My annual countdown of the strangest local news stories of the year appears in my Wednesday column.

How do I come up with them? I clip and save stories from the Bulletin, and occasionally other papers, throughout the year in a folder labeled “Weird stories of [year],” then sift through them in late December. There were 29 stories in all, some of them from my columns — although none of the 10 selections ended up being anything I’d written about. My choices and the rankings are somewhat random, but if the stories got a lot of attention, they move up in the countdown.