Do you love pets but don’t have time to deal with them? Check out Flexpetz, a California company that lets you timeshare a dog so you only have to take care of it when and if you want to. You can get the dog for as little as a few hours, making it the perfect thing for fooling a date into thinking you’re a sensitive pet lover. You pay a $100 sign-up fee and $50 a month, then go online and reserve the dog of your choice from a location near you. Well, as long as you live in LA or San Diego, with New York, San Francisco, and London locations opening soon. Traveling? Don’t take a dog with you, rent one there! What a concept! If it works out don’t be surprised it they start offering the same service for kids, mothers-in-law, and spouses.

After 28 years as the only newspaper that would tell the world about aliens endorsing Bill Clinton, the world’s fattest cats, and the recently found original Ten Commandments, the Weekly World News has announced that it will stop printing “The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper” as of the August 27 issue. Not to worry, you’ll still be able to read them online. Reportedly their slot at the supermarket checkout counter will be filled with copies of Scientific American. Or The Wall Street Journal should Rupert Murdoch succeed in buying it.

While Congress is getting ready to vote on a five-year farm bill that extends agriculture and nutrition programs, the GAO reports that over the past seven years the U.S. Department of Agriculture has handed out $1.1 billion to over 170,000 dead farmers. True, that only averages out to $6470.59 per person, but it’s not bad considering that you not only don’t have to work, you don’t even have to be alive. At that rate you’d think people would be dying to get into farming.

A Gary, Indiana, anger management instructor was arrested and charged with domestic battery after his daughter called police to report that he was fighting with his wife, who says he grabbed and beat her during an argument. Hey, maybe they were just role playing.

When a reporter asked Yves Leterme, a Belgian politician who is expected to become the country’s new prime minister, to sing La Brabançonne, the country’s national anthem, he smiled and sang, “Allons enfants de la patrie,” the opening words of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. When questioned about it, he said, “Hey, it’s easy to get confused. All Def Leppard songs sound alike, you know.”

Scientists in England hope to cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce global warming by getting cows to burp less. The average dairy cow spews out 26 to 52 gallons of methane every day and, contrary to popular belief, most of it comes out of their mouths. Scientists at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research figure if they can change the cows’ diets, they can help the environment. And make Al Gore feel better about drinking milk. It shouldn’t be hard. After all, they figured out how to make burpless cucumbers, didn’t they?

A Finnish researcher, wanting to find out if fish show ill effects or distress from listening to heavy metal music, is having aging rockers Uriah Heep perform in a tent near his huge tank full of salmon, trout, pike, and perch. “I will be looking for any abnormal behavior or activity,” Mikko Erkinaro said. You know, like whether the fish shake their heads violently while pumping their fins in the air, try to climb on top of the pagoda in the bottom of the tank and dive onto the other fish, or go home and apologize to their parents for enjoying one of the worst bands of their generation.

When a man in France went to the hospital suffering from mild weakness in his left leg, doctors were surprised to discover that he suffered from hydrocephalus — water on the brain. It turns out the fluid took up so much room in his skull that he only had a “thin sheet of actual brain tissue.” In spite of his mini-brain, the man is a married father of two, has an IQ of 75, and works as a civil servant. Nice to know that having a tiny brain won’t hold someone back from getting a civil service job, even in France.

A struggling writer submitted chapters from Jane Austen books to publishers to see if they’d accept it for publication. Seventeen rejected or ignored the query, while one told him not to mimic Pride and Prejudice so closely. It must have been that he changed the titles of the chapters and the names of the characters. If only he’d kept them the same he might have a publishing contract today.

Orthodox Jewish groups in Israel are upset that since the official release time of the new book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, occurs this Saturday at 2:01 am their time, many bookstores are going to stay open and sell the book in spite of the law that requires most stores to close on the Jewish Sabbath. They say they’d feel differently if the Goy Wonder were to convert, changing his name to Hayim Potter and agreeing to wear a magic tallis that makes him invisible, ride a menorah when he played Quidditch, and guarantee that only Manischewitz Concord Grape wine would be poured into the Goblet of Fire.

