-- Spare the Rod: In September, engaging in a 300-year tradition of the Dussera holiday in India's Tamil Nadu state, Hindu priests ritually whipped 2,000 young women and girls over a five-hour period as penance for a range of sins, from insufficient studying to moral impurity. Said one sobbing yet inspired lash recipient, to an NDTV reporter, "(W)hen we are whipped, we will get rid of our mental and physical ailments and evil spirits." (And in November, Pope John Paul II was revealed to have periodically atoned for sins by privately whipping himself, according to a nun who worked with him and who was cited in the Vatican's ongoing consideration of John Paul II for sainthood. The nun said she heard him distinctly several times from an adjacent room.)

-- From a police report in the North Bay (Ontario) Nugget (Nov. 7): An officer in line at a traffic light, realizing that cars had not moved through two light changes, walked up to the lead car to investigate. The driver said she was not able to move on the green lights because she was still on the phone and thus driving off would be illegal. The officer said a brief lecture improved the woman's understanding of the law.

-- The inspector general of the National Science Foundation revealed that on-the-job viewing of pornography Web sites was so widespread at the agency that the resultant ethics investigations hindered his primary mission of investigating fraud on grant contracts. The agency report, obtained by the Washington Times in September, said the heaviest user was a senior executive who logged on to pornography at least 331 days in 2008. He subsequently retired, but before leaving defended his habit, claiming that his Web site visits actually helped impoverished women in Third World countries to earn a decent living (by posing for pornography).

-- Fine Lawyering: Jacob Christine, 21, acting as his own lawyer at an October hearing, denying charges that he severely slashed a fellow inmate at an Easton, Pa., prison, offered his own view of whoever the perpetrator was: "Whoever attacked (the victim) had a high regard for life," said Christine, because the cut "isn't deep at all. It's on his neck. It's not on his face."

-- When Minnesota's Riverview Community Bank opened for business in 2004, founder Chuck Ripka claimed divine inspiration -- that God had told him to "pastor the bank" and, in exchange, that He would "take care of the bottom line," leading Ripka to use "prayer" as a theme in the bank's promotions. In October 2009, Riverview became only the sixth bank in the state to be shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Riverview acknowledged that it had invested aggressively in real estate.

-- Dr. Hulda Clark, 80, passed away in September of multiple myeloma, an advanced cancer of the plasma cells. Before she was stricken, she had authored three books touting her eccentric remedies as cures, first, for "all diseases," and then, especially, cancer. In her books "The Cure for All Cancers" and "The Cure for All Advanced Cancers," she urged those diagnosed to immediately stop chemotherapy and embrace her quixotic regimens, to subdue the "parasites" that cause cancer.

-- Albert Freed's lawsuit for defective underwear against Hanes was dismissed in October by a Pensacola, Fla., judge, even though Freed had complained that the briefs had caused severe pain and ruined his vacation. Freed said the garment's flap had inexplicably failed to close, allowing his penis to protrude and rub against swim trunks that contained sand from the beach, irritating the sensitive skin. However, Freed delayed diagnosing the problem -- by declining to inspect his organ. He explained that he cannot easily peer over his "belly" (and wouldn't even consider, he said, examining his naked self in a mirror or asking his wife to inspect). Consequently, he had endured increased irritation before recognizing the source of the chafing.

-- According to a November Chicago Sun-Times report, county officials in Chicago have agreed to pay a $14,000 injury claim to janitor Mary Tait, of the sheriff's department. The amount covers two incidents, in 1997 and 1998, in which she hurt her back in the same way -- while "reaching around to pick up a piece of toilet paper."

-- In November, a judge in Somerville, N.J., overruled a local police chief who had rejected a firearms license for hunting enthusiast James Cap, 46. The judge ordered the chief to grant the license, even though Cap is a quadriplegic and will need to mount the gun on his wheelchair and fire it by blowing into a tube. (Cap was an avid hunter before a football injury incapacitated him.)

-- (1) In July, Charles Diez was charged with attempted murder for his angry reaction to a bicyclist who was carrying his 3-year-old son on the bike unsafely, on a busy Asheville, N.C., street. According to police, Diez was so anguished that he pulled his gun and fired at the bicyclist, grazing the man's helmet. (2) In October, just as Pennsylvania federal judge Lawrence Stengel was launching into his explanation for the sentence he was about to impose, bank robber Trammel Bledsoe grew impatient. "Can you hurry this up? I don't have time for this. Just sentence me. ..." ("You'll have all the time in the world," responded Stengel, who gave Bledsoe 41 years.)

