Part-time Devon, England, vicar Gavin Tyte, who serves churches in Uplyme and Axmouth, recently produced a rap video of the Nativity, in which he plays a shepherd, an angel and the narrator. Sample lyrics (about Mary placing her baby in a cattle trough and angels calming the frightened shepherds): "No hotel, motel, custom baby-changer / She wrapped the baby up and laid him in a manger" and "Chill out, my friends, there's no need for trepidation / Got a message for the world, and it's elation information."

-- Apparently, not only will there be fewer overall resources for disabled people in Greece (due to government austerity), but the resources will be spread over a larger number of recipients. The Labor Ministry in January expanded the category of eligible "disabled" (with reduced-amount payments) to include pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists, sadomasochists, pedophiles, exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs. The National Confederation of Disabled People said the changes would inevitably reduce funds available for the blind and the crippled and other traditional categories of need.

-- Even at a time of schoolteacher layoffs nationally, the Buffalo, N.Y., school system continues to cover all costs for cosmetic surgery for teachers. The benefit was established in the calmer 1970s, and no one, it seems, anticipated the facelift and liposuction crazes that subsequently developed. The annual expense in recent years, for about 500 benefit-takers a year, has been from $5 million to $9 million (equivalent to the average salaries of at least 100 teachers). The teachers' union said it is willing to give up the benefit in a new collective bargaining agreement, but a quirk in New York law lessens the incentive of teachers to negotiate such a contract (in that the current, highly lucrative contract remains in force until replaced).

-- In February, Kenneth Gunn, of the U.K.'s Scottish Borders Council, decried the budget cutbacks that closed down local offices that had previously posted marriage notices. By making it more difficult for the public to be aware of specific marriages, Gunn feared an inevitable increase in incest. "I am aware in my own ward of brothers sitting beside sisters they do not know in primary school." (The problem is more serious in Iceland, whose 300,000 people are far more self-contained. However, a new website containing genealogical data back 1,200 years is expected to help reduce the risk of incest.)

-- But, Why? (1) Two British designers (who claim they had the idea independently and learned of the other only after they finished) recently produced elegant pieces using parts from a 2012 Ford Focus. Judy Clark made a dress and a biker jacket adorned with car keys, radio and dashboard components, seat covers, a speedometer and red taillights. Katherine Hawkins created a necklace using dials, springs, buttons, seat materials and instrument panel switches. (2) Swiss artist Christoph Buchel has now secured local permits to bury a Boeing 727 38 feet under a patch of California's Mojave Desert, near Bakersfield. Visitors will take a tunnel down in order to tour the 153-foot-long plane.

-- In February, a German court awarded artist Stefan Bohnenberger the equivalent of about $2,600 from the Munich gallery that had previously housed his work, "Pommes d'Or," which consisted of two ordinary french fries contrasted with two golden-leafed ones. The gallery returned the golden-leafed ones but claimed it could not find the ordinary fries, and, anyway, pointed out that they were nothing but old french fries.

-- Police officers are of course generally forbidden to engage in sex acts in order to gather evidence. Thus, a scandal erupted in the U.K. in January when The Guardian revealed that two undercover officers had fathered children (to enhance their credibility) while infiltrating protest groups beginning in the 1980s. After the two women learned in late 2011 who their kids' fathers really were, they filed lawsuits against the responsible police agencies. (In Sydney, Australia, a state contractor operated under no such restriction when it hired a brothel inspector in January. Brothels are legal and regulated in Sydney, and if off-books facilities are providing sex illegally, the inspector can testify from first-hand knowledge.)

-- Mayor Jim Preacher of the town of Norway, S.C., was pulled over by a state trooper in January for speeding. Preacher was unable to convince the trooper that his speeding was necessary in the performance of a mayoral duty, and their encounter apparently ended bitterly. As soon as the trooper drove off, the mayor turned on his own blue lights, chased the trooper down and accused the trooper of speeding. (Norway disbanded its police department last year, and a question remains whether the mayor has police powers.)

