Weird But True

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Ah, the start of my new life! But first...
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A man freed from jail in Belgium last
Friday allegedly committed eight robberies before being
arrested the next day, the national Belga news agency reported.
The unidentified man was carrying stolen jewels when he was
arrested in Jambes, on the outskirts of the southeastern city
of Namur, the agency reported Sunday. The agency gave no other
details on the arrest or what he was imprisoned for earlier.
Police confirmed an arrest.

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Obedient driver follows orders, crashes car
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German motorist followed the command
"Turn right now!" from his navigation system and crashed into a
small toilet hut by the side of the road -- about 30 yards
before the crossing he was meant to take.
The overly obedient 53-year-old from Freiburg drove his
sport utility vehicle off the road onto into a building site,
up a stairway and into the small toilet shack, police in the
eastern town of Rudolstadt said Sunday.
It caused 2,000 euros ($2,500) worth of damage to the
stairway, 100 euros damage to his car, and he was also fined 35
euros.
Earlier this month an 80-year-old motorist also chose to
follow his navigation system and ignored a "closed for
construction" sign on a Hamburg motorway. He then crashed into
a pile of sand but neither he nor his passenger were injured.

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Inmate won't use "get out of jail free" card
BERLIN (Reuters) - A 59-year-old German man who has spent
the last 34 years in jail has turned down offers to be let out,
an official said Saturday.
"He rejected an offer to leave in 1992," Thomas Melzer, a
spokesman for the Brandenburg state justice ministry, told Bild
newspaper. "We can't do anything if someone sentenced to life
in prison doesn't want to leave."
The man, identified only as Gerold H, was convicted of
murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1972 when the area
was part of communist East Germany.
German prisoners have no obligation to agree to leave jail
before their sentences have been completed.

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A cow you can steer
SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - A Chilean taxi driver has come
up with a new way to fight assaults: make your vehicle so
conspicuous that nobody would dare try to rob you.
After being robbed several times, Juan Geraldo upholstered
and covered every square inch of his car's interior with black
and white spotted cowhides, including the steering wheel and
ceiling. He then decorated the interior with stuffed toy cows,
and added a horn that moos.
The visual effect is even more impressive at night, when
the black and white taxi interior is set off from floor to
ceiling by a flood of neon light.
"The effect was immediate. They haven't robbed me since,"
said Geraldo, who said the special effects also brought in more
clientele and allowed him to expand his cab fleet from one car
to nine.
The 46-year-old taxi driver with 27 years of experience
completes the cow theme by dressing in a cowhide jacket and
hat.

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Prisoners wed after peephole courtship
ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Two prisoners in an Ivory Coast jail
who courted and fell in love through a peephole in an iron door
have been released for a few hours to get married, one of their
jailers said Friday.
Roland Guy Bouabre, serving a 3-year sentence for stealing
a bicycle, courted Emilie Yobouet, who was given a one-year
sentence for kidnapping a child, while he was delivering
groceries for her to cook.
He would take the groceries to the iron door and then a
guard would deliver them.
"You can find love in all kinds of places -- even prison,"
Daloa prison guard Norbert Bah told Reuters by telephone.
Yobouet completed her sentence two days after the wedding
but brings food to the jail each day to supplement her
husband's meager prison diet.

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Fighting spirit saves British pensioner from attack
BERLIN, Oct 23 (Reuters) - A 70-year-old British pensioner,
trained in martial arts during his military service, dispatched
a gang of four would-be muggers in a late-night attack in
Germany.
"Looks like he had everything under control," a police
spokesman from the German town of Bielefeld said of the incident
last Friday.
The man, a native of Birmingham who now lives in Germany,
was challenged by three men, demanding money, while a fourth
crept up behind him. Recalling his training, the Briton grabbed
the first assailant and threw him over his shoulder.
When a second man tried to kick him, the pensioner grabbed
his foot and tipped him to the ground. At this point, the three
men, thought to be aged between 18 and 25, fled, carrying their
injured accomplice with them.
The pensioner, whose name was not immediately available,
suffered light abrasions.

