By M.Christian

YNOT – Even though 2011 is coming up on halfway done and there are a lot of uncertainties in the air — from the future of a certain political Weiner’s weiner to whether Paul Revere was rode hard and put away wet — two universal constants have emerged: People are still having sex, and people are having really strange sex.

Case in point: West Virginia resident Mark Thompson was apprehended by the long-arm of the law after he developed much too intimate a relationship with a stolen pygmy goat. For whatever reason, the goat’s owner decided to confront Thompson, 19, about the animal’s disappearance, and barged into Thompson’s residence unannounced, only to be horrified by the scene in the bedroom.

Thompson “was standing there with his pants down,” the goat’s owner told The Charleston Gazette. “He had on women’s clothing and the goat was dead and there was blood everywhere. It was just a scene.”

The goat-loving cross-dresser subsequently led police on a merry chase through the nearby woods, dressed only in bra and panties. After he was apprehended, he blamed the sordid affair on a on “bath salts,” the latest quasi-legal designer drug in his neighborhood.

Police charged the teenager with animal cruelty, and the court remanded him to Adult Protective Services … which is a polite way of saying they confined him to a rubber room.

Luckily, some good — and blessedly goat-free — news has emerged from Brazil: Ana Catarian Bezerra, 36, recently won a landmark court case allowing her to pursue a very personal hobby while at work. According to a report at Guanabee (“Spicy Coverage For Latinos”), Bezerra suffers from a chemical disorder that provokes hypersexuality. The only relief she has been able to find is masturbation … a lot of it, even at work.

Her condition “got so bad I would masturbate up to 47 times a day,” she said. “That’s when I asked for help. I knew it wasn’t normal.”

Under a doctor’s care, she has been able to reduce the frequency of her sojourns into self-pleasure to only 18 times daily, which still was too frequent for her employer, who threatened to terminate her from her accountancy position. The court ruled not only could Bezerra keep her job, but on the advice of her physician she is allowed to watch porn on her work computer and masturbate in the office “as needed.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, a very different kind of court case has been scheduled in South Africa: 12 people face trial for burning to death a pastor accused of using his “magic penis” to bewitch women in his congregation into having sex with him.

The wife and daughter of pastor Albert Malwane of the Izwi Zion Christian Church went into hiding after his killers also burned their house.

The magic penis was neither the first nor the last supernatural allegation leveled at Malwane and his family. Villagers also claimed the pastor spoke with animals and sometimes used an invisible penis on unwilling potential consorts. After Malwane’s death, his family was accused of wreaking magical vengeance by casting sickness spells on the village, and Malwane’s wife was said to “turn into a snail and terrorize the community.”

Penises actually seem to be grabbing more than their share of news headlines lately. In Bulgaria, two best friends engaged in a drunken battle to determine the better swordsman, in the literal sense. One thing led to another, and with one careless swipe of a Japanese katana, Lyubomir Todorov lopped off pal Zaprian Lozanov’s personal “sword.”

Evidently not one to hold a grudge, Lozanov eventually managed to secure Todorov’s early release from a six-year prison sentence, but there was an ulterior motive behind his largesse.

“People tell me I was noble to get him released, but I want him to get a job so he can pay the compensation I am due,” Lozanov told the press, adding that his goal now is to help the mad swordsman find a job so he can finance Lozanov’s reconstructive surgery.

M.Christian is a YNOT.com contributing editor and an author of literary erotica that blends the spectrum of sexual preferences and desires with horror and science fiction. Got weird sex news you want to share? Email him.