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June 2013

27 June 2013

Florida's Edward Zipperer, 47, was looking for missing macaroni and cheese in the home he shared with brother Randy, 49. In the argument-laden search, he knocked over Randy's beer. So the elder Zipperer stabbed the younger one in the stomach. Randy later told Volusia County sheriff's officers that he'd just 'poked him a little with the knife' and hadn't meant to cause injury. Randy still faces a charge of aggravated battery.

Last year, a bank employee in Germany was preparing a transfer of 62.40 EUR from a pensioner's account when he fell asleep at his computer. His finger was on the '2' key at the time, so the transfer document ended up with an amount of 222,222,222,222 euros.
According to the BBC, a labour court has now ruled that the man's boss was unfairly dismissed for authorising the transaction, which was corrected later. Accused of not checking the sleepy man's work, the supervisor told the court that she did look at each document prepared: that day, she had examined 812 documents, for about a second each.

Iowa's Dave Burgstrum advertised an oak coffin on the Craigslist Web site in an attempt to raise the equivalent of 10,000 euros owed in property taxes for his now-moribund chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows. The advert neglected to mention that the coffin contained a full skeleton. This surprise led to the police seizing both coffin and old bones.
Burgstrom said that the Iowa State Medical Examiner's office, now checking out the bones, is welcome to keep the skeleton, which the fraternal order's records suggest was donated by a physician who retired in the 1880s.

A 14-year-old boy was playing hide-and-seek with his best friend on the grounds of a museum on Texas Tech University's main campus when he ran head-long into trouble. Under the supervision of adults in the pre-dawn hours, Miguel Martinez ran into a statue of a bull. The bull won: the youth was impaled on a horn and died.
The National Ranching Heritage Museum, in the city of Lubbock, has now sprouted various sorts of memorials to Miguel alongside the bull statues.

Tom Stilwell returned to his Auckland flat after a night of drinking and realised that he'd locked himself out. The 20-year-old man showed up at his upstairs neighbour's door at 2am, and she agreed to let him jump down to his own balcony from hers, on the fifteenth floor. She later said: 'I thought "Okay, I'll just let you see that it's really impossible." I didn't think he'd jump, because it's really scary.' Stilwell went for it. He slipped and fell 13 floors. He survived, though suffering a fair few fractured bones.

France's The Local reports that a 52-year-old Paris woman attempted to impersonate her daughter for purposes of sitting a high-school English exam at Bossuet Notre-Dame. The woman, identified as Caroline D., might have been able to pull off the look, which involved 'elaborate' make-up and low-cut jeans, had a supervisor not remembered the real girl, Laetitia, from an exam two days earlier. The mother completed the two-hour exam and was arrested on her way out. She admitted to fraud, and Laetitia risks not being allowed to take any official exams for the next five years.

Kees Wijnands, a constable with the Ontario Provincial Police, says that officers discovered an odd scene when they pulled over a pickup truck that was pulling a horse trailer. The horse trailer appeared to have people inside, with 'little fingers and heads' visible at the top. When the trailer door was opened, 54 people exited. The driver, an Ontario man, faces a fine of about 100 EUR for this method of hauling passengers to a rodeo.

Nude-photo entrepreneur Valerie Dodds claims that she'd been motivated by a desire for revenge on judgemental former classmates when she filmed herself posing naked in late-night videos she shot at the St. Pius X high-school campus in Lincoln, Nebraska. She addressed them in comments online: 'Now when you say all those nasty things about me, you have a good reason.'
Upon receiving a ticket for trespassing and for public nudity in connection with these acts, she asked: 'Why would you give me a ticket for public nudity if I'm trespassing onto private property?'

A recent spate of thefts from cars on a street in Sandy, Oregon, left one particularly awkward situation in its wake. When a police officer asked Haleigh Kirby to describe what had been stolen from her sedan, she explained that she'd lost several hundred dollars' worth of items she'd bought for a friend's hen party. She tried to list each of the 'toys, blow-up items', costumes, etc. for the officer.
Kirby said that she'd stashed the trawl of sex toys etc. in her car to keep them safely out of her children's sight. Meanwhile, bride-to-be Chelsey Coutts said that she has already received many donations to replace the items.

During February, volunteers working with municipal authorities in Brunete, Spain, approached people who had just left their dog's mess for others to clean up. They struck up a conversation aimed at learning the dog's name. With this information and the breed, the owner's identity could be checked in a database of registered pets. The volunteers then packed each load of faeces into a city-stamped box for posting to the dog-owner's home under the label 'Lost Property'. The town has reported seeing a 70% drop in wayward dog waste since the campaign, which involved 147 deliveries.

