In the tony Denver suburb of Castle Rock, Colorado, the motto might be "If the house is rockin', DO come knockin'!" Residents on Avery Way are in a tizzy about the Thunderstorm Play Palace, a 7,500-square-foot home where, neighbors told KDVR-TV, the owner invites swinging couples and singles to gather for wild sex parties. Invitees must make a "donation" ($70 for couples and single men, $20 for single women), and the parties include drinks, snacks and potluck dishes. "One had four crockpots," said a neighbor, "showing up like they're going to a Bunko party or something." On the invitation, guests were asked to bring their own condoms and show respect for the "new furniture." The host is a married father of three who feels harassed by the neighborhood, but he counters that he's taken steps to be discreet, including installing soundproofing and making sure "there are no open areas." But neighbors claim they hear "disturbing sounds" coming from the house. "You can hear people doing what they're doing," one resident told reporters. Castle Rock Police say the man is not breaking the law because he's only taking donations, and the activities are contained to his home. [KDVR, 4/24/2018]

Do Not Climb!

The Black Panther isn't feeling the love in South Korea lately. The Walt Disney Co. sent two statues of the superhero to Busan to celebrate Marvel Studios' filming along Korea's southern coast. But on March 17, according to The Korea Herald, a 32-year-old drunk man was arrested after he vandalized the statue in the Gwangbok-ro shopping district, and on April 21, the statue near Gwangalli Beach was toppled and part of its head broken off. An official from the Korea Film Council thought someone had probably tried to climb the statue, despite numerous off-limits signs. [Korea Herald, 4/23/2018]

Oops!

-- Police officers in the German town of Neustadt were called April 25 to an apartment building after reports of screaming led neighbors to suspect domestic violence, the Daily Mail reported. Instead, they found a couple receiving instruction in the Japanese art of Shibari erotic bondage from the apartment's tenant. ("Shibari" translates as "the beauty of tight binding.") In a statement titled "Fifty Shades of Neustadt," police reported the couple were "well and in a good mood," even asking the officers if they'd like to join in, but they had to decline. [Daily Mail, 4/26/2018]

-- In the seaside village of Lytham St Annes, England, Douglas Cholmondley Travis, an 88-year-old member of the local Neighborhood Watch, was on patrol Oct. 10, 2017, when he and an 87-year-old watch colleague noticed a van turning into Lytham Park Cemetery. Regarding the vehicle as suspicious, they began taking pictures of it until Antony James, driver of the van, there only to visit family graves, grew angry and stopped, according to Metro News. James got out of his van to confront Travis, causing a panic, according to defense attorney Robert Castle, that resulted in James being knocked down by the Neighborhood Watch vehicle and Travis charged for reckless driving and assault. "This is all terribly sad," Castle told Blackpool Magistrates Court in late April, as his client is "one of the eyes and ears of the police." Travis was fined 40 pounds plus court costs. [Metro News, 4/30/2018]

Look-alikes

Dolores Leis, 64, of Nanton in Galicia, Spain, is a modest wife and potato farmer. But thanks to the internet, she has found fame as "Trump's Galician sister." The Associated Press reports that a journalist researching farming posted a photo of Leis at her farm on Instagram, and the striking resemblance between her and the U.S. president caught the attention of the web. "I say that it must be because of the color of the hair," Leis told La Voz de Galicia on April 24. She added that she's not overwhelmed by the sudden attention because, unlike her doppelganger, she doesn't use a mobile phone and isn't much interested in online chatter. "I look at everything that my daughters show me, but it never stung my curiosity to have (a phone)," she said. [Associated Press, 4/25/2018]

Misguided

Greyhound Bus passengers were frustrated on April 19 after their trip to New York was delayed by mechanical trouble and navigational challenges. The ride started in Cleveland, where the scheduled departure time was 2:30 a.m., passengers told WEWS-TV, but the bus didn't leave until 6 a.m. After crossing into Pennsylvania, the bus turned around, and the driver explained he was returning to Cleveland because of mechanical difficulties. However, the driver missed Cleveland and drove all the way to Toledo before realizing the mistake and heading back to Cleveland. "We were on this bus for seven hours just going in a circle," said passenger Morgan Staley. [WEWS TV, 4/20/2018]

