The notoriously isolated North Korean economy only permits new products to be sold as needs arise, and in December (according to a report by Agence France-Presse), the ministries began allowing Western-style “skinny jeans” (having relaxed the rule requiring female workers to wear skirts).
Also recently for sale: human fertilizer (owing to the attrition of the animals that previously produced manure for family gardens).
Because
you don’t
want to
waste time 
The SEGA video company’s Japan division began test-marketing its new Toylets game in January, designed for men’s urinals.
With sensors in the basin and a video screen at eye level, men score points based on the strength and accuracy of their streams.
Among the suite of games: sumo wrestling (squirt the opponent out of the circle), graffiti-erasure (strong streams wipe out more graffiti), and skirt-raising (the stronger the stream, the higher a woman’s skirt is “blown” upward).
Shouldn’t
that be
illegal?
Automaker BMW of Germany announced testing in December of a new technology (“flash projection”) in which an ultra-bright light sears the company logo into a viewer’s vision, where it lingers even if the viewer subsequently closes his eyelids tightly.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa Fla. 33679 or go to www.newsoftheweird.com.)