Encode Features with no Strand Information in UCSC BED Format

The UCSC Genome Browser is a powerful tool that allows you to visualize your own data in custom tracks with respect to scores of other publicly available data tracks.  To use some of the more advanced features for plotting .bed files, strand information is a required field in the .bed files.  Usually, I would just arbitrarily assign a "+" for the strand information to indicate the feature was on the plus strand, when in actuality there is no relevant strand for the feature.  This results in arrows (>>>>>>) being drawn over the feature in Genome Browser, not the end of the world, but still not the polished look I was going for.  To circumvent this, I tried to leave the field blank when uploading a custom track, however, I would get the error: "Error line 1 of custom track: Expecting + or - in strand".  Then I stumbled on a simple fix, that doesn't seem to be documented well.  All Genome Browser needs is a period (.) in the strand field of the .bam file for each feature and all seems to work fine.  The result: a sharp looking feature track in Genome Browser.