of a fetus while the heart was still inside the mother's womb -- in essence successfully operating on two patients simultaneously. The Uruguayan mother said her initial reaction upon referral to CHOP's surgeons was to "start laughing, like what, they do that?" (The baby's December birth revealed that the tumor had grown back and had to be removed again, except this time, through "ordinary" heart surgery.) [KYW-TV (Philadelphia), 3-30-2017]

-- The word "Isis" arrived in Western dialogue only after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as an acronym for the Islamic State, and the Swahili word "Harambe" was known to almost no one until May 2016 when the gorilla "Harambe" (named via a local contest) was put down by a Cincinnati zoo worker after it had dragged an adventurous 3-year-old boy away. In April, a Twitter user and the website Daily Dot happened upon a 19-year-old California restaurant hostess named Isis Harambe Spjut and verified with state offices that a driver's license (likely backed by a birth certificate) had been issued to her. ("Spjut" is a Scandinavian name.) [DailyDot.com, 4-12-2017]

Earn $17,500 for two months' "work" doing nothing at all! France's space medicine facility near Toulouse is offering 24 openings, paying 16,000 euros each, for people simply to lie in bed continuously for two weeks so it can study the effects of virtual weightlessness. The institute is serious about merely lying there: All bodily functions must be accomplished while keeping at least one shoulder on the bed. [The Guardian, 4-4-2017]

Sidewalk Wars: (1) Thirty-four residents of State Street in Brooklyn, New York, pay a tax of more than $1,000 a year for the privilege of sitting on their front stoops (a pastime which, to the rest of New York City, seems an inalienable right). (The property developer had made a side deal with the city to allow the tax in exchange for approving an architectural adjustment.) (2) The town of Conegliano, Italy, collects local taxes on "sidewalk shadows" that it applies to cafes or businesses with awnings, but also to stores with a single overhanging sign that very slightly "blocks" sun. Shop owners told reporters the tax felt like Mafia "protection" money. [New York Post, 1-23-2017] [The Guardian, 1-17-2017]

"Oh, come on!" implored an exasperated Chief Justice Roberts in April when the Justice Department lawyer explained at oral argument that, indeed, a naturalized citizen could have his citizenship retroactively canceled just for breaking a single law, however minor -- even if there was never an arrest for it. Appearing incredulous, Roberts hypothesized that if "I drove 60 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone," but was not caught and then became a naturalized citizen, years later the government "can knock on my door and say, 'Guess what? You're not an American citizen after all'?" The government lawyer stood firm. (The Supreme Court decision on the law's constitutionality is expected in June.) [New York Times, 4-27-2017]

-- Emily Piper and her husband went to court in January in Spokane, Washington, to file for a formal restraining order against a boy who is in kindergarten. Piper said the tyke had been relentlessly hassling their daughter (trying to kiss her) and that Balboa Elementary School officials seem unable to stop him. [KXLY-TV (Spokane), 1-9-2017]

-- A private plane crashed on take-off 150 feet from the runway at Williston (Florida) Municipal Airport on April 15, killing all four on board, but despite more than a dozen planes having flown out of the same airport later that day, no one noticed the crash site until it caught the eye of a pilot the next afternoon. [Gainesville Sun, 4-17-2017]

Didn't Think It Through: (1) Edwin Charge Jr., 20, and two accomplices allegedly attempted a theft at a Hood River, Oregon, business on April 23, but fled as police arrived. The accomplices were apprehended, but Charge took off across Interstate 84 on foot, outrunning police until he fell off a cliff to his death. (2) Police said Tara Cranmer, 34, tried to elude them in a stolen truck on tiny Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, on April 22. Since it is an island, the road ends, and she was captured on the dunes after abandoning the truck. [KPTV (Portland), 4-25-2017] [Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, 4-27-2017]

Variations of the Semen-Weaponization Fetish: (1) Timothy Blake, 28, faced several charges in January after admitting to a spree of semen incidents at a Wal-mart in Marietta, Ohio. The liquid was his semen, he finally admitted, but he squirted it at his female victims only from a syringe rather than the old-fashioned way. (2) Brian Boyd, 27, was charged in January with squirting women from a syringe in a similar series of incidents at a Tampa Target store. However, though Boyd had simulated masturbation, the syringe itself contained only white liquid "hair conditioner." [Marietta Times, 2-28-2017] [The Smoking Gun, 1-18-2017]

Italian Surgeon Sergio Canavero (notorious as the world's most optimistic advocate of human brain transplants) now forecasts that a cryogenically frozen brain will be "awakened" ("thawed") and transplanted into a donor body by the year 2020. His Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group claimed success in 2016 in transplanting a monkey's head, with blood vessels properly attached (though not the spinal cord). Canavero promised such a head transplant of humans by 2018, though problematic because, like the recipient monkey, the recipient human would not long survive. Of the subsequent brain transplant, one of the gentler critics of Canavero said the likelihood of success is "infinitestimal" -- with harsher critics describing it in more colorful language. [Daily Telegraph, 4-27-2017]

The question in a vandalism case before the U.S. Court of Appeals in July (2013) was whether Ronald Strong's messy bowel movement in a federal courthouse men's room in Portland, Maine, was "willful" or, as Strong claimed, an uncontrollable intestinal event. Three rather genteel judges strained to infer Strong's state of mind from the condition of the facility. A cleaning lady had described the feces as "smeared," but Judge Juan Torruella took that to mean not "finger smears," but "chunks," "kind of like chunky peanut butter." Two other judges, outvoting Torruella, seemed skeptical that feces could have landed 2 feet up the wall unless Strong had intended it. (Torruella countered by imagining himself as the perpetrator, that surely he would sully the mirrors, but that all mirrors were found clean.) [Salon.com, 7-26-2013]