-- The Price Is Right: (1) Ms. Khadijah Baseer was arrested in Los Angeles in January on suspicion of prostitution. According to several men, Baseer had opened their car doors in the drive-thru lane at a McDonald's, offering them oral sex in exchange for Chicken McNuggets. (2) Misty Kullman, 25, was arrested for prostitution in Shelby, N.C., in January after police stopped a man who said Kullman performed an act for the agreed-upon price of $6. The man said he paid Kullman with a $2 bill, three $1's and coins.

An elite squad of six Chinese soldiers, performing a training ritual for a public audience in Hong Kong in January, stood in a circle and passed a satchel of live grenades from man to man, counting down to the expected moment of explosion. At the last possible second, the man caught holding the satchel discards it, and all dive into a hole for protection. At the exhibition, according to Chinese Central Television, it worked out fine.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) An unidentified man fled and is still at large after attempting to break into the change machine at the Busy Bubbles laundromat in Winter Haven, Fla., in January. The surveillance video showed the man shooting at the machine four times with a handgun, but no money came out. (2) Two men were arrested in Albuquerque in January after being caught in the act of a home burglary by a neighbor, who called the police. The men were apprehended with various burglarized goodies as they made their getaway in a grocery store shopping cart.

* When Leona Helmsley's now-deceased dog Trouble inherited about $12 million from her estate in 2007, it called attention to the occasional decision by lonely rich people to pass on millions of dollars to their pets. In December, the former stray cat Tommasino inherited the equivalent of about $15 million in Italy when his owner, real estate holder Maria Assunta, died at age 94. The only pets richer than Tommasino were the German shepherd Gunter (equivalent of about $140 million in 2000) and the Australian chimpanzee Kalu (equivalent of about $60 million, though the estate he inherited was revealed in 2010 to be worthless).

(1) Fritz Gall, a self-described failed inventor, opened the Museum of Nonsense in Herrnbaumgarten, Austria, recently to pay homage, apparently, to even greater failures than his own. Among the exhibits are the "portable anonymizer" (a stick holding a black bar that one holds over his eyes to obscure identity), a transportable hat rack, a bristleless toothbrush (for people with no teeth), and a "portable hole" (similar to those that appear in the ground whenever the Road Runner needs something for Wile E. Coyote to fall into). (2) Take a Wild Guess: An unidentified man was taken into custody in Chesapeake, Va., in October after he rushed into the Regional Medical Center with a machete and a can of gasoline and demanded to know the "test results."

LEAD STORY

Sri Lanka has, as an "unwritten symbol of pride and culture," the world's highest per-capita rate for eye-donation, according to a January Associated Press dispatch from Colombo. Underpinning this national purpose is the country's Buddhist tradition that celebrates afterlives. "He's dead," said a relative of an eye recipient about the donor, "but he's still alive. His eye can still see the world." Doctors even report instances in which Sri Lankans consider giving up an eyeball while still alive, as a measure of virtue. A new state-of-the-art clinic, funded by Singaporean donors, is expected to nearly double Sri Lanka's eyeball exports.

-- Melissa Torres was a passenger in an April 2011 auto accident in Texas City, Texas, in which the five people involved were reported "uninjured" by police, and indeed, Torres was released from the Mainland Medical Center emergency room after a routine evaluation (for which she was billed $4,850). In fact, records from April 2011 until September showed her balance as $4,850. However, in December, Mainland learned that Torres had made an insurance claim against the driver and settled it for $30,000. The hospital quickly "updated" her balance to $20,211 and filed a claim against the settlement.

-- Hospitals, of course, are obligated to render emergency care to anyone who needs it, even to undocumented immigrants and irrespective of ability to pay. However, various state laws, such as New York's, also prohibit hospitals from releasing a patient who has no safe place to be discharged to. A January New York Times report noted that New York City hospitals currently house about 300 of those "continuing care" patients, with many in the five-year-long range and one patient now in his 13th year. (In some states, even, the laws' wording permits "pop drops," in which adult children leave "ailing" parents at a hospital when the children decide they need a break.)

