Foremost, when an article cites a law or ordinance, the author never provides a name (or, dare I ask it, cite) for the law under which the alleged deviant is being charged. To all the journalists and would-be journalists out there, please, please, please NAME THE LAW in order to (cough) save me time when I'm close to my deadline (cough) inform the public.

Secondly, I can't forward anything any more, as people are feeling way too free to ask me questions. (Ok, ok, that's not a bad thing; I just like to complain. Ask away.)

Did you hear about the wombat rape case?
-I Can't Believe I Just Said 'Wombat Rape' in a Sentence

I hadn't actually, ICBIJSWRS, but you can better believe I looked it up. Apparently a New Zealand man called his local police, claiming he was actively being raped by an unnamed wombat (let's call him Willy) and needed help.

Well, I'll say.

However, shortly thereafter he called back, saying that he was retracting his complaint of rape against Willy the Wombat as it had "pulled out." (Someone needs to tell that wombat that the withdrawal method is not a valid form of birth control.) Rape isn't unknown in the animal kingdom (mallard ducks are pretty egregious), so I'm not saying dude couldn't have been raped by a marsupial with freaky teeth, but given that he stated that his only ill effect was a change in accent (to Australian), it seems unlikely. The police agreed, and he was sentenced to community service for his false report.

Ok, so this article about a rapist who opted for castration to shorten his sentence says that "castration results in [ . . . ] erection problems." Has FoxNews completely lost it from an understatement perspective, or do they know something I don't know?
-Never Trusted Fox Anyway

No, NTFA, they actually haven't completely lost it (well, in that regard, anyway). Assuming that it wasn't chemical castration (like, say, a shot of Depo Provera), the most likely physical castration procedure would be removing the testicles. Though this decreases certain hormone levels rapidly and permanently, if physical castration of the testicles is performed after a man has reached puberty, he's still, technically, capable of erection.

Do people in Ohio have nothing better to do? It's not my thing, obviously, but do you really think sex with a picnic table should be a felony?
-Wondering in Michigan

Do we even have to ask this? Of course I don't. For those who haven't seen the story, a certain Mr. Price of Bellevue, OH (please let's refrain from any Buckeye jokes) was arrested after he was seen on multiple occasions engaging in sexual congress with a metal picnic table. Nude. Now, no matter how you feel about it, this fellow was in his own backyard, and it's not like he could ask that certain special piece of patio equipment for its consent before he got down (because if he was talking to a picnic table and expecting a reply, that'd just be nutty).

Apparently the reason his neighbors found his behavior so heinous (and the reason his public indecency charges - four, for each time he was seen having table sex, so hello sex offender registry - are being bumped up to felonies) is because his lawn furniture lovin' went down "near" an elementary school. However, according to his neighbors Mr. Price, clearly mindful of the kids, only sexed up the table mid-morning, when elementary school children obviously would've been in class. Besides, to quote a fellow RG staffer, "if that was the legislative intent - if a guy doing a picnic table in his backyard is what whichever Congressman had in mind when constructing this law - then I don't want that guy in office." Well said.

Who's more screwed up: the guy who has sex with picnic tables, or the neighbor who only turns the guy in after getting it on video?
-My Money's on the Neighbor

Mine too, MMN. It's one thing to (inadvertently, I'm sure) overhear or spy on the neighbors in flagrante delicto. That's probably going to happen to everyone at some point in their lives. (Apparently, in some sections of the Lawyer's Club, that point is now.) But there's no way taking a camera to it (nonconsensually) is a cool thing to do, no matter how many hits the neighbor thought s/he could get on YouTube. Especially not, as the article implies, multiple times. (Was the neighbor building an archive?) Further, it's just plain old mean to call the cops only after you've got your shot.

What would one even call this fetish?
- Picnic-tablephilia Doesn't Sound Right

Seriously, I have no idea, and in the (increasingly incredibly rare, honest) instance that I have absolutely no idea, I, like the Beatles, get by with a little help from my friends. Especially my friends who know Greek. (That's not a double entendre, I swear.)

Why Greek? Well, some of y'all may or may not realize that the clinical term for fetishes and some other non-mainstream sexual behavior is paraphilia, which is, shock of shocks, Greek. Currently, the DSM-IV, which is located on Sub-1 of our library (Advanced Legal Research, ya heard?) classifies what some may see as a loving relationship between a man and his outdoor furniture (along with a lot of other, less-Home Depot, sexual behaviors, like cross-dressing or water sports) as a disorder. (Quirky Neighbor Syndrome? You decide.) Of course, these are the same people who classified gay as a mental malfunction up until 1973, so grain of salt, and all that. Regardless, the "official" names for many fetish practices are, like their category, in Greek, and obviously I'm not one to buck tradition.

Realizing that Krafft-Ebing was going to let me down here, and not wanting to mislead folks, I outsourced part of my column this week. If you're my friend (or hell, even good acquaintance), you get used to receiving awfully questionable emails, so when I dropped my Greek-speaking buddy a line asking what one might call a guy who has sex with metal picnic tables using the umbrella stand hole buck nekkid in his back yard, he (barely) took pause before, an excellent sport 'til the end, he translated like a pro. The problem, of course, is that we really have no idea what turned Mr. Price on. If it was the metal, then he's likely down with metallophilia. If it was the naked where others might see, then he's more in line with a specific brand of exhibitionism known as autoagonistophilia. If it was the picnic table itself, on the other hand . . .

"Love of picnics, which I must construe as love of eating in open spaces, would likely be constructed as agorasitophilia: agora -- open space; sito -- eating. Love of tables, by similar (if less complicated) logic, would then be trapezaphilia.  Of course trapeza is also the term given to monastic refectories, which lends another curious spiral to the whole concept, but it is likely the best that I can do. A picnic table fetish would be termed something like trapezagorasitophilia (or maybe agoratrapezasitophilia), and a metal picnic table fetish would probably be a metallagorasitotrapezaphilia."

Wow. Does it matter that it was the umbrella stand aperture?

"As for the umbrella stand fetish, it is difficult because any attempt at retrofitting this would be pure gibberish.  Umbrella is derived from the Latin umbra meaning shade, shadow, or spirit (as in Hades).  It is actually a diminutive thereof, literally meaning little shade.  The equivalent term in Greek would be skia, but the meaning . . . I think . . . would be lost in translation.  And there really is no term in Greek for 'stand' that means anything along the lines of bin.  The closest I can get is keeper, but keeper in terms of a person who does the keeping . . . although it can be used to express keeper of things.  That word is fulax.  So the best I can do on lover of umbrella stands is skiafulacaphilia [ . . . ] In reality, though, that would give you something with the meaning of lover of the keeper of the spirits of the dead, of shadows, or of evil spirits, among other things which would amount to [lots of Greek] Eurynome, or Cerberus, or Charon [even more Greek], among many other persons, spirits, or beings.  Unfortunately, there is no backing into this one."

Have I mentioned yet that my friends are completely and entirely awesome? Greek speaking buddy, I salute you.