Civilization in Decline: "Tom Tom," a 2-year-old Yorkshire terrier, was laid to rest at the Oakland Cemetery in Monticello, Ark., in March, even though he was in good health. His owner, Donald Ellis, had just passed away but had left explicit instructions that he wanted Tom Tom buried along with him, and not later on, because he felt that no one could love Tom Tom as much as he did. Ellis' reluctant family finally took Tom Tom to a veterinarian, who tried to change their minds but ultimately acquiesced and euthanized the dog out of fear that they would put him down anyway, less humanely.

-- Unlikely Successes: (1) In July, the world's largest four-day rodeo, the Pendleton Round-Up, released a signature-brand men's cologne, Let'er Buck, to mark the company's 100th anniversary. A spokesman claimed that the $69-a-bottle product has the fragrance of "sensuous musk and warm sandalwood." (2) Thai Airways announced in June that it would begin selling seven curry sauces directly from its airline food menu in take-out shops in Bangkok, Phuket and Chiang Mai.

-- Shaking Up the Condom Market: (1) The Swiss government announced in March that it would help bring to market "extra"-small condoms for boys as young as 12. (The decrease in circumference from a "standard" condom would be about 5/16th of an inch.) (2) The Washington Post reported in May that high school and college-age adults had complained that condoms given away by the District of Columbia's HIV-prevention program were of too-low quality and that the city should spring for deluxe Trojan Magnums (in gold-colored packaging, giving them, said a city official, "a little bit of the bling quality").

-- In July, the prominent BrewDog brewery in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, began producing the world's strongest (and most expensive) beer, called The End of History, which is 55 percent alcohol and sells for 500 pounds ($780) a bottle. As if to enrage both anti-alcohol and animal-welfare activists, BrewDog released the first 12 bottles taxidermally inserted inside the carcasses of roadkill (seven ermines, four squirrels and a rabbit). Said company founder James Watt, BrewDog aims to "elevate the status of beer in our culture."

-- At least two employees at the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar, Calif., were accused in May of carrying on a makeshift "beauty salon" inside the facility's Neonatal Intensive Care unit. Allegedly, eyebrow waxes and manicures were given near sensitive equipment used to combat infant infections and respiratory disorders. An investigation is continuing, but a hospital official said the notion of a "salon" was overblown and that perhaps a few nail treatments were involved. (Simultaneously, the facility is being investigated for taking kickbacks from nursing homes for placing discharged Medicare or Medicaid patients into those homes.)

-- On an August ABC-TV "Nightline," professor Matt Frerking of Oregon Health and Science University allowed cameras to record his narcolepsy-like "cataplexy," which causes temporary muscle paralysis each time he contemplates romantic love (hugging or holding hands with his wife, viewing wedding pictures, witnessing affectionate couples). He noted that he can often fend off an impending attack by concentrating on his own lab work in neuroscience.

-- Breakthroughs: (1) When Ron Sveden's left lung collapsed in May, doctors initially diagnosed a tumor, but on closer inspection learned that Sveden, of Brewster, Mass., had ingested a plant seed that had somehow migrated to his lung and sprouted open. He is recovering. (2) A Pomeranian puppy recently found wandering in San Bernardino, Calif., was diagnosed with reproductive-organ complications that destined him to be put down, but a woman volunteered $1,165 for "transgender" surgery. "Red" is now happy and ready for adoption (and of course neutered).

-- To most, the toilet is a functional appliance, but to thoughtful people, it can be an instrument upon which creativity blossoms. Thus, the price tags were high this summer when commodes belonging to two literary giants of the 20th century went on sale. In August, a gaudily designed toilet from John Lennon's 1969-71 residence in Berkshire, England, fetched 9,500 pounds (about $14,740) at a Liverpool auction, and a North Carolina collectibles dealer opened bids on the toilet that long served reclusive author J.D. Salinger at his home in Cornish, N.H. The dealer's initial price was $1 million because, "Who knows how many of Salinger's stories were thought up and written while (he) sat on this throne!"