-- A November Comtel airlines charter flight from India to Birmingham, England, stopped in Vienna, Austria, to refuel, but the pilots learned that Comtel's account was overdrawn and that the airport required the equivalent of about $31,000 for refueling and take-off charges, and thus, if the passengers were in a hurry, they needed to come up with the cash. After a six-hour standoff, many of the 180 passengers were let off the plane, one by one, to visit an ATM, and eventually a settlement was reached.

Paul Rothschild, 40, was facing a Dec. 9 court date in Lake County, Ill., on a charge of indecent solicitation of a minor -- a charge that could have sent him to prison for five years. Apparently oblivious of the imminent danger, Rothschild was arrested on Dec. 7 after a months-long campaign to entice another minor girl to engage in sex.

-- In November, Rickie La Touche, 30, was convicted in England's Preston Crown Court of killing his wife in a rage over her having allegedly destroyed the Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker memorabilia that he had collected since childhood. And in January, a judge in Portland, Ore., ordered a 45-day jail sentence, plus mental evaluation, for David Canterbury, 33, after he attacked Toys R Us customers with a lightsaber in each hand. And in February in Brooklyn, N.Y., Flynn Michael expanded his search for his stolen $400 custom-made lightsaber. "I guess that's the joke," said Michael, self-pityingly. "Some Jedi I turned out to be."

-- Recent Newsmakers: In a Christmas Eve alcohol-related auto accident in Buffalo, N.Y., the injured victims included Chad Beers, and the man charged was Richard Booze Jr. In Burnett County, Wis., in October, Scott Martini, 51, was arrested for suspicion of DUI, which would be his fourth offense. In Madison, Wis., in January, police filed weapon and drug charges against the 30-year-old man who had legally changed his name to Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop. And charged with vandalism of a Rhode Island state troopers' barracks in November was the 27-year-old Mr. Wanker Rene.

-- In 2011, for the first time in 10 years, Jose was not the most popular baby name in Texas (it was Jacob), but more interesting were the outlier names from the birth register examined by the Houston Press in December. Among last year's Houston babies were boys with the first names Aa'den, Z'yun, Goodness, Godswill, Clever, Handsome, Sir Genius and Dallas Cowboys. Girls' names included Gorgeousg'zaiya, A'Miracle, Dae'Gorgeous and Praisegod. The newspaper had previously combed the register of convicts in Harris County (Houston) and found Willie Nelson de Ochoa, Shi'tia Alford, Petrono Tum Pu, Charmin Crew and Anal Exceus.

-- Bill Robinson, 66, of Decatur, Ga., was arrested on a misdemeanor firearm charge in December for gathering holiday mistletoe in the "best way" he knew -- shooting it out of a tree with a 12-gauge shotgun. The fact that the tree was in the parking lot of the suburban North DeKalb Mall (filled with holiday shoppers) apparently completely escaped his attention. "Well," said Robinson to WGCL-TV, "about the time I did it, I got to thinking about it. ... I guess I assumed that everybody knew what I was doing."

-- Not Ready for Prime Time: Mostafa Hendi was charged with attempted robbery of the We Buy Gold store in Hendersonville, N.C., in December, but clerk Derek Mothershead stopped him. As Hendi reached for the money, Mothershead punched him in the face, momentarily knocking him out cold. He held Hendi down with one hand and called 911 with the other, and as the two waited for police, Mothershead handed Hendi cleanser and paper towels and ordered him to clean up his blood off of the floor.

-- Needed to Think It Through Better: Car salesman Frank Ready was showing his inventory to Pedro Prieto and Yordan Llauger at his lot in Austin, Texas, in December, and they had settled on a Nissan Maxima for around $9,000. "They asked if I took Visa," Ready told KVUE-TV. "I said, 'Yeah.'" The next day, Prieto and Llauger returned with 90 $100 Visa gift cards. Naturally, Ready called police, who later found at least 28 counterfeit credit cards on the pair and charged them and a third person with fraud and identity theft.

