With the emphasis on “odd.”
• In September 2008, Santiago Cabrera woke up in his Fresno, California, home when he “felt something hit him in the face,” according to the subsequent police report. He looked up to see “an unknown male bent over him. The male continued to strike him in the face and head area with a sausage.” The assailant—who really was hitting Cabrera with a sausage—then took off his pants and ran out of the house. Police found the man’s identification in the pants he’d left behind, and Antonio Vasquez Jr., 21, was arrested a short time later. “I tell you,” said Fresno police officer Ian Burrimond, “this was one weird case.” (The sausage couldn’t be used as evidence; amid the confusion, Cabrera’s dog ate it.)
• Prena Thomas of Lakeland, Florida, has something unusual in her freezer: a 33-year-old snowball. She made it in 1977 during a rare Florida snowstorm and kept it as a memento. “It’s just like a little pet,” she says, and she occasionally takes it out of the freezer to look at it.
• British television personality Myleene Klass, 31, was appearing on the reality show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! in Costa Rica in 2009 when she had to call for help one night from her hotel room. The problem? She’d sprayed herself with insect repellent, which had reacted with the varnish on the bed’s wooden frame—and one of her hands had gotten stuck to the wood. Staff had to slowly peel Klass off the frame to free her (which was, many agreed, more entertaining than the reality show).
• Jonathon Guabello, 29, of Fort Myers, Florida, and his girlfriend came home from a bar one night in October 2008. Guabello wanted to have sex, but his girlfriend wasn’t in the mood…so Guabello shot himself in the arm twice, then tripped over the oven door, hit his head, and passed out. His girlfriend called the police; Guabello was arrested for threatening violence and firing a weapon in an occupied dwelling, and faces several years in prison.
In 2007 Gibson Guitar launched a Les Paul Robot Guitar that can tune itself.
Two men burst into a home in Plant City, Florida, late one night in December 2008. One of the men held a knife to the throat of the homeowner…and demanded an eggbeater. The homeowner found an eggbeater and gave it to him. Robert Eugene Thompson and Taurus Deshane Morris were arrested a short time later on burglary and aggravated assault charges. The eggbeater was found in Thompson’s back pocket and returned to the victim.
In January 2010, police arrested Carlos Laurel, 31, and Andre Hardy, 39, on drug charges in Kingston, Pennsylvania. Police reports noted dryly that Laurel and Hardy had 50 bags of crack cocaine in their possession.
Adeel Ayub, 30, a stocker at a supermarket in Preston, England, was arrested in 2009 for, among other things, licking a raw chicken in the store. A coworker filmed the chicken-licking, the video ended up on YouTube, and Ayub was arrested. He was later sentenced to two months in prison.
A farmer named Luis Alfonso Sanchez was treated at a Colombian hospital in December 2009—after he castrated himself so that he wouldn’t cheat on his wife. She had refused to have sex with him, he told doctors. “When I saw that I could no longer count on her,” he said, “I made the decision to cut my testicles off because I am a Christian and did not want to go look for another.” He also said that, as a farmer, he had castrated many animals, so he thought it was no big deal. “He’s been looked at by the urology department,” a hospital spokesman said, “and they found a complete absence of the testicles.” They added, however, that his wounds had become infected.
In January 2010, lawyer Jeffrey Denner stood up in court in Woburn, Massachusetts, and told the judge that his client, Eben Howard, on trial for assault, was mentally competent to stand trial. His client suddenly jumped out of his seat, accused Denner of putting poison in his cranberry juice, and attacked him. Courtroom security had to restrain him. “Perhaps,” Denner said later, “I spoke too hastily.” The trial continued at a later date.
The total number of counterfeit U.S. $50 and $100 notes passed and seized in 1990: 1,240,840.