Another Sunday Smorgasbord

All the stories I wanted to talk about that were too small to be posts unto themselves:

• Another in a continuing series of "don't mess with Granny" stories: A burglar is caught by a grandmother who chases him six blocks and then uses her martial arts skills to tackle him and hold him till the police arrive.


• A Wisconsin man had several items of value (laptop, Palm Pilot, digital camera, etc.) stolen from his home recently, but the burglar had second thoughts and returned most of the items the next day--after calling the victim (from a blocked cell number) to tell him that he had the items.


• A list of creative excuses for missing work. Perhaps the best one: "A tiger peed in my ear, which then became infected."


• I imagine the next family gathering will be awkward: In Pennsylvania, one sister attacked another--using the latter's artificial leg as a weapon.


• Now that the nation's "eccentric" former dictator has passed on, the nation of Turkmenistan has lifted its ban on opera and circuses.


• To promote awareness of a campaign to send shoes to poverty-stricken Africans, Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) coach Ron Hunter coached a game barefoot on Thursday night. (The campaign brought in over 100,000 pairs of sneakers for the charity before the game even tipped off.)


• Misunderstood headline of the week: Turkey blocks access to YouTube for second time. It didn't occur to me at first that an Eastern country was practicing Internet censorship; I thought maybe that the site's server had been compromised by some sort of wacky caper by a barnyard animal.


• And in the "sweetest" story of the week, an 87-year-old woman from Maine--struggling to get by on a Social Security check--told a newspaper that her only real indulgence over the years has been Hershey's candy bars. Upon hearing of this, people from across the country started sending her some, and the company itself sent her a generous assortment.

This has been a lazy day for me; back to regular news tomorrow.