"My ultimate dream is to be buried in a deep ocean close to where penguins live," explained the former Alfred David, 79, otherwise known in his native Belgium as "Monsieur Pingouin" (Mr. Penguin), so named because a 1968 auto accident left him with a waddle in his walk that he decided to embrace with gusto. (His wife abandoned the marriage when he made the name change official; evidently, being "Mrs. Penguin" was not what she had signed up for.) Mr. Pingouin started a penguin-item museum that ultimately totaled 3,500 items, and he created a hooded, full-body black-and-white penguin outfit that, according to a September Reuters dispatch, he wears daily in his waddles around his Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek.

-- Though South Korean children score among the highest in the world on standardized reading and math tests, their success comes at a price, according to an October Time magazine dispatch. They supposedly suffer "educational masochism" -- punishing themselves by overstudy, especially in high school preparing for university admissions tests (a process so competitive that even test-coaching schools are picky about accepting students). Earlier this year, to curb the "masochism," the government began enforcing a 10 p.m. curfew on coaching-school activities, and in Seoul, a six-man team conducts nightly after-hours raids on classes that run late-night sessions behind shuttered windows. (Ironically, Time acknowledged, American educational reformers want U.S. students to study harder, like Asians do, but Asian reformers want their students to relax, like American students.)

-- In America, the quest for perfectly straight teeth can lead to orthodontia bills of thousands of dollars, but in Japan, a dental "defect" -- slightly crooked canine teeth -- makes young women more fetching, even "adorable," say many men. Women with the "yaeba" look have canines pushed slightly forward by the molars behind them so that the canines develop a fang-like appearance. One dental salon, the Plaisir, in Tokyo, recently began offering non-permanent fixtures that replicate the look among straight-toothed women.

-- Polls report that as many as 57 percent of Russians "notice" signs of a "cult" surrounding Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, according to a September Spiegel Online dispatch, and a chief cult leader is "Mother Fotina," 62, who has a following of thousands among Russian Orthodox practitioners and believes herself to be the reincarnation of Joan of Arc and Putin to be St. Paul. "God," she said, "has appointed Putin to Russia to prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ." Mother Fotina was a convicted embezzler in the 1990s, and critics suspect her devotion to Putin is a ruse to deflect law-enforcement attention.

-- Sheriff's deputies in Bergholz, Ohio, arrested three Amish men in October and charged them in incidents in which other Amish men and women had their homes invaded and their hair (and men's beards) cut off -- supposedly grave insults. The three are part of an 18-family breakaway sect of Amish who were said to be exacting revenge upon mainstream Amish for insufficiently pious behavior. The "bishop" of the breakaways, Sam Mullet, 65, denied the arrestees were acting under his authority.

-- "Snakeman" Raymond Hoser, of Park Orchards, Australia, was about to be fined in August for violating his Commercial Wildlife Demonstrator License -- by failing to keep at least three meters' distance between his venomous snakes and the public -- when he hit upon a defense: He would prove that he had de-venomized the deadly taipan and death adder snakes by allowing them to bite his 10-year-old daughter on the arm. (Though both bites drew blood, the girl was otherwise unhurt. Said Hoser, "(I)f they'd been venomous, she'd have been dead in two minutes.")

-- For the 10-year remembrances of Sept. 11 this year, many cities recalled the tragedy with monuments and public events, including Washington Township, N.J., about 20 miles from ground zero. A large commemorative plaque was unveiled, but provoked immediate outrage because the only names on it were not victims' but only the mayor's and those of the five council members who approved the plaque. Said one retired police officer, "It made my blood boil." (Mayor Samir Elbassiouny later apologized and ordered a steel overlay to obscure the politicians' names.)

-- A judge in Nice, France, ruled in September that Article 215 of the French civil code (defining marriage as a "shared communal life") in fact requires that husband and wife have sex. A husband identified only as Jean-Louis B. had evidently lost interest years earlier, and his wife was granted a divorce. Apparently emboldened by her victory, she then filed a monetary claim against the husband for the 21-year-long lack of sex, and the judge awarded her 10,000 euros (about $13,710).

