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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 […]

Serious Substance Abuse: Bill Long, a former member of the county council in Daytona Beach, Fla., was charged with DUI in December after he, allegedly speeding, hit another car. “When officers arrived at the scene,” reported WKMG-TV (Orlando), “(Long) was found drinking … suntan lotion.” Joseph Cardillo, reportedly a certified therapist in tantra, kundalini and […]

Police in Mount Lebanon, Pa., said in December that no illegal acts were involved, but some parents still want to know why the nondenominational Christian Mount Lebanon Young Life club had staged a teenagers’ social event during which boys wore adult diapers, bibs and bonnets and sat in girls’ laps while being spoon-fed. Said youth […]

Mr. Coll Bell, a New Zealander who invented a composting toilet supposedly superior to a septic system and who wanted permission from the Auckland Regional Council to install one at a campground, said an ARC bureaucrat had queried him on whether the worms he uses would be traumatized by the volume of work required in […]

Joshua Hoge, a schizophrenic confined to Washington’s Western State Hospital, is claiming at least part of his late mother’s estate even though he’s the one who killed her in 1999. Washington law prevents profiting from the “unlawful” and “willful” taking of another’s life, but Hoge was found “not guilty by reason of insanity,” and the […]

Wayne DuMond, who made News of the Weird in 1988, was briefly notable in December 2007 as part of the Republican presidential race. DuMond was an Arkansas rape suspect in 1984 (later convicted) when he said that vigilantes castrated him, and the evidence of that wound up in a jar on the desk of the […]

Killed by early-morning gunshots in a club in Greensboro, N.C., in December: Mr. Born God Supreme Thompson. Arrested and charged with groping two women in Springfield, Ill., in December: Larry Letcher, 24. The loser of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in December that sought to suppress child pornography found on his computer by a Circuit […]

At least a half-dozen groups in five countries are seriously engaged in the quest to show that man can fly through the air and land without a parachute, according to a December New York Times report. “All of this is technically possible,” said a physics professor, referring to the wing suits fliers are testing. “The […]

With the American West seemingly under perpetual threat of drought, developer Richard Mladick is nonetheless preparing to build Waveyard, a massive water theme park, near Mesa, Ariz., which will require 50 million gallons of groundwater to open and as much as 100 million gallons annually. Explained Mladick: “I couldn’t imagine raising my kids in an […]

Holdup-Note Blues: Arthur Cheney, 64, was arrested near Marysville, Calif., in December driving a car that had been spotted at a bank robbery. On the center console of the car, officers found a yellow “sticky” note with a handwritten “Robbery 100s and 50s only.” Said an officer, “We call that a clue.” And Orlando Taylor, […]