The world as we know it

Jockstrip: The world as we know it FLOWER FRACAS AT WEDDING

A wedding reception in Garden City, N.Y., ended with three friends of the groom in jail and two police officers injured.

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Twenty-four-year-old Jonathan Torres, who had been drinking, and his brothers decided to "borrow" a flower stand and take a picture of it next to his car in the parking lot.

When police arrived they said the Torres brothers were in a struggle with waiters over the flower stand, the New York Post reports.

As the officers tried to subdue the situation, one brother jumped on the other to keep him from being hand-cuffed and the Torres father joined and landed on an officer.

One officer suffered a knee injury, the other sustained a back injury, the Post says.

QUANTITY MATTERS IN PORNOGRAPHY

Men who view more than six hours of pornography weekly are more likely to describe women in sexualized terms than are men who view less pornography.

They also tend to categorize women in stereotypically traditional feminine gender roles, according to researcher Ryan Burns at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.

"The quantity of porn consumed does seem to matter," Burns says in a statement.

Burns, who will present his findings at the November meeting of the National Communication Association in Miami, says his study supports the theory pornographic depictions of women as sexual agents are how some men develop their concepts about women.

FIRST VIRTUAL CHURCH IN BRITAIN

In an effort to beef up church attendance and become more mutli-cultural, a British church has turned to the Internet.

St. Philip and St. James Church in Bath, England, has more than tripled its flock with 500 "live" virtual worshippers from Japan to Uganda, MSNBC reports. An equal number visit the church's Web site after the service.

"We wanted to open the church up to a much wider congregation," the Rev. Alan Bain says. "People in the United Kingdom are very secular -- some people haven't been to church for three generations."

Less than 7.5 percent of adults in England and Wales go to church on an average Sunday, according to the 2002-2003 United Kingdom Christian Handbook, produced by the Christian Research Association.

BOOTLEG HARRY POTTER WITH APOLOGIES

The official Spanish translation of the latest Harry Potter book has not yet been released, but a bootleg version has been on sale in Venezuela for months.

This version of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" comes complete with translation apologies.

On one page the translator warns, "Here comes something that I'm unable to translate, sorry," the BBC reports.

On a page that includes the sentence, "You gave him 'the old one-two'," the translator adds, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand what that meant."