Bathing News

-- Evelyn Washington, 29, broke then crawled through a window in a Monroe, Louisiana, home on April 17, then settled into a warm bath with a bag of Cheetos and a large plate of food within reach on the toilet lid. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that when the homeowner returned from work around 5 p.m., she called police, who removed Washington to the Ouachita Correctional Center, where she told them "an unknown male told her to break into the victims' residence." [Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 4/18/2018]

-- On April 4, a homeowner in the Longton area of Stoke-on-Trent, England, returned home to discover a man bathing in his tub and enjoying a cup of Oxo (broth), according to the BBC. When police arrived, the 36-year-old naked man tried to flee but was caught and arrested. The homeowner complained: "He ate me crisps, had five rounds of corned beef and sauce, ate a jar of pickles, had two ice creams and a can of Coke." [BBC, 4/6/2018]

What's in a Name?

A Planet Fitness customer in Saginaw Township, Michigan, was alarmed April 15 to find a Wi-Fi network named "remote detonator" while searching for an available connection. The gym manager evacuated the building and called police, who brought in a bomb-sniffing dog and declared the facility safe after a three-hour shutdown. Saginaw Township Police Chief Donald Pussehl told MLive.com that people often choose odd names for their Wi-Fi networks, adding that one on his own street is called "FBI surveillance van." [MLive.com, 4/16/2018]

Crime Report

In October 1981, Stephen Michael Paris escaped from the Jess Dunn Correctional Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where he had been serving a nine-year sentence for drug possession and distribution. Using the name Stephen Chavez, Paris managed to evade authorities until April 12, when investigators tracked him down, thanks to his mother's obituary, at an office in Houston where he was working. Now 58 years old, Paris was mentioned in his mother's tribute, using his alias, the Associated Press reported, and after confirming his identity with fingerprints, the U.S. Marshals Service returned him to custody. [Associated Press, 4/12/2018]

New World Order

Jaywalkers, beware: The city of Daye, in Hubei province China, has installed water sprayers and an electronic screen at a crosswalk to stop people from crossing on a red light. Five pylons were placed along the road April 16, China Daily reported, three of which identify offenders using sensors and then spray them with water vapor. Other pylons "photograph people crossing against red lights," explained Wan Xinqiang of the Daye public security bureau, and "a large electronic screen at the intersection will instantly display their photos. ... If the equipment works well, we will utilize it throughout the city." [China Daily, 4/20/2018]

At Pennsylvania State University, the Outing Club, founded in 1920, provided students with outdoor recreation opportunities such as hiking and camping. But no more. Penn State has announced that after this semester, the university will no longer allow the club to organize student-led trips because it is too dangerous out in the wilderness, according to the offices of Student Affairs and Risk Management. Two other outdoorsy clubs, the Nittany Grotto Caving Club and the Nittany Divers Scuba Club, have also been restricted from club activities outdoors. Michael Lacey, president of the Caving Club, told the Centre Daily Times: "Penn State's just been clamping down really hard on the nature of activities" since the Jerry Sandusky scandal. University spokesperson Lisa Powers said Penn State will offer school-sponsored outdoors trips, but students noted the cost will be much higher. [Centre Daily Times, 4/20/2018]

Unclear on the Concept

In a perhaps unintentional bid for the worst criminal disguise of 2018, Kerry Hammond Jr., 22, broke into a GameStop store in St. Marys, Georgia, at 1:19 a.m. on April 13, where he was captured on camera wearing a clear plastic wrapper (of the sort that holds bundles of bottled water) over his head. Even with the plastic "mask," WJXT reported, Hammond's face is clearly visible in surveillance video, and St. Marys police quickly identified him and captured him on April 17. Hammond already had two active felony warrants for his arrest for burglary and second-degree criminal damage to property. [WJXT, 4/16/2018]

