Lead Story Anthropomorphizing Little Muffy: (1) A February St. Petersburg Times report found several local people who regularly cook gourmet meals for their dogs and who revealed their dogs' (or maybe just "their") favorite recipes. "Veggie Cookies for Dogs," for example, requires whole-wheat flour, dried basil, dried cilantro, dried oregano, chopped carrot, green beans, tomato paste, canola oil and garlic. Asked one chef: Why feed "man's best friend" what you wouldn't eat yourself? (2) A ...

Lead Story Pastor John Renken's Xtreme Ministries of Memphis, Tenn., is one of a supposedly growing number of churches that use "mixed martial arts" events to recruit wayward young men to the Christian gospel. Typically, after leading his flock in solemn prayer to a loving God, Pastor Renken adjourns the session to the back room, where a New York Times reporter found him in February shouting encouragement to his violent parishioners: "Hard punches!" Renken yelled. ...

Lead Story When Dexter Blanch's dog nearly died from complications during spay surgery, he decided to use the event as inspiration and brought to market a chastity belt to give pet owners more control of their animals' animal instincts. The Pet Anti-Breeding System harness is especially valuable to professional breeders who may want to keep a female out of one or more "heat cycles" without resorting to sterilization. So far, said Blanch, the belts have ...

Lead Story In all likelihood, convicted murderer Paul Powell would have been sentenced to life in prison for his 1999 crime, but he could not resist gratuitously ridiculing the prosecutor. Powell's original sentence of death was overturned because of a technicality in Virginia law: The "aggravated" circumstance in a murder that warrants the death penalty must be committed against the actual murder victim (whereas the prosecutor had proved only that Powell had also raped the ...

Lead Stories (1) April Gaede, who four years ago guided her teenage daughters, Lynx and Lamb (performing as "Prussian Blue"), to a brief music career singing neo-Nazi songs, announced a new project recently on the white nationalist Web site Stormfront.org. She offers a no-fee matchmaking service to fertile Aryans, hoping to encourage marriage and baby-making -- to help white people keep up with rapidly procreating minorities. (2) Don "Moose" Lewis announced plans in January for ...

What's the Straight Dope on radiation hormesis? From what I understand, this hypothesis rejects the current wisdom that if a lot of radiation is very bad, a little bit of radiation is at least somewhat bad. These folks claim a little bit of radiation might actually be good. Sound science or voodoo? - harriswillys

I've heard coconut juice is almost identical to human blood plasma, and has been used as a plasma substitute during wartime. I asked a friend from Vietnam who lived there during the war about this, and she was very matter-of-fact about the use of coconut juice as a substitute for blood plasma during the war by Vietnamese soldiers (on both sides). She told me when they expected a big battle, they would gather coconuts in ...

Why do babies run fevers when teething? More important, why do doctors claim that they don't? Is it just so stupid/inexperienced mamas won't ignore a serious infection when they erroneously attribute a fever to teething? Or do the doctors lie because they don't understand why it happens? That seems unlikely since they admit to not knowing why/how plenty of other things work. I just had to shell out a bit of cash for an ER ...

My brother refuses to go running on days the air quality index tells him not to because he doesn't want to die sooner. My idea: how do we go about proving him insane? -littleWaki

Is the Myers-Briggs personality assessment just an example of modern-day snake oil sold by corporate soothsayers? Or does it really work? Certainly a huge industry has built up around this test. If it needs to be debunked, you're just the guy to do it. -Jim