-- It might well be "excessive force" if a sheriff's deputy beats and pepper-sprays a black motorist who had been stopped only because the deputy saw the motorist without a fastened seatbelt. A district court judge had concluded that the force was surely justified, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said in August that excessiveness of force was for a jury to evaluate. (The deputy's explanation: The motorist, waiting for the deputy to finish his report, was sitting on a curb eating a bowl of broccoli, and the deputy had to beat him down, he said, out of fear that the motorist would throw the broccoli at him and then attack him.)

"Urban farming" is growing more popular among city-dwelling progressives committed to eating local foods, but that usually involves gardens in backyards. For Robert McMinn and Jules Corkery, it means raising two chickens in their one-bedroom apartment in New York City -- just to have a supply of fresh eggs. "I don't think it's the ideal situation," McMinn told the New York Daily News in October. However, he said, the hens are "cute. They're fun to (watch) run around. They're excited when we come home." On the other hand, he said, "(T)hey poop everywhere."

Bank Robbers Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Thomas Love, 40, was arrested in New Castle County, Del., in October after he had walked out of a WSFS Bank empty-handed. According to police, Love had presented a demand note to a teller, who couldn't make out the writing and handed it back, provoking Love to flee. (2) Henry Elmer, 56, was arrested in Yuma, Ariz., in October where he had just sat down to enjoy a beer at the Village Inn Pizza Parlor. Police identified Elmer as the man who just moments earlier had robbed the Wells Fargo bank in the same block and "fled" the few steps to the Village Inn (which is also just across the street from the Yuma Police Station).

Soon, it might be absolutely impossible to get hurt in Britain -- because of stringent health and safety rules. St. Mary's Church in Cottingham announced it would go without an overhead light because government rules require that it rig scaffolding to change the light bulb in its 30-foot-high ceiling. (Using a ladder would be unsafe.) And following the August riots in London, hundreds of volunteers took to the streets to speed the cleanup process, but at several junctures, police turned them away, fearful that the civic-minded workers lacked the sense to avoid cutting themselves on the broken glass and debris.

In January (1994) at the Lake Como Fish and Game Club near Syracuse, N.Y., Brian Carr beat out three dozen competitors in the annual ice-fishing derby with 155 catches. The temperature that day was minus-30(F), and prize money for the top three anglers was, respectively, $8, $6.50 and $5.

London Fashion Week usually brings forth a shock or two from cutting-edge designers, but a September creation by Rachel Freire might have raised the bar: a floor-length dress made from 3,000 cow nipples (designed to resemble roses). Initial disgust for the garment centered on implied animal abuse, but Freire deflected that issue by pointing out that the nipples had been discarded by a tannery and that her use amounted to "recycling." The 32-year-old Freire, who has worked with mainstream entertainers such as Christina Aguilera, was kept so busy with the animal-abuse angle that she was largely spared having to explain another issue -- why anyone would want to wear a dress made with cow nipples.

-- Death is big business in Japan, with 1.2 million people a year passing away and overtaxing the country's cemeteries and crematoriums. With the average wait for disposal at least several days, and space running short in funeral homes, "corpse hotels" have opened in many cities, with climate-controlled "guest rooms" renting for the equivalent of about $155 a night, with viewing rooms where relatives can visit the bodies daily until cremation is available.

-- The world's real economy may be flagging, but not necessarily the make-believe economy of online multiplayer games, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal (July) and the website Singularity Hub (August). For example, entrepreneur Ailin Graef's Anshe Chung Studios is worth "millions" of real U.S. dollars, earned mostly by managing rentals of make-believe real estate and brokering make-believe money transactions in the game Second Life. Graef also commands top (real) dollar for her designs of make-believe fashions for players' game characters (avatars). Two other companies are suing each other in federal court in San Francisco over the copyright to their lucrative business models of creating make-believe animals (horses, rabbits) that sell very well to players who take them on as game pets for their characters or breed them to make other make-believe animals.

