Offbeat Enough

Sounds like every girl’s dream guy: he’s tall; he’s on the cover of newspapers around the world; he confessed to, then denied, a murder. No wonder he’s receiving love letters in prison.

STORY, Ind. – A woman whose hair caught fire when her hairspray-coated follicles ignited as she lit a cigarette is now a southern Indiana town’s reigning “Village Idiot.” Dani Hamm earned the honorary title this month by getting the most votes from regulars at the Story Inn, a restaurant and bar about 15 miles east of Bloomington where she’s a bartender.

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Waitresses wield swords and flare flames at diners, who have to get past a moat before sitting at their table in the dimly lit dining hall.

WARSAW (Reuters) – A dog had a lucky escape when a Polish boat rescued him from an ice floe that had carried him more than 100 miles up a river and out onto the icy waters of the Baltic Sea.

MORROW, Ga. – A man dressed as an elf is jailed after police in Georgia say he told a mall Santa that he was carrying dynamite.

LONDON (Reuters) – A British man on the run from police sent a picture of himself to his local paper because he disliked the mugshot they had printed of him as part of a public appeal to track him down.

BRUSSELS – Police said a one-legged suspect was caught after only one shoe went missing in a store in Belgium. An amputee was an immediate suspect when a store attendant found one shoe missing from a shop in the western Belgian town of Maldegem. Police spokesman Rik Decraemer said Monday authorities were alerted and quickly found the man who fit the description by shopkeepers. The shoe was also recovered.

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Muslims in Malaysia have been barred from attending a concert by U.S. hip hop band the Black Eyed Peas sponsored by Guinness which is owned by the world’s biggest spirits group Diageo.

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) – Indian farmers are falling back on a trusted local method to bring badly needed monsoon rains — marrying off two frogs.

HANOI (Reuters) – Many sick passengers who flew to Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam took fever reducers to cheat temperature scanners at the airport, leading to the discovery of several infected cases later, state media reported at the weekend.

TAIPEI (Reuters) – A Taiwanese groom died on his wedding day after having too much wine and beer to drink, police and local media said Monday.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Internet-Age innovator Google is taking advantage of an old-time principle to thwart wildfires: goats will eat almost anything.