What a strange year. It looked like any other until sometime around, oh, November, I guess, and then all of a sudden, for some reason, when I reported the latest incompetent criminal or imaginative fe... more

-- Las Vegas body modifier Nathan McKay, 24, complained in November about the difficulty of getting proper medical care: further surgery to prevent his already surgically forked tongue from fusing bac... more

-- New York doctors, praising an unconventional remedy for diarrhea in the American Journal of Gastroenterology in November, surmised that sufferers might merely lack certain predator bacteria in the ... more

-- Doctors in England are under criticism, according to a November report in Canada's National Post, for having performed a leg-stretching surgery on Emma Richards, 16, apparently only for the purpose... more

-- A court in Council Bluffs, Iowa, will rule in early December on whether to admit "brain fingerprinting" evidence that might free Terry Harrington, who has been in prison for 22 years for a murder h... more

-- The attorney for alleged San Francisco dog-abuser Steven Maul said in November that Maul only bit the dog in the neck as part of an unorthodox but loving discipline method and that in fact Maul "is... more

-- Officials at the Paralympic Games, held in Sydney two weeks after the Olympics, said performance-enhancing drugs were a concern, certainly, but that some athletes with spinal-cord injuries presente... more

-- The Alberta Ferretti fashion house recently introduced, in New York and London, self-described "gorgeous pieces" made from hamster fur, including a reversible multicolored-fur/camel-leather coat (a... more

-- Wealthy retired Italian law professor Giacinto Auriti began in July to circulate a private currency, called the "simec," among citizens (and about 40 shopkeepers) in the town of Guardiagrele (about... more

-- Rapidly gaining viewers in the competitive Moscow TV market is a program called "The Naked Truth," on an obscure channel, which features straight news delivered by a 26-year-old female anchor, but ... more

-- Legitimate Chinese cricket-fight promoters once again staged their national championship matches in Beijing in October despite fears from their ranks that illegal gambling was ruining their "sport"... more

-- In September, driving-school owner Bharat Patel, 49, became the 31st person convicted in a driver's-license bribery scandal at a Chicago examining station. According to testimony, Patel did not eve... more

-- A New York appeals court ruled in July that a 53-year-old, serial-plastic-surgery patient, who became dissatisfied with her tucked-and-tightened body after 12 operations over a seven-year-period, c... more

-- The Wishes of the Fetus: On Sept. 6, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit by a 7-year-old girl with spina bifida, who had sued her parents' doctors because she wanted to have been aborted (sin... more

-- Campaign 2000: In September, Robert Salzberg finished a strong second (26 percent) in the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat from Sarasota, Fla., despite revealing that he would soon plead in... more

-- Muslim-dominated Pakistan allows a large, prosperous brewery to operate, even though its product is off-limits to 97 percent of the population and is regularly denounced by the nation's leaders, ac... more

-- An August Wall Street Journal dispatch from Nuoro, Sardinia (Italy), described locals' love for "casu marzu" ("rotten cheese"), brown lumps of sheep dairy, crawling with maggots, a "viscous, pungen... more

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-- Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz, whose best-selling 1991 book "Chutzpah" celebrated the virtues of impudence, asked a team of Florida lawyers in July for a cut of the $3.4 billion judgment they ... more

-- The U.S. Department of Agriculture is actively proposing that animal carcasses with cancers, tumors or open sores be regarded merely as unaesthetic but safe for human consumption as long as the off... more

-- William Draheim was fired from his job in St. Louis Park, Minn., in May, for sexual harassment for talking excessively about his pierced penis at work (almost exclusively, he said, in response to q... more

-- On July 4 at Coney Island in New York, Japan's Kazutoyo "The Rabbit" Arai (who weighs 101 pounds) beat defending champ Steve Keiner (400 pounds) in the annual Nathan's international hot-dog-eating ... more

-- In May, a 19-year-old mentally ill patient walked away from the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs, and authorities warned that he was potentially dangerous. Twelve hours later, the patient, Te... more

-- The ritzy Barra da Tijuca suburb of Rio de Janeiro is preparing for the October high-society wedding of Pepezinha and Winner, which will be extravagant even though the bride and groom are dogs (shi... more

-- In April, doctors at Washington, D.C.'s St. Elizabeths Hospital said Tomar Cooper Locker, 25, was no longer mentally ill and should be unconditionally released. Just two months earlier, Locker had ... more

-- Dutch researchers writing in an April British Medical Journal advocated that Viagra be dispensed for free in the Netherlands because, even though costly, Viagra enhances the quality of its users' l... more

-- Ignatius Piazza, 40, has completed $3 million worth of infrastructure toward his planned gated community 50 miles from Las Vegas in which every resident will be trained in firearms use, creating wh... more

-- Fox Network's Far-Ranging Influence: On April 27, a reporter for Russia's RTR television arrived in the town of Ivanovo to shoot a piece on a housewife merrily feeding her family while her soldier-... more