| A
Colorado, postman
who uses his dog to pull his letter cart has been told by bosses to
leave
the pet at home. Terry Trish, 50, has let golden retriever Sydney pull
the cart since undergoing a hip replacement operation two years ago
(01).
Now, Aspen's new acting postal inspector Howard Orona has told Trish to
leave his canine partner at home, saying the dog violates safety
regulations |
| Mikael
Persson pleaded
guilty after he was nabbed using a vacuum cleaner to suck $300 from
parking
meters in Gothenburg, Sweden. |
| An
escaped burglar and
his cell mate were arrested within hours when they were caught on a
train
without tickets. The 22-year-old burglar, who has 13 previous
convictions,
broke out of prison in the Simmering district of the Austrian capital
Vienna
with his 25-year-old cell mate. But a train conductor found them and
handed
them over to police. |
| A Brazilian model turned pop
singer is to wash 100
cars to promote her new single in Germany. Jana Ina has also promised
to
sing the track - Make My Day - for any man who turns up to have his car
washed |
| One in four homeless people in
South Korea have credit
cards, according to a report. The study comes amid concern over the
number
of people in the country running up bad credit card debts. |
| Students at a Norwegian school
are to be given an
extra two hours in bed each morning next month - to help them cope with
their hangovers. A school in Rogaland says students can skip their
first
two lessons during their celebrations in the run-up to their final
exams. |
| An elderly woman was caught
shoplifting in China
after a fortune teller advised her to eat some free meat. The
well-to-do
woman was caught stealing meat from a supermarket. |
| The 2001 British census results
have revealed that
390,000 people in the UK gave their religion as Jedi. The figure
is equivalent to 0.7 per cent of the population. At the time of
the
census, an internet campaign was running to persuade people to sign up
as Jedi. Registrar General for England and Wales Len Cook
said:
"We have put them among the 7.7 million people who said they had no
religion. |
| Two robbers have been jailed in
Italy after being
identified from a mobile phone text picture. Daniel Puiu,
20,
and 21-year-old Dorin Oborcianu are thought to be the first crooks in
the
world to be convicted using the image technology. The pair were
snapped
by a tobacconist who grew suspicious of them as they hung around
outside
his shop. |
| A German smoker had a painful
lesson about the health
risks of smoking when a cigarette machine fell on him. Walter
Neubauer,
42, from Cologne started banging the machine with his hand when it
failed
to give him the cigarettes he had paid for. But the
machine
fell off the wall and landed on top of him, closely followed by a large
section of the wall. He was taken to the hospital but after treatment
for
cuts and bruises he was allowed to go home. |
| A German dentist found a Second
World War bullet
lodged in a pensioner's neck during a routine check-up.
Walter
Henning, 83, from Climmbach in Hessen, had no idea the Russian bullet
was
in his neck until his dentist told him he needed an x ray. |
| Austrian (?) police have staged
a series of raids
on bakeries across the country acting on information that their
doughnuts
do not contain enough jam. In every third doughnut tested
by
police food inspectors, the jam content was less than the prescribed 15
per cent. Police said it was a serious matter of
fraud,
carrying fines or jail sentences of up to three months. |
A Belgian mayor has set up a
Department of Tenderness
to encourage people to be nicer to each other. Kruibeke mayor
Antoine Denert, who allocates civic duties, said he would make it his
personal responsibility. "People don't cuddle anymore and that's the
reason
why there are so many conflicts," he told Het Laatste Nieuws. |
| The winner of British dog show
Crufts could lose
his title fora llegedly having a secret "facelift". Pekinese Danny beat
22,000 rivals to be crowned supreme champion at the top dog show. But
organisers
have been tipped off that Danny underwent an operation last year. |
| The largest private company in
the world is the Indian
railway system, which employs 1.6 million people. |
The skin of the armpits
can harbor up to 516,000
bacteria per square inch, while drier areas, such as the forearm, have
only about 13,000. |
| The average adult eyeball
weighs about one ounce
(28.3 grams). |
| A salmon tagged with a
satellite device baffled experts
when it was tracked traveling on a highway - before they realized it
had
been caught by poachers. |