Almost No Longer Weird: (1) Fifteen firefighters on three crews (estimated cost per hour, the equivalent of $1,400) were dispatched to Norwich market in Norwich, England, in January to rescue a gull entangled on tree branches and, according to the animal rescue society, "in distress." (2) Women in Dado village on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao went "on strike" last year to persuade the men to stop their fighting over land disputes. ("If you do bad things," a September Agence France-Presse dispatch quoted one woman, "you will be cut off, here," motioning below her waist.) These sex strikes do not always work, but, reported AFP, this one did.

Recent Public Appearances of Jesus and/or the Virgin Mary: Wiltshire, England, June (Jesus in candle wax dripping from a church's pulpit). Anderson County, S.C., July (Jesus on a Walmart receipt). Kinston, N.C., June (Jesus' body on a cross formed by kudzu on a telephone pole). Orpington, England, December (Jesus on a sock). Fortitude Valley, Australia, January (Jesus on a tomato that had remained in an office refrigerator a little too long). Yuma, Ariz., August (Mary in a dried mango slice). Blue Springs, Mo., December (Jesus on crayons melted for a science class project ("(W)hat better sign to get than (one) right in front of you?" asked the student's mother.).

"Dementiaville": Swiss health officials have authorized construction of an assisted-living "village" of 1950s-style homes and gardens designed to "remind" patients with Alzheimer's and similar afflictions of surroundings that they might actually recall and with which they might be more comfortable and secure than they are with modern life. The 150-resident grounds, near the city of Bern, will be similar to a Dutch facility set up in 2009 in a suburb of Amsterdam. "To reinforce an atmosphere of normality," reported London's The Independent in January, the Swiss caretakers will dress as gardeners, hairdressers, shop assistants and the like.

-- The varsity girls' basketball teams at predominantly white Kenmore East High School near Buffalo, N.Y., have, for several years, apparently, psyched themselves up in a pre-game locker-room ritual by chanting, "One, Two, Three, (n-word (plural))!" before running out the door and onto the court. Although the white players this year called the use of the word a "tradition" (passed down from year to year), and not a racial "label," the team's only black player not surprisingly had a problem with it and reported it to school officials. According to a December Buffalo News report, it was always a players-only tradition, and no adult was aware of the chant, but upon learning of it, officials immediately imposed player suspensions and team penalties.

-- The U.S. Treasury Department's inspector general for tax matters revealed in January that the IRS certified 331 prison inmates as registered "tax preparers" during a recent 12-month period, including 43 who were serving life sentences. None of the 43, and fewer than one-fourth of the total, disclosed that they were in prison. (The agency blamed a 2009 federal law intended to encourage online filing of tax returns, noting that "tax preparer" registration can now be accomplished online by passing a 120-question test.) (USA Today reported in February 2011 that prisoners filing false or fraudulent tax returns scammed the IRS for nearly $39.1 million in 2009.)

-- The Olympic Committee Will Not Be Calling: (1) Mr. Badr Al-Alyani told a Saudi Arabian newspaper in November that he was nearing the world record for squirting milk from his eye. The current champion, Mehmet Yilmaz of Turkey, reached 2.7 meters (almost 9 feet), and Al-Alyani reports one squeeze of 2.3 meters. He said he "will continue training." (2) In San Francisco, there is an annual refereed "Masturbate-a-thon," and the supposed world record, set in 2009, is held by Masanobu Sato, who remained aroused for nine hours, 58 minutes. In a series of videos released recently, Sato calmly explained how he "practices" for about two hours every morning while his live-in girlfriend goes about her business (in one video, ironing). Sato said he trains by swimming twice a week and has "gained about (11 pounds) in muscle," which helped him with "stamina."