-- No sooner had Anthony Sowell been convicted in August of murdering 11 women in Cleveland and burying their remains around his property than entrepreneur Eric Gein of Florida had hired someone to fill sandwich bags of soil from Sowell's property so that he could sell the souvenir dirt for $25 a gram on the Internet. (Gein follows well-publicized salesmen who have famously collected the pubic hair of New York prostitute-killer Arthur Shawcross, the crawlspace dirt from the house of John Wayne Gacy, and the "fried hair" of Ted Bundy -- that fell on the floor as he was executed.)

-- In July, a surgeon from Britain's Oxford Radcliffe Hospital announced a cure for a 57-year-old man with a rare condition that made, in his mind, audible and ever-louder sounds whenever his eyeballs moved. "Superior canal dehiscence syndrome" elevates the interior sounds of the body (such as heartbeat and the "friction" of muscles moving against muscles) to disturbing levels.

-- Artificial meat (grown in a test tube from animal stem cells) has been theoretically planned for about 10 years, but a European Science Foundation audience in September heard predictions that lab-grown sausage might be available as soon as next year. The meat is produced in sheets ("shmeat") and would be prohibitively expensive at first, in that the largest specimen produced so far measures only about one inch long and a third of an inch wide. The biggest drawback facing artificial muscle tissue: that even lab-grown muscles require exercise to prevent atrophy.

-- Recent Alarming Headlines: (1) "Miami Invaded by Giant, House-Eating Snails" (up-to-10-inch-long snails that attach to, and slowly gnaw on, stucco walls). (2) "Scientists Develop Blood Swimming 'Microspiders' to Heal Injuries, Deliver Drugs" (spider-like "machines," made of gold and silica, smaller than a red blood cell yet which can travel through veins carrying drugs and be directionally controlled by researchers).

-- In an art-science collaboration in August, Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi and Utah State researcher Randy Lewis produced a prototype bulletproof skin -- or at least skin that would limit a .22-caliber bullet to only about 2 inches' penetration into a simulated human body. Genetically engineered spider silk (reputed to be five times stronger than steel) was grafted between layers of dermis and epidermis. Mused Essaidi, we "in the near future ... (may) no longer need to descend from a godly bloodline in order to have traits like invulnerability...."

Turned down once before, liquor manufacturer EFAG convinced Germany's Federal Patent Court in September to award trademark protection to its schnapps with the brand name Ficken, which in German translates directly into what in English is known as the F word. The court acknowledged that the name is unquestionably in poor taste but is not "sexually discriminatory" and does not violate public morals. In fact, the court noted, the word is widely used in Germany. (In March 2010, the European Union trademarks authority granted a German brewery the right to call its beer "Fucking Hell" -- the first word of which is the actual name of an Austrian village and the second a German word referring to light ale.)

(1) The Department of Motor Vehicles office in Roseville, Calif., was closed for a week in July after a driving school student crashed into the building and left a five-foot hole in the wall. (2) A young man taking a test at the drivers' center in Brisbane, Australia, in August lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a bench outside the building, hitting his mother, who was waiting for him. (3) A 56-year-old DMV driving tester was killed in July when the woman she was evaluating ran off the road in Williamsburg, Va., and struck a tree.

In October, a court in Ottawa, Ontario, sentenced pornography collector Richard Osborn, 46, to a year in jail on several charges, but dismissed the more serious child porn counts. Judge Robert Fournier ruled that Osborn's hard-core images of Bart and Lisa Simpson, and Milhouse, were not illegal, on the grounds that he could not be sure of the characters' ages. (Baby Maggie Simpson was depicted, but she was not involved in sex.) Judge Fournier was clearly exasperated at Osborn's perversions, among them his homemade video of swimsuit-clad youngsters, interspersed with shots of Osborn himself masturbating, aided by a Cabbage Patch doll whose mouth had been cut open. At one point, a disgusted Judge Fournier cut off the presentation of evidence. "Enough," he said. "We are not paid by the taxpayers to sit here and torture ourselves."

