truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Thousands of Koreans, and some tourists, uninhibitedly joined in the messy events of July's Byryeong City Mud Festival, which glorifies the joys of an activity usually limited to pigs. Mud wrestling, mud-sliding, a "mud prison" and colored mud baths dominated the week's activities, but so unfortunately did dermatological maladies, which hospitalized 200 celebrants.

A Tokyo rail passenger company, Keihin, installed a face-scanning machine recently so that employees, upon reporting for work, can tell whether they are smiling broadly enough to present a good impression.

Americans Fantasize, Germans Act: Two formerly well-off retired couples in Speyer, Germany, whose nest egg was largely wiped out by investments in sub-prime Florida mortgages, vented their anger by kidnapping their investment adviser, James Amburn, in June. They took him to the vacation home of one of the couples near the Austrian border, bound him like a mummy and beat and tortured him over several days, fracturing two ribs, in repeated attempts to punish him and extort his own property as partial compensation for their losses. Police rescued him after he managed to send a coded message by fax.

"Pop" is a 2 1/2-year-old Swedish kid whose "gender" is unknown to everyone, including Pop. "It" will be counseled that people do not have identical apparatus between their legs, but Pop's folks told the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in June that they intend to ignore all cultural characteristics of "boys" and "girls" in raising Pop. To the parents, "gender" is a social construct, and Pop will someday decide which roles seem appropriate.

In June in Xianyang, in China's Shaanxi province, a family hired a service for the equivalent of $4,400 to dig up a female corpse for their recently deceased son to "marry." It's the latest incidence of trying to overcome a centuries-old curse that forecasts a bad afterlife for men who die unmarried.

The nomadic Vadi tribe, in the Indian state of Gujarat, continues to be adept at flouting the country's 18-year-old ban on snake-charming. Historically, the Vadi have taught their children, beginning at age 2, to be at peace with cobras through affection and respect. According to a June dispatch in London's Daily Telegraph, male children practice the iconic flute routines, and females provide hands-on care and feeding. The cobras are not de-fanged (which would be disrespectful), but each is fed an herbal solution that supposedly neutralizes the venom and is released back into the wild after a few months' service.