Sometimes the news carries some mighty strange news items. I have been looking through some and have found, what I consider to be unusual to say the least. These are not all recent, but they are all unusual.

There was a suicide attempt that ended in tragedy about 12 years ago. This poor guy who lived on the tenth floor of an apartment building, decided that all was lost and all he could do was end his life. He walked over to the window, closed his eyes and jumped out. As he was falling past the ninth floor he was hit with a shotgun blast that killed him. It turned out that he wouldn't have died from the fall, because a net had been put up to protect people that were working at the eight floor. What had happened was that an elderly couple who lived on the ninth floor were arguing and the husband took out his shot gun and pointed it at the wife and pulled the trigger. He was a lousy shot and hit the guy that was falling outside. It turns out that he did this a lot, but with an unloaded shotgun. His son knew this and was mad at his mother, so he loaded the gun figuring that the father would pull the trigger, thinking that the gun was empty. When the police tried to sort this out, they determined to charge the son with the murder of the guy who was falling outside the window. How crazy can things get?

One of the big places that houses dolphins was trying to figure out an easy way to keep the tank clean. They tried an experiment. Every time a dolphin would give the trainer a piece of debris that was thrown into the tank, the trainer would give the animal a fish. Soon all the dolphins were keeping the tank clean. One dolphin decided to take all the debris he collected and put it under a rock at the bottom of the tank and would bring it up and hand it over a little at a time, so he could get more fish. It even got to the point where if he didn't have enough trash, he would break it in half and give half to the trainer, thus retaining a reserve. One day a seagull flew into the tank. The dolphin held him and when the trainer came he gave him to the trainer. It was a big bird so the trainer decided to give the dolphin a large amount of fish. The dolphin ate all the fish except one. He used the one fish he had to lure another seagull into the tank. He had figured out how to collect a lot of fish. The dolphin taught this to his offspring and they taught it to the other dolphins and soon all the dolphins in the tank were luring seagulls into the tank for their reward. Who says animals are dumb?

A man in Wichita, Kansas was walking on the shore of a lake. He noticed what looked like a basketball bouncing around in the water. He began to wonder what was going on, because the ball seemed to be bouncing around on its own. On closer observation he couldn't believe his eyes. A large flathead catfish had tried to swallow a basketball and it was stuck in its mouth. The fish had tried to dive, but it was impossible because the inflated ball kept him afloat. The guy walked out to the fish, since the water was shallow and tried repeatedly to get the ball out of the fish's mouth. He finally did it after he realized that he had to deflate the ball first. This made for one very happy fish.

A scientist actually got hit in the head with a beam in a particle accelerator. The accelerator had malfunctioned and the scientist was trying to repair the device. I guess he wasn't worried, because he felt that the several safety mechanisms would prevent him from getting hurt. WRONG! As he bent over the machine his head went into the area that the beam passes through. The beam hit the left side of his face swelling it up to a terrible size. He was a Russian scientist and he was taken to a Moscow clinic to die. The skin on that side of his face peeled away and you could see the path that the beam had followed. He didn't die. He lost all the nerves in the left side of his face and they were gone, but he was still able to function. He continued in science. For about twelve years he suffered seizures. Over the last few years the seizures turned into Grand mal seizures. As he aged, only the right side of his face aged, not the left side where the beam hit.

Most people feel safe when they, or their family, hold the keys to their home. Unless someone is adept at picking locks, they will never be able to get into the home as long as they don't have a key. Some scientific advances are not always to our benefit. Scientists have announced that they now have perfected a method that can copy all keys from only a photograph of a key. This is a very good reason to never leave you keys out, or hold them in your hand. You never know when someone with a cell phone is taking a photo of you.

Shoplifters have become a problem for many stores, but a shoplifter in Germany is one of the most unusual. A man with no arms stole a 24 inch tv from a store. He brought a couple of friends with him, who put clamps on his body and loaded the tv onto his back. How he ever got out of the store this way without anyone from the store noticing is unbelievable. The way the store found out about it, was that one of the employees saw it on the store video. A policeman commented, "It's hard to believe that the sight of an armless man walking along with a giant TV clamped to his body did not get anyone's attention."

An Indonesian man has developed a very strange disease. He has begun to look like a tree and is known in his village as the tree man. Local doctors have been looking at this guy for over 20 years and can not figure out what is wrong with him. Roots are growing out of his body along with branch like structures. The guy could no longer support his family until he joined what is commonly known as a freak show. He had cut his knee as a teenager and roots began to grow out of the cut. His wife left him with the children, which he raised. An American doctor flew out to the village and has identified the disease and is going to treat it. The doctor has stated that the disease is a virus and it was able to change or hijack, as he put it, the cellular machinery of the man's skin cells. The disease caused the growth of an enormous amount of cells that caused these tree like structures. It is going to take daily doses of synthetic Vitamin A. The doctor said that this should reduce the size of these growths, where he can use his hands. He said that in his entire medical career he has never seen anything like this.