Useless Legs, Brawling Monks

and the Morning Edition of Chuck's News of the Weird Daily for Tuesday

Too many fingers, too many hands, too many arms, too many legs
News of the Weird has been here before with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (and if it's a sexual thing, especially a man whacking his stuff off while still intending to remain a male, it's apotemnophilia), but this latest report also expands the field: people who long to be paralyzed (maybe so they can be confined to cool wheelchairs!) and people who want to be blind or deaf. The continuing crisis for BIID'ers is that it's hard to get a doctor to help them meet their goals (what with that "do no harm" deal), leaving the solution to "self-help" or, um, "undocumented" physicians. (Related point, from previous News of the Weird coverage: There are "members of the deaf community" who so love being deaf that they prefer deaf babies, and, if that fails, refuse suggestions for Cochlear implants that would open a lifetime of sound to the kid.) Bizarre magazine
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Update: It was mostly peaceful this last week in Israel and the West Bank (well, except for an internal-Christian smackdown in that church in Jerusalem)
We're forced to report periodically on the brawls inside the massive Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was built on the ground where Jesus was supposedly crucified and where six Christian denominations share worship space while they each continually dream of the day when the other five will just go away. Two major problems between the sects: (1) The centuries-old series of edifices almost never get upgraded, and rarely repaired, because every part of the infrastructure seems to run through multiple sects' sectors, and there's little cooperation. (One decrepit wooden ladder attached to a ledge above the entrance has been there since the 1800s.) (2) The denominations celebrate different holy days differently, so you get lots of Egyptian coptics, say, herding through the place while Armenian monks, say, aren't celebrating anything in particular, and then the complaints start about how unruly one group is compared to another, nyah nyah nuh nyah-nyah. (Bonus, of course: When they brawl, it's Muslim Jerusalem police officers who have to come in and calm down the Christians.) BBC News /// BBC News [an October skirmish] /// NOTW M061 (6-8-2008) /// NOTW M042 (1-27-2008) [almost precisely the same problem, occurring at the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem]
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People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Ryan Bailey, 32, was arrested in Indiana, charged with sexually assaulting an Amish man, with the explanation that he was actually out hunting for an Amish woman to sexually assault but couldn't find one and so had to settle. Associated Press via Indianapolis Star
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Your Daily Jury Duty
[no fair examining the evidence; verdict must be based on mugshot only]
Salvador Solis, 40, arrested after reacting to what he felt was poor customer service at a massage parlor. Houston Chronicle
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More Things to Worry About on Tuesday
[Oh, there are certainly a few things to worry about today; see the Afternoon post.]