One would think the robber of a gas station would consider filling the tank before fleeing. However, Moses Gift, 47, was arrested in September in Winston-Salem, N.C., and charged with robbing the Huff Shell station -- shortly before running out of gas a short distance away. And in Winder, Ga., Micah Mitchell was arrested in October shortly after, according to police, he crashed through the front door of a BP station to steal merchandise. He was arrested minutes later a few miles from the station, where he had run out of gas.

In April (1994), defendant Arthur Hollingsworth, despite previous recalcitrance, for some reason agreed, reluctantly, to waive his constitutional right of silence and to testify on his own behalf in his trial for armed robbery of a Houston convenience store. Prosecutor Jay Hileman first got Hollingsworth to admit that he was in the store at the time it was robbed and that he was armed. Then Hileman asked, "Mr. Hollingsworth, you're guilty, aren't you?" Hollingsworth replied, "No." Hileman repeated the question: "Mr. Hollingsworth, you're guilty, aren't you?" Hollingsworth: "Yeah." Hileman said he had no further questions.

Bureaucrat's Delight: An update of the official index for classifying medical conditions (for research and quality control, and for insurance claims) was released recently, to take effect in October 2013, and replaced the current 18,000 codes with 140,000 much more specific ones. A September Wall Street Journal report noted, for example, 72 different codes for injuries involving birds, depending on the type. "Bitten by turtle" is different from "struck by turtle." Different codes cover injuries in "opera houses," on squash courts, and exactly where in or around a mobile home an injury occurred. "Walked into lamppost, initial encounter" is distinct from "walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter." Codes cover conditions stemming from encounters with extraterrestrials and conditions resulting from "burn due to water skis on fire." "Bizarre personal appearance" has a code, as well as "very low level of personal hygiene."

-- A small number of environmental and animal rights activists employ violence and physical threats in attempts to achieve their goals, and similar tactics have recently been used by another group bent on intimidating scientists: sufferers of "chronic fatigue syndrome." London's Observer reported in August that medical researchers who even suggest that the illness might have a "psychological" component have been subject to vitriolic abuse, stalking, disruptions to the scientists' workplaces, and even death threats. In at least one case, the activists succeeded: A psychiatry professor said he had moved his area of research from chronic fatigue to Gulf War syndrome. "That has taken me to Iraq and Afghanistan where ... I feel a lot safer."

-- Political Correctness Lives: British authorities threatened Iain Turnbull, 63, with a fine (equivalent of $1,530) in August because he refused to complete the mandatory census earlier this year. Turnbull, from Wales, was protesting that the government, intending to be progressively "inclusive," made available census questionnaires and instructions in such languages as Urdu, Punjabi and Tagalog -- but not Welsh (one of Britain's native languages, spoken by a half-million citizens).

-- Although the Patriot Act, drafted in the days after 9-11 and quickly enacted into law, was designed expressly to give prosecutors more leeway to challenge suspected terrorism, one of its key provisions has since then been used more than 100 times as often for drug investigations as for terrorism. New York magazine reported in September that "sneak and peek" warrants (enabling searches without notifying the targets) have been obtained only 15 times for terrorism threats but 1,618 times in drug cases.

-- In 2009 Diane Schuler, with a 0.19 blood-alcohol reading (and marijuana in her system), drove the wrong way for two miles on a New York freeway, finally crashing into another car, killing three people and herself. In July 2011, her widower, Dave Schuler, filed a lawsuit against the state, alleging that the collision was the state's fault for not posting signs warning motorists like Diane Schuler that they were going the wrong way. (Dave Schuler's own private investigator told The Daily Cortlandt newspaper that he tried to discourage Schuler from filing the lawsuit, to no avail.)