| Flower delivery company
Interflora is selling anti-sneeze
bouquets for hay fever sufferers using blooms like orchids and irises. |
| A 1997 Gallup poll found that
about one in four American
workers - 24-per-cent - said that if they could do so, they would fire
their boss. |
A 1991 Gallup survey indicated
that 49-per-cent of
Americans
didn't know that white bread is made from wheat. |
| A "hairsbreadth away" is 0.05
centimeters (1/48 of
an inch). |
| The tip of a rotary mower
travels at over 200 kilometers
(124 miles) an hour. |
| During winter, the skating
rinks in Moscow cover
more than 250,000 square metres (2,690,000 square feet) of land. |
| The longest word that can be
typed using only the
right hand is "lollipop." |
Cross-dressing thief Lemont
Fuller, 42, fooled a
court and served seven years in a women's jail before being found out
in
Cleveland, Ohio. |
Police woke a naked lorry
driver after finding him
sleepwalking down a German highway. Officers spotted the 45-year-old on
the A6 motorway in Wattenheim near Stuttgart. He was
dressed in nothing but a pair of slippers. When the cops
stopped him, he woke and told them he was surprised to find himself
outdoors. |
Kittens can clock an amazing 31
miles-per-hour (49.8
kilometres-per-hour) at full speed and cover about 3 times their body
length per leap. |
| Uninterruptedly since the sixth
century the Japanese
throne has been occupied by a member of the same family, and the
present-day
emperor, Akihito, is the 125th in succession. |
| A female pharaoh was unknown in
Egypt before Hatshepsut,
who had herself portrayed in male costume, with a beard and without
breasts. |
| An Indian man killed a cobra
after biting it back
in anger after it had bitten him. The farm laborer was working in a
paddy
field when the black cobra bit him. He chased after the
snake,
grabbed hold of it and took two bites out of it. |
| A Jersey man allegedly stole a
car to get to a court
where he was to be sentenced for car theft. The 27-year-old made it to
court in Union City where he was jailed for six months for the previous
offense. But he now faces new charges when he gets out
after
an off-duty police officer says he saw him driving a stolen car to
court. |
| Cats have over one hundred
vocal sounds, while dogs
only have about ten. |
| The word "checkmate" in chess
comes from the Persian
phrase "shah mat," which means "the king is dead." |
| Pinocchio is Italian for "pine
head." |
| Residents of a Romanian village
say women with moustaches
are the most sought-after wives. Villagers in
Baleni-Sirbi,
Dimbovita county say moustaches are a sign of fidelity and fertility. |
| The first song played on Armed
Forces Radio during
Operation Desert Shield was "Rock the Casbah" by the Clash. |
The reason firehouses have
circular stairways is
from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The
horses
were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up
straight
staircases. |
| The earth's average velocity
orbiting the sun is
107,220 kilometres (66 miles) per hour. |
| Two male teachers have
been suspended after
fighting in front of 500 pupils over a woman colleague. The love rivals
rolled on the ground, pulled hair and flung stones and mud at each
other
at the school in southern India. |
A 22-year-old German man had to
be rescued by police
after getting his head stuck in a sewer. He looking for a set of keys
which had fallen through the manhole cover, when he managed to get
his head jammed. |
Bride Annemarie Mitchell, 22,
of Newbury, Berkshire,
had a surprise at her wedding reception - she went into labour with
her first child as she and new hubby Jeff cut their cake. |
| Spiders never spin webs in
structures made of chestnut
wood. That is why so many European chateaux were built with chestnut
beams
- spider webs on a 50-foot beamed ceiling can be difficult to clean. |
| The war with Spain was the
shortest war in American
history. It lasted five months: April 1898 to August 1898. |
| The Tower of London, for which
construction was begun
in 1078 by William the Conqueror, once housed a zoo. It also has served
as an observatory, a mint, a prison, a royal palace, and (at present)
the
home of the Crown Jewels. |
| Americans spent a total of $6.9
billion on cosmetic
surgery procedures in 2001. |
| Rats and horses can't vomit. |
| A total of 4.5 trillion
cigarette butts were thrown
on the ground around the world in 2001. |
The orchid is named after the
male genitalia. Its
botanical family name, Orchidaceae, means "testicles" in Greek and may
derive from an early notion that the orchid possessed aphrodisiac
qualities. |
| The Aztec Indians in Central