-- Great Expectorations: (1) Charles Hersel, 39, was arrested in Thousand Oaks, Calif., in November after police investigators overheard him offer $31 to a Westlake High School boy to spit in Hersel's face. Several boys had complained to police that a man (allegedly Hersel) had approached them, offering money for expelling saliva and other bodily fluids on him. (2) Also in November, Patrick Girard, 29, a member of the City Council in Plattsburgh, N.Y., apologized to the constituent in whose face Girard had spit at the height of a barroom argument about the Boston Red Sox. Said the constituent, "It got in my eye, on my face, on my jacket."

-- Could've Planned Better: (1) Vincent Salters, 46, was arrested in East Knoxville, Tenn., in November after having shoplifted shoes the day before from the Shoe Show store. He had dashed out hurriedly with several display shoes, but an employee said they were all for the left foot. Salters was arrested outside the store the next day, perhaps having come to pick up right-foot shoes. (2) Travis Himmler, 22, was charged with burglary in November after allegedly stealing the cash register from the Golden Wok restaurant in Bloomington, Minn., and carrying it away on his bicycle. He was found down the street, injured, after taking a bad tumble when the dangling cash register cord got caught in the bike's spokes.

-- Las Vegas body modifier Nathan McKay, 24, complained in November 2000 about the difficulty of getting proper medical care, namely, further surgery to prevent his already surgically forked tongue from fusing back together and removal of all teeth (and replacement with platinum implants). Said McKay, who also has 1-inch-stretched holes in his earlobes (for holding ebony disks): "I want my tongue split ... as far back as possible, to the uvula, so I have two separate strands in my mouth." The original surgeon was a family friend, but he has balked at any follow-up. Said McKay, "I'm not trying to turn myself into anything except someone to remember."

Commercial test-preparation courses are already popular for applicants to top colleges and graduate schools, and recently also for admission to prestigious private high schools and grade schools. Now, according to a November New York Times report, such courses and private coaching are increasingly important for admission to New York City's high-achiever public kindergartens, even though the applicants are just 3 and 4 years old. Basic coaching, which may cost more than $1,000, includes training a child to listen to an adult's questions and to sit still for testing. Minimum qualification for top-shelf kindergartens are scores at the 90th percentile on the Olsat reasoning test and the Bracken School Readiness knowledge test.

-- In the past three years, at least 39 drivers in Dallas have been ticketed by police officers for the "offense" of being "a non-English speaking driver," according to a Dallas Morning News investigation in October. The software for officers' in-car computers features a check-off box with the phrase, perhaps leading officers (and their sergeants) to believe it constituted a separate traffic offense rather than merely an indication that the motorist might not have understood an officer's instructions. The police chief expressed shock at the report and promised to end the practice.

-- The Public Record: (1) From the Findlay, Ohio, police: "A woman called the police early Saturday morning (Oct. 31) during an argument with her husband after he claimed that the woman's daughter performed oral sex on him, and the daughter was better at it." (2) From the Steamboat Pilot (Steamboat Springs, Colo.), Nov. 4: "Police were called to a report of a suspicious incident in the 2900 block of West Acres Drive where a woman reported that she found feces in her toilet that she did not think she put there."

-- Justifiable Felonies? (1) Five people were arrested in Los Angeles in October and charged with kidnapping and "torturing" two "loan modification" agents who had taken fees while promising to save their home from foreclosure but had allegedly failed to help. (2) Daniel Adler, 61, was arrested in October in Stony Point, N.Y., and charged with assault. Police said Adler had been solicited by a Sears Home Improvement telemarketer and had agreed to an appointment but that when the employee arrived, Adler allegedly punched him in the face. Adler said he had scheduled the appointment only to "advise" Sears, in person, to stop calling him.

-- Oops! In an October incident, an off-duty Jacksonville, Fla., sheriff's deputy forgot to leave her service weapon outside when accompanying her mother to Shands Jacksonville hospital for an MRI. The powerful magnet sucked her Glock away in a flash, trapping the deputy's hand between the machine and the gun. Repairs, plus the lengthy powering-down and re-powering of the machine, was said to have cost the hospital $150,000.

-- Google 1, FBI 0: In September, Nebraska prison guard Michal Preclik, 32 (who had been on the job for a year and had just been promoted), was discovered to be on the lam from Interpol for drug and fraud crimes in the Czech Republic. The Corrections Department's background check, on the FBI's National Criminal Information Center database, had turned up nothing, but when officials subsequently Googled Preclik, the Interpol wanted poster was one of the top results.

-- Promoting the General Welfare in Malaysia: (1) The government of the state of Terengganu initiated a campaign in November to halt the growing divorce rate by offering pre-marital classes in sensuality. Also, because newlyweds have identified spousal body odor and ugly pajamas as turn-offs, the government invited cosmetics firms and lingerie sellers to improve their offerings. (2) The chairwoman of the family and health committee of Malaysia's Kelantan state suggested in October that male legislators should take, as additional wives (permitted under Islam), some of the 16,000 unmarried mothers now dependent on state support.

