-- The Yaohnanen tribe on the South Pacific island of Tanna believe their true ancestral god is Britain's Prince Philip (based on photographs of him with the queen during a 1974 visit to Tanna's mother nation of Vanuatu) and believe he promised he would return for good on his 89th birthday (June 10, 2010). Although the prince has kept in touch, he failed to show up for the grand celebration, but fortunately, Scottish university student Marc Rayner was on the island, working as a volunteer teacher, and stepped in for the prince, which meant that he and not the duke of Edinburgh got to wear the "formal" ceremonial penis sheath appropriate for such special events.

-- Iconic female beauty in Mauritania (and in a few other African societies, as News of the Weird has reported) regards "rolling layers of fat" as the height of sexiness, according to a July dispatch by Marie Claire magazine, and professional force-feeders earn the equivalent of about $200 each from parents for bulking up their young daughters in boot camps that sometimes serve animal fat as drinks and apply the cattle-thickening drug Oradexon. "The stomach flab should cascade; the thighs should overlap; and the neck should have thick ripples," said Aminetou Mint Elhacen, the feeding drill sergeant. Some girls rebel, but others embrace their new bodies. Said one, "When I realized the power I had over men, I started to enjoy being fat."

-- Though most victims seemed baffled or distressed by the behavior of Sherwin Shayegan, 27, another thought him "completely harmless." From time to time (allegedly dating to at least 2006), Shayegan befriends high-school male athletes, questions them as a reporter would, and finally, jumps on their backs and demands "piggyback" rides. No other overtures are made, and the principal complaint about Shayegan, after the shock wears off, seems to be his obnoxiousness. His latest arrest took place in May in Tualatin, Ore., near his earlier haunts in Washington state.

-- "It's springtime in Japan, and that means (two) things," wrote GlobalPost.com in March: penis festivals and vagina festivals. Held annually in several locations (for the last 1,500 years, some say), with the best-known taking place at Komaki City's Tagata shrine in March, they were initially spiritual -- as prayers for procreation and crop fertility. However, they have grown into carnivals for tourists and children of all ages. Most Western visitors hardly believe what they're seeing: huge, parade-float-sized phalluses heavy-lifted through the street and giggling children brandishing toy penises and vaginas (to make offerings of them at local temples).

-- Another Pampered Pet: Gail Posner (the widow of legendary hostile-takeover executive Victor Posner) died in March in south Florida but left a will that endowed her beloved Chihuahua Conchita (and two other, less-loved dogs) a $3 million trust fund plus the run of her $8.3 million mansion for their remaining dog years. (After all, Conchita has a style to maintain, including a four-season wardrobe, diamond jewelry and full-time staff.) Mrs. Posner's only living child, Bret Carr, who admits he had issues with his mother, is challenging her $26 million-plus will (that left him $1 million), mostly because, he said, Mrs. Posner's staff and bodyguards suspiciously wound up with the bulk of the riches on the pretense that they would be caring for Conchita.

-- More British Welfare Spongers: In May, the Daily Mail profiled the Houghtons of Crawley, West Sussex (Lee, 42, and Jane and their five youngest children), who live in free government housing and draw monthly benefits of the equivalent of about $1,600, without doing a bit of work -- because Lee has a "personality disorder" and daughter Chelsea, 16, has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and needs a caretaker to help with her baby. The Houghtons admit that they spoil their kids at Christmas with lavish gifts, and the reporter noted the presence of four TVs, two Xboxes, three DVD players, mobile phones for everyone, and a computer and laptop. Lee is unpopular with his neighbors, who call the police on him frequently because of his drinking. Said Lee, "If people want to work, good for them. I would if I could...."

-- News of the Weird has been among those taunting the Scottish over the years for their culinary devotion to haggis (sheep's stomach, boiled, with liver, heart or lung, accompanied by oatmeal, suet, onions and various "spices"), but the Edinburgh chocolatier Nadia Ellingham recently answered -- with "haggis chocolates," which are thankfully meat-free but contain the familiar haggis spices.

