-- Some callers to Boston's major homeless shelters became angry that their requests to help out this year on Thanksgiving and Christmas day were rejected because the shelters have too many volunteers... more

-- British Army officers examining highly motivated potential recruits in the Commonwealth's Pacific island of Fiji reported in November encountering an alarming number of the men with marbles sewn un... more

-- Inga Kosak won the first World Extreme Ironing Championship in Munich in September, beating 80 contestants (from 10 countries), who are judged on the degree of difficulty they can create for themse... more

-- Alberta (Canada) judge Shelagh Creagh ruled in October that prison inmate Shane Arthur Wilson could not be punished for carrying around a homemade plastic knife since Wilson said the knife was only... more

-- Even with a $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez is having trouble attracting pancreatic-cancer patients for his Columbia University study (only 25 of 90... more

-- Among issues in the months-long labor-management strife at the Taronga Zoo (Sydney, Australia): Workers have resisted managers' alleged solution for getting Kibabu the gorilla to mate (following hi... more

-- A business consulting firm teaching how to use astrology to increase profits was inaugurated in May in San Francisco by two former telecommunications executives (and ex-Marines). Bruce Cady and law... more

-- The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concluded in May that Costco Wholesale Corp.'s firing of Kimberly M. Cloutier for refusing to stop wearing an eyebrow ring at work constituted relig... more

-- University of Wisconsin-Madison veterinarians said in September they now have the technology to detect the fraudulent use of three udder-enhancing schemes employed on show cows at dairy exhibits. F... more

(CORRECTION: Two weeks ago, I mistakenly wrote that Lutherans believe there is only one God, when I should have written that it is the Lutherans' Missouri Synod which believes that (and it was that or... more

-- England's Mentorn production company announced in September that it was finalizing a deal with Channel 4 TV in London for a series in which a terminally ill man would volunteer for what Mentorn cal... more

-- Among the personal items that former Tyco International chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski bought and charged to the company (without authorization, said the company in September) were two New Yor... more

-- September reports in the New York Post and the Toronto Star, quoting parents' Web site "reviews" of the Mattel $19.99 Nimbus 2000 plastic-replica broomstick from the latest Harry Potter movie, high... more

-- The 12-story, earthquake-proof, $190 million Roman Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels was dedicated in Los Angeles in September, celebrated not only for the obligatory gift shop ($24.99 f... more

-- The 60,000 delegates (from 182 countries) to the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, luxuriated not only in four- and five-star accommodations but an elega... more

-- During the last four months, an unidentified motorist in a maroon Volvo has been reported by construction workers in the California cities of Fremont, Hayward, Brentwood and Dublin to have approach... more

-- A Fortune magazine-commissioned study reported in August that officers and directors of the 1,035 companies that have fallen the most from their recent bull-market peaks cashed in $66 billion worth... more

-- Plastic surgeons told The Wall Street Journal in August that requests for designer navel and nipple surgery are increasing (probably brought on by the skin-revealing tops women wear), with slim, ho... more

-- Artist Brock Enright of Virginia Beach, Va., originally started staging rough, vivid kidnappings, using volunteers, so that he could show them on video at New York City galleries, but found so many... more

-- Serial killer Coral Eugene Watts, 52, thought to have been put away for life by a Houston judge in 1982, is now scheduled to be released in 2006 because of a drafting error in his plea bargain. (Be... more

-- In June, after the British musical group the Planets introduced a 60-second piece of complete silence on its latest album, representatives of the estate of composer John Cage, who once wrote "4'33"... more

-- Despite a warning label reading "Do not use indoors because of flammability" on its carpet adhesive, the Para-Chem company was ordered by a jury in Akron, Ohio, in July to pay $8 million to two pro... more

-- More News From the Front Lines: The Jammu and Kashmir State Cable Car Corp. continues to run its gondolas at the mountain resort of Gulmarg (according to a July Washington Post dispatch), passing w... more

-- "Dozens" of money-making Web sites have recently been created by parents who post photos they have taken of their adolescent daughters (as young as age 6) frolicking in frilly clothing or swimwear,... more

-- About 2,500 festive marchers turned out for Jerusalem's first gay pride day in June, including a few Palestinians. And according to reports in The New York Times, The Times of London and The Scotsm... more

-- Uncontrolled crime (eight times the murder rate of New York City) and a huge wealth disparity (most people either fabulously rich or appallingly poor, with few in the middle) have caused the 1 mill... more

-- The minimum age for attendance at tennis, soccer and golf academies has dropped to 2, according to a June CNN story bolstered by interviews with instructors, parents and doctors in New York City an... more

-- In a May dispatch from Cuba, The Wall Street Journal reported that Fidel Castro proposed in 1987 to alleviate a chronic milk shortage by trying to get his scientists to clone the most productive co... more