-- U.S. Homeland Security officials confirmed in October that an estimated 200,000 temporarily admitted foreign visitors to the U.S. since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are still in the country illegally, with overstayed visas, and that there is still no system in place to catch them. The problem had surfaced in September when a 19-year-old Jordanian man (legally admitted on a since-expired tourist visa) was arrested and accused of plotting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper. He had been arrested two weeks before that on a traffic violation, and even though he was on an FBI watch list because of visits to a jihadist Web site, he had no immigration "record" and thus was released after paying the traffic fine.

-- When the DRP party candidate for president of Mexico City's most populous borough lost in the primary this year, party officials hatched a plot to elevate a street peddler, "Juanito" Angeles, to run in the general election, with the "understanding" that he would step aside if victorious, in favor of the original candidate, Clara Brugada. Helped by his "everyman" image (according to a New York Times dispatch), Angeles won the election. However, his sudden power and celebrity apparently went to his head, and he refused to relinquish the presidency. (He finally agreed, in September, but only after receiving concessions from the party.)

-- Florida Democracy in Action: (1) When a Broward County Republican club held its scheduled meeting in October at a local gun range (according to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel report), among the shooters was the congressional candidate trying to unseat the Democratic incumbent, and on his target as he fired away, someone had written the Democrat's initials. (2) Also in Broward County in October, the father (a Democrat) of County Mayor Stacy Ritter was arrested and charged with threatening his daughter at gunpoint. The father is running for mayor of Tamarac and was upset that his daughter had endorsed his opponent.

Franciscan monk Cesare Bonizzi, 63, who 15 years ago turned from spiritual new age music to heavy metal (inspired, he said, by the groups Metallica and Megadeth) and who has spent the last several years as the robe-clad lead singer of his own band, Fratello Metallo, announced his retirement in November after realizing, he said, that the devil had tempted him too much with celebrity and turned him away from his brothers.

(1) William Evans, 57, on trial in St. Augustine, Fla., in August for a sex crime that occurred nearly 30 years ago (but not erased by the statute of limitations), committed suicide while away from the courthouse, awaiting the jury's decision. Without knowing that, the jury came back and declared him not guilty. (2) Engineering student Ken Kitamura, 19, drowned in the Yodogawa River in Osaka, Japan, in August. He and several colleagues had constructed a prototype canoe made of concrete, and Kitamura was the first to try it out.

News of the Weird reported in October 1998 the on-the-job death by snake bite of serpent-handling preacher John W. (Punkin) Brown Jr. (In a landmark book on Southern snake-handling preachers, "Salvation on Sand Mountain," Brown was called the "mad monk," the one most "mired" in the "blood lust of the patriarchs.") Because Brown's wife had died three years earlier (of a snake bite during services in Kentucky), the Browns' three orphans were objects of a custody fight between the two sets of grandparents. In February 1999, the wife's parents won primary custody, in a Newport, Tenn., hearing, largely because Mr. Brown's parents were not able to refrain (despite a judge's orders) from taking the grandkids to snake-handling services.

In October in Orange County, Calif., Billy Joe Johnson, who had just been convicted of murder as a hit man for a white supremacist gang, begged the judge and jury, in all sincerity, to sentence him to death. Johnson knew that those on California's death row get individual cells and better telephone access, nicer contact-visit arrangements, and more personal-property privileges than ordinary inmates. The Los Angeles Times reported that the state's spending per death-row inmate is almost three times that for other inmates. The current death-row census totals 685, but because of legal issues, only 13 have been executed since 1977 (compared to 71 death-row fatalities from other causes). In fact, Johnson was so eager to be put on death row that he tried to confess to two murders that no one yet knew about.

-- Veteran marathoner Jerry Johncock, 81, was four-fifths through the Twin Cities Marathon in October when he was overtaken by a medical problem common to men of his age: urinary blockage. As he stopped to discuss his plight with officials, noting that he would have to quit the race to get to a hospital before his bladder burst, a spectator overheard the conversation and offered him the use of a "spare" catheter he had in his car. Johncock repaired to a rest room, administered the catheter, and returned to finish the race.

-- Shipments of Ford passenger vans arrive each month in Baltimore from a Ford plant in Turkey, but each time, workers immediately rip out the non-driver seats and replace the side windows with steel. The reason, according to a September Wall Street Journal report, is to avoid an expensive tariff on imported "delivery vans," which is 10 times the tariff on "passenger vans." Ford found it less costly to re-fit passenger vans than to acknowledge importing delivery vans. Ironically, the tariff was imposed in 1963 specifically to protect the U.S. auto industry from foreign imports.

