Coffin Conversations - by dementia

Police in Edmonton, Alberta, said officers were training with a dog at a business late Tuesday when they heard an alarm sound from the building next door.

When they went to investigate, a car smashed through a garage door and zoomed past an officer and his dog, Wizzard, Edmonton police spokeswoman Karen Carlson said.

"He didn't get very far because he got stuck in a snow bank," Carlson said. The car turned out to be stolen.


The suspect tried to make a break for it on foot, but was quickly forced to give himself up when Wizzard caught up with him.

SPRING HILL, Fla. (UPI) -- A Florida woman ticketed for reckless driving said she hit 19 mailboxes because she couldn't stop crying over the death of her cat that morning.

Tracy Chadwell said the cat, Monty, had helped her get through some difficult times in recent years. The only thing she could think to do was go to work, hoping that would take her mind off the loss, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

Chadwell said she didn't realize she had taken out so many mailboxes and thought it was just a garbage can stuck beneath her truck, the newspaper said.


Deputies say Chadwell passed a sobriety test, although she was taking medication for back and leg pain. She also had a suspended and expired Louisiana driver's license.

Chadwell said she never got a Florida driver's license because all of her paperwork was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina.

Two clowns were shot and killed by an unidentified gunman during their performance at a traveling circus in the eastern Colombian town of Cucuta, police said Wednesday.

The gunman burst into the Circo del Sol de Cali Monday night and shot the clowns in front of an audience of 20 to 50 people, local police chief Jose Humberto Henao told Reuters. One of the clowns was killed instantly and the second died the next day in hospital.

"The killings had nothing to do with the show the victims were performing at the time of the incident," Henao said in a telephone interview. "We are investigating the motive."

With an entrance fee of under 50 U.S. cents, Circo del Sol de Cali attracts mostly poor Colombians. It pitched it tents in Cucuta, near the border with Venezuela, earlier this month.

"The clowns came out to give their show and then this guy came out shooting them," one audience member told local television. "It was terrible."

A New Yorker claims he achieved a world record in Thailand on Thursday for doing the most squat-thrusts in one minute on the back of an elephant.

Ashrita Furman climbed onto the obliging elephant in Northern Thailand and powered through 40 squat thrusts.

This, he says, breaks the previous record set on firm, level ground of 30 in one minute.

The 52 year old from New York City undertook the challenge in the Thailand heat, on top of a forty-year-old female elephant named Kamee.

Furman is no stranger to laying claim to bizarre records.

By his own count, he currently holds 54, and has held 144 records overall including the fastest mile while balancing a pool cue on his finger.

The aristocratic owner of a gay dog aims to cash in on lucrative same-sex weddings by offering his pet pooch as best man at the ceremonies.

Sir Benjamin Slade, 51, is advertising his 13-year-old Labrador-Doberman cross Jasper – who inherited a £100,000 trust fund – for ceremonies at his 13th century manor in Somerset.

A man, who was drunk, let his 14-year-old son drive them both home - the kid was also drunk.

James Vernon Holbert Jr., of Virginia faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced in May.

The hole is said to be more than 100m (330ft) deep. Residents said they had felt the earth shaking and heard loud noises before the houses collapsed.

President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia (Africa's smallest country) has long believed he had mystic powers, but he said a vision received on Jan. 18 makes it possible for him to personally cure AIDS and asthma, though only on certain days and for a limited number of people. The vision gave him recipes based on seven herbs mentioned in the Quran but authorized him to treat no more than 10 AIDS sufferers, on Thursdays and Mondays, and not more than 100 asthma patients, on Fridays and Saturdays. (Not surprisingly, the government self-reports success.) Jammeh's previous visions included making Gambia rich by exporting oil, but so far no deposits have been found.

A group of young German women used so much spray deodorant in the bathroom of a North Sea youth hostel that it set off a fire alarm and brought the local fire brigade rushing to the rescue, police said Monday.
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Let me just say that I just LOVE my satin walnut finish casket! What with one thing and another, you'd think that this would be the last casket I'd ever own, but you'd be wrong.

With monitor lizards, snakes, and bats prowling their parks, residents of tropical Singapore are no strangers to the occasional animal ambush.

A Walhalla man might have had a good reason for not responding to officers who surrounded his home: He was asleep in a recliner when the SWAT team found him after a four-hour standoff, authorities said.

“He did not know we were there until we put our hands on him,” Oconee County Sheriff’s Capt. Steve Jenkins said.

A man who was fired for visiting an adult chat room while at work at IBM is suing the company for $5 million. He says he deserves sympathy, not firing, since he is an Internet addict.