-- Blairsville, Ga., advertising agency owner Mike Patterson introduced the "first ever patriotic home-based business opportunity" recently, and, though it resembles a traditional "pyramid" scheme, Patterson termed it "network marketing" and an important way to fight government "tyranny." For joining up at $12, $24 or $50 a year and enlisting others, Patterson promises recruiters "up to $50,000" (actually, up to $283,000 by securing $50 memberships). On spelling- and grammar-challenged Web pages, Patterson laid out salesmanship "levels" and "matrix" patterns that promise a member 60 cents per $24 recruit -- leaving $12 for patriotic programs and $11.40 for Patterson. (For some reason, after rounding up 29,523 members -- Level 9 -- the recruiter payout drops to 15 cents each.)

-- In September, the Romanian Senate rejected a proposal by two legislators to regulate, and tax, fortune-tellers and "witches," even though the government is otherwise desperately seeking new sources of revenue. A prominent witch had complained about potential record-keeping burdens on the "profession," but one of the bill's sponsors told the Associated Press he thinks opposition came from lawmakers who were frightened of having spells and curses placed on them.

Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood continues in the thrall of what forensic experts everywhere discredit as pseudo-science (everywhere except Mississippi, that is). Hence, death-row inmate Eddie Lee Howard's date with destiny approaches. Although only scant physical evidence was presented at his murder trial, the jury famously heard from local dentist Michael West, who, using fancy equipment, somehow identified scratches on the victim's body as "bite marks" unique to Howard's teeth. (In 2008, News of the Weird mentioned the DNA-inspired release of two accused Mississippi rapists who had served 12 years in prison -- having also been positively identified by West on the basis of bite marks. Between then and now, West's theories have been nationally, resoundingly rebuked, but the attorney general has chosen to defend Howard's original, West-based conviction rather than look anew at the case, and Howard remains marked for execution.)

Disrespecting Electricity: (1) New Hampshire teenager Kyle Dubois was critically injured in March when, during an electrical trades class, he and fellow students attached clamps to his nipples and plugged in an electrical cord. Dubois suffered permanent brain damage, and in August his parents sued the school district and the teacher. (2) As an alternative to the surgical scalpel, zapping a penis with electricity can produce a cleaner cut and with much less blood, according to a team of doctors from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in Taiwan. Best of all, their July report noted, since the experiments were too risky for ordinary test volunteers, they performed all procedures on themselves.

In 2001, a woman filed a federal lawsuit in Minnesota (Engleson vs. Little Falls Area Chamber of Commerce), seeking to recover for injuries she suffered when she tripped over an orange traffic cone. The lawsuit was dismissed in November 2002 by Judge Donovan Frank, who said that since the very purpose of the bright orange traffic cone is to warn of imminent risk, citizens should not need to be warned that they are approaching bright orange traffic cones.

More than a half-million children in the U.S. take antipsychotic medicines and (reported The New York Times in September) "(e)ven the most reluctant (doctors) encounter a marketing juggernaut that has made antipsychotics the nation's top-selling class of drugs by revenue, $14.6 billion last year, with prominent promotions aimed at treating children." In one psychiatrist's waiting room, observed the Times reporter, "(C)hildren played with Legos stamped with the word Risperdal" (an antipsychotic made by Johnson & Johnson). (The company, which recently lost its patent on the drug, said it has stopped handing out the toys -- which it insisted were not toys at all but advertising reminders for doctors.)

-- Three self-described bisexual men filed a federal lawsuit in April against the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance for disqualifying them from the Gay Softball World Series in Seattle in 2008 because they were not sufficiently gay. Teams were limited to two heterosexuals, and when the men's team won second place, questions were raised about the three until organizers took them aside and asked "intrusive" questions about their sexual attractions and desires. Ultimately, they were disqualified as being too straight. (The alliance acknowledged that it has no standards for judging gayness level, but explained, as a private organization, that it is not subject to federal law.)