-- David Belniak, now serving 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to DUI manslaughter for killing a woman and her adult daughter and her husband in a Christmas Day 2007 car crash, filed a lawsuit from prison in January against the victims' family, demanding justice from them in the form of compensation for medical expenses and his "pain" and "anguish." Police records show Belniak was driving between 75 and 85 mph when he rear-ended the victims' stopped car (and that he had alcohol, Xanax and cocaine in his system). Attorney Debra Tuomey, Belniak's sister, represents him and called her brother's imprisonment "government sanctioned assassination."

-- Not One Second Longer With That Wench: A man identified as Antonio C., 99, filed for divorce in December against his wife of 77 years, Rosa C., age 96, in Rome, Italy. According to an ANSA news agency report, Antonio became upset when he discovered 50-year-old letters from an affair Rosa once had.

-- Christopher Bolt pleaded guilty in September to felony destruction of property in Loudoun County, Va., for spray-painting more than 50 vehicles. Some were marked with the number "68," which a sheriff's detective explained was probably because Bolt had initially sprayed "69" but realized it "didn't look right."

-- Brogan Rafferty, 16, in jail in Cleveland, Ohio, awaiting trial for assisting in at least one murder in a robbery scheme, wrote to his father in December (in a letter shared with the Plain Dealer newspaper) that he was certain God would not allow him to suffer a long prison sentence. That would mean, he wrote, that "all my meaningful family members would be dead" when he got out. "(N)o way God would do that to me."

-- Benjamin North, 26, was apprehended by deputies in Humboldt County, Calif., because they were pretty sure he was the man who used a stolen credit card at a Safeway supermarket in December. They knew this because North, for some reason, insisted that the purchase be credited to his personal "Safeway Club" card, which he presented to the cashier along with the stolen card.

-- Gayane Zokhrabov, then 58, was knocked down by the flying corpse of Hiroyuki Joho, 18, during a rainstorm in Chicago in 2008, and in December 2011 filed a lawsuit against Joho's estate for compensation for the various injuries she suffered that day (broken leg, broken wrist, shoulder pain). Joho's corpse was "flying" because he had just been fatally struck by a fast-moving train as he dashed through the storm across several tracks -- while Zokhrabov was waiting on a nearby station platform. A judge initially ruled that Zokhrabov's injuries were not a "foreseeable" result of Joho's crossing the tracks, but in December, a state appeals court reinstated the lawsuit.

-- PayPal confirmed to a Toronto Star reporter in January that its refund policy required the shattering of a violin that may well have been a pre-World War II classic easily worth the $2,500 the seller was asking. The buyer had balked after paying, claiming the violin was counterfeit and produced one expert's opinion to that effect, demanding that PayPal refund the money, which it did, provided that the buyer first "destroy" the property. (According to PayPal, the laws of many countries, including the U.S., prohibit mailing knowingly counterfeit goods, and hence, PayPal's could not simply order the violin returned to sender. The seller, certain that the violin was authentic, was left with neither it nor the money.)

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Police in London stepped up their search for the man who tried to rob the Halifax bank in October but escaped empty-handed. He had demanded 700,000 pounds from a bank employee and then, intending to hand over the bag that he had brought for the money, instead absentmindedly handed over his gun. Realizing his mistake, he dashed out the door. (2) Verlin Alsept, 59, was arrested in Dayton, Ohio, in January and charged with trying to rob a Family Dollar store. He had demanded all the money in a cash register and, apparently as an attempt to intimidate the clerk, he pulled out a .38 caliber bullet from his pocket and showed it to her. She was, of course, undaunted, and he walked away (but was arrested nearby).

In Jerusalem, It's Good to Be a Man: Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, already responsible for excluding or segregating women on public transportation, advertising images and even use of sidewalks, struck again at a January medical research conference in Jerusalem. Despite their obvious interest in the conference's topic ("Innovations in Gynecology/Obstetrics and Halacha (Jewish Law)"), all women in attendance were required to sit apart from males, and no female was allowed to address the audience from the podium.