The man claims chat rooms relieve the post-traumatic stress he has suffered from since seeing his best friend killed in Vietnam in 1969.

A Chinese man was sentenced to death for scamming people out of 3 billion yuan ($387 million). The man created a fake business that supposedly made wine, tea and medical elixirs using black ants.

Ants are thought to be a natural remedy when steeped in tea or soaked in liquor.

A man described as a 'loner' was being questioned last night over a series of letter bomb attacks which have left nine people injured.

Miles Cooper, a 26-year-old school caretaker who does not drive, was arrested at his home near Cambridge early yesterday on suspicion of sending seven letter bombs in the past month, several to the offices of companies with links to traffic regulation enforcement.

"We want to show respect and dignity to the body of Ms. Smith," said Seidlin. "Beauty was important to her. She wants to look beautiful and we want to make sure that occurs."

Five Deer Park, N.Y. teens have been arrested since October for "fence plowing," the latest rage among certain Long Island youths, according to Suffolk County police. The concept is simple: Pick out a fence, run toward it at high speed, and launch yourself like a missile to plow through the wood.

Another 10 fence plowing incidents are still under investigation in the Deer Park area, police said. The arrests were made after the suspects were caught on a surveillance camera installed by a home owner whose fence was plowed five times, police said.

A New Zealand lawyer who took to wearing an Alice in Wonderland costume in court to highlight an alleged cover-up by the army has been found guilty of contempt.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A media exhibit featuring a campaign for a fake drug to treat a fictitious illness is causing a stir because some people think the illness is real.
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MOUNTLAKE TERRACE, Wash. - The owner of a coffee stand north of Seattle is offering free coffee for a year to anyone who helps catch a robber.

Troy Malchow hopes the offer will create a buzz that finds the man who pointed a gun at him Wednesday at Perfetto Espresso.

A male lynx has surprised animal keepers in Zhengzhou Zoo by refusing to mate with a female lynx.

Instead, the lynx has been seen attracting the attention of a leopard in the next-door pen. The male lynx is frequently seen petting and playing with the leopard even though they are separated by a fence, and whenever the female lynx approaches he drives it away.

AN ADELAIDE printing company is rushing to print and distribute new copies of suicide handbook The Peaceful Pill, in case it is banned.
A decision from the Classification Review Board is imminent, following a referral from Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock on the basis that the book is already a banned import.

i like 2 take bathes with my german shepard

THE creator of a south coast religious community claimed to receive messages from the Virgin Mary and believed a new race of people would be created through him, a Sydney court has heard.

William Kamm, 56, also known as the Little Pebble, is facing trial on five counts of sexual intercourse with a person under 16 under his authority and one count of committing an act of indecency.

Local authorities are warning residents in the Valemount area to be on the lookout for a cult that is recruiting followers in the Robson Valley.

The Dendroctonus Ponderosae Fallus Flamas Cult (also known as the Pine Beetle Fall and Burners), an offshoot of the Buddhist Marathon Monks of central Japan and an ancient animal worship cult from India, is known to be conducting unusual rites and ceremonies in the remote mountains in this area. Experts believe the cult has elevated the Mountain Pine Beetle to deity status. Devotees worship the Mountain Pine Beetle much as Hindus worship Shiva the Destroyer. Like Shiva, followers believe this tiny bug has the power to wreak havoc on the world and subsequently usher in a new era of peace on this planet.

A Dutch primary school teacher who is dying of cancer is overseeing one last project among her beloved pupils - they are making a coffin for her.

Eri van den Biggelaar, 40, has just a few weeks left to live after being diagnosed last year with an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Always popular at school, she asked the arts and crafts teacher to build a casket for her.

A town in Germany has removed every road sign as part of an EU-backed project to encourage responsible driving.

Traffic in Bohmte, which has 13,000 inhabitants, is split into cars, bikes and pedestrians.

Airport security can be very frustrating in this age of post-9/11 paranoia, security theatre and the War on Liquids. But one German tourist in the Phillipines should probably have found a better outlet for his dissatisfaction – because he could now face six years in jail for dropping his trousers before walking through an X-ray machine

The CEO of NextMedium, which has launched a product placement marketplace called Embed, states that, “To date, product placement has been opportunistic and Rolodex based. Our goal is to establish brand integration as an ad category.” To meet that goal, a product could be written--that is, entrenched--into a story line.

