After Christopher Lee McCuin was booked into the Smith County Jail in Tyler, Texas, on charges of murdering and possibly eating the flesh of his girlfriend, the county sheriff received a letter from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals requesting that McCuin be placed on an all-vegetarian diet while in jail so that he could not be “involved in any senseless killing.” At first jail officials thought the letter was a hoax, but the Tyler Morning Telegraph interviewed the author, PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich, who confirmed he had written it and said it was not intended to be funny. READ MORE...

Wal-Mart announced that it is going into the wine business, teaming up with Gallo Winery of Modesto, California, to produce an affordable ($6 to $8) bottle of *vino* for the masses. The principal red varietal will be a charming little number called Arkansas Beaujolais, made of muscatel READ MORE...

Selva Kumar, a 33-year-old man from a village in southern India, killed two dogs in 1992 and, four days later, was stricken with paralysis. Fifteen years of medical treatments failed to improve his condition, so he consulted an astrologer who told him that he was cursed because of killing the dogs, and that the only way to lift the curse was to marry a dog. READ MORE...

In Northern Ireland, line-dancing was officially banned by the Free Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterians have always been opposed to normal dancing, but line-dancing has become increasingly popular at Protestant weddings. Now the Rev. Ian Paisley has officially denounced it, saying line-dancing "sullies the sanctity of the ceremony" and that it's "aiding and abetting fleshly lusts which war against the soul." READ MORE...

Three Lesbians (capital “L”) are suing an organization of lesbians (lower case “l”) for calling themselves Lesbians (capital “L”) in the name of their organization, which is the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece. Dimitris Lambrou, a male Lesbian, traveled from Mytilene, the capital of the island of Lesbos, to Athens to file the suit, pointing out as he did that natives of Lesbos have been called Lesbians for thousands of years READ MORE...

Broderick Lloyd Laswell of Bentonville, Arkansas, is suing the Benton County Jail for putting him on a starvation diet that has caused him to lose more than a hundred pounds. When he was first booked for murder, Laswell weighed 413 pounds, but after just eight months in jail, he was down to a frail 308. There’s obviously something wrong with a prison system that uses hunger as a means of manipulation and control, and if Broderick goes under 280, I say we go to the feeding tube before we have another Terri Shiavo situation on our hands.

The Florida Senate passed a bill banning the display of fake bull testicles that dangle from trailer hitches, but the bill still has to get through the House of Representatives, which has historically had a majority of lawmakers who enjoy testicle displays and who, in fact, frequently employ fake ones on the floor of the House, usually in the service of bull.

Sheriff’s deputies responding to a disturbance call at a Motel 6 in Hagerstown, Maryland, asked James Jackson why he had a car key embedded in his temple, just above his right ear. Jackson explained—before being admitted for key-removal surgery READ MORE...

A middle school in Siberia has a new plan for dealing with
children who misbehave. If the problem can't be solved after monthly conversations with the local Commission for Children and Adolescents, businesses have agreed to release the child's father from work so that he can attend school with his child. READ MORE...

If you’ve ever wondered who invented the popular Armor of God children’s pajamas, which are based on Ephesians 6:10-18 and look like a cross between a competitive kung fu uniform and the Crusader chainmail worn by Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles if he had added footies, the answer is Shirley Rogers of Lake City, Florida, and Peggy Wakefield of Spartanburg, South Carolina, who offer the complete boy’s PJ’s (traditional Roman-style helmet) for $39.95 READ MORE...

When a 66-year-old Seattle woman changed the channel of the television in the common room of an assisted living complex because she wanted to watch a religious program, she was challenged by another woman, a resident of the complex in her early sixties, who eventually grabbed a six-inch kitchen knife and stabbed the channel-switcher in the abdomen. READ MORE...

The real Shaolin Temple, not to be confused with the classic 1982 kung fu movie of the same name, installed luxury restrooms worth $340,000 so that tourists visiting the Beijing Olympics who want to see where they filmed Silver Hermit From Shaolin Temple (1979) won’t be inconvenienced by the monk latrines which, for all we know, were constructed to be intentionally primitive to challenge the discipline of the fighters, as in 18 Shaolin Disciples (1976), not to mention the challenged bladder of The Shaolin Drunken Monk (1982).

