As the saying goes, now that I have your attention... Due to continued downtime due to my brain brown-outs, I'm resorting to the standby of sharing from other people's work. When my higher functions dim, I like to go for cheap laughs. In this case, The Fortean Times Book of Weird Sex, compiled by Steve Moore [London: John Brown Publishing, 1995]. Thus I can fulfill readers' curiosity and pretend to be of worth to the community. Despite the title, don't expect salacious details. These are fairly mild, if disturbing. Although all items are taken from actual published news accounts, they aren't 100 percent guaranteed to be true; this is not the Darwin Awards, which at least makes an effort to verify their winners.

Here are some items in no particular order.

• A Chinese housewife, acting on the advice of a soothsayer in 1994, cut off her husband's penis while he slept in the belief that he would grow a new one which would restore their marriage.
• [...]Lonnie Destry of New Orleans, who lost both testicles while using a chainsaw to cut logs. When doctors failed to reattach them, he had them preserved in glass and used them as a paperweight.
• The men of Kenya were warned in October 1992 against the practice of washing their genitals with battery acid after sex, as a preventative against AIDS. A doctor said the end result could be "even more disastrous".
• The Chief Surgeon at the Cincinnati Shriners Burns Institute was sacked in 1992 for drawing happy faces on the manhood of two patients "to relieve stress".
• Just before the fire that demolished part of Windsor Castle in 1992, a caretaker there was arrested for performing an undisclosed sex act with a jar of Bovril in the same chapel in which the conflagration began.
• Angry Cowboy Ross Howard of Denver, protesting about men being allowed marry men, was refused a licence [sic] to marry his horse in 1992. The hitch was a technicality: Colorado law says that three-year-olds need parental consent.