Last Date

The future "Mr. Bewitched" commits teen-i-cide!

Death Wish

Police in North Vernon, Indiana say it is obvious this man had a death wish. That may not be so uncommon for men his age and perhaps in his profession, but he accomplished it in a very disturbing fashion. I've followed the events in The North Vernon Plain Dealer & Sun, but I do find it somewhat unnerving that the story is making the rounds through many newspapers in central and southern Indiana, as I fear widespread dissemination of the story may open the door to copycats.
UPDATE: Meth, unsuprisingly, played a role. Greensburg Daily News

Unrelated bonus mugshot from the same paper of Nikkiah C. Weddle, a loving mother, that just appears slothful. I feel that her having smoked marijuana three weeks earlier will play a heavy role in her defense, since we've all smoked a joint that we took almost a full month to recover from.

Safety in Offices

When your office is staffed by the Three Stooges.

Time Out For Trouble

An evil, possessed clock destroys one family and revels in the troubles of a whole town. That's my kind of public-service announcement!

Weird Shorts

A Romanian would-be burglar was quite literally caught with his pants-down when he tried to sneak into a closed supermarket through a small window, became stuck, then somehow managed to wriggle out of his trousers while trying to free himself. Which was how he was found, 11 hours later (Sky News).

An 81 year-old Australian took a wrong turn when driving to collect the morning paper, ending up on a major highway. Nine hours and four hundred miles later, he finally stopped and asked for directions. Eric Steward later rejected offers of a satnav device saying he’d only been lost once before, from 1997 to 2001 (Reuters).

The British Government has produced a sex guide for pensioners. The guide examines the benefits of a healthy sex-life, suggests the safe positions for the frailer retirees, and explains how to use Viagra and practise safe sex (STV).

Santa Claus will have a slightly easier job of it this year as the US Postal Service has axed its seasonal practice of forwarding letters to Santa to North Pole, Alaska, where dozens of volunteers help answer them, after one volunteer recognised another as a listed sex offender (CNews).

A new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne, Germany is revealing how the Nazi Party tried to “de-Christianise” Christmas. It documents how many carols still sung in Germany today were rewritten without their previous religious imagery, and includes a display of Nazi designed Christmas decorations from that period in the shape of swastikas, grenades and Iron Crosses (Telegraph).

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Marijuana Farm to blame for Massive California Fires

According to the Los Angeles Times, the huge wild fires California is experiencing were caused by a cooking fire on a Pot farm.

I've heard people refer to smoking pot as "burning mad trees", but I think this takes that a little too literally.

Irony

While a 53-year-old man was competing successfully in the swimming section of the National Senior Games in Palo Alto, California, his 61-year-old brother was back home in Madison, Indiana, at the Yacht Club. When the brother called home to his mother to tell her he had just won a 500-yard freestyle, she told him his older brother had just been swept away in the rain-swollen Ohio River and could not be located. The Madison Courier. His body was later found.

Vorsprung Durch Technik?

An accident on Germany's A2 autobahn involving 259 cars has left 66 people injured, 10 of them seriously, but incredibly resulted in no deaths.

The pile-up occurred in the late evening, when a combination of heavy rain and a setting sun hampered the drivers' vision and made the road conditions slippery. The first accident happened near Hamelerwald, and began a cascade of other accidents that over the next two hours grew to span a 30 kilometre stretch of road. It finally took 340 emergency workers well into the next morning to finish dealing with the people and vehicles involved and the clean-up cost is expected to exceed 1.75 million Euros, i.e. $2.5 million (NY Daily News).

Death by Chocolate

Many people joke about it, and there is even a dessert named Death by Chocolate, but it is no laughing matter. A man working at a chocolate processing plant in New Jersey lost his footing, fell into the large melting vat, and was hit in the head by the agitator.
Source: CNN.com

A Little More Light Weirdness

Just some un-themed oddities that caught my eye:

Plans to chop down a tree to make way for a roundabout in Jaslo, Poland have revealed that the oak was in fact planted to commemorate Hitler's birthday when the town was occupied during World War 2. The town's mayor, Maria Kurowska, called the choice between traffic improvements and the living memorial "simple," but not everyone agrees. "It's a historic curiosity," said local Kazimierz Polak, who was present at the planting ceremony as a child 67 years ago, adding, "It's not the tree's fault" (Reuters).

Two Bengal white tigers in a zoo in South Africa have given birth to a tiger cub that's not only white, but stripe-less (London Paper). Surely that's just called a lion?

A spiritual "healer" in Puerto Rico may want to re-read the manual today, after accidentally dropping a lit candle into the bath of alcohol he had instructed he lady patient lie in. The victim, who was suffering financial and marriage issues, can now add 50% burns to her list of problems (Metro).

The Swiss state of Appenzell went the whole of the second world war without a single German invader, so was perhaps unprepared to come under sustained assault by German hikers dressed in nothing but their socks and boots. Naked hiking, which has become a popular Alpine pastime apparently, has generated a stream of complaints from Swiss locals, and the authorities of the Outer and Inner Rhodes provinces of Appenzell have responded by imposing stiff fines of 200CHF ($175) on anyone caught without clothes, though where they expect the hikers to produce the money from is not explained (Cape News). To publicise the ban, the Swiss officials have ordered signs banning nude hiking, to the surprise of designer Dan Walter, who originally drew the sign as a joke (Metro).

All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.