-- Justine Winter, 17, who was badly injured in a car crash in Flathead County, Mont., in March 2009, filed a lawsuit in July 2010 against the pregnant driver whom she had hit and killed (along with the woman's 13-year-old son). However, the local prosecutor has already charged Winter with two counts of homicide, based on text messages she had sent her estranged boyfriend minutes before the crash. "If I won (you)," she texted, "I would have you ... and I wouldn't crash my car." Also, "That's why I'm going to wreck my car. Because all I can do is f--- up. Because I am a terrible person, and I know it." Also, "Good bye ... my last words." That was then; nowadays, Winter says the woman she hit was driving negligently and that construction companies failed to maintain the roadway properly.

-- Craig Smallwood of Hawaii filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year against the makers of the online virtual-world game "Lineage II" for failing to warn him that he would become so addicted to playing it that he would be "unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends." (He claims to have spent 20,000 hours over five years playing.) In August, Judge Alan Kay declined to dismiss the lawsuit and set it for trial.

-- Between suicide, murder, assault, drunken driving and drug use, the soldiers of the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division, at Fort Bliss, Texas, have been statistically in greater peril while stateside than while deployed in Iraq. "Being back (home) is what we don't do well," Lt. Col. David Wilson told The New York Times in July. During the last year in Iraq, the brigade lost only one soldier to combat, but in the previous year stateside, seven were killed and four people died in crimes committed by brigade personnel.

-- Challenging Times for Labor Unions: (1) At a rally in Washington, D.C., in July denouncing employers who hire nonunion carpenters, many of the chanting protesters were nonunion day workers hired by the carpenters' union to make the demonstration look bigger, according to a Wall Street Journal report. (2) In August, Jim Callaghan, a long-time writer on the headquarters staff of the United Federation of Teachers, was fired after trying to organize his colleagues into their own union local. Callaghan said that UFT staff deserve the same protections as the teachers they represent. (A UFT spokesman said most UFT employees are already unionized.)

-- The Republican candidate for governor of Colorado, Dan Maes, explained in August that he began the campaign supporting "green" programs, such as Denver's innovative "bike-sharing" project, but that he has rethought his position. Now, he told reporters, environmental programs are, in reality, plots. "(I)f you do your homework and research, you realize that (encouraging people to park their cars and ride bikes in the city) is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty."

-- The New South Wales (Australia) anti-corruption commission, at a hearing in August, got engineer Don Gamage to admit that he "exaggerated" his credentials to get a series of government contracts. Nonetheless, Gamage was defiant: "If I didn't exaggerate," he explained, "the people of NSW ... would have missed (out on) the service and the benefit that I delivered."

-- Bruce Tuck, who confessed in December to a series of rapes in Martin, Tenn., and was sentenced to 60 years in prison (and who faces still more charges), tried to withdraw his confession in June, complaining that he was not of sound mind at the time because, though weighing 275 pounds, he was being held in jail on a "lettuce-only" diet. Thus, he said, he was unusually vulnerable when a detective offered him a bag of chips to admit to the charges.

After an historic site along the lower Jordan River was closed for a day in July for public health reasons, an environmental group, EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth (Middle East), called for a permanent suspension until the governments of Israel and Jordan (on either side of the river) assure that it is safe from agricultural discharge and untreated sewage. Facing sites on the river both claim to be where John the Baptist baptized Jesus, and pilgrims flock to the sites to be baptized, as well.

Lame: (1) Gerald Maxwell, 39, a convicted burglar who was caught in August breaking into the same Sarasota, Fla., home he had broken into last year, quickly tried to explain his innocence to officers. "I was going back in there to leave a thank-you note, because I'm the guy who burglarized this place last year (and) I just got out of jail." (2) Terrance Mitchell was arrested in Waterloo, Iowa, in July, identified from video as the man who tried to shoplift surveillance equipment from a store. Mitchell was thus apparently unaware that stores that sell surveillance equipment might operate surveillance cameras.

