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.

After coming under fire in 1995 for using sweatshop labor in Central America, The Gap vowed to do better in the future. Since then wages for garment workers in San Salvador have risen from 55 cents an hour to 60 cents an hour, which is almost a full penny every two years. Future increases aren't expected, however, as the Salvadoran women have apparently run up massive credit card debt with their windfall "mad money."

Matthew Jackson was arrested by sheriff’s deputies in Rockdale County, Georgia, after they caught him selling chocolate bunnies laced with LSD and chocolate ducks that contained psilocybin mushrooms. Sergeant Jodi Shupe said the busts in both Newton and Rockdale counties came after authorities received information that the ducks and bunnies were being used by several area drug dealers. You could tell by a bitter aftertaste if you bit down on the entire head of the chocolate animal.

A woman in St. Augustine, Florida, found her 32-year-old boyfriend wedged into her cat door at 3 a.m., dead. A big man, Charles Tucker Jr. was apparently trying to get inside, but could only get one of his arms and his head through the door before dying. Important safety tip for people in awkward dating situations: cat doors are made for creatures approximately one-twentieth of your size.

Pam Babcock of Ness City, Kansas, had a fear of leaving the bathroom, so remained on the toilet for two years, until forcibly removed by the sheriff. At first this might sound more disagreeable than literal couch potato Gayle Laverne Grinds of Stuart, Florida, who refused to leave her sofa for six years, since a sofa is much more comfy than a toilet. However, Grinds later died from couch fusion, whereas Babcock was merely disabled by toilet seat fusion, showing once again that it’s not what you sit on, it’s how long you sit there. God wants us to keep moving.

Linda F. Long of London, Kentucky, was bitten on the right cheek by a yellow timber rattlesnake during services at the East London Holiness Church. Members of the church took her to the local Marymount Medical Center, where a nurse engaged Long in a lengthy series of questions, asking about her religious beliefs, how she got the bite, and, according to a recent lawsuit, delaying treatment so long that, when the patient was later airlifted 75 miles to the University of Kentucky Medical Center, she arrived dead. I think we already know what kind of service this was. My question is: In a case like this, does the offending snake get released into the wild, in the manner of a triumphant bull in the arena? Or does it just prove it was Satan all along?

The number of single mothers in America increased three times faster than married couples over a decade, with a record 13 million women now raising children without a husband. Newly released census statistics on the state of the American family also revealed that, of the 54.4 million married men, 47.3 million are planning to get out while the gettin's good.

New findings in the Archives of General Psychiatry show that the brain does not stop maturing at age 20, as previously believed, but continues developing until age 48. We now know that the "white matter" of the brain, the part that sends signals from one part of the brain to another, continues to develop in the frontal and temporal lobes, whereas the "gray matter," or cerebral cortex, achieves peak development at the end of adolescence and then declines. Put more simply, the hard-wiring is pretty much finished by the time you stop lusting after Britney Spears, but the ability to get really kinky with combinations ricochets around in there like a Silly Putty tennis ball.

Last year the nation of Oman passed a revolutionary law that allowed women to drive taxis—as long as the passengers were women. Now they've gone one step further, allowing lady cabbies to accept male passengers as well. Transsexuals, however, are still required to take the donkey-cart.

Bobby Cutts Jr. of Canton, Ohio, put an elbow to the throat of his pregnant lover Jessie Davis, killed her in front of his two-year-old son, wrapped her up in a rug, loaded her into his car, drove 20 miles to a park, and dumped her there so he wouldn’t have to pay child support for a fourth child. Other than that one day, they were happy.

Archeologists from Peru's San Marcos University unearthed the oldest known city in the Americas, a 160-acre settlement dating to 2627 B.C., with six pyramids, an amphitheater, and a residential complex all built 100 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza. Three thousand years older than Machu Picchu, the ruins of Caral are located 120 miles north of Lima. The Peruvian Congress reacted to the news of yet another possible tourist mecca by changing the name of the province to--translating loosely--"Region of Cool Scary Bloody Sacrificial Stuff That's Older Than Mexico's Coolest Scary Bloody Sacrificial Stuff."

Mysterious pig deaths shut down the Lihir gold mine in Papua New Guinea. After quite a few pig carcasses turned up, the local landowners instituted the practice of "gorgor," the traditional religious way to shut down a business, demanding that the mining company explain the porcine carnage. The most likely culprit is poisoned lead batteries that were lying around on the island, but local authorities aren't ruling out kosher terrorism.

A University of Pennsylvania student was driving his truck through the Sahara Desert in Egypt when he found . . . a 94-million-year-old dinosaur. The plant-eating "Sauropod" had a long neck, weighed 60 tons, and may be the second largest land animal we know of. Scientists already knew about 50-foot-high predators on the coast of North Africa that lived around the same time, but they could never figure out where they found enough food to survive. It turns out that they were eating Sauropods, rare. Since the area was full of huge prehistoric ferns and mangrove trees, they also had a salad bar. They used elephants as croutons.

When no one called him on his 29th birthday, Ashley Martin Hurst of Ipswich, Australia, held off police throughout a 12-hour siege, brandishing knives and daring them to shoot him. Unfortunately, they held their fire.

In 1990 McDonald's made a big deal out of switching from beef fat to vegetable oil for cooking their famous fries. Now two Hindus and a vegetarian have filed a class action suit saying those rascals lied and that the fries have beef products added in the factory. According to the suit, which seeks reparations for anyone misled by advertising into eating beefy fries, the McDonald's potato is first washed, then steam-peeled, then cut, then "blanched," then dried, then "par-fried with flavoring" (and that flavoring turns out to be beef flavoring), then frozen, then shipped to your local McDonald's where it is dumped into one of those wire baskets and fried in a vat of scalding vegetable oil. Among other things, this rather frightening list of food processing stages begs the question: Irishmen died for this?

A Texas appeals court told a West Texas lawyer that he could put a sign back up on his property facing Interstate 20. The lawyer's billboard said "Just Say NO To Searches!" and gave a phone number people could call for a recording telling them that they're not required to let police search their cars during traffic stops. The police in nearby Abilene complained, and eventually the Texas Department of Highways prosecuted him for violation of the Highway Beautification Act, which places restrictions on roadside signs. He was found guilty and fined $1200, so in 1999 he burned the sign down to bring attention to his case. Now the circuit court of appeals says that his message was protected free speech and the sign can go back up, but Texas being Texas, the Attorney General is considering his own appeal. Seeing as how Interstate 20 is one of the longest loneliest highways in America, and seeing as how West Texas ranchers are among the most ornery cusses in the world, we hope this starts a trend that will finally create some visual relief on that endless prairie. Suggested messages include "Just Say NO To the Pope," "China Can Kiss My Royal Red Hiney," and "Bald Eagles Kill Hundreds of Calves a Year—Let's Shoot 'Em!"