"You eat meat, so why not blood?" asked The Globe and Mail, which sampled several Toronto restaurants' sanguinary haute cuisines, including the Italian eatery Buca's spaghetti with blood-blackened noodles and torta di sanguinaccio (figs, almonds, buffalo-milk creme, on a base custard of dark chocolate and slow-cooked pig's blood). Patrons "thought we were crazy," said chef Rob Gentile, but now "can't seem to get enough." The Black Hoof restaurant uses 10 liters of fresh blood a week for dishes like its own blood custard, seasoned with rosemary and pickled pears. Montreal's DNA kitchen sometimes highlights blood soup and blood pasta. (The Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark -- which some believe to be the best restaurant in the world -- marinates cauliflower in pig's blood.)

-- "I don't get it. I just don't get it. And you're not going to get me to get it," warned Marine squadron commander Lt. Col. Jerry Turner (to a Wall Street Journal Afghanistan reporter writing in October), when learning that a few of his troops were sporting artistically shaped eyebrows sculpted by a barber in the town of Shinwar. "Stylist" Gulam Farooq can't practice on Muslims (forbidden) but said "one or two" Marines come by every day (in between calling in artillery barrages) for tapering. -- The Military Times news service, reporting from Afghanistan in August, disclosed a U.S. Marines command directive ordering troops to restrain their audible flatus because, apparently, Afghan soldiers and civilians complained of being offended. The reporter doubted the directive could be effective, in that passing gas by front-line troops is "practically a sport."

-- A vendor at a street market in Leipzig, Germany, was revealed in September to be shamelessly selling personally tailored coats and vests made with fur from house cats. A first report, in the sensationalist tabloid Bild, was doubted, but a follow-up by Germany's premier news source, Spiegel, confirmed the story. The vendor said he needed eight cats to make a vest (priced at the equivalent of $685) and 18 for a coat. However, such sales are illegal under German and European Union laws, and the vendor subsequently denied that he sold such things.

-- Too Soon? An 11-year-old California boy and a 7-year-old Georgia girl have recently decided -- with parental support -- to come out as the other gender. The boy, Tommy, wants more time to think about it, said his lesbian parents, and has begun taking hormone blockers to make his transition easier should he follow through with plans (first disclosed at age 3) to become "Tammy." The McIntosh County, Ga., girl has been living as a boy for a year, said father Tommy Theollyn, a transgendered man who is actually the one who gave birth. Theollyn petitioned the school board in September (unsuccessfully) to allow the child to use the boys' bathroom. Theollyn said the girl first noticed she was a boy at age 18 months.

-- Recurring Theme: Italian men are notorious "bamboccionis" ("big babies") who exploit doting mothers by remaining in their family homes well into adulthood, sometimes into their 30s or later, expecting meals and laundry service. Many mothers are tolerant, but in September an elderly couple in the town of Mestre announced (through a consumer association) that if their 41-year-old, gainfully employed son did not meet a deadline for leaving, the association would file a lawsuit to evict him. (A news update has not been found, perhaps indicating that the son moved out.)

-- Crime-Fighting: (1) In October, about 120 professional mimes began voluntarily patrolling the traffic-congested Sucre district of Caracas, Venezuela, at the request of Mayor Carlos Ocariz. The white-gloved mimes' specialty was wagging their fingers at scofflaw motorists and pedestrians, and mimes interviewed by the Associated Press reported improvements. (2) At least 300 professional clowns from Mexico and Central America, in Mexico City in October for a convention, demonstrated against the country's drug-cartel violence by laughing, in unison, nonstop, for 15 minutes. (They were likely less successful than the mimes.)

-- Parenting: Freemon Seay, 38, was arrested in Thurston County, Wash., in October on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon after disciplining his 16-year-old daughter for leaving home without his approval. Seay allegedly forced the girl to suit up in armor and helmet, with a wooden sword, and to fight him (also in armor, with a wooden sword) for over two hours until she could no longer stand up. Seay's wife (the girl's stepmother) was booked as an accessory and was said by deputies to have been supportive of her husband's "Renaissance fair" enthusiasm (which Freemon Seay called a "lifestyle").

-- In Malone, N.Y., in September, Clyde Gardner, 57, was sentenced to five to 15 years in prison for trying to murder his ex-girlfriend twice. Initially, he was going to dress in a recently skinned bear's hide -- walk on its paws, so as not to leave shoe prints, and "maul" her with the claws. After abandoning that plan, he promised a friend $15,000 to kill the woman in a car crash, and since Gardner was a demolition derby driver, he offered expert instructions (though the friend turned Gardner in).