-- More Bad Multitaskers: Driver Bryan Parslow, 19, injured himself and three passengers when he crashed into a tree near Wheatland, N.Y., in May. He was playing "hold your breath" with the others and passed out. And in July, Lora Hunt, 49, was sentenced to 18 months in jail in the crash that killed a woman on a motorcycle in Lake County, Ill., in 2009. Hunt was so preoccupied painting her nails (polish was splashed all over the car's interior) that she never even moved to apply the brakes before the collision. On the other hand, Amanda McBride, 29, is such an excellent multitasker that she was able to drive herself to the hospital in Bemidji, Minn., in May while giving birth. (Her husband was in the front seat but, seizure-prone, he does not drive.) The child emerged just as Amanda pulled into the hospital parking lot. "(H)e just slid out," she said. "It really wasn't bad at all."

-- One of the more famous cultural landmarks in Britain's South Tyneside is an 1890 toilet, "Westoe Netty," commemorated in a 1972 painting and which remained on display at the Beamish Museum. In March, it was relocated within the building because, as News of the Weird has reported about other museum-display toilets, a visitor could not resist using it. The toilet will be moved to a nonpublic part of the building and be hooked up to public plumbing.

-- Face Tattoos Still a Handicap for Criminals: Royce Spottedbird Jr., 23, apparently once thought it cool to have his name tattooed on his neck. However, when he was pulled over in a routine traffic stop in April in Butte, Mont., and feared a warrant might be out on him, he gave the officer a bogus name. When he could not explain what "Royce Spottedbird Jr." was doing on his neck, he was detained for obstruction of justice and eventually pleaded guilty. (And he was wrong about the warrant.)

-- News of the Weird has reported on several mothers' desires to prolong breastfeeding past the culturally normal age, some continuing well after the child's sixth birthday. The issue flared again in July in Melbourne, Australia, when a 6-year-old boy's birth mother (who had relinquished the child as an infant) used breastfeeding as a strategy to try to wrest him away from the caretakers who had raised him. During sanctioned visitations with the child, the birth mother had pressured the boy to suckle, but he rebelled, and the caretaker obtained a judicial order against further breastfeeding.

-- Americans continue to agonize over government "giveaways," but as News of the Weird has noted several times, somehow federal farm subsidies continue unabated -- even though much of the money no longer goes to cuddly "family farms" but to rich urban industrialists who hardly know a plow from a sow. In the latest accounting from Environmental Working Group records, the weekly New York Press revealed such "agrarian" handout-seekers as Manhattan billionaires Leonard Lauder and David Rockefeller -- and Rockefeller's son Mark. (In fact, for 10 years now, the federal government has handed Mark $54,500 a year not to grow anything on his 5,000 acres in Idaho. According to the Press, Mark never intended to, in that he only bought the land because it was adjacent to the upscale, socialite-hangout South Fork fly-fishing lodge he runs next door.)

A recent surge of neo-Nazism in several countries -- including, improbably, Israel, and Mongolia (where some dark-skinned natives are rabidly anti-Chinese) -- has generally been denounced, but Corinna Burt credited it with rescuing her from a life of acting in pornographic videos. According to a hate-group watchdog, the Portland, Ore., woman is "the most prominent National Socialist Movement organizer in the Pacific Northwest." In an August interview with Gawker.com, the white-supremacist Burt (a mother of two and a professional embalmer who is also into bodybuilding) said she terminated her porn career (as "Cori Lou," doing mostly bondage and "torture" films) because, "If we (Caucasians) consider ourselves a master race then we have to act like a master race, not degenerates."

-- Though volunteers got the project started in May, Ventnor City, N.J., continued through the summer to seek financial donations to finish the new restrooms that provide relief for those visiting the town's Atlantic shore. Said Commissioner Stephen Weintrob, "How would someone like to have a toilet named after themselves, or a urinal or sink?"