Michael Peterson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife, Kathleen, and sentenced to life in prison in North Carolina, but T. Lawrence Pollard, who was one of Peterson's lawyers, has relentlessly offered the alternative theory (though not during Peterson's trial) that Mrs. Peterson was instead killed by a rogue owl one night in her home. Earlier this year, Raleigh's News & Observer wrote a series on deficiencies in the state's original investigation (though not about owls), and Pollard filed affidavits in August -- one by an owl expert that Mrs. Peterson's injuries were consistent with an attack by "a large bird of prey" and the other by scientists who offered to DNA-test what investigators say might be a faint microscopic "feather" from the crime scene.

The lawyer for a former Fort Lauderdale, Fla., phone-sex worker announced to reporters in November (1999) that he had won a workers' compensation settlement for his client based on her claim of carpal tunnel syndrome due to being encouraged to masturbate on the job as much as seven times a day. Steven Slootsky said his client (who declined to be publicly identified) accepted the settlement to avoid the embarrassment of testifying, even though the money is not enough to reimburse her for the surgery she required on both hands.

Professional Training Required: The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced in August that it had contract work for up to 2,100 language specialists to transcribe wiretaps, with immediate needs in the Atlanta field office for 144 Spanish experts, along with 12 for Vietnamese, and nine each for Korean, Farsi and "Ebonics." Ebonics is recognized by some linguists as the "nonstandard" form of English spoken by African-Americans. (In one example cited by the Associated Press, offered by Stanford professor John Rickford, "th" endings are pronounced as "f," e.g., "both" as "boaf.")

-- Texas State Rep. Joe Driver, an 18-year House veteran whose website notes his opposition to "big spending habits of liberals in government," was revealed in August to have been routinely double-billing the government for travel expenses and to have been genuinely surprised to learn that voters and colleagues might find that improper. Wrote the Associated Press: "Driver insists he thought the double-billing was perfectly appropriate -- until talking about it with the AP," at which point he appeared to change his mind. "Well, it doesn't sound (appropriate) now (if) you bring it up that way," he admitted. "(To learn that) pretty well screws my week." For at least five years, Driver had been collecting from the government for expenses already reimbursed by his re-election campaign.

-- Every weekend for the last four years, parishioners from the New Beginnings Ministries church in Warsaw, Ohio, have gathered in front of The Fox Hole strip club in nearby Newcastle and tried to shame customers by photographing them and posting their license plate numbers on the Internet, and brandishing hellfire-threatening signs. Recently, however, Fox Hole's strippers joined the duel, congregating on Sundays in front of New Beginnings, wearing bikinis and "see-through" shorts, dancing scandalously, squirting each other with jumbo water guns, and wielding their own Bible-quoting signs to greet the day's worshippers.

-- The Los Angeles Unified School District has laid off nearly 3,000 teachers in the last two years, faces a $640 million annual shortfall, and runs some of the country's worst-performing classrooms. However, in the last three years, it has opened three luxurious "Taj Mahal" schools costing $1.1 billion, including the $578 million, amenity-rich, architecturally grand Robert F. Kennedy school, opening in September. "New buildings are nice," said one California Board of Education member, but not "when they're run by the same people who've given us a 50 percent dropout rate." Included in these elegant palaces are a state-of-the-art swimming pool, manicured public park, a restaurant-quality kitchen, modernistic towers, a cushioned dance floor -- and of course lavish offices for teachers and administrators.

-- An Indian in the western Brazilian state of Rondonia lives completely isolated from humans -- the last survivor of his never-contacted tribe. However, the government has taken the unprecedented step of protecting 31 square miles of his habitat, monitored against trespass by technology including heat-sensitive flyovers -- even though developers point out that 31 square miles of farming could produce food for many more Brazilians than "one." The man was spotted 15 years ago, appearing to be about 30 years old (and leaving one of the spotters with an arrow in the chest), but has left only clues since then, and three years ago, the government stopped looking for him.