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Dutch army should take prostitutes abroad -mayor
AMSTERDAM, Oct 23 (Reuters) - A Dutch mayoress has raised
eyebrows by backing the idea of sending prostitutes to accompany
Dutch troops on foreign missions.
"The army must consider ways its soldiers can let off
steam," Annemarie Jorritsma, mayor of the town of Almere in
central Netherlands and a member of the ruling VVD liberals,
told Dutch television.
"There was once the suggestion that a few prostitutes should
accompany troops on missions. I think that is something we
should talk about," she said, adding that the prostitutes would
keep soldiers from turning to local women.
Her comments have drawn a mixed response in the Netherlands,
renowned for its liberal prostitution laws.
"I don't think my wife would find it a good idea," Wim van
den Burg, a spokesman for the military service trade union told
Dutch newspaper Volkskrant on Monday.
Andre van Dorst of sex industry organisation VER told the
same paper: "I can see somthing in this, though it's a very
strange idea."
The Netherlands has more than 2,000 soldiers serving abroad,
most of them in Afghanistan as part of a NATO peacekeeping
force, and in Bosnia.

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"Paris Syndrome" leaves Japanese tourists in shock
PARIS, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Around a dozen Japanese tourists a
year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the
reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with
their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
"A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer
relapses and the rest have psychoses," Yousef Mahmoudia, a
psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame
cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.
Already this year, Japan's embassy in Paris has had to
repatriate at least four visitors -- including two women who
believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot
against them.
Previous cases include a man convinced he was the French
"Sun King", Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she was being
attacked with microwaves, the paper cited Japanese embassy
official Yoshikatsu Aoyagi as saying.
"Fragile travellers can lose their bearings. When the idea
they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover
it can provoke a crisis," psychologist Herve Benhamou told the
paper.
The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed "Paris Syndrome",
was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.
Bernard Delage of Jeunes Japon, an association that helps
Japanese families settle in France, said:
"In Japanese shops, the customer is king, whereas here
assistants hardly look at them ... People using public transport
all look stern, and handbag snatchers increase the ill feeling."
A Japanese woman, Aimi, told the paper:
"For us, Paris is a dream city. All the French are beautiful
and elegant ... And then, when they arrive, the Japanese find
the French character is the complete opposite of their own."

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Scales of justice weigh heavy for dieting escapee
SYDNEY, Oct 20 (Reuters) - An Australian prisoner who went
on a crash diet so he could squeeze his way out of jail escaped
to show authorities that he could go straight on the outside, a
court heard on Friday.
Robert Cole, 37, fasted and used laxatives to lose some 14
kg (30 lbs) before he squeezed through a hole he had chiselled
with a butter knife to escape from a hospital in a Sydney
maximum security prison in January.
Weighing just 56 kg (123 lbs), Cole squeezed through the
hole he had made between brickwork and a windowframe, scaled a
razor-wire fence, walked along a prison wall and then jumped to
freedom. He was recaptured three days later.
Cole's lawyer Richard Leary told the New South Wales
District Court that his mentally ill client -- jailed on theft
and assault charges -- had acted naively after failing to
convince authorities he was fit for release, Australian
Associated Press reported.
"He committed this offence in a vain hope to show
authorities that he can survive outside," Leary said.
Judge Roger Dive described Cole's offence as serious and
jailed him for 21 months.
"It has involved some time-consuming efforts and planning
and preparation," Dive said.
Cole's sister Denise Roberts, an Australian actress, said
he had long suffered from drug-induced psychosis. She said her
brother had put on a lot of weight since his recapture.

