Fire Authorities in California found a corpse in a burnt out section of forest
whilst assessing the damage done by a forest fire. The deceased male was
dressed in a full wet suit, complete with a divetank, flippers and face mask.

A post mortem examination revealed that the person died not from burns but from
massive internal injuries. Dental records provided a positive identification.
Investigators then set about determining how a fully clad diver ended up in the
middle of a forest fire. It was revealed that, on the day of the fire, the
person went for a diving trip off the coast - some 20 kilometers away from the
forest.

The firefighters, seeking to control the fire as quickly as possible, called in
a fleet of helicopters with very large buckets. The buckets were dropped into
the ocean for rapid filling, then flown to the forest fire and emptied. You
guessed it. One minute our diver was making like Flipper in the Pacific, the
next he was doing a breaststroke in a fire bucket 300m in the air. Apparently,
he extinguished exactly 1.78m (5'10") of the fire.

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Earlier this year, the dazed crew of a Japanese Trawler were plucked of the Sea
of Japan clinging to the wreckage of their sunken ship. Their rescue, however,
was followed by immediate imprisonment once authorities questioned the sailors
on their ship's loss. To a man they claimed that a cow, falling out of a clear
blue sky, had struck the trawler amidships, shattering its hull and sinking the
vessel within minutes.

They remained in prison for several weeks, until the Russian Air Force
reluctantly informed Japanese authorities that the crew of one of its cargo
planes had apparently stolen a cow wandering at the edge of a Siberian
airfield, forced the cow into the plane's hold and hastily taken off for home.
Unprepared for live cargo, the Russian crew was ill-equipped to manage a now
rampaging cow within its hold. To save the aircraft and themselves, they shoved
the animal out of the cargo hold as they crossed the Sea of Japan at an
altitude of 30,000 feet.

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"We will not have him put down. Lucky is basically a damn good guide dog,"
Ernst Gerber, a dog trainer from Wuppertal told reporters. "He just needs a
little brush-up on some elementary skills, that's all." Gerber admitted to the
press conference that Lucky, a German shepherd guide-dog for the blind, had so
far been responsible for the deaths of all four of his previous owners. "I
admit it's not an impressive record on paper. He led his first owner in front
of a bus, and the second off the end of a pier. He actually pushed his third
owner off a railway platform just as the Cologne to Frankfurt express was
approaching and he walked his fourth owner into heavy traffic, before
abandoning him and running away to safety. But, apart from epileptic fits, he
has a lovely temperament. And guide dogs are difficult to train these days."
Asked if Lucky's fifth owner would be told about his previous record, Gerber
replied, "No. It would make them nervous, and would make Lucky nervous. And
when Lucky gets nervous he's liable to do something silly."

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"For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead patient in the
same bed every Friday morning," a spokeswoman for the Pelonomi Hospital (Free
State, South Africa) told reporters. "There was no apparent cause for any of
the deaths, and extensive checks on the air conditioning system, and a search
for possible bacterial infection, failed to reveal any clues." "However,
further inquiries have now revealed the cause of these deaths. It seems that
every Friday morning a cleaner would enter the ward, remove the plug that
powered the patient's life support system, plug her floor polisher into the
vacant socket, then go about her business. When she had finished her chores,
she would plug the life support machine back in and leave, unaware that the
patient was now dead. She could not, after all, hear the screams and eventual
death rattle over the whirring of her polisher.

"We are sorry, and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in question.
Further, the Free State Health and Welfare Department is arranging for an
electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be no repetition of this
incident. The enquiry is now closed."