-- Wisconsin law permits independent candidates five-word statements to accompany their names on the ballot, to signal voters just as the words "Republican" and "Democrat" are signals, but Milwaukee Assembly candidate Ieshuh Griffin was ruled in July to have gone too far with her statement ("NOT the 'whiteman's bitch'") (her capitalization and punctuation). Griffin said the decision baffled her since "everyone" she spoke with understood exactly what she meant.

-- Mark Reckless, elected to the British House of Commons only two months earlier, apologized in July for failing to vote on a budget bill that required a late-night session to pass. He explained that he had had a drink or two while waiting for the session to begin and barely remembered what happened (except for "someone asking me to vote").

Joseph Wheeler filed a $12 million lawsuit in August against Prince George's Hospital in Upper Marlboro, Md., over its treatment following a June 23 car accident. He was admitted with serious injuries, but hospital staff mistakenly marked him for next-day cancer surgery, and when he protested and tried to leave, two muscular staff "security" men restrained him, dishing out even more pain. Yelled one, according to the lawsuit, "Get off the floor, bitch!" "I don't care who you think you are. This is my camp." (The next day Wheeler talked his way out and over to St. Mary's Hospital, where he was treated for four broken ribs, a sprained shoulder, a ruptured spleen and a concussion.)

John Theodore Anderson (also known, in his court filings, as "John-Theodore:Anderson) filed a lawsuit in August against an Alpine, Utah, attorney who had acquired land from a man who Anderson said owed him $4,000 for "consulting" work. The attorney, and the previous owner, denied Anderson's claim, provoking Anderson to file a lien on the land -- for $918 billion (a mark-up only quixotically related to the $4,000). However, by the time Anderson got around to filing the lawsuit to defend the lien, his $4,000 claim had become $38 quadrillion (38 thousand trillion dollars).

Unclear on the Concept: (1) In Maine Township, Ill., Mr. Janusz Owca was arrested in August for choking his wife and was booked into jail and given his traditional phone call. With police listening, Owca called his wife and threatened to kill her. (2) Veteran criminal Nathan Pugh, 49, walked in to a Wells Fargo bank in Dallas on July 26 and presented his holdup note to a teller (claiming to have a "bom"). The teller told Pugh that she could not release large amounts of money without proper ID and convinced Pugh to turn over both a Texas state ID card and his Wells Fargo debit card, both in his own name. Police arrived just as Pugh was leaving and after an attempt to grab a hostage, he was arrested. (He even failed with the hostage -- a woman carrying a child -- who still managed to take Pugh to the floor.)

-- More British Local Council Wisdom: (1) Nottinghamshire County Council recently refused, for the third time, to issue a disabled-parking permit to British Army Cpl. Johno Lee, whose right leg was amputated below the knee following an explosion in Iraq. Lee said a staff member told him he was "young" and that his situation "might get better." (2) The Romford council's housing administrator ruled in July that, notwithstanding sweltering temperatures and kids' summer vacations, vinyl wading pools were prohibited -- as safety hazards, in that firefighters could possibly trip over them if responding to emergencies.

-- More Poor Multitaskers: (1) A 47-year-old woman accidentally drove off a boat ramp in Sacramento County, Calif., in August and drowned, as she had become distracted on a cell phone call with her daughter. (2) In Cincinnati in August, Colondra Hamilton, 32, was arrested after a routine traffic stop. Officers said they found Hamilton with her pants unbuttoned, a sex toy in her lap, and a computer playing a video in the passenger seat.

Police in Bonita Springs, Fla., charged Randall James Baker, 45, with aggravated battery in August (1998) for shooting his friend Robert Callahan in the head -- sending him to the hospital. A sheriff's spokesman said Baker and Callahan had a playful tradition between them -- that any time either of them acquired a new baseball-type cap, the other would try to shoot the little button off the top. This time, according to the sheriff, alcohol played a bigger role than usual.