Techno-Weird

In Tokyo, women who have qualms about living alone may soon have a new security option. "Man on the Curtain" is a prototype smartphone app that connects to a projector and throws a moving shadow of a man onto a closed window curtain. The shadow man can be doing any of several different activities, such as boxing, karate, vacuuming, playing guitar or getting dressed. Keiichi Nakamura, advertising manager of Leopalace21 Corp., an apartment management company where the idea originated, told Reuters that eventually his company would like to "commercialize it once we add variety, such as releasing a new video every day." [Reuters, 4/21/2018]

Fun-suckers

In Oslo, according to Reuters, tradition calls for recent high school graduates to participate in "Russ," a several-weeks-long party that includes drinking, nudity and public sex, sometimes resulting in fatal car crashes. So this year, the Public Roads Administration issued a statement on April 18 headlined "No to sex on roundabouts," warning that students should refrain from running naked and having sex on bridges and roundabouts, because such behavior gives drivers "too much of a surprise." Terje Moe Gustavsen, head of the administration, said: "Everyone understands that being in and around roundabouts is a traffic hazard. It may not be so dangerous for someone to be without clothes on the bridge, but drivers can ... completely forget that they are driving." [Reuters, 4/18/2018]

Bright Ideas

-- Resorting to a low-tech, but possibly offensive strategy, Largo, Florida, detectives visited a dead man at Sylvan Abbey Funeral Home in Clearwater and attempted to use his finger to unlock his smartphone. Linus F. Phillip, 30, was shot and killed by Largo police March 23 after he tried to drive away from an officer wanting to search him. As part of their investigation, police said they needed to access and preserve data on Phillip's phone. Legal experts generally agreed the detectives had not broken any laws, but Phillip's girlfriend, Victoria Armstrong, 28, was less forgiving: "Nobody even calling us ... to let us know detectives were coming there at all is very disturbing," she told the Tampa Bay Times. "I'm very skeptical of all funeral homes now." [Tampa Bay Times, 4/21/2018]

-- United Press International reports that in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the mayor has employed a clever way to keep his finger on the pulse of the city. When he goes out, he wears a fake beard so he'll blend in and not be recognized as the capital city's leader. Mayor Albek Ibraimov told Fergana, a Russian news agency: "I dress in old clothes ... take off my tie and I go and look, and see how things actually are." [United Press International, 4/20/2018]

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Over the last two years, Cameron County employee Gilberto Escamilla, 53, of Brownsville, Texas, has been accepting shipments of fajitas worth a total of $1.2 million at the Darrell B. Hester Juvenile Detention Center in Brownsville. The only trouble is, the inmates there aren't served fajitas. Escamilla had been ordering the meat from Labatt Food Service in Harlingen and intercepting it to resell. "It started small and got bigger and out of control," Escamilla told the court, according to The Brownsville Herald. On April 20, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to theft by a public servant. [The Brownsville Herald, 4/20/2018]

Oops

The Washington State Department of Transportation had to issue a mea culpa on the afternoon of April 17 after an electronic highway sign displayed the message "U SUCK" above Interstate 5 near Jovita. WSDOT called the sign "an inappropriate message" that appeared due to a training error and was "clearly a mistake," according to KCPQ TV. [Q13 FOX, 4/18/2018]

Bad Attitude

Timothy Hill, 67, of Grassington, North Yorkshire, England, having installed a laser jammer in his Range Rover, thought he was outsmarting law enforcement speed cameras. In fact, he was so sure of his scheme that he repeatedly raised his middle finger to the cameras -- sometimes casually, sometimes aggressively -- as he passed. What he didn't realize was that the laser jammer, rather than hiding his identity, was only blocking police from determining his speed, so when they tracked him down, he was charged not with speeding, but with perverting the course of justice. "If you want to attract our attention, repeatedly gesturing at police camera vans with your middle finger while you're driving a distinctive car fitted with a laser jammer is an excellent way to do it," Traffic Constable Andrew Forth told Metro News. Hill pleaded guilty on April 23, and was sentenced to eight months in jail and prohibited from driving for a year. [Metro News, 4/23/2018]

