Saudi Arabia is host to several camel beauty pageants each year (condemned as religiously fatuous by Muslim clerics), but the countrys irst goat beauty pageant was held in September in Riyadh, with the distinctive Najdi breed, featuring high nose bridges and silky, shaggy hair, taking top prizes.

Freud de Melo, 73, operates a quirky tourist park in central Brazil that features stone models of Noah's Ark and other sculptures, but he also notoriously suffers from taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive, and one of his sculptures is his own elaborate, fear-assuaging crypt.

But what if the device falls into the wrong hands? A 55-yearold British man whose bowel was ruptured in a nearly catastrophic traffic accident has been fitted with a bionic sphincter that opens and closes with a remote controller.

Spare the rod: In September, engaging in a 300-year tradition of the Dussera holiday in India's Tamil Nadu state, Hindu priests ritually whipped 2,000 young women and girls over a five-hour period as penance for a range of sins, from insufficient studying to moral impurity.

The public record: (1) From the Findlay, Ohio police: "A woman called the police early Saturday morning (Oct. 31) during an argument with her husband after he claimed that the woman's daughter performed oral sex on him, and the daughter was better at it.

In October in Orange County, Calif., Billy Joe Johnson, who had just been convicted of murder as a hit man for a white supremacist gang, begged the judge and jury, in all sincerity, to sentence him to death.

(1) In September, the Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers, along with four physicians and three surgical nurses, donated their services for delicate brain surgery on a 25-year-old silverback lowland gorilla at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs.

The first line of "defense" at the 400 Iraqi police checkpoints in Baghdad are small wands with antennas that supposedly detect explosives, but which US officials say are about as useful as Ouija boards. The Iraqi official in charge, Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, is so enamored of the devices, according to a November New York Times.

For some consumers, good environmental citizenship is important even when choosing among sex accessories. No longer will they tolerate plastic personal vibrators made with the softeners called phthalates;

Procter & Gamble announced in October that it will once again create and host a public restroom for the holiday season in New York City's Times Square as a promotion for Charmin tissue.