Imminent swirling vortex of damnation Land developers for the iconic Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo., (famous as the inspiration for the hotel in Stephen King’s “The Shining”) announced recently that they need more space and thus will dig up and move the hotel’s 12-gravesite pet cemetery. Neighbors told the

The bar is always open A 61-year-old Texas man who was admitted to a hospital appearing to be falling-down-drunk, despite denying having had even a single drink, was discovered to be unintentionally manufacturing beer in his stomach. With “auto-brewery syndrome,” stomach-based yeast automatically ferments all starches (even vegetables or grains)

Haute couture A few still-primitive cultures inexplicably celebrate such female adornments as the stacking of metal neck rings and the inserting of saucer-sized disks into pierced earlobes. For “civilized” society, there is the annual Paris Fashion Week in September, when renowned designers outfit brave, otherwise-gorgeous models in grotesque clothing. Among

More bang American Exceptionalism: Which is more characteristically American, that a Texas company could invent an ordinary rifle that mimics a machine gun or that America’s incomparable legal minds could find a loophole in existing anti-machine-gun laws to permit it to be manufactured and sold? The Slide Fire company’s weapon

Home sweet home “With its neatly cut lawns and luscious tropical vegetation,” wrote a BBC News reporter in July, Miracle Village, Fla., is an “idyllic rural community” of 200 residents — about half of whom are registered sex offenders, attracted to the settlement near Lake Okeechobee because laws and ordinances

First Amendment blues In the public libraries of Seattle (as in most public libraries), patrons are not allowed to eat or sleep (or even appear to be sleeping) or be shirtless or barefoot or have bad body odor or talk too loudly — because other patrons might be disturbed. However,

Happiness is a clean toilet Beginning in 2011, about three dozen people in Tokyo have been meeting every Sunday at 6 a.m. on a mission to scrub down, one by one, the city’s grungiest public rest rooms. “By 7:30,” according to an Associated Press reporter who witnessed an outing in

Spreadsheet parenting Loco Parentis: First-time mother Amy Webb proudly notates dozens of data points about her child each day and obsessively tracks their detailed progression by computer on spreadsheets, according to the provocative first-person account she wrote for Slate.com in July. In categories ranging from ordinary vital signs, to the

Queen of the night The conflicted double life of Israeli Orthodox Jew Shadar Hadar, 34, might be as formidable to manage as that of an international spy. Though deeply and defiantly religious, around midnight he typically “trades his knitted white yarmulke” for a “wavy blond wig and pink velvet dress”