Here is a selection of offbeat news items that took their place alongside tragedies, wars and natural disasters during the year. As can be expected, a lot of them concerned judicial scrapes, prison mix-ups, strange regulations and the like.
- In Denmark, a 43-year-old man was sentenced to two months in prison for passing himself off as a bona fide prisoner and thereby spending a night voluntarily behind bars. Per Thorbjoern Lonka said he carried out the prank in order to prove that rich people could easily pay someone else to serve their prison terms. The prison guards who locked him up failed to ask for his identity papers.
- A canny youth serving a sentence for assault in a Scottish jail escaped by virtue of the fact that his identical twin was also incarcerated there, but was due for release. When the brother's name was called, his twin presented himself, and was duly let out. The authorities then had little choice but to free the brother as well.
- A court in the Swiss city of Zurich ruled that owners of very short cars could pay only half a parking fine, provided that two of them could really fit into one space. A couple who owned two tiny city runabouts had done just that, but needless to say the parking attendant had stuck a fine on both their vehicles.
- Tired of hearing reports of visitors paying grossly inflated prices for taxi rides in his city, the mayor of Prague disguised himself as an Italian visitor - and promptly unmasked a driver whose meter ran at over six times the normal rate. "Disguised the way I was, I was certainly expecting to be charged a higher price, but not to such an outrageous extent," he said.
- Local lawmakers in the US state of Virginia threw out a bill that would have banned young people from wearing baggy falling-down trousers, which are currently all the rage. "Underwear is called underwear for a reason" said the congressman who sought the measure.
- Forty-six students in Thailand were banned from the military for life after they tried to cheat their way through the army entrance exam via mobile phones concealed in their shoes.
- A woman in the US city of Norwalk, Connecticut filed a lawsuit against the local authorities for exposing her to colleagues' perfumes and colognes in her job as a municipal clerk. She cited a serious allergy.
- A couple in California pleaded guilty to trying to extort money from a major hamburger restaurant chain after claiming to have found a human fingertip in a bowl of chili. The court found that the fingertip was placed there on purpose, and had been purchased for $100 from a construction worker who lost it in an industrial accident.
- The local council in the northern English resort town of Blackpool enacted an employment rights charter for the donkeys that carry tourists along the beach. The animals won regulated working hours and a day off each week.
- A German woman who was mistakenly recorded as being dead by her local pensions office was asked to provide documentary proof that she was, in fact, alive.
- When World Trade Organization negotiators rolled into Hong Kong for a major summit, digital piracy figured prominently on their busy agenda. Strange to relate, many of the bustling outlets that usually sell music CDs, DVDs and software in the city decided to shut down for the duration of the talks.
Offbeat escapades from 2005
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