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N.Y. funeral homes plead guilty to body part theft
NEW YORK (Reuters) - At least four funeral homes stole
human body parts from thousands of corpses to sell for use in
transplants in a scheme in which seven funeral directors have
pleaded guilty, New York prosecutors said on Wednesday.
The plot's suspected ringleader, Michael Mastromarino, a
former New Jersey oral surgeon who ran a Fort Lee, New Jersey,
company that sold human tissue for medical implants, pleaded
not guilty on Wednesday along with three others to new charges
in the case, including body stealing and opening graves.
The prosecutor said the case raised concerns that some
tissue provided for possible use in transplants could have been
tainted.
"These ghoulish thieves thought they could pull off the
crime of the century, stealing bones from the dead, without any
thoughts of their victims' families or the transplant
recipients who would receive possibly tainted bone and tissue
grafts," Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said in a
statement.
One of the bodies possibly harvested was that of famed
British broadcaster Alistair Cooke, longtime host of the U.S.
TV program "Masterpiece Theater," who died in 2004. Prosecutors
said the suspects changed documents to show Cooke died at age
85 of a heart attack, not at age 95 from cancer.

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Waiter, there's a fly on the wall
LONDON (Reuters) - Many of life's personal dramas are in
restaurants. From flirtations, proposals to divorce, people lay
them out over food and wine -- assuming there is no audience.
But there is -- and thanks to the Internet, it might be a
global one.
"My new customers are too busy French kissing to notice me.
I skid to a halt, turn around, and walk away ... I don't have
anything against public displays of affection, but there is
something called room service."
Waiter, as the anonymous narrator of this extract from
http://waiterrant.net calls himself, has changed details to
protect the privacy of his customers, and keep them coming to
his upmarket New York Italian restaurant, alias The Bistro.
Since April 2004, his weblog has been building into a
situation comedy of life in and around a restaurant - its owner
and staff, motley customers, the local homeless guy who shows
up at the window, or the woman neighbor who stepped out naked
on the street -- but for a towel -- on a dare.

[MalahatTwo7]

Can't search beyond the current page while in the office, hopefully NJ hasnt beat me to this one

Ape Monkeying Around Pulls Fire Alarm. Firefighters Rush To Scene

POSTED: 8:11 am EDT October 24, 2006

DES MOINES, Iowa -- One of the great apes at a research center in Des Moines was doing more than monkeying around -- she ended up with the Fire Department on the way.

Web Site: See Photos Of Panbanisha

Firefighters said a bonobo ape pulled the fire alarm mounted on the wall at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa and sent a signal to the 911 dispatcher.

The alarm sent fire trucks racing to the scene.

Fire Department spokesman Brian O'Keefe said a false alarm by an animal is a first for his department. Officials at the center said the offending female ape, an adult named Panbanisha, has been given a scolding and told not to do it again.

The alarm is mounted on a wall in the bonobo home in an area used by the apes and scientists.

Alarms at the center are also being covered to make monkeying around with them a little more difficult.

Distributed by Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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October 25, 2006 -- This Chicago-area 14- year-old was just plane stupid - and thank goodness for that, anguished family members said. When a 46-year-old man she met on the Internet convinced her to visit him for a sexual encounter, she bought an airplane ticket to Washington, D.C. After the plane landed she realized she had goofed - the guy lives in Washington state, not D.C. He was busted after the troubled teen 'fessed up to airport police and the FBI.

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Science exam a test of love...
ACCRA (Reuters) - A 30-year-old Ghanaian man could be
jailed for up to five years after writing his wife's paper in a
science exam, police in the West African country said on
Wednesday.
Kofi Ochere and his wife Christiana Yeboah, 28, a teacher,
had both registered for the exam at the Presbyterian Secondary
School in Legon, a suburb of the capital Accra.
But Ochere, who did not need the qualification, offered to
write his wife's paper while she wrote his.
"He feared the woman would not do well. But at the
examination hall, they noted the paper had a feminine name,"
police spokesman Beneso Darkwa said.
The two had been arrested while investigations continued.