Least Competent Criminal

Kiana Wallace, 24, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in Belmont County, Ohio, on April 23 following her guilty plea for tampering with evidence. On probation after a drug possession sentence in 2017, Wallace failed a drug urine test when the "borrowed" sample she used tested positive for drugs. "Let me get this straight," Judge Frank Fregiato said in court, according to WTOV-TV. "To avoid the positive test with your own urine, you used someone else's urine, which turned out to be positive also. That's bizarre." [WTOV, 4/23/2018]

Inexplicable

-- On April 23, police officers in Warren, Michigan, responded to a home for a welfare check on 68-year-old George Curtis, whose relatives had become concerned because they hadn't heard from him. Curtis was, indeed, dead -- in fact, WJBK-TV reported, he had been deceased for months, maybe even a year. Also in the home: his girlfriend, who had continued living there with his decaying body, which was laid out in a bed. Police transported the unnamed woman to a hospital for a mental evaluation and are awaiting a report on cause of death from the medical examiner. [WJBK, 4/24/2018]

-- Meanwhile, on the South Side of Chicago, police responded to reports of an elderly woman pushing a dead body around the Chatham neighborhood in a shopping cart on April 21, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Officers took the woman to a hospital for a mental evaluation and launched an investigation into the female body, whose age and identity had not been determined at press time. [Chicago Sun-Times, 4/22/2018]

In Dorking, England, Chris Hepworth and his partner, Tanisha Prince, both of London, dove across the finish line in one minute and 37 seconds, setting a course record and capturing the coveted U.K. Wife Carrying championship on April 8. Any adult couple can compete in the contest -- married or not and regardless of gender -- which consists of one team member carrying the other, most using the "Estonian carry," with the "wife" upside-down, her legs over her partner's shoulders and gripping him around the waist from behind. About 40 pairs competed over the quarter-mile course strewn with hay bales and mud, Reuters reported. Hepworth and Prince plan to move on to the world finals in Finland. "I think a Finnish guy wins it every year," Hepworth noted, "so it'll be good to go there and take them down." [Reuters, 4/9/2018]

What's in a Name?

In Ohio in 2004, 6-year-old Alex Malarkey spent two months in a coma after a car accident, awaking as a quadriplegic and telling his family he had visited heaven, seeing angels and meeting Jesus. Alex and his dad, Kevin Malarkey, co-wrote a best-selling book in 2010, "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven," but in 2015, Alex admitted he had made up the story to get attention. "I did not die. I did not go to heaven," Alex told The Guardian. In a recent effort to set the record straight, Alex filed a complaint April 9 in DuPage County, Illinois, against the book's publisher, Tyndale House, alleging that "any reasonable person would have realized that it was highly unlikely that the content of the book was true." The Washington Post reported that while Kevin Malarkey is not a party to the suit -- which cites several Illinois statutes regarding the right to privacy, defamation, and financial exploitation of a person with a disability, among others -- it does allege that Alex's dad concocted and sold the story to Tyndale. The younger Malarkey did not receive any royalties from the sales of the book. [The Washington Post, 4/13/2018]

The Continuing Crisis

Richland Carrousel Park in Mansfield, Ohio, a family-oriented destination, just wanted to provide a seasonal attraction for kids who wanted to pose for a picture with the Easter Bunny. But Ladonna Hughett, 54, had other things in mind on March 24 when she plopped into the bunny's lap, grabbed him in inappropriate ways and made lewd comments, reported Fox 8 Cleveland. She then moved on to ride a horse on the carousel, also in ways witnesses described as lewd. "As soon as you think you hear all," said Mansfield Assistant Police Chief Keith Porch, "I've never heard of somebody performing those types of acts on the Easter Bunny." Hughett was arrested for public drunkenness and is no longer welcome at the amusement park. [Fox 8, 3/26/2018]

The Hypnotic Power of Special Sauce

McDonald's drive-thrus are a chill place to be, if three recent events are any indication. On March 17, police officers called to a McDonald's restaurant in Okeechobee, Florida, found Derril James Geller of West Palm Beach had passed out in his car while waiting in line. Geller was arrested for driving on a suspended license (a crime for which he had been charged three previous times). But that's just the tip of the ice cream cone: The Okeechobee News reported that in January, an Okeechobee woman was charged with DUI after passing out at a different area McDonald's drive-thru, and in December, a Texas man also received a DUI for nodding off in the line at that same McDonald's. [Okeechobee News, 3/21/2018]

Ewwwww!

