Sweet, Sweet Revenge 

Sweet, Sweet Revenge
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-$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.

Can't Possibly Be True
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.

• 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 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.

• The word "ISIS" arrived in Western dialogue only after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as an acronym for the Islamic State. 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.)

News You Can Use
Earn $17,500 for two weeks' "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.

Government in Action
Thirty-four residents of State Street in Brooklyn, N.Y., 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.

• The town of Conegliano, Italy, collects local taxes on "sidewalk shadows" that it applies to cafés 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.

Finer Points of the Law
"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.

Wait, What?
Emily Piper and her husband went to court in January in Spokane, Wash., 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.

• A private plane crashed on take-off 150 feet from the runway at Williston, Fla., 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.

Least Competent Criminals
Edwin Charge Jr., 20, and two accomplices allegedly attempted a theft at a Hood River, Ore., 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.

• Police said Tara Cranmer, 34, tried to elude them in a stolen truck on tiny Ocracoke Island, N.C., on April 22. Since it is an island, the road ends, and she was captured on the dunes after abandoning the truck.

Update
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.