A survey taken for Puzzler Brain Trainer Magazine found that we’ve traded computer memory for our own. Apparently since we now store all our information in cell phones and computers, 25% of us don’t know our home telephone number, two-thirds can’t remember the birthdays of more than three friends or family members, and 45% of the men surveyed had no idea when their wedding anniversary is without looking it up. That magazine, uh, whatever the name of it is again, also found that the under 30 crowd is worse at remembering these things than their elders. Actually, all this isn’t anything to worry about. Well, as long as you don’t forget where you left your cell phone and laptop.

The world’s tallest man, 7-foot-9-inch Bao Xishun of Mongolia, married a woman on Thursday who’s two-thirds his height and half his age. This means his better half is more like his better one-sixth*.

* (1/2 x 2/3) x 1/2 = 1/6

In a document released yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI says Catholicism is the only true path to salvation and that other Christian denominations are “defective” and not true churches. He went on to say that Buddhists need more prayers and fewer riddles, Judaism isn’t a religion but rather an excuse to eat bagels and lox, and Muslims need to settle on a spelling for their religion’s founder before he can even consider taking them seriously.

A man in Cambodia recently injected hair tonic into his penis in order to enlarge it. After all, if it will grow hair it will grow anything, right? Wrong. It caused “massive, excruciating ulceration of the phallus” which was so painful that the man hanged himself. Cambodian officials went public with the information because they say it wasn’t an isolated case. Some people will do anything to grow a thick, lustrous, uh, mane.

Police in Aachen, Germany, set up a soccer match as part of a campaign against fan violence at sporting events. The game was called after five players attacked a heckler and other players and fans joined in. Why would they do such a thing? Beats me.

Something to think about the next time you’re at a ballgame, concert, or street festival waiting in a long line to get into the bathroom and wondering if it’s physically possible to press your thighs together any tighter. The Chinese city of Chongqing has opened a four-story, 32,290 sq. ft. public bathroom that has more than 1,000 toilets. Some areas have soothing music piped in, others have TVs to keep you busy, and others feature urinals that look like open crocodile mouths. Don’t be surprised if the city changes its official motto to: Chongqing – If you’ve got the pee, we’ve got no queue.

At the end of a dinner party in Verviers, Belgium, a helpful guest cleared the table, washed the dishes, and took the leftovers to the basement to put them in the deep freeze. There she discovered the host’s wife and 12-year-old stepson — frozen solid. Hopefully the host won’t use the defense that his wife was frigid all along.

White House spokesman Tony Snow says that even though President Bush has commuted Lewis “Free Ride on a Scooter” Libby’s sentence, he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a pardon down the road. After all, “Scooter Libby may petition for one.” Snow went on to say that, should Libby ask, the president would also consider giving him his job back, awarding him the Congressional Medal of Honor, and nominating him for the Nobel Perjury Prize.

FOR SALE: Dracula’s Castle. 57 cozy rms, courtyard, underground passages. Lovely 14th century attention to details. Built on 200 ft. tall rock overlooking picturesque village of Bran. Reportedly slept in one night by Vlad the Impaler, now a thriving museum. Furniture and art included. Short 105-mile commute to Bucharest. Blood stains, fangs, bats, and bad accents extra. Contact Archduke Dominic Habsburg at 00.40.21.311.1460. At night.

Some air traffic controllers have been protesting a government dress code that says they can’t wear shorts, jeans, T-shirts, and halter tops to work by showing up in dresses, which apparently aren’t on the verboten list for men. They’re following a longstanding tradition of cross dressing, one that goes back at least to the 15th century B.C.. Scientists the other day announced that they used DNA to identify an Egyptian mummy as pharaoh Queen Hatshepsut, who’s best known as the female pharaoh who dressed like a man and wore a false beard. It’s a safe bet no one mistook her for Cleopatra.