The Holy Prepuce—which is the, ahem, foreskin of Jesus—has been missing since 1983, but all the bishops and priests who might be able to shed light on the matter of its whereabouts have been silenced by papal decree. Therefore The Wittenburg Door put in a formal request for an audience with the Pope this week, READ MORE...

Robert Baldwin of Gonic, New Hampshire, stuffed an entire package of bologna down his pants and had to be apprehended by authorities for disgusting use of luncheon meats. The official charge was “willful concealment,” which is a misnomer since Baldwin was obviously engaging in willful enhancement, but he was sentenced in Portsmouth District Court to 40 hours of community service, and at least a portion of that time will involve learning the proper usages of all sausages, salamis, bratwursts, knackwursts, kielbasas, and, need we point out, wieners.

Eileen Issa of Macungie, Pennsylvania, checked out a children’s book called King & King from the Lower Macungie Public Library and started reading it to her two-year-old son. The story, by Dutch authors Linda de Haan and Stern Nifland, is about an overbearing queen who demands that her son marry a princess, but he marries a prince instead, and the final scene has the two men holding hands and exchanging a kiss of marital bliss at the altar. The ending made her “sick,” said the mom, and she demanded that the library remove the book from circulation, even though there had been no previous complaints about homosexually-themed children’s books translated from the Dutch. The library board decided to leave the book alone, lest Dutch homosexuals feel estranged from Greater Macungie society.

A man talking into his cell phone walked around a lowered railroad crossing gate at Alvarado Street in San Leandro, California, ignored the bells, flashing lights and signs, and was pancaked by an Amtrak passenger train, dying instantly, because there is no call-waiting when God’s trying to get your attention.

Scientists documented the first sex act in history. It occurred 570 million years ago when theFunisia Dorothea, which lived on the floor of the ocean and resembled a piece of shriveled beef jerky, copulated with anotherFunisia Dorothea and continued to be the only sexual organism for the next 30 million years, until the second sexually active creature appeared:Forget Dorothea, Try Heather.

Sebastian Horsley, the British author of Dandy in the Underworld, was denied entry into the United States on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” Horsley, who always wears a top hat and tails, arrived at Newark Airport to promote his latest book, filled with tales of his drug addiction, some of the 1,000 prostitutes he’s slept with, and his self-crucifixion in the Philippines in 2000, and after questioning by immigration agents, was put on a plane back to London. READ MORE...

Parley Parker Pratt, the great great grandfather of Mitt Romney and quite a few others (since he had twelve wives), will be dug up from his grave in Alma, Arkansas, and moved to the Salt Lake City Cemetery where he will join his fellow original members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Pratt was murdered on a farm northeast of Van Buren, Arkansas 151 years ago by Hector McLean, who was legally married to Eleanor McLean, who had not bothered to get a divorce before she entered into a “celestial marriage” with Pratt. READ MORE...

Jason and Tammy Barrett of Laurel County, Kentucky, had their foster-care license revoked because they admitted to attending snake-handling religious services, even though they didn’t take their four foster kids to the services. Apparently the state of Kentucky, and specifically an agency called Lifeway for Youth Kentucky, are crazed PETA fanatics who don’t realize that, in modern snake-handling denominations, the serpents are not harmed in any way and in fact are quite well fed with diets of live mice as well as the usual fare of satanic infidel non-believers.

Nine third-graders at Center Elementary School in Waycross, Georgia, brought a steak knife, handcuffs and duct tape to class so they could show their female teacher just how much they dislike her. READ MORE...

A 32-year-old man on a bicycle in Fort Pierce, Florida, was propositioned by a 300-pound hooker wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt at 1 a.m. When he offered her $10 because, he told police, “he felt sorry for her,” she knocked him off the bike, stole his wallet, fished $100 out of it, and pedaled away on the stolen bike. I ask you: When will the Size Prejudice cease? When will we realize that elephantine sex workers committing random assaults, robberies and vehicle thefts are people, too? When will we say, “Come, my sister, sit with me in peace and love. Take two chairs.”

