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Each year on the first Monday of Lent, the people of the tiny Greek town of Tyrnavos go crazy about penises, singing lewd songs and urging passersby to kiss their model phallusses. The pagan fertility festival is one of the most famous parties in Greece.

If you want to eat phallus-shaped bread, drink through phallus-shaped straws from phallus-shaped cups, kiss ceramic phalluses, sit on a phallus-shaped throne and sing dirty Greek songs about the phallus, then you should visit the little Greek town of Tyrnavos each year on “Clean Monday.”

The one-day pagan fertility festival in this town of 15,000 people near the central Greek city of Larissa marks the beginning of Lent, the fasting period before Easter, and is one of the most famous carnivals in Greece.

Come prepared. Passersby tend to be grabbed and rocked over a pot of boiling “bourani” spinach soup while a ceramic penis is placed between their legs. They must kiss the phallus, then drink tsipouro — a strong local spirit — from its tip, and then stir the soup before they’re let go.

Phallus-kissers are rewarded with ash-streaks on their face, which presumably absolves them from having to go through the procedure again, unless of course they would like to.

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– I’m sorry, but when I read Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, I thought this was a problem he was describing in South Africa in 1915.  At that time, the whites had decided that East Indians were black and had to go to the back of the proverbial bus.

– It’s pretty amazing to see that here and now in South Africa, the local Chinese have just been declared to be black.  Amazing.  Even more amazing?  This is what they wanted.

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JOHANNESBURG // It has to be one of the more surreal court decisions. In South Africa’s high court, Justice Pretorius recently ruled: “It is declared that South African Chinese people fall within the ambit of the definition of ‘black people’.”

In terms of human skin tones, east Asians are about as far removed from Africans as it is possible to be without being Caucasian. But in modern South Africa “black” is a relative concept.

South Africa’s naturalised Chinese community – as opposed to more recent arrivals as part of the Asian global diaspora – are largely the descendants of traders and small businessmen who immigrated in the first 40 years of the 20th century, in the wake of the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand.

Most of the indentured labourers who were brought in to work in mining and construction were sent home at the end of their contracts, but a few stayed on, and their children and grandchildren are Chinese South Africans too.

Some Taiwanese investors, who arrived in the 1980s after trade agreements were signed between Taipei and Johannesburg, were effectively treated as “honorary whites”, but under apartheid, Chinese South Africans were included within the “coloured” designation, along with those of mixed race and all who did not fit into the convenient categories of “white” or “black”. As such, they were subject to discrimination, educated in “coloured” schools, not allowed to live in “white” districts under the Group Areas Act, and barred from marrying whites, with sexual relations between the races illegal under the Immorality Act.

After the advent of democracy in 1994, when South Africa’s new ANC-led government instituted a series of measures designed to redress historical wrongs, known as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE), South African Chinese thought that they too would benefit.

Instead, the legislation defined “black” as Africans, coloured people, Indians, disabled people and women. Chinese, who now number between 6,000 and 10,000 people, were reclassified as “white”.

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How to Win Your Wife’s Weight in Beer

Every year, the small Finnish town of Sonkajärvi hosts the Wife Carrying World Championships. All men have to do is sprint around an obstacle course while carrying their wives. And the women? They have to hold on tight — which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

It sounds like it could be some primitive Scandinavian skill, dating to when skin-wearing Nordic tribes had to haul their women from burning huts before an onslaught of marauding Vikings (more…) or maybe Huns from the eastern steppes.

As it happens, though, the Wife Carrying World Championships, held every summer in the small Finnish town of Sonkajärvi, isn’t even close to that old. The event, which sets husbands from around the world racing down an obstacle course for the grand prize of the woman’s weight in beer, hasn’t even been around for two decades.

It started as a lark by Sonkajärvi locals in 1992. Four years later it became an “international contest,” and this year 50 couples will compete from 14 countries around the world, including Germany, Sweden, the United States, Australia, China, Kenya and Israel.

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Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman – a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs – staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it’s come to that.

“God is the only one we can turn to at this point,” said Twyman, 59. “Our leaders don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.”

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