Don't Panic! Lighten Up!S

Mail

Postcard delivered 90 years too late

When Private Walter Butler posted a card to his sweetheart from the trenches in the First World War, neither thought too much about it when it failed to arrive.

Pte Butler, who was fighting on the Western Front with the Dorset Regiment, went on to marry his girlfriend, Amy Hicks, and the pair lived long and happy lives in Chippenham, Wilts.

Wine

Man grabs shark with hands; Blames vodka

Australia - A man who caught a 4-foot shark with his bare hands off an Australian beach said on Friday he only tried the feat because he was drunk on vodka.

Phillip Kerkhof was fishing off a jetty at Louth Bay, a town on South Australia state's Eyre Peninsula 870 miles west of Sydney, when he spotted the bronze whaler shark swimming in the shallows, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.

"I just snuck up behind him, and eventually I went for the big grab and I fluked it and got him," Kerkhof said.

"He was just thrashing around in the water ... starting to turn around and try to bite me and I thought 'well, it's amazing what vodka does'," Kerkhof said.

Wine

Irish are shunning Guinness

It is as Irish as shamrock and the Blarney Stone, but a pint of Guinness is falling out of favour in its home country.

The iconic drink, which has been brewed in Dublin for the last 250 years, is suffering a severe downturn in sales, the company admitted yesterday.

Diageo, the UK drinks giant that owns Guinness, said volumes of the stout fell by 10 per cent in Ireland in the last six months as increasing numbers of drinkers die off.

Sheeple

Batman Sighting Puts Schools on Lockdown

To an Arizona middle school, Batman! Three schools in the north Phoenix suburb of Cave Creek were on lockdown for about 45 minutes Wednesday morning after a student at Desert Arroyo Middle School reported seeing a person dressed as Batman run across campus, jump a fence and disappear into the desert, Scottsdale police Sgt. Mark Clark said.

Bizarro Earth

Fla. teen hiccuping for over 3 weeks

Jennifer Mee can't stop hiccuping. For more than three weeks now, the 15-year-old St. Petersburg teen has hiccuped close to 50 times a minute - despite the best efforts of doctors and home remedies.

She's had blood tests, a CT scan and an MRI. Drugs haven't worked. Neither has holding her breath, putting sugar under her tongue, sipping pickle juice, breathing into a paper bag and drinking out of the wrong side of a glass.

And, yes, people have tried to scare them out of her.

The hiccups do stop when she's sleeping.

Eagle

Skittering squirrel forces plane to land

An American Airlines flight made an unscheduled landing in Honolulu after pilots heard something skittering about in the wire-laden space over the cockpit. The airline blamed the emergency landing of the Tokyo-Dallas flight with 202 passengers on a stowaway squirrel.

"You do not want a varmint up in the wiring areas and what-have-you on an airplane. You don't want anything up there," said John Hotard, spokesman for the Ft. Worth, Texas-based airline. He said pilots feared the animal would chewed through wiring or cause other problems.

"So, as a precaution, we diverted," Hotard said.

Once on the ground late Friday, the Boeing 777's human passengers were put up in hotel rooms and later rebooked on other flights.

Bomb

Happy Valentine's Day From the Bush Administration

Have a heart!

Document

Professor keeps account of every film, cigarette, drink consumed

21,098 packs of cigarettes. 21,194 bottles of soju. 227,423 pages of manuscript papers. A life of 70 years can thus be broken down into its component parts.

Kim An-je, 70, a chair-holding professor at Dankook University, has published a book marking his 70th year. His 2,700-page book contains nearly 360 items of his personal data. Over his long career, Kim has written 25 books and 780 research papers, and until August 2004 served as the chief of the presidential office's commission on the relocation of Korea's administrative capital. According to his records, he has taught 18,327 students.

Recycle

Chinese villagers confused over county's decision to paint mountain green

Villagers in southwestern China are scratching their heads over the county government's decision to paint an entire barren mountainside green.

Workers who began spraying Laoshou mountain last August told villagers they were doing so on orders of the county government but were not told why, media reports said Wednesday. Some villagers guessed officials of the surrounding Fumin county, whose office building faces the mountain, were trying to change the area's feng shui - the ancient Chinese belief of harmonizing one's physical environment for maximum health and financial benefit.

Bomb

Archaeologists won't separate prehistoric couple unearthed in eternal embrace

Italy's recently discovered prehistoric couple will continue their 5,000-year-old embrace undisturbed through Valentine's Day and beyond.

The two skeletons unearthed last week will be scooped out of the earth together to undergo tests before going on display in the northern Italian city of Mantua, archaeologists said Tuesday.