-- A Treasury Department inspector general reported in June that, out of 2.6 million applicants for federal mortgage relief, 14,000 "home buyers" wrongly received tax credits and that in fact, 1,300 of them were living in prison at the time of filing, including 241 serving life sentences. Sixty-seven of the 14,000 received tax credits for the same house, and 87 more potentially fraudulent tax-credit applications were filed by Internal Revenue Service employees.

-- Things That Shouldn't Get Backlogged: (1) California requires that if a sex offender's GPS tagging device signals that he's in a prohibited area, parole agents must immediately respond, but that law was easier to pass than to implement. As of June, according to a San Diego Union-Tribune investigation, the state had fallen about 31,000 responses behind. (2) A July Illinois law requires that all hospital "rape kits" on victims be tested for blood and DNA (in that finding a rapist, and certainly convicting him, without such evidence is often hopelessly difficult). Until now, 80 percent of the rape kits taken in the state had sat, untested. (As TV police dramas emphasize, many rape victims are reluctant to submit to the indignity of swabbing and photographing so soon after being violated and comply only because detectives assure them of the rape kit's importance.)

-- It is common knowledge that American corporations avoid taxes by running U.S. profits through offshore "tax havens" like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, but a May Bloomberg Business Week investigation traced the specific steps that the pharmaceutical company Forest Labs takes to short the U.S. Treasury. Although Forest's anti-depressant Lexapro is sold only in the U.S., the company's patent is held by an Irish subsidiary (and since 2005, shared with a Bermuda subsidiary in a tax-code hocus-pocus that insiders call the "Double Irish"), which allows the vast majority of the $2 billion Forest earns a year on Lexapro to be taxed at Ireland's low rate (and at Bermuda's rate of zero). Bloomberg estimates that the U.S. Treasury loses at least $60 billion annually by corporations' "transfer pricing" -- enough to pay for the entire Department of Homeland Security for a year.

-- Time magazine reported in August that among the entrants in this year's "Detroit Hair Wars" (showcasing 34 stylists working with 300 models) were The Hummer (stylist: "Little Willie"), in which a mass of extensions is shaped to resemble the vehicle, including four large tires -- with "metal" wheels and front grid added -- sitting upon the styled hair of model Sharv Bailey; and Beautiful Butterfly (stylist: Niecy Hayes), featuring extensions thinned, teased and stretched into four artistic "wings" arising from the styled hair of model Taja Hiu. Both stylings appear to be at least 2 feet long, dwarfing the models' heads, and take at least 10 hours to prepare.

-- Featured at London's Royal College of Art in June was Hiromi Ozaki's "Menstruation Machine" -- a wearable contraption that enables men to experience the two primary symptoms of the "curse." It periodically generates abdominal pain, and its reservoir permits liquid ("blood") to be stored and released over several days' time.

-- In July, Manuel "Lefty" Hernandez, 28, was charged in Springfield, Mass., with snatching a man's wallet (which he probably did with his left hand, which is his only hand). (If he had had a weapon, police could have charged him with a felony, but it was only a misdemeanor because Hernandez was unarmed.)

-- A frightening August headline in The Union (Grass Valley, Calif.): "S.W.A.T. Team Requested for Violent Midgets." In fact, they were steroid-using, bodybuilder midgets, headed by an apparently particularly dangerous "lead female."

In March, four NYPD officers, acting on department intelligence, went to the home of Walter and Rose Martin in Brooklyn, N.Y., looking for a suspect, and broke a window as they worked their way inside. The Martins, retired and in their 80s, were clean, and a police spokesman later admitted that officers had wrongly visited or raided the Martins' home more than 50 times since 2002 because of a stubborn computer glitch. When the software was originally installed, an operator tested it by mindlessly typing in a random address, but that happened to be the Martins' house, and thus the visits and raids began. The Martins say they have been assured several times that the problem had been corrected, but evidently their address has wormed its way too deep into the system.

