truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

In August, the annual Gotmar festival in India's Madhya Pradesh state was finally banned, after "centuries" of tradition. Residents of two neighboring villages would come together once a year to bombard each other all day long with rocks (resulting in dozens of bloody injuries and, most years, deaths), but at the sundown cease-fire, both sides would bandage their wounded and celebrate with each other (only to do it all over a year later).

Bride Lin Rong wed in August in China's eastern Jilin province, walking down the aisle in a dress that was more than 7,000 feet (1.3 miles) long (rolled up in a wagon behind her).

The New Torture: In August, Glasgow hosted the sixth annual World Pipe Band Championship, with 200 bagpipe bands competing. (Professional piping often hits a sound level of 100 decibels and can go to 120, which is louder than a pneumatic drill.)

Urinate in the Shower to Save the Forests: The Brazilian environmental group SOS Mata Atlantica this summer began encouraging people to urinate in the shower to save the Atlantic Rainforest (one avoided flush per day saving 1,100 gallons of water a year.)

"If I had portrayed Hitler in his underpants," explained Belgian artist Jan Bucquoy at the opening of his museum in July in Brussels, "there would not have been a war." Bucquoy has displayed, in glass cases, the drawers of prominent Belgians, but also exhibits "Warhol-type" drawings of underwear-clad celebrities as he imagines them (like Margaret Thatcher). As Bucquoy told Reuters: "If you are scared of someone, just imagine them in their underpants. The hierarchy will fall." Whose knickers does the artist most covet? France's First Lady Carla Bruni's would be nice, he said, but even better, the pope's.

Britain's National Health Service of Sheffield issued a "guidance" to schools this summer to encourage teaching students alternatives to premarital sex, including masturbation. According to the Daily Telegraph, the leaflet (titled "Pleasure") contains the slogan "(A)n orgasm a day keeps the doctor away" and likens the health benefits of eating fruits and vegetables, and exercising, to the benefits of masturbating twice a week.