The Weirdest News of 2011

As the weirdness of 2012 begins, it's time to take a look back at the bizarre year behind us. Some of the year's oddest stories:

• In Florida, an 8-foot-tall Lego man washed up on a beach—apparently the work of a Dutch artist, not the Lego company.
• The US Army created one of the year's weirdest foods: A beef jerky stick with as much caffeine as a cup of coffee.
• Want to buy the rights to one of the country's strangest festivals? Nederland, Colo., is trying to sell off its annual Frozen Dead Guys festival.

• The Texas man who used a frozen armadillo as a weapon sounds like a strange character—but he probably smells better than the Colorado man found hiding inside a Portapotty tank at a yoga festival.
• Workers renovating a bank in Louisiana made an unsettling find: The skeleton of a man who had become wedged in the chimney 27 years earlier.
• New York's JFK airport was forced to close runways several times because of an unusual hazard: Sex-crazed turtles. But the turtles didn't cause any casualties, unlike the escaped crocodile blamed for a deadly plane crash in the Congo.
• In Iceland, 2011 was a banner year for the country's penis museum: It obtained its first human specimen.

(More year in review stories.)