Recurring Themes: Eugene Palmer, 40, wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun, was arrested in Brunswick, Ga., in March as he tried to rush into a SunTrust bank during business hours but became frustrated by the locked doors -- in that it was a drive-thru-only branch. (2) Danny Spencer, 31, and a partner were arrested in Bridgeport, Conn., in December as they called attention to themselves by driving through the city dragging a half-ton safe they could not crack open at the Madison Auto store they had just burglarized. (3) Ethan Ayers, 18, and a partner were arrested in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in March after an alleged mugging. Police found them easily, as their transportation that night was a relative's van advertising in large lettering, "Big Earl's Gold Mine," a Des Moines strip club.

(1) After surveying 374 waitresses, professor Michael Lynn, who teaches marketing and tourism at Cornell University, concluded that customers left larger tips to those with certain physical characteristics such as being slender, being blond or having big breasts. Lynn told the Cornell Daily Sun in May that his study was important in helping potential waitresses gauge their "prospects in the industry." (2) Perhaps more usefully, University of Central Lancashire (England) researchers writing in a recent Archives of Sexual Behavior reported that women achieve orgasm more often during foreplay than intercourse but that they more frequently emit orgasm-signaling "vocalizations" just before, or simultaneously with, male ejaculation.

In May (1996), Minneapolis artist Judy Olausen's hardcover photographic essay "Mother" went on sale, featuring her 70-year-old mom as a series of passive, subordinate characters. Included were her mother kneeling on all fours with a pane of glass on her back ("Mother as Coffee Table"), lying alongside a highway ("Mother as Road Kill"), and sprawled at an entrance ("Mother as Doormat"). Said Olausen, "My brothers think I'm torturing my mother," but actually, "I'm immortalizing her."

Woody Allen Joke Come to Life: Shirley Anderson, 71, is suing her son Ken, 46, in Vancouver, British Columbia, for parental support -- even though she and his father had abandoned him when he was 15 (having one day just picked up and moved and, as in Mr. Allen's joke, "left no forwarding address"). An archaic 1922 law in British Columbia obligates adult children to support "dependent" parents, and in 2000, Shirley sued, demanding $350(Cdn) per month each from Ken, who is a trucker, and his four siblings (three of whom were at least 17 when the parents left and not considered "abandoned"). A judge awarded token interim support pending a final resolution, which after years of paperwork and delay was to come in early August but has been postponed once again.

-- We Have Rules! A team of anglers from Hatteras, N.C., had first place wrapped up in the prestigious Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament in June, salivating over their $1,231,575 prize money (including a bonus for single-largest catch), when judges discovered that one member of the Hatteras crew, Peter Wann, had not gotten a $30 North Carolina coastal recreational fishing license before their boat pushed off that day. Under the rules, the entire team was disqualified, and the runner-up, from Cape Carteret, N.C., got the money.

-- They Don't Make "Drug Lords" Like They Used To: (1) Widely feared Jamaican drug kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke was arrested in June and extradited to New York City after being picked up wearing women's clothes and a 1970s-style Afro wig too small for his head (with a pink wig on standby). The Jamaica Observer reported that Coke wet his pants as he was arrested. (2) Longtime South African drug lord Fadwaan "Fat" Murphy, speaking at a bail hearing in January in Cape Town, disclosed that he was born a hermaphrodite and has a separate identity ("Hilary"), which became relevant when arresting officers discovered that Murphy was wearing a strap-on penis. Nonetheless, he insists he is a man: "I look like a man. I talk like a man. I am a man."

-- "(A) new high point" in electoral politics in Philadelphia occurred this spring, according to the publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, when openly gay state Rep. Babette Josephs "outed" her primary opponent Gregg Kravitz as straight. According to Josephs, the heterosexual Kravitz was posing in Josephs' gay-friendly 182nd District as bi-sexual. Kravitz said he is "attracted" to both men and women and found Josephs' comments offensive.

