A Minnesota man is struck by lightning, and his clothes save his life.

NEW YORK (AP)—Now branded with an asterisk, the ball Barry Bonds launched for his record 756th home run nearly a year ago landed Tuesday night in the Hall of Fame.

The souvenir arrived in Cooperstown, N.Y., after a strange day of back-and-forth statements between its owner, fashion designer Marc Ecko, and the shrine.

“We are very happy to receive the baseball as a donation, and not as a loan,” Hall spokesman Brad Horn said. “We look forward to adding this ball to our permanent collections.” (more…)

BEIJING (Reuters) - Fifty-two passengers on a Chinese airliner whose flight was cancelled due to bad weather refused to disembark and instead spent the night onboard before finally leaving to their destination, local media said on Friday. The passengers boarded for their 8 p.m. (1:00 a.m. EDT) flight from Beijing to the eastern coastal city of Yantai, but after more than three hours of sitting on the tarmac, the airline cancelled the flight, the Beijing Morning Post said.

“Most of the about 200 passengers disembarked to complete flight transfer procedures, but a Mrs. Shi was one of 52 passengers who refused to get off,” the newspaper said. (more…)

WASHINGTON (AFP) - OMG! What is that on my car’s license plate?

That’s the question asked by 10,000 drivers who registered their vehicles in North Carolina last year and got registrations starting with “WTF.”

Long just an innocuous combination of three letters, like OMG (”Oh my God!”) WTF is now heavy with vulgar connotations: it is an oft-used email and mobile phone abbreviation that means “What the f***.” (more…)

SAVANNAH, Ga. - Sometimes, it’s better to look like a jailbird than sport a birthday suit. Police say Bill Merit, 49, left the Chatham County jail and began walking by the side of the road, naked. Witnesses called police, who arrested him and jailed him again on a charge of public indecency. (more…)

PHOENIX (AP)—Shaquille O’Neal will lose his special deputy’s badge in Maricopa County because of language he used in a rap video that mocks former teammate Kobe Bryant.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the Phoenix Suns center’s use of a racially derogatory word and other foul language left him no choice. Arpaio made Shaq a special deputy in 2006 and promoted him to colonel of his largely ceremonial posse later that year. (more…)

LONDON (Reuters) - The owner of a tiny island in off Scotland declared its independence from the United Kingdom on Saturday, saying he wanted the territory, population one, to be a crown dependency like the Channel Islands.

In a declaration on his Web site, Stuart Hill, who owns the 2.5 acre island of Forvik in the Shetland Islands in the North Sea, said he no longer recognised the authority of the government or the European Union, and cited a centuries-old royal marriage dowry deal as the basis for his claim. (more…)

CANBERRA (Reuters) - A 1.8 meter (nearly six feet) python has been found in a toilet bowl in a highrise apartment in Australia’s northern tropical city of Darwin, media reported on Friday.

The Northern Territory News said the black-headed python was found in a 10th floor toilet.

Reptile catcher Chris Peberdy told the newspaper the python, likely to be a runaway pet, had been traveling through the building’s sewer pipes. (more…)

Attaboy, who edits my favorite art magazine Hi-Fructose, sent me this fun video of artist Sako Kojima who lived like a hamster in a storefront window for almost a week. According to Kojima’s Web site, “This performance is so hard bacause sako was moving all day long as a hamster. quickly running, biting wood, paper and scratch wall. It continue about from 3 to 6 days. After the days sako come back human.” Link

NEW YORK - Tourists gaped at six stunning wedding dresses displayed at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in New York’s Times Square.

The fashionable white frocks were fashioned entirely of toilet paper.

Six dresses were displayed at the Times Square “odditorium” Thursday and three winning designers squared off for the top prize of $1,000.

The judges from Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, Charmin and Cheap-Chic-Weddings.com crowned this year’s winner, Katrina Chalifoux of Rockford, Ill. She spent two weeks creating a sheath dress with a raised flower pattern from molded toilet paper.

Terro Glover of Marlin, Texas, was a second prize winner. Ann Lee, of Honolulu, Hawaii, placed third in the annual dress competition, which just celebrated its fourth year.

And the picture above is the evidence! P. Selvakumar (left) places a garland on a sari-draped former stray female dog named Selvi during a marriage ceremony in Manamadurai, south of Chennai in India last November 2007. Selvakumar married a female dog in a traditional Hindu ceremony as an attempt to atone for stoning two other dogs to death, an act he believes cursed him. Apparently. after he stoned the dogs, his legs and hands got paralysed, he lost hearing in one ear, and his speech was impaired. With doctors unable to help him, Selvakumar turned to an astrologer who told him he was cursed by the spirits of the dogs he had killed. He could undo the curse only if he married a dog and live with it!!! And since we’re in rural India, all things are possible — and so man marries a dog!

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - The owner of a New Zealand cafe that mistakenly served dishwashing liquid as mulled wine has been fined for causing emotional harm to two women, court officials said Monday.

Chico’s Restaurant Ltd. in the mountain resort of Queenstown on South Island pleaded guilty to a charge of selling food containing extraneous matter — the chemical sodium hydroxide — that caused injury. (more…)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Trouble, the beloved dog of late American billionaire Leona Helmsley, lost 5.1 million pounds ($10 million) in an inheritance settlement but it still should be able to live a life of luxury.

Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Renee Roth accepted a settlement between Helmsley’s heirs and the New York State Attorney General’s office that cuts Trouble’s inheritance from $12 million to $2 million on grounds that Helmsley was mentally unfit when she made her will. (more…)

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexico’s Manuel Uribe, once the world’s most obese man, celebrated his 43rd birthday on Wednesday with a very short trip outside his house.

In only his third outing in six years, Uribe, sitting on his huge reinforced bed, was dragged outside his garage bedroom and onto the pavement outside his house in Monterrey in northern Mexico. Presents of suckling pig and lamb arrived. (more…)

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian drugs trial lasting more than three months and costing taxpayers over A$1 million ($947,000) has been aborted after a number of jurors were found to have spent up to half the time playing Sudoku puzzles.
Sydney District Court Judge Peter Zahra cancelled the trial of two men on drugs conspiracy charges after the jury foreperson admitted that four to five jurors had been playing the addictive number sequence game, local media reported. The judge was alerted after some of the jurors were observed writing their notes vertically, rather than horizontally. The game involves completing a grid of numbers in the correct sequence. (more…)