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New book takes humbug out of quotations
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Showman P.T. Barnum never said
"There's a sucker born every minute" although he wished he had.
And Civil War Admiral David Farragut probably never said "Damn
the Torpedoes! Full Speed Ahead" -- words that have inspired
generations of fighting men.
To make things even more complicated, it is doubtful that
Paul Revere warned that "The British are coming" when he would
have at the time of the American Revolution thought himself
British, although a revolting one. He probably would have said
"The Redcoats are coming."
A new, meticulously researched book of quotations attempts
to set the record straight on those beloved phrases that have
crept into everyday use as signs of wisdom and wit, including
Sigmund Freud's sage advice that "sometimes a cigar is just a
cigar." (He didn't quite say that, although his biographer
thinks he would have approved of the idea.)
"The Yale Book of Quotations" has a simple thesis: famous
quotes are often misquoted and misattributed. Sometimes they
are never said at all but are, instead, little fictions that
have forged their way into public consciousness.
Take, for example, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead,"
a rallying cry supposedly uttered by Farragut during the
American Civil War battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864.

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Nude shower gel ad with "child-like" model banned
LONDON (Reuters) - A shower gel advert which featured a
very young-looking woman sitting naked under a lemon tree was
slated by Britain's advertising watchdog Wednesday which ruled
it "offensive and inappropriate."
Although the model in the television advert for Original
Source shower gel was an adult, the Advertising Standards
Authority (ASA) said she might be taken for a child by some
people.
"Because some viewers were likely to believe that the model
was a child, we considered the sexual overtones and nudity in
the ad were offensive and inappropriate."
It said the ad must not appear again in its original form.
Several people had complained about the ad because the
model looked under 16 and was shown in what they considered to
be a sexually provocative way.

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China's Great Wall raises defenses against ravers
BEIJING, Oct 25 (Reuters Life!) - China has banned
partying, stunts and other "inappropriate behavior" on the
Great Wall to protect one of its top tourist attractions from
erosion.
The Great Wall, which snakes its way across more than 6,400
km (4,000 miles), receives an estimated 10 million visitors a
year, mostly to the mere 10 km opened to tourists at Badaling,
the nearest stretch to Beijing.
More adventurous visitors climb wilder, crumblier sections
that are not officially open to the public and stretches near
the capital have become popular sites for summer raves.
The new rules, issued by the State Council, or China's
cabinet, prohibit the driving of vehicles on the wall or group
activities such as parties.
"Inappropriate tourist exploration has caused damage to the
Great Wall and its historical features," the government's Web
site on Wednesday cited a State Council official as saying.

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VIENNA, Oct 24 (Reuters) - A Viennese man cut off his ring
finger and presented the digit, still holding his wedding band,
to his ex-wife after an acrimonious divorce, Austrian news
agency APA reported on Tuesday.
Charged with dangerous harassment and assault for the act,
he told a preliminary hearing he did not regret having cut off
the finger and had chosen deliberately not to reattach it.
"It was an act of breaking free," the man was quoted as
saying. He did not miss his finger, could work well without it
and did not plan on getting married again anyway, he said.

[Lewiston2FF]

VIENNA, Oct 24 (Reuters) - A Viennese man cut off his ring
finger and presented the digit, still holding his wedding band,
to his ex-wife after an acrimonious divorce, Austrian news
agency APA reported on Tuesday.
Charged with dangerous harassment and assault for the act,
he told a preliminary hearing he did not regret having cut off
the finger and had chosen deliberately not to reattach it.
"It was an act of breaking free," the man was quoted as
saying. He did not miss his finger, could work well without it
and did not plan on getting married again anyway, he said.

I know you all are thinking it, so I will just say it: brings new meaning to the phrase "giving her the finger".

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October 27, 2006 -- The high school in Swartz Creek, Mich., was evacuated after a plastic bottle with foul-smelling contents was found in the men's bathroom. "Two police officers and three members of the bomb squad refused to go near it or touch it, and that was good enough for me," a school administrator said of the decision to send students home. Lab tests later revealed the bottle contained spoiled chocolate milk - cleaned out of a student's locker and accidentally left behind.