-- "(My) client was devastated by what happened," said the lawyer for Jean Pierre in announcing Pierre's $80 million lawsuit in August against the city of Newburgh, N.Y. Pierre's estranged girlfriend had committed suicide by driving into a city lake, taking the couple's three small children to their deaths, also. In the time before he became devastated, Pierre had been arrested for failure to pay child support and for endangering one of his children (found wandering the street in freezing weather on a Super Bowl Sunday), and friends of his girlfriend told the New York Post that Pierre constantly abused her, including immediately before her final drive.

-- Chicago's WLS Radio reported that a man (unnamed in the story) filed a $600,000 lawsuit on Sept. 2 against the Grossinger City Autoplex in the city, claiming that five employees had physically harassed him during business hours over a two-month period in 2009. Included was the man's claim that he had been given multiple "wedgies," one of which was a "hanging" wedgie.

-- Cicero, Ill., Town President Larry Dominick, the defendant in sexual harassment lawsuits filed by two female employees, gave depositions in the cases, in March 2009 and February 2011, but provided challenging answers on one issue. Asked in 2009 whether he had "ever touched" the plaintiff, Dominick, under oath, said "No." However, in 2011, Dominick (again under oath) gave a narrative of his relationship with the same plaintiff beginning in 2005, admitting that he had had sex with her numerous times at her home. (Dominick claimed to have misinterpreted the earlier question.)

-- Unclear on the Concept: (1) Pennsylvania state Rep. Michael Sturla, an opponent of increased natural-gas drilling in his district, warned in August that one effect of the drilling would be an increase of sexually transmitted diseases "amongst the womenfolk." (He said later that he had heard that from a hospital administrator.) (2) Nicholas Davis was arrested in a public park in Seattle in August while, according to a police officer, "masturbating violently." The officer said Davis explained, "There just isn't enough free love in Seattle."

A female Wisconsin prison chaplain was charged in September with several crimes in an alleged attempt to stage a fake hostage situation with an inmate for the purpose of gaining transfers of both to another prison in the state. Prosecutors said the chaplain, a Wiccan priest named Jamyi Witch, 52, instructed the inmate at Oshkosh Correctional Institution to come to her office, barricade the door, throw things around the room, and role-play with Witch as if she were his mother. While the office was under siege, the pair allegedly had consensual sex, and Witch supplied the man with drugs and sang him lullabies, supposedly to calm him down, ending the drama (until charges were filed).

Anthony Watson, sentenced to prison in 1992 for crimes that included rape and robbery, became a notorious jailhouse lawyer (even drafting a book, "A Guide to the Plea Circus") and through successful challenges had reduced his 160-year sentence to 26 -- and a release date of 2018. However, he filed one appeal too many. A court ruled in his favor on that final appeal and ordered a new trial altogether (vacating the convictions and sentence but also the reductions Watson had worked so hard for). At the retrial in March 2011, he was found guilty again and this time sentenced to four consecutive life terms.

The most notorious fetishist toe-sucker of the last 20 years, Michael Wyatt, now age 50, who had been arrested in the 1990s in Conway, Ark., and nearby towns, returned to the news in August 2011. Two Conway women reported in separate incidents that a man had approached them, complimented their toes, and asked to suck them (and in one case, to imagine out loud doing violent things to the toes). Both women picked Wyatt out of a police lineup, but a third woman, reporting a similar incident, could not identify the perpetrator. Wyatt earlier served one year of a four-year prison term but was last heard from, according to news databases, in 1999.

Overenthusiastic Parent/Sports Involvement: In October (1995), Richard King, 36, pleaded guilty to making threatening and obscene phone calls to two boys who were star players on his son's Little League team in Blue Springs, Mo., to get them to reconsider their plans to quit the team. According to prosecutors, King called the boys several times while he was on a business trip in China and threatened to kill one kid and his parents and to commit sodomy on the kid's whole family.