LAME FASHION

Among the ensembles witnessed by a New York Times critic at the Paris Fashion Week this year were a hat with objects resembling steroid-enhanced stalks of peas; a shoe that appeared to sprout “twig-studs”; “a flexible cage covered in doughnuts of black satin”; and a pillow clutch with its own porthole.

Recurring Themes

— News of the Weird first reported successful “stool implants” among family members in 2007. They were intended to cure infections such as C. difficile by introducing the donor’s “good” microbes to overcome an imbalance of “bad” bacteria in a relative’s intestines. In 2012, two University of California, Davis, neurosurgeons extended the cutting-edge treatment for three patients with a highly malignant brain tumor unresponsive to treatment. The doctors tried infusing bowel bacteria directly into the tumor. The patients died, nonetheless. Although the patients had given informed consent, the school pressured Drs. J. Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph Schrot to resign for having violated internal and FDA procedures.

— It’s well known that hospitals charge for medical supplies far in excess of what the products would cost at drugstores. An August New York Times investigation of “saline drips” vividly demonstrated the disconnect. While Medicare reimburses $1.07 for a 1-liter plastic bag of saltwater, White Plains (N.Y.) Hospital charged patients’ insurance companies $91 per bag. Other hospitals decline to charge per-bag, listing only “IV therapy” of, for example, $787.

— The world’s cosmetic-surgery capital is South Korea, where one woman in five has had at least one procedure. The “Smile Lipt,” offered by Aone Plastic Surgery in the city of Yongin, is designed to produce a permanent smile, which is associated with success in South Korea. The Smile Lipt turns downward-drooping lip corners upward to create a persistent smile that resembles that of Batman’s nemesis the Joker.

— The Dayton Daily News reported in September that an audit of Dayton lawyer Ben Swift (the highest-paid court-appointed public defender in Ohio, at $142,900 in a recent year) revealed several invoices demanding government payment for work days of more than 20 hours — in one case, 29 hours. Swift’s attorney said his client was guilty of nothing but bad record-keeping.

— In some cases, a tumor is heavier than the patient it’s removed from. A 63-year-old man in Bakersfield, Calif., had surgery after his set of tumors grew to 200 pounds. Bakersfield surgeon Vip Dev noted that the tumors dragged on the floor when the man walked. The surgery was complicated by the patient’s shape, which couldn’t be accommodated by the hospital’s MRI and CT scan machines.

— In 2010, Chinese agencies stepped up “birth tourism” packages for rich pregnant women who wanted to book vacations in America that were timed to their due dates to exploit the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born here. A September USA Today report indicated that Chinese mothers now prefer to land in the U.S. territory of Northern Mariana Islands (where birth also bestows citizenship). Islands officials would prefer traditional Chinese tourists instead of the “birthers.” Historians agree that the 14th Amendment birth right was aimed at assuring citizenship for freed slaves.

Updates

— At Hong Kong’s traditional hungry ghost festival in August, people burned fake money on top of ancestors’ graves. A weak economy and inflation seem to have upped the ante for the gifts that are bestowed on the dead. An August Wall Street Journal dispatch noted that the denominations of burnable “currency” sold in stores have appreciated, including one that is given a value of one trillion Hong Kong dollars. Some festival-goers ask how the ancestor could expect change from such a bill if he needed to make a small afterlife purchase.

— The family of the great Native American Olympic athlete and Oklahoma native Jim Thorpe (1888-1953) was so disappointed that the governor of Oklahoma wouldn’t properly honor Thorpe on his death that one faction of Thorpe’s family moved the body to Pennsylvania, where municipal officials eagerly offered to name a town after him. Since then, Jim Thorpe, Pa. (current population, 4,800), has withstood legal challenges by those who seek to return the body to Oklahoma. A recent federal court decision holds that the Pennsylvania town is a Native American “museum.” A grandson said Thorpe spoke to him at a sweat lodge in Texas in 2010, telling him to leave the body in Jim Thorpe, with “no more pain created in my name.”

— Anthony Alleyne appeared in News of the Weird in 2003 for turning his Hinckley, England, home into a replica of the command center of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise. The center included a “transporter control,” “warp core drive,” “infinity mirror,” etc. When he later tried to sell the home, he learned that potential buyers didn’t value the house as much as he thought they would. In September 2013, Alleyne was back in the news as Leicester Crown Court sentenced him to 34 months in prison for viewing child pornography. He blamed that habit on years of depression caused by his marital difficulties and the real estate market.

— The Raelian sect initially made News of the Weird in 1998 when “Bishop” Brigitte Boisselier ran a human-cloning start-up operation, planning to charge $200,000 to make identical twins. Raelians’ core belief is that humanity descended from extraterrestrials who explained to Raelian founder Claude Vorilhon that life’s purpose is to experience sexual pleasure. Recently, a Raelian “priestess,” Nadine Gary, has turned the sect’s attention to counseling victims of the genital mutilation, which remains traditional among some African societies. She has enlisted a prominent U.S. surgeon to undo the procedure pro bono. Wrote London’s The Guardian, in an August dispatch from the surgeon’s San Francisco clinic, “Just 12 minutes of delicate scalpel work removes a lifetime of discomfort.”

— The story of Kopi Luwak coffee is by now a News of the Weird staple. It began in 1993 with the first reports that there was a market for coffee beans digested by Asian civet cats, then washed and brewed. In June, news broke that civets were being mistreated — captured from the wild and caged solely for their bean-adulterating usefulness. In August, the American Chemical Society reported that a “gas chromatography and mass spectrometry” test had finally been developed to assure buyers that their $227-a-pound Kopi Luwak beans had, indeed, been excreted by genuine Asian civets. Thus, Kopi Luwak drinkers, who pay up to $80 a cup in California, can sip their brews without fear of being ripped off.