-- In October, Poland's Polskieradio reported a settlement in the 18-month legal battle between two neighbors in Mikowice over a plastic bucket worth about $4.50. One had sued, accusing the other of ruining the bucket by kicking it. The respondent had elaborately offered proof of innocence by submitting video of the neighbor continuing to use the bucket as before, but the neighbor had countered by calling an "expert" witness, who examined the bucket and concluded that it was probably damaged.

-- Lisa Blair and her six sisters were enjoying a Thanksgiving meal in Hamilton, Ontario (in Canada, Thanksgiving was Oct. 12), when they began noticing suspicious flecks in the food and realized that their necklace lockets, containing the ashes of their mother (who had passed away two weeks earlier) were leaking. A local funeral services store restocked and sealed the lockets.

-- In November, researchers roaming the depths of Scotland's Loch Ness in a submarine, looking for the legendary monster, reported finding mainly "hundreds of thousands" of golf balls at the bottom, from popular use of the lake as a driving range. A recent Danish Golf Association report lamented the slow decomposition of golf balls (taking 100 to 1,000 years), and one U.K. legislator has called golf balls "humanity's signature litter."

-- The October "Miss Asia" beauty pageant in Hong Kong mostly followed a traditional script, but special bonus competitions were added, according to a report in The Straits Times. Contestants appeared behind boards with only certain body parts exposed so that judges could comment without knowing which woman they were observing. Breast-judging turned out well for each of the three finalists, as did waist-judging. However, the judges had harsh words for two contestants' hair. Wang Zhi Fei was criticized for "lots of dandruff and oily scalp," and Wang Chen learned the hard way that she had significant "signs of hair loss."

-- In September, prominent chocolate food engineer Hanna Frederick introduced her latest concoction at a conference of the Meat Industry Association in New Zealand: dark chocolate truffles tinged with venison and salami. Said Frederick: "There's this smoky taste to start, then a strong chocolate flavor comes in, and at the end you have this wonderful taste of salami." Earlier in the year, she had introduced chocolates injected with Tongkat Ali, a Southeast Asian herb reputed to stimulate testosterone production.

-- In August, the Thorpe Park amusement facility in Chertsey, England, posted signs on its roller coaster admonishing riders not to wave their arms during the ride. According to director Mike Vallis: "We've found that when the temperature tops 77 degrees (F), the level of unpleasant (underarm) smells can become unacceptable, and we do receive complaints."

(1) Kenny Jackson, 30, was arrested in St. Paul, Minn., in August after rampaging through his house, destroying furniture and menacing his son, 4, upon finding the boy wearing a blue shirt, which happens to be the color favored by a rival gang (to Jackson's Bloods). (2) In April, Helen Ford was evicted from her home of 30 years in Cambridge, Mass., the result of, she says, being tricked by her son six years earlier to sign the house over to his "business associates" (who recently defaulted on the mortgage). Her son is former college and pro basketball player Rumeal Robinson, 43, who is under federal indictment for bank fraud. Ford (for exemplary community service) and Robinson (for basketball fame) are both prominent citizens of Cambridge, and the house in question sits on Rumeal Robinson Way.

(1) The victim of fatal gunshots in Buffalo, N.Y., in October: Mr. Mister Rogers, 23. (2) Arrested for flashing women in Annville Township, Pa., in October: Mr. Hung Thanh Vo, 19. (3) Sentenced for burglary in Portland, Ore., in November (for a December 2008 incident in which he, nude, was detained by the 88-year-old female homeowner, who had grabbed hold of his scrotum): Mr. Michael G. Dick, 47. (4) Arrested (for the second time; the first was also reported in News of the Weird) for prostitution in Forsyth County, Ga., in October: massage parlor employee Mi Suk Yang, 47.

(1) From a police report in the Oct. 6 Jersey Journal: An out-of-state visitor who parked his Ferrari Modena overnight on the street in Jersey City returned the next morning to find the car burglarized and a $100,000 Audemars Piguet watch that he had left inside the car missing. (2) A still-unidentified driver who had just spent $1.25 million on a 2006 Bugatti Veyron EB (at 1001 horsepower, reputed to be the fastest and most expensive car in the world) was distracted by a low-flying pelican while driving in LaMarque, Texas (on Galveston Island), and accidently drove the car into a salt-water inlet.

Widower Charlie Bonn Kemp, 77, of Vero Beach, Fla., took especially hard the loss of his wife, Lee, in 2006 because she was unquestionably the love of his life even though the couple had stopped having sex even before they got married in 1978. According to a June 2007 St. Petersburg Times profile, Lee had been Charlie's gay lover for 26 years, until revealing in 1978 that he could no longer resist the urge to become a woman, and especially a housewife. Such was their attachment that, following Lee's full sex change, she and Charlie decided to take advantage of Lee's new status and legally marry, and continue their devotion, even though Charlie remained sexually attracted only to men.