The Reverend Patrick Dunne, pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in White Plains, New York, was sent to rehab by his bishop because he was cashing church checks in order to fuel his “gambling addiction.” In White Plains, you’re about equally distant from Foxwoods Casino, largest per-square-foot casino in the country, although many people prefer the nearby Mohegan Sun, in the north, and Atlantic City, with eleven major casinos, in the south, plus you’re in easy striking distance of all the best thoroughbred tracks on the east coast, including Aqueduct, Belmont, and Saratoga Springs, some of the most historic harness tracks in the nation in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and Monticello, New York, and then you’ve got your jai alai frontons and your greyhound tracks in Rhode Island if you’re in the mood, so “gambling addiction” could mean anything and we fail to see how investing the church’s money should suddenly become some kind of a sin. Now sports betting, that’s illegal in all states except Nevada, so if they caught him doing that, then shame on the padre.

Bob Popplewell, the owner of Bayou Bob’s Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch west of Fort Worth, was arrested for selling bottles of vodka containing dead baby rattlesnakes to East Asian immigrants. The charge was selling liquor without a license, since Texas has no law involving the selling of dead baby rattlesnakes without a license. This particular case got a lot of attention in the Texas media, and I’m not sure why, since most people would recognize rattlesnake-infused vodka as a common vending item at rattlesnake ranches, and the police paid no attention at all to the Lizard Grape Nehi that, in my opinion, has no place in a roadside reptile attraction.

Craig Rhodenizer, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lyndonville, New York, told his wife he was going to Best Buy to get his computer fixed and was found a day and a half later, 422 miles away, at the KC Lounge topless bar in Riverside, Ohio, where he had consumed four beers, paid for four lap dances, and left an empty bottle of Bacardi on the floor of his Toyota Camry in the parking lot. This is instantly recognizable to any trained therapist as Delayed Titty Bar Syndrome, often caused by being deprived of breast milk in the key six-to-12-month teething period, and can be cured by either a) a really expensive hooker, or b) public humiliation.

Daniel French clambered over a locked gate in the middle of the night and wandered around London’s Leicester Square Gardens, where he made “sexual motions” toward several iron railings, then announced to police, “I’m going to have sex with a fence.” Later, in City of Westminster Magistrates Court, French was asked by a judge if he intended to follow through on his urges, and French denied ever threatening to rape a fence, saying “That’s disgusting.” This is something we see in family counseling all the time and is caused by childhood trauma. When parents continually bring home strange fences and random iron railings, so that the child doesn’t know from week to week which fence and which railing he might find in his mother’s room when he gets home from school, he’ll develop an inner rage that will frequently show up in later life as he’s aroused by cast iron facings, ornate latticework, and even, in some extreme cases, the agricultural pens erected by stonemasons on pig farms.

A nude man, covering his private parts with his hands and wearing a nun’s habit on his head, drove into the parking lot of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Union City, California, and told three girls to get into his car, but the girls ran into the church instead. This is what sometimes occurs in counseling, when a therapist says “Get into the habit of controlling your sex drive by thinking of Jesus,” and the patient hears that as “Put on a habit, and drive to where Jesus lives to have sex.” You have to watch your commas and capitalization when you hand out psychiatric literature.

Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore discovered that sometime within the last 11 billion years, a mysterious "dark energy" began to take over the universe, and now it's believed that the cosmos consists of 65 per cent "dark matter," 30 per cent "dark matter of unknown nature," and 5 per cent stars, gas and dust. (That would be our part.) "We live in a preposterous universe," concluded Dr. Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. A younger colleague from San Francisco summed up by saying, "Goth rules, man."

In yet one more area in which Europe’s economy is surpassing America, the leading funeral company in Vienna announced a new cremation urn in several styles, shaped like a soccer ball, for only $558. It’s appropriate given that Austria is hosting the upcoming Euro 2008 championship tournament, especially since there will undoubtedly be drunk English fans murdered during actual games. No regular NFL football cremation urn is currently available, although they could sell thousands of those at Lambeau alone.

Assistant Rabbi Uria Ohana of Chabad Lubavitch was entering a subway station in Brooklyn when Ali Hussein snatched the yarmulke off his head. Ohana chased Hussein to get his yarmulke back, with Hussein’s Arabic friends joining in the foot chase, screaming “Allah-hu Akbar!” As they all ran outside the station, Hussein darted into the street and was knocked over by a blue Volvo. Hussein remained on the ground, crying, his leg broken, long enough for police to arrive, but Hussein’s friends had fled the scene. The lesson for all of us is that God can, at any time, should He so desire, send a five-cylinder turbocharged T5 engine with 1,500 to 5,000 rpms of torque and 227 horsepower to put 3,792 pounds of metal on your ass.