-- Workers renovating the old Dayton's department store in downtown Minneapolis came across an unusual find in early April: the mummified remains of a monkey. The store apparently had a pet department in the 1960s, and The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reported that Steven Laboe, who worked in the building in the early 2000s, heard stories of a monkey escaping into an air conditioning duct, where it may have met its fate in the form of an exhaust fan. In fact, the mummy does show an injury to the abdomen. "We continue to find pieces of history in the Dayton's project as we redevelop the building," Cailin Rogers, a spokeswoman for the redevelopment team, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. [Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, 4/10/2018; Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 4/12/2018]

-- At Bull City Burger and Brewery in Durham, North Carolina, April is Exotic Meat Month! This year, according to WTVD, the restaurant offered a tarantula challenge. Customers were invited to enter their name in a raffle, and if chosen could claim a $30 tarantula burger, which included a pasture-raised beef patty, gruyere cheese, spicy chili sauce -- and an oven-roasted zebra tarantula. Those who finished the burger received a commemorative "tarantula challenge" T-shirt. [WTVD, 4/13/2018]

Do Not Eat

1. An unnamed Chinese man "accidentally" swallowed a plastic and metal lighter 20 years ago. 2. He neglected to seek medical attention until recently, when he began experiencing stomach pains and other symptoms we'd rather not detail here. 3. In early April, using a camera inserted in the man's body to locate the lighter, doctors at Dujiangyan Medical Center in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, performed not one, but two surgeries to extract the item. The Global Times reported that the lighter had been severely corroded by gastric juices. [The Global Times, 4/16/2018]

My Weird Obsession

You may have read that the company that makes Necco Wafers announced in March that it would have to shut down in May unless a buyer was found. Since then, crazed Necco fans have been stockpiling candy. "Necco Wafers are up 150 percent," Candystore.com reported in a blog post. "A clear signal of panic-buying." Katie Samuels, 23, of Florida tried to strike a deal with Candystore.com, a wholesaler. "I offered to trade my 2003 Honda Accord for all of their stock," Samuels told the Boston Globe. "I don't have much right now, so I was like, 'I've got this car, and I want all that candy,' so maybe they would consider it." Candystore didn't accept her offer, but Samuels did buy 48 rolls of candy using her credit card. [The Boston Globe, 4/10/2018]

Oops

Officials in the city of Vordingborg, Denmark, planned the demolition of a 174-foot-tall silo months ahead of the event, but as onlookers cheered the explosion on April 6, the tower toppled in the wrong direction, landing on a waterfront library and music school. No injuries were reported, according to The Guardian, and the library interior, while covered with dust, sustained no serious damage. [The Guardian, 4/8/2018]

Picky, Picky

In Manchester, England, 75-year-old Peter Vipham of Rawtenstall, Lancashire, was shocked on April 11 when he was approached in the city center by two women who identified themselves as law enforcement. The officers told Vipham, a retired shoemaker, that he had been filmed littering when a small crumb of the pork pie he had been eating fell to the ground, and he flicked another crumb off his coat. Vipham offered to pick up the crumbs, but told Metro News he was not given the opportunity to view the video footage, and he refused to pay the fine. "If I had dropped litter I would pay the (50 pound) fine, but I would never drop litter. I am against litter 100 percent. I hate it," Vipham declared. A Manchester city council spokesperson said the city would review the evidence and contact Vipham to discuss his case. [Metro News, 4/15/2018]