-- Awesome! The ingenuity of drug smugglers is never to be underestimated, as one ABC News report from Nogales, Ariz., in October demonstrated. Smugglers had dug tunnels from Nogales, Mexico, underneath the border to Nogales, Ariz., engineered perfectly to end along International Street's metered parking spaces. Vans with false bottoms were parked in certain spaces (and meters were fed); smugglers in the vans broke though the pavement to meet the tunnelers, and the drugs were loaded. Still parked, the vans' crews repaired the pavement, and the vans departed. "(U)nbelievable," said the Arizona city's mayor.

-- Basically, "Toto" is to sophisticated toilets in Japan as "Apple" is to consumer electronics in America. In September, Toto unveiled a prototype motorcycle with a toilet bowl to convert a driver's waste into fuel, not only making it self-gassed-up but contributing to the company's goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent within six years. The company was launching a monthlong, cross-country publicity tour (presumably featuring a gastro-intestinally robust driver).

-- People Who Shot Themselves Recently: Two men -- a 23-year-old in Fayetteville, N.C. (June), and a 22-year-old in Seminole, Fla. (October), accidentally shot themselves in the head while trying to assure friends that their guns posed no danger. A firearms instructor shot himself in the thigh during his recertification class at the Smith & Wesson facility in Springfield, Mass. (September). A man on a first date at Ruth's Chris Steak house in Charlotte, N.C., accidentally shot himself in the leg as he was escorting his date to their car (September). And as usual, at least one man (a 27-year-old in Chandler, Ariz.) paid the price for inartfully using his waistband as a holster, causing a "groin" injury (August). And Milwaukee police secured a search warrant to photograph Otis Lockett's penis (July), as evidence that he was illegally in possession of a gun (as a felon) by showing that he had accidentally shot off nearly all of his organ.

-- At a high school basketball game in February (1992), Oklahoma City police officer Eldridge Wyatt became dissatisfied that no fouls were being called on "No. 21" and walked onto the court to point out the player's elbowing to the officials. When referee Stan Guffey told Wyatt to leave the foul-calling to him, Wyatt placed Guffey under arrest. Guffey was un-arrested a few minutes later so that the game could continue, but when a reporter after the game asked Wyatt for a reaction, Wyatt tried to arrest him, too.

Saddam Hussein Back in the News: (1) Mohamed Bishr, an Egyptian man bearing a remarkable resemblance to the late Iraqi dictator, claimed in October that he had been briefly kidnapped after spurning an offer to portray Saddam in a porn video. Bishr's adult sons told the al-Ahram newspaper in Alexandria that their father had been offered the equivalent of $330,000. (In 2002, according to a 2010 Washington Post report, the CIA briefly contemplated using a Saddam impersonator in a porn video as a tool to publicly embarrass Saddam into relinquishing power prior to the U.S. invasion.) (2) In October, former British soldier Nigel Ely offered at auction in Derby, England, a two-foot-square piece of metal that he said came from the iconic Baghdad statue of Saddam toppled by U.S. Marines in April 2003. Ely said he had grabbed the piece indiscriminately, but remembers that it was a portion of Saddam's buttocks.

-- Apparently, officials at the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport felt the need for professional guidance on rebranding their facility to (as one put it) "carry it into the modern era," and so hired the creative talents of Big Communications of Birmingham, Ala., to help. Big's suggested name for the airport, announced to great fanfare in September: "Chattanooga Airport."

-- Justice! ... Now! (1) Elsie Pawlow, a senior citizen of Edmonton, Alberta, filed a $100,000 lawsuit in September against Kraft Canada Inc., parent company of the makers of Stride Gum, which brags that it is "ridiculously long-lasting." Pawlow complained that she had to scrub down her dentures after using Stride, to "dig out" specks of gum -- a condition that caused her to experience "depression for approximately 10 minutes." (2) Colleen O'Neal filed a lawsuit recently against United/Continental airlines over the "post traumatic stress disorder" she said she has suffered since a 20-minute flight in October 2009 -- in which, during turbulent weather, the plane "banked" from side to side and lost altitude.

-- In August, a state court in Frankfurt, Germany, awarded 3,000 euros (about $4,200) to Magnus Gaefgen, 36, on his claim that during a 2002 police interrogation, officers "threat(ened) ... violence" against him if he did not disclose what he knew about a missing 11-year-old boy who was later found dead. In 2003, Gaefgen was convicted of the boy's murder and is serving a life sentence, but the court nevertheless thought he should be compensated for his "pain and suffering."

