truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

News of the Weird reported in 2002 on a rooftop brawl in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre (under joint control of six Christian faiths, whose adherents sometimes get snippy with each other), when a cleric placed a chair in an area reserved for another faith. In September 2004, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox clerics had a fistfight (resulting in at least five injuries) after a Catholic left a door open during an Orthodox service. (Coincidentally, on almost the same day in Bedford, Ohio, police said that more than 100 Sikhs were involved in a brawl over proper clerical dress at the Guru Gobind Singh Sikh Temple.) [WEWS-TV (Cleveland)-AP, 9-26-04

Ultra-Orthodox California rabbi Nachum Shifren, 53, cuts a dashing figure on the beach at Malibu, where he is the legendary surfer "Shifty," easily spottable on 20-foot waves by his long beard, according to a September profile in the San Diego Union-Tribune. In his spare time (he says he is ready to ride 24/6, allowing for the Sabbath), he has conducted "Passover surfaris" and beach bar-mitzvahs, and his lectures on Deuteronomy include the observation that "surf punks" paddled out into the Red Sea during the Jews' exodus from Egypt. "[T]he whole religious experience," he told the reporter, "the outer body experience, is encompassed in the act of surfing."

The Arabian Peninsula Women's Information Bureau (which is said to be an al Qaeda affiliate) announced in September that it had published the first issue of an Internet magazine, Al- Khansaa, designed to help women sort out their simultaneous obligations to their family and to the holy jihad. Among the inspirational guidelines: "The blood of our husbands and the body parts of our children are the sacrifice by means of which we draw closer to Allah," and "

Separation of Church and Bedroom: A 43-year-old Catholic priest and a 26-year-old nun were sentenced to six-month suspended sentences in July after they were caught by police having sex in the back seat of a Toyota Corolla at the Lilongwe International Airport in Malawi. And in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria, in August, police raided the headquarters of an Islamic breakaway sect, the Yan-Gwagwarmaya, whose conventions are at odds with the mainstream in several ways, most notably its devotion to wife-swapping.

Catholic priest Zivko Kustic told a newspaper in Zagreb, Croatia, in July that his church would lobby the Croatian Parliament for an exemption to a tough drunk-driving law being debated, on the ground that priests have to drink wine in as many as three masses a day and sometimes in three different villages and often cannot meet the safe blood-alcohol level of under 0.05.

In June, Norway's Labor Inspection Authority rejected the official registration papers filed by the Skjargard School, a private Christian fundamentalist institution that nonetheless receives much federal assistance. The Authority said it needed to see a better organization chart, in order to track lines of responsibility, because the chart Skjargard submitted merely listed as its CEO Jesus Christ.