Community ClicksInexplicable
Colin Hall, Lord Mayor of Leicester, England, visiting the Southfields library for its Summer Showcase on global understanding in June, apparently at some point experienced his pants falling down.
His spokesman later said, “He was not wearing a belt, and the trousers came loose and fell.”
Reports in The Guardian and other newspapers emphasized that nothing indecent occurred.
<<< Jammie Harms, 34, who had been executive assistant to CEO John Smith of the developer Hearthstone Homes, filed a lawsuit against the Omaha, Neb., company in June for wrongful firing.
According to the lawsuit, Smith told Harms that, after consulting with psychics, he was troubled by her pregnancy.
He said he was feeling “negative energy” from her fetus, sensing that it was “hostile” toward him and causing him to be reminded of his own unpleasant experience as a fetus.
Outer frontiers
The $125 million Jay Peak ski resort in Vermont, with 120-room hotel, ice arena, golf course and the Northeast’s largest water park, is just months away from completion, thanks to half-million-dollar investments from each of 250 foreign nationals from 43 countries who, as part of the deal, were given conditional U.S. “green cards” (for permanent residency).
Clumsiness
An internal police inquiry concluded in April that it was an accident that an officer in the Utica, N.Y., courtroom of Judge Randal Caldwell shot Caldwell in the leg with his Taser gun.
Investigators concluded that the officer was merely trying to re-holster the weapon to make it less uncomfortable, and it slipped.
<<< Youth worker Cherie Beekman, 33, took a group of her kids to a bowling alley in Didsbury, England, in April for a diversion but got her thumb stuck in her bowling ball.
She was taken to a fire station, where, for over two hours, rescuers used an electric saw, hacksaw and chisel to free her.
Redneck tales
In July, Mike Morateck, 46, a self-described “man of science,” won the Jefferson (Wis.) County Fair’s annual cricket-spitting contest with a hock of 21 feet, 2 inches.
His two main “scientific” secrets (he told Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel): “pick a big cricket” and “feet first on its back with the head pointing out because you don’t want the legs dragging on the way out.”
<<< Juliana Bryant, 33, was arrested in Florala, Ala., in July after police were called to her home on a disturbing-the-peace complaint and discovered several open gasoline containers throughout the house.
Bryant explained to the officers that she “like(s) the smell.”
Crime report
Allen Dawes, 28, and Jimmy Lee, 43, were charged as burglars in, respectively, York, Pa. (June), and Blackburn, England (July), after having inexplicably left clues behind.
For reasons unreported, Dawes had left his birth certificate at the scene and Lee his DNA-laden false teeth.
<<< Officials at the Synergy Credit Union in Lashburn, Saskatchewan, have the surveillance video but not the perp.
On April 13, a man in black with a curved sword jabbed at the ATM, smashed his way through the glass front door, roamed around, leaping over counters and jabbing at more things with the sword before departing empty-handed (and bleeding).