-- Names in the News: The man stabbed to death in Calgary, Alberta, in August: the 29-year-old Mr. Brent Stabbed Last. Among the family members of Jared Loughner (the man charged with shooting U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in January) who were interviewed by authorities regarding mental illnesses in the Loughner family: Loughner's distant cousin Judy Wackt. Passed away in May in Fredericksburg, Va.: retired Army Sgt. Harry Palm. Charged with murder in Decatur, Ill., in September: a (predictably underrespected) 15-year-old boy named Shitavious Cook.

-- Hey, It Could've Happened: (1) The British recreation firm UK Paintball announced in August that a female customer had been injured after a paintball shot hit her in the chest, causing her silicone breast implant to "explode." The company recommended that paintball facilities supply better chest protection for women with implants. (2) The Moscow, Russia, newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported in October that a local woman's life had been saved by her "state-of-the-art" silicone breast implant. Her husband had stabbed her repeatedly in the chest during a domestic argument, but the implant's gel supposedly deflected the blade.

(1) In Charlotte, N.C., in October, a female motorist was arrested for ramming another woman's car after that woman said "Good morning" to the motorist's boyfriend as the women dropped kids off at school. (2) In Arbutus, Md., in October, a woman was arrested for throwing bleach and disinfectant at another woman in a Walmart (an incident in which at least 19 bystanders sought medical assistance). Police learned that the arrestee's child's father had become the boyfriend of the bleach-targeted woman. (3) In a hospital in Upland, Pa., in October, two pregnant women (ages 21 and 22) were arrested after injuring a woman, 36, and a girl, 15, in a brawl inside a patient's room.

-- The North Koreans called it a "cruise ship" and tried to establish a business model to attract wealthy tourists from China, but to the New York Times reporter on board in September, the 40-year-old boat was more like a "tramp steamer" on which "vacationers" paid the equivalent of $470 to "enjoy" five days and nights at sea. More than 200 people boarded the "dim" and "musty" vessel, "sometimes eight to a room with floor mattresses" and iffy bathrooms. The onboard "entertainment" consisted not of shuffleboard but of "decks of cards" and karaoke. Dinner "resembled a mess hall at an American Army base," but with leftovers thrown overboard (even though some of it was blown back on deck). The trip was capped, wrote the Times, by the boat's crashing into the pier as it docked, knocking a corner of the structure "into a pile of rubble."

-- The thief who made off with the valuable lamp from St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Winson Green, England, in October might well return to the building soon, for confession. Clearly visible on the surveillance video inside was the man, as he was just about to snatch up the lamp, making the sign of the cross.

-- Sally Stricker was angry that the Nebraska troopers patrolling the state fair grounds in September had told her that she had an "illegal" message on her T-shirt and that if she wished to remain at the fair, she would have to either change shirts or wear hers inside out. The "message" was a marijuana leaf with the slogan "Don't panic, It's organic." Stricker was at the fair to attend the night's live concert -- starring (marijuana-friendly) Willie Nelson.

-- Boise State University's highly rated football team suspended three players for several games at the beginning of the season for violating eligibility rules by receiving impermissible financial benefits. According to an October news release by the school, the most prominent player sanctioned was Geraldo Boldewijn, the team's fastest wide receiver, who had improperly received the use of a car. (However, it was a 1990 Toyota Camry with 177,000 miles on it.)

(1) It's Bad for You: A 44-year-old woman was hospitalized with a head injury and a broken clavicle in September after she inadvertently walked into a still-moving train at the Needham Center station near Boston. Her attention had been diverted because she was trying to light her cigarette as she walked. (2) Sometimes, It's OK: A 51-year-old woman told police she fought off an attempted street robbery in Pennsville Township, N.J., in October by burning the age-20-something assailant with her lit cigarette. She said the man yelled "Ouch" and ran away.

In a 1992 issue of the journal Sexual and Marital Therapy, two therapists at the Institute of Psychiatry in London described "orgasmic reconditioning" they performed on their patient, "George," age 20. They reported "partial" success in getting George to switch his masturbatory stimuli from the family car (an Austin Metro) to photographs of naked women. George had reported arousal previously only when sitting in the car or when squatting behind it while the engine was running. (Before that, George was sexually preoccupied with urination by women, children and dogs.)

"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.