Rubber Chicken for the Soul

Good old clean funnies here!

Here's some samples from today - enjoy!
* BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE: In Lancashire England, Ian Lewis, 43, spent 30 years tracing his family tree back to the 17th century, traveling all over England and interviewing 2,000 relatives, before he learned that he had been adopted when he was a month old and that his real name was David Thornton. He said he would immediately start researching his new family history.

* Gary Blantz, 29, was arrested for kidnapping a bar owner near Lancaster, Pa., in February. Police reported later that Blantz shot himself in the foot with hes .45-caliber revolver to show the victim what would happen to him if he were disobedient.

* In Kansas City, Missouri, officials were checking videotapes to find who won a $10,000 slot machine jackpot and walked off without it.

* In 1972, an ambitious, but not noticeably well educated man in Argentina was arrested after trying to hijack a bus to Cuba.

* In Virginia, a janitor went to great lenghts to avoid I.D. in a 7-Eleven robbery, using a ski mask and rental car for the occasion. But he also wore his work uniform, which said "Cedar Woods Apartments" and had his name, Dwayne, stitched across the front.

* Dave Feuerstein sued the British supermarket chain Tesco because on of its promotions offered so many bargains that he hurt his back carrying off the discounted merchandise. "Offers like this are too good to refuse," said Feuerstein, who make several trips to the store over a three-day period to redeem more than 300 coupons. "Tesco should have been more considerate and make it impossible to do what I did. If Tesco hadn't had this offer I wouldn't have hurt my back."

* In April, 1995, a gunman in Columbia, Tenessee, announced a bank robbery, but the bank had closed the previous August. "He walked in here and said, 'Give me your money,' and I laughed," said Lea Ables, who works for the insurance company that moved into the office. "I didn't think he was serious at first. He then sort of looked funny and asked, 'This ain't a bank anymore?'" He left after robbing two workers of $127.

* The attorney for Howard "Wing Ding" Jones, accused of selling drugs, sought to lower his client's bail from $150,000 insisting in a Norristown, Pennsylvania, courtroom that Jones was not a risk to flee. At that very moment, Jones bolted from the courtroom and sprinted out the front door. Police captured him 50 minutes later and returned him to the courtroom, where his bail was raised to $500,000.

* In Rhode Island, cops were sure they had the right guy when the suspect in a string of coin machine thefts paid his $400 bail entirely in quarters.

* Texas authorities, respinding to a store robbery, seized a man who was fleeing naked. He said he'd stripped after the job because he figured his clothes would make him identifiable.

* Swedish business consultant Ulf Trolle labored for 13 years on a book about Swedish economic solutions. He took the 250-page manuscript to be copied, only to have it reduced to 50,000 strips of paper in seconds when a worker confused the copier with the shredder.

* After an 11-hour standoff in South River, New Jersey, police finally persuaded three family members to come out of their apartment lined entirely with aluminum foil. The family told police that the foil was to keep out "moonbeams and rays from the outer planets.."