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Authorities in Valentine, Neb., have been on the lookout since November for the vandal who has approached several storefronts at night and, apparently with Vaseline smeared over his nude body, pressed himself against windows and doors. A radio station called the person “the buttcheek bandit” (although some speculate there may also be a copycat). Asked […]

Washington, D.C., firefighter Gerald Burton faced suspension in December for disobeying a direct order by fighting a blaze he had come across while driving his fire truck to a training class. A supervisor had ordered him on to the class, but Burton and his partner put out the fire (limiting damage to $150,000), along with […]

Clumsy: A 26-year-old accused shoplifter was hospitalized in Grand Rapids, Mich., in January after he got into a scuffle with a department store security officer. He had allegedly stuffed some knives under his clothes, and when he was knocked to the ground, he accidentally fell on several of the blades. Josue Herrios-Coronilla, 18, was arrested […]

In December, the city of Bangalore, India, staged its fifth annual marathon, with an elite group of runners that officials thought would bring the city recognition in the world racing community, but problems occurred, the least of which were the city’s ubiquitous potholes and pollution. At about the 20 km mark, the leaders were chased […]

Michael Windisch, proprietor of the Maltermeister Turm restaurant in Goslar, Lower Saxony, Germany, solved what has become a crisis for other restaurants since the state extended a smoking ban in August. Windisch opened three holes in an outer wall so that, in cold weather, a smoker need not venture outside but can stick his head […]

Douglas Hoffman, 61, was sentenced in January to as much as five years in prison for staging a small-scale terror campaign among his neighbors in Henderson, Nev., to mask his own vandalism in destroying over 500 trees to get a better view of the Las Vegas Strip. At first, according to prosecutors, Hoffman cut down […]

According to a report in Britain’s Bolton News in December, the House of Lords has recently been discussing the need to reduce the thickness of slices of bread, which Baroness Gardener of Parkes said would help alleviate Britons’ alarming levels of obesity.  TV’s Weather Channel recently released a CD comprising 12 of what it called […]

The desire of some deaf parents to create deaf children (and deny them subsequent sound-creating implant surgery, to assure that their kids are raised with the benefits of the deaf lifestyle and support of the “deaf community”) made News of the Weird in 1995 and 2002. According to a December report in The Times of […]

Ronald Stach, 41, climbed to the roof of the Canton Station bar in Baltimore on Dec. 11 and remained until Christmas Day, protesting the poor showing of the Baltimore Ravens football team. As such, Stach called attention not just to the Ravens, but also to himself, and thus inadvertently alerted his former wife as to […]

Ingrates: “Get in here and do your (word omitted by the Allentown Morning Call) jobs, you dumb (omitted),” said Donald Reidnauer Sr., 56, after summoning police to investigate a BB pellet fired at his house in Richland Township, Pa., in November. “I pay taxes. I am your boss. Get in here and do your jobs […]