-- Charmed Lives: (1) Recently while visiting her childhood home of Bishop, Texas, Joan Ginther won a Texas lottery drawing for the fourth time, taking home a $10 million first prize to lift her career Texas lottery winnings to $20.4 million. (By then, she had already moved to Las Vegas.) (2) At the other end of luck, British farm worker Mick Wilary, 58, was hospitalized in April after machinery crushed both his legs. According to the Daily Telegraph, Wilary has also had his ankles broken (twice), ribs cracked, finger cut off, head split open, collarbone broken and fingers broken, and been stabbed, and been frequently kicked by livestock.

-- Thinking Large: (1) Northern Ireland farmer William Taylor introduced his prototype Livestock Power Mill recently and claimed that the world's 1.3 billion cattle, using treadmills for eight hours a day, could produce 6 percent of the world's electricity requirement. (The cow must keep walking to avoid sliding down an incline.) (2) California gubernatorial candidate Douglas Hughes proposed this year to solve the state's child-molestation problem by developing an island 30 miles off the Santa Barbara coast to contain the state's pedophiles, who would, according to The Daily Caller, "write their own constitution, build their own infrastructure and maintain a society."

-- Avoiding Marriage, the Hard Way: A female lawyer from Puri, India, in her mid-30s told The Times of India in July that she recently underwent gender-reassignment surgery in part to avoid the male-female marriage that her parents were arranging for her: "I did not want a family life which is being forced on girls in our society."

-- The Power of Books: Speaking to the city council of Crestview, Fla., in July, the founder of the local "Protect Our Children" citizens' group said her son (whose age was not revealed) had "lost his mind" when he looked through the violent Japanese "manga" graphic novel he found on open stacks in the Crestview Public Library. "Now," she said, "he's in a home for extensive therapy."

-- North Korea's World Cup adventure began auspiciously with a hard-fought 2-1 loss to a superior Brazil team, leading the government to release photographs of the North Korean coach supposedly receiving long-distance telepathic strategy signals during the game from Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il. With the country's hopes up, the team was embarrassed in two subsequent games and dispatched from the tournament. Back home in July, the players were paraded into the People's Palace of Culture in Pyongyang, where for six hours, they were publicly denounced and taunted. Coach Kim Jong-huh is said to fear an eventual violent end.

-- Just before the World Cup matches, North Korea issued a public demand for compensation, blaming the United States for almost every single misfortune suffered by the country in the last 65 years. Its official news agency assigned the U.S. responsibility for 5 million people injured, kidnapped, missing or killed -- as well as for economic damages resulting from U.S.-led trade sanctions. According to the news agency, America can atone for the losses by sending North Korea $65 trillion.

(1) James Burden, 55, was convicted of indecent exposure in Scotland's Falkirk Sheriff Court in June based on a March incident when a neighbor looked out her window before dawn and saw Burden, naked, smoking a cigarette and masturbating while bouncing on her family's outdoor trampoline. Burden said he did not know anyone would be watching at that hour. (2) In New Zealand's Auckland District Court in June, Judge Mary Beth Sharp dismissed an elderly male juror from a trial involving sexual abuse because the man disclosed, under questioning, that he had worn a condom under his clothes in the jury box because the testimony was making him aroused.

(1) Justin Johnson, 21, was arrested in Bloomfield, Ind., in July after failing to get a Bloomfield State Bank branch to cash his bogus check for $1 million, which he presented to a teller in the bank's drive-through window. Optimistic, he had handed over his driver's license for ID along with the check. (2) Scot Davis, 52, was charged with robbing the All in the Family bar in Des Moines, Iowa, in March. Davis, a contractor who is friends with bartender Gladys York, had spent the evening at the bar passing out business cards before leaving. Said York, when Davis re-appeared carrying a .22-caliber rifle and demanding money, "Scot, What the (expletive)?" Said an officer, "This is not the hardest case our detectives have ever had to investigate."

Ron Kravitz, 22, filed a lawsuit in June (1989) against Mickey Mantle Sports Productions Inc., for injuries he suffered the previous September while watching a company baseball video in his den to improve his base-stealing technique. While attempting to "beat" Tom Seaver's pickoff throw to "first base," he crashed into a table, resulting in torn ligaments and a severed tendon, which he thought somehow was the production company's fault.