Along those lines, in order to give a particular scene a certain organic feel, where product placement must be integral to the plot, a porn director arranged for a couple to use a sex machine built for two, with the male playing the role of an activist salesman. “This the Televibe 8100,” he explains to her as they proceed to undress. “It can be operated remotely either by telephone or over the Internet.” She asks, “How does it work?”

When John Peffer got made redundant from his job at a funeral home, he didn't take it lying down.

Instead he allegedly started his own phoney funeral business by carrying caskets in an SUV and asking his girlfriend to act as a priest.

The notion that Jack the Ripper might not in fact be a man at all, but rather a woman, was one postulated by Inspector Abberline himself at the time of the killings. According to Donald McCormick, author of The Identity of Jack the Ripper published in 1959, Abberline raised the theory in a conversation with his mentor, Dr. Thomas Dutton after the murder of Mary Kelly. Testimony given by Caroline Maxwell, who lived in the area, was central to the argument.

Straight out of the ghettos of Transylvania, to the mean streets of West Salt Lake; they are The GRP. Hear the sounds of vicious, undead thugs the likes of which none have ever seen before... and lived! Witness the voluptuous horror of erotic, zombilicious booty dancers! Those few brave souls, that have escaped to tell the tale, have never been the same again!

Lindsay Lohan has purchased Marilyn Monroe’s 2-bedroom West Hollywood El Palacio Apartment which isnt the house she died in but lived in during the 1950’s. Lindsay recently sold her condo after never setting foot in and living at the Chateau Marmont long enough to rack up a $431,000 bill.
The El Palacio has a pretty morbid history as 23-year-old heiress Georgette Bauerdorf was found strangled and found facedown in her bath in 1944 and in 1965 Dorothy Dandridge committed suicide there by overdosing on barbituates.

Poland artisans who used to made lace craft used in church altars for John Paul II and the Queen of England made an strategic and wild twist in their traditional work and decided to make sexy lingerie. The G-strings have been a succesful product selling it online around the globe.

Koniakow, employs almost 60 lace makers of the catholic village, where the new business hasn’t been totally accepted.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Tabloid darling Anna Nicole Smith attracted even more publicity after her sudden death on Thursday. And now, so may the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino - one of her favorite hangouts in South Florida.

Though time will tell whether the Seminole Hard Rock or Room 607, where Smith stayed, become macabre tourist attractions, public relations specialist Virginia Sheridan said the venue now has a higher profile given the amount of news coverage, television footage and photographs taken of the site.

Scores of police have been sent to the jungles of remote Papua New Guinea to hunt for a cult leader known as the Black Jesus, who is said to have sacrificed three young women to the devil and eaten their bodies.

In one case reported by villagers, a mother who had fallen under the cult leader's spell led her 14-year-old daughter to his hideout, offered her to him as a virgin then stabbed her to death.

The Raelian movement, an atheistic cult that claims humans were created by aliens, has reverted to its original symbol: a swastika inside a Star of David.

The movement, established by former French racing car driver Claude Vorhilon, says its swastikas are an ancient symbol of peace. The group stopped using the symbol in 1992, replacing the swastika with a cross, when it offended Jews they had approached for support.

A Good Samaritan taxi driver who allowed three people injured in a car accident to shelter from from the cold in his cab was left counting the cost - after emergency services destroyed the taxi to 'rescue' the trio.

Cabbie Peter Andersson, 45, from Lulea in central Sweden said: 'They had a few cuts and bruises and I let them shelter in my cab. They looked worse than they were.

Some colleges in Malaysia could soon offer students courses on how to keep public toilets clean.

Tourists and Malaysians frequently complain about the nation's public lavatories, saying they often lack toilet paper, soap and even seats.

A woman from Pittsburgh was surprised to find a package left on her doorstep by her ex-boyfriend. On the plus side, it was nicely wrapped in red bows and pink tissue paper, and came with a note saying 'I love you, Your Ben'.

On the down side, it contained the severed head of a kitten.

Did you know that people living in the Western region of the United States are more likely to become victims of a serial killer than people living in the Northeast?

Singer Morrissey is known for being a bit morbid, so it's no surprise that he already knows where he wants to be buried.

Shawn Hornbeck's parents received the best possible news when their son was found alive more than four years after his abduction.

For self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Brown, however, the news was not so good.

The family of 21-year-old Stephanie Gach, who was abducted and murdered in 1992, thought they had stopped her killer from continuing to hurt the family when they filed a lawsuit in 2004 over essays about the crime that convicted murderer Jack Trawick had posted on the Internet.

But Trawick, on death row at Holman Prison in Atmore, is back on the Internet -- this time offering for sale sketches of the mutilated corpse of a young woman on an Internet auction site.