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Last year, a BBC News correspondent in Sudan reported that village elders in the Upper Nile state had punished Charles Tombe, who had been caught being amorous with a goat, by requiring him to pay a dowry to the goat’s owner, to endure a “wedding” to the goat, and to treat the goat as his […]

The University of Minnesota campus newspaper reported in February that some students are combining trips to the blood bank to make donations with quick trips to local bars for a drink or two, because they report a quicker and more powerful “high” immediately after blood loss. Said one, “As soon as the needle’s out of […]

Among the long-term disabilities that have been drawing compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs (at a time when the returning wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan are meeting bureaucratic delays in getting their own disabilities properly compensated): 124,000 veterans receiving monthly checks because of hemorrhoids (according to a March Scripps Howard News Service report) and […]

Cops Getting No Respect: Taryn McCarthy, 21, in the course of a contentious January arrest for DUI in Portsmouth, N.H., was further charged with five counts of simple assault, including four separate incidents of grabbing a state trooper’s genitals. Felicha Marin, 18, was charged with shoplifting shoes from a store in Richmond, England, in March, […]

In breathtaking attention to detail reminiscent of the movie “The Great Escape,” some inmates at Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility chipped through 8 inches of concrete, then continued tunneling until they had cleared the facility’s two external walls by an extra 25 feet, but then a guard spotted an irregularity near a cell wall and discovered […]

Stewart Laidlaw, 35, was banished from Thirsty Kirsty’s pub in Dunfermline, Scotland, in March, following numerous complaints about his excessive flatulence. (A shocked Laidlaw said no one had complained before, but conceded that was probably because cigarette smoke had been masking the odor until Scotland’s recent smoking ban.) And in December, an American Airlines flight […]

In February in Bethlehem, Pa., middle school principal John Acerra was arrested and charged with selling crystal meth from his office, but not to students (and when arrested in his office, after hours, he was reportedly nude). And in April, in Lorain, Ohio, principal Robert Holloway resigned after apparently too eagerly delivering on a wager. […]

After a street assault in January, a 22-year-old New Zealander was rushed to Wellington Hospital to have surgeons remove his car key, which was embedded behind his right ear. After a vicious attempted carjacking in March, an 18-year-old Australian was sent to Fremantle Hospital in Perth, where surgeons removed a screwdriver embedded in his face.

Mexico City taxi driver Manuel Quiroz was seeking a sponsor earlier this year for his pursuit of the world raw-chili-pepper-eating contest. Supposedly, he can guzzle dozens of them at one sitting and even harmlessly squeeze their juice into his eyes. In February, Dublin, Ireland, software engineer Michael Killian demonstrated his sideways-traveling bicycle, in which a […]

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which operates mass transit just south of San Francisco, and whose employees stage about three dozen office parties a year, issued 33 pages of specifications in January to invite local companies to bid on a contract to supply sheet cakes. The winning bidder must be versatile enough to offer […]