America used animal
blood mixed with cement as a mortar for their buildings, many of
which still remain standing today. |
| The American Bible Association
has published almost
a billion Bibles since it was founded in 1816. |
| The heart of a blue whale only
beats nine times a
minute. |
| In the state of Michigan, it is
illegal for a woman
to cut her hair without her husband's consent. |
| If ribbon worms can't find any
food, they will eat
themselves. |
Ice cream lovers bored with
chocolate chip and raspberry
ripple are being offered a radically different range from a
manufacturer in Toyko - octopus, squid, ox tongue, cactus, eel and
crab flavors. |
| An exhibition of spy gadgets -
including a five centimetre
(two inch) camera in a brassiere used to take photos for blackmail -
has
gone on display in Marienborn, Germany. |
| A team from Luxembourg beat 40
other mowers yesterday
(08/04/02) in the annual 12 Hour Lawnmower Race in a field at
Pulborough,
Sussex, England. |
| - In the American city of
Miami, Florida, it is illegal
for a man to wear a strapless gown. |
| Killer Whales capture fish by
slapping them. |
| Grand Illusion was the first
foreign language film
to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. |
| The ocean sunfish can lay
5,000,000 eggs at one time. |
| In Toronto, Canada, it is
illegal to ride a streetcar
on Sunday after eating garlic. |
| Americans choke on toothpicks
more than anything
else. |
| The average woman uses up
approximately her height
in lipstick every five years. |
| Husbands who kiss their wives
before leaving home
for work each morning have been documented to live five years longer
than
those who do not. |
| Experts insist that the average
person falls in love
seven times before marriage. |
| More than 40 per cent of the
women in the United
States were in the Girl Scouts organization. Two-thirds of the women
listed
in Who's Who of Women were Girl Scouts. |
| More than 45,000 pieces of
plastic debris float on
every square mile of ocean. |
| With 980-plus species,
bats make up more than
23 percent of all known mammals by species. |
Firefighters in the
Pennsylvania,town of Hyndman
were called to a blaze at their own station. The volunteer brigade in
the small mountain town lost much of their equipment and fire engines. |
A missing parrot has been
quickly reunited with his
worried owners - because he told rescuers officers his name. Animal
collection officer Debbie Sheppard was sent to pick up the bird, which
had been reported sitting on a fence in a
back-garden.
When she took him back to her home in Swindon, England the
four-year-old
bright-green parrot started to laugh and squawk various words -
including
his name, Basil. |
| Fishing fans Sarah pepper and
Sean Finch got married
on a pontoon on the Thames in Berkshire, Britain, and had a cake made
of
perch, chub and pike. |
| In Provincetown, Massachusetts,
it is illegal to
sell suntan oil until after noon on Sunday. |
| A weddell seal can hold its
breath for seven hours. |
| A blind chameleon can
still change colors
to match its environment. |
| A Dutch burglar called the
police when his own house
was broken into but forgot to hide his own ill-gotten
gains.
Police arrived at the man's home in Breda and noticed a computer
bearing
the sticker of a local school and arrested him. |
Bank managers are the most
likely professionals to
buy red cars,
according to a new survey. |
| Thirty-eight per cent of North
America is wilderness. |
| An ordinance in Carmel,
California, makes it unlawful
for a lady to take a bath in a business office |
| Intelligent people have more
zinc and copper in their
hair. |
A man in North Carolina, has
survived being struck
by lightning for the fourth time. Mark Stinton from Chatham County
says, "I either draw it or I've got the worst luck anybody can possibly
have. I haven't decided which." |
| Mountain goats are not goats;
they are small antelopes. |
| On average, a beaver can cut
down two hundred trees
a year. |
| One species of antelope, the
Sitatunga, can sleep
underwater. |
| Belize is the world's only
country with a jaguar
preserve. |
| Carnivorous animals will not
eat another animal that
has been hit by a lightning strike. |
A rat can last longer without
water than a camel.
A scallop has a total of 35 eyes which are all blue.
A baby platypus remains blind after birth for 11 weeks. |
| Canada imports an average of
850 Russian-made hockey
sticks each day. |
The Indian election in 1984 was
the largest election
of any
country. Over 379,000,000 voters were eligible to vote at over
480,000 polling stations. |
and you will be