In Novokuznetsk, western Siberia, a man entered a 16-year-old girl's home and asked for a date with her elder sister. According to RIA Novosti, she wasn't at home and he refused to take 'no' for an answer. The man apparently produced an assault rifle and mounted a device that looked like an explosive on a door to the house. The local Interior Ministry office said: 'The man demanded that the teenager call her sister or he would blow up the house.'
Police convinced the man to surrender, and they confiscated an air gun and 'a bundle of green wire that resembled a grenade'.

Meanwhile, in the US, a man allegedly strode into the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission office in Salem and placed a pressure cooker on the front desk. He told the receptionist that he had tried to blow up the sign outside, because it featured a misspelling. Vickie Chamberlain, the executive director of the commission, said that the 'd' in 'Teacher Standards an Practices Commission' may have worn off over time.
Staff rang the police, and officers later arrested 50-year-old Leonard Burdek, whose pressure cooker was nothing out of the ordinary. He is charged with disorderly conduct.

After 23-year-old Luis Briones crashed his Ford Explorer into another vehicle, he tried to drive off, abandoning his passenger, who had been thrown from the vehicle. A witness grabbed the car keys, whereupon Briones ran off. He was found hiding in a cactus and wearing inside-out shorts and a single shoe. The injured passenger, a naked woman, was taken to hospital.
The causes of the crash are believed to include running a red light, consuming alcohol, driving too rapidly, and - as reported by witnesses - 'having sexual intercourse with the passenger'. Even in the police car, he refused to keep his trousers on.

Australia's Gold Coast brings us a man who decided not to drive while intoxicated. A patrol car pulled over a vehicle that was travelling along at 3am without its headlights on. The 41-year-old drunken man in the passenger's seat is being charged with various traffic offences. The driver, a seven-year-old boy, is now in the care of relatives.
In Louisiana, it was a 10-year-old boy who took the role of designated driver. Two drunken women - one of them the boy's grandmother - were arrested after motorists reported reckless driving on the interstate highway. Also in the car was a 15-year-old child, whose ability to drive was not specified. Brenda Byrd, 54, and Sheila Joiner, 48, have been arrested for 'contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile and allowing an unlicensed driver to operate a motor vehicle'.

Woodbury, New Jersey, Fire Marshal Joseph Buono reports that online easy fixes for bedbug infestations are a 'catastrophe in the making'. That county recently was host to an incident in which a homeowner tried to use a space heater, hair-dryer, and heat gun to get rid of bedbugs in an upper-floor bedroom. The combination is unlikely to have harmed any bedbugs, but the homeowner was injured in the ensuing fire and hospitalised.

Pennsylvania state police report that guests found that 11 greeting cards had gone missing from a gift table at a wedding reception. They noticed Jennifer Ann Martz, 40, heading to the ladies' room. She was later found with hundreds of dollars in cash and cheques stuffed into her bra, while the cards were in pieces in a toilet that would no longer flush.
Martz's boyfriend was an invited guest at the reception. It is unknown whether he will ever be one again.

Martin Åkersten is one of the dozen or so train drivers and conductors on Stockholm's Roslagsbanan line who wish to be allowed to wear shorts in summertime. Åkersten, 30, said that customers have expressed only support for the drivers' decision to wear skirts to work in hopes of seeing a policy change.
Speaking for the company that runs the train line, Tomas Hedenius said that, while Arriva wants its employees to look 'nice and proper', stopping men from wearing 'women's clothes' would constitute discrimination.

Michigan's Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office reports that officers responding to a burglar alarm at Ypsilanti Middle School found a 41-year-old screaming man outside a broken window. He was naked, covered in blood, and holding a portion of his penis. Sheriff's Sergeant Geoff Fox said: 'They couldn't really communicate with him in terms of constructive communication.' Once the man was in hospital, the magic mushrooms he'd consumed wore off and he was treated for blood loss, among other things. It is unknown whether the part of his penis he'd torn off could be reattached.

A 64-year-old man from Queensland bought a knife at a shopping centre near Melbourne and, in the car park, held it to a younger woman's throat and demanded her vehicle. In what Senior Constable Paul Mitchell termed the 'most bizarre incident' he has yet come across in his work, the woman rang the police, who sped to the scene while the man began packing several bags and his walking frame into the car. He hadn't yet finished this process when officers arrived.