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Texas prisoner William Greer Jr agreed to plead guilty to murder charges if he could stay in the country jail until the end of the month, since he believed that he would have a better chance of seeing the Super Bowl on TV in the jail than in state prison. Prosecutors agreed, so Judge Bob Gill sentenced Greer to 18 years, and asked the county sheriff to delay his transfer to prison.

The inscription on the metal bands used to tag migratory birds in the USA has been changed. The bands used to bear the address of the Washington Biological Survey, abbreviated to "Wash.Biol.Surv." That was until the agency received a letter from a camper in Arkansas: "Dear Sirs, While camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you it was horrible." The bands are now marked: "Fish and Wildlife Service". New Scientist, 10 Oct 1998.

After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus-station and offered everyone in the queue a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for three days.

Twenty-year-old Kelly Lee Hardyman was burgling a house in Gainseville, Florida when he decided to have ago on the Nintendo console he was in the process of stealing. He spent so much time playing that he was caught red-handed when the homeowner returned. It was the second time he had been caught playing Nintendo in someone else’s house.

Kerry Bingham was on a late night drinking spree with friends when he volunteered to bungee jump off the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington. His buddies took a disconnected power cable: one end was fixed to the bridge, the other knotted round Bingham’s leg. Inevitably, 40ft into his fall, the cable tightened and his foot was ripped off. The rest of him hit the water, where he was picked up, alive, by a fisherman.

A 61-year-old Thai man has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for attempting to have sex with an elephant. Kim Lee Chong was discovered standing on a wooden box approaching the animal a 29-year-old, five-tone beast called Boua from the rear. IN his defense, Chong said he believed the elephant was the reincarnation of his wife, Wey, who died 28 years ago. "I regonised her by the naughty glint in her eye," he said.

When Laura Mackenzie got stuck at a red light in the Australian outback, she remained patient. For two days she waited for the lights to change, before another driver found her slumped in the car, suffering from dehydration. "How was I supposed to know the light was broken?" Said Mackenzie, later. "It was red so I wasted for it to change."

When friends of Lauren Rhoda refused to believe her claim that she had x-ray vision, she decided to prove it by driving blindfold through Ottawa city center. The 27-year-old ran over one pedestrian’s toe before crashing straight into three cars, one belonging to the local police force. She received a £400 fine.

A Turkish farmer reported to his local hospital suffering from terrible stomach pains. When they examined him, doctors found a small amount of insecticide in his blood stream. The man did not seem suicidal though, and the doctors were baffled as to how he could have drunk the insecticide by accident. However, once he had recovered, the farmer himself provided the answer – he told the medics that a fly had flown down his throat and he "wanted to kill it before it started having babies inside of me."

Reaching the climax of his magic act in Azul, Argentina, Professor Marvo asked his assistant to shoot him in the face. The gun was fired, and Marvo proudly pulled the bullet from between his teeth. Gold miner Marco Asprella was so impressed with the trick that he took out his handgun and, with a shout of "Catch this one, Professor," fired it at the magicians head. Marvo was killed instantly. At his trial, Asprella remained distraught, still unable to understand why the magician had failed to catch his bullet. He was acquitted of murder.

When journalists in Manila ran a story claiming police had stolen a cache of confiscated cocaine from their own lockers, the police chief General Necesito angrily denied the allegations, offering the explanation that "rats and cockroaches got in through gaps in the locker doors and ate it all". As evidence of this, he said that the cockroaches at police headquarters had been behaving strangely. "They just stand there looking dazed when we shine lights on them. They’re obviously high on drugs." A reporter then showed the chief pictures of officers selling cocaine on the street.

In March 1996, Brazilian thief Edilbar Guimares broke into glue factory in Belo Horizonte. Attracted by the smell of glue, he decided to take some of the shelves for a sniff. This dislodged two other cans of glue which fell off the shelves. The next day, police found a sleeping Guimares still glued to the floor.

In the Autumn of 1994, De Witt Finley was driving through the snow in the Klamath mountains in the US when his car got stuck. But rather than get out of the car and look for help, Finley put his trust in the Lord, praying that he would be found. To while away the time until what he thought would be his inevitable rescue, he wrote letters to his girlfriend and his children. Doctors estimated that he would have starved to death around the middle of January 1995. His body was found by a group of hikers the following May. If Finley had got out of his car, he would have discovered a clear, wide road just yards from where he had got stuck giving him an easy walk down to ground level.

A Sheffield woman spent 20 years in darkness because she didn’t want to kick up a fuss when her electricity board cut her off in the mid-Seventies. The woman, now 86 and too embarrassed to be identified, said: "My husband and I came home from shopping one day and some electricity board workers were digging outside. I remember a letter saying we were low users so I thought we’d been cut off because we weren’t good customers." She was reconnected last year when neighbors alerted Yorkshire Electricity to the situation.

Punishment was swift for American shoplifter Barry Quemby when he tried to hide a pair of lobsters he had stolen from a Boston fishmonger down his trousers. Before he could make it out of the shop, the lobsters attacked, sending Quemby crashing into a display of tinned pilchards, screaming and clawing at his trousers. One of the lobsters had managed to sever Quemby’s penis, which was reattached by surgeons. "The strange thing was," said the doctor, "the lobsters were making this funny clucking sound, like they were laughing."

Kennet Albourg lost his job as a keeper at Reykjavik Zoo after colleagues caught him dressing his favorite penguin in stockings and suspenders. Bachelor Kennet was fired on the spot, in spite claims that he was trying to keep the penguin, called Brunella, warm.

In the middle of the night, a rep received a call from a woman in some distress. She had woken her children and moved her entire family into the neighbor’s house. From where she was phoning. When she had calmed down, she explained that her computer was about to blow up. It turned out that her Macintosh had just suffered its first system error and the woman had become hysterical after seeing the bomb symbol which appears on the screen. She thought her computer was about to blow up.