Wednesday, November 5, 2008

In the News

Police Take Aggressive Rooster Into Custody
A rooster played chicken in the wrong town. That's the word from the downstate community of Benton, Illinois, where police took a rooster into custody after it allegedly confronted a woman and her child.
Police Chief Mike O'Neill said the rooster has been bothering people lately, trying to keep them from getting where they want to go. O'Neill said officers had enough on Monday and took the rooster into custody after what he described as a brief scuffle.
Nobody was injured and the rooster was thrown in an enclosed area near the police department. There, it lived on chicken feed and water until police located the owner. Chickens aren't allowed to live in Benton and the rooster was turned over to the owner only after he promised to find it a new home in the country.
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Who wants to be the office tea monitor?
A 'tea task force' could be employed to spy on employees filling the kettle at work, a Government body has said.
Envirowise is calling on businesses to appoint tea monitors to make sure people do not waste water.
It is advising companies to use teapots instead of making individual cups of tea, and hopes to re-introduce tea urns to the workplace.
They say that the moves will cut greenhouse gas emissions and, in turn, help businesses to save money.
Envirowise, which is funded by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, estimates that more than 30 billion cups of water are unnecessarily boiled each year.
In a statement it tells businesses: "Appoint a tea task force or tea monitor to make sure all your office hot drink-making facilities are as efficient as they could be. Only boil the water you use - this will avoid water and energy being wasted."
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Have I overlooked anything?
A US man who built a Lamborghini sportscar in his cellar had to dig into the foundations of his house to get it out.
Ken Imhoff began building the sportscar after falling in love with it during the movie Cannonball Run.
But it took him 17 years to build his own version of the car in the basement of his home in Wisconsin.
However, when he finished assembling it, he was confronted with the problem of how to get the car out.
He had to hire an excavator to gouge out a slope in his garden and then dig down into the foundations of his house. The car was then hooked up to the excavator and pulled out.
Despite the amount of effort involved, Mr Imhoff said that it was all worth it.
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Patient was told to buy own tweezers
A hospital told a patient to buy his own tweezers to remove his ingrown eyelashes when he arrived at A & E. Medical staff at Maidstone Hospital told Dai Williams, 45, they couldn't find a suitable instrument to conduct the procedure. They then suggested that he 'pop out' and buy his own.
So Mr Williams drove three miles to the nearest supermarket and bought a pair before returning to the hospital to have the painful eyelashes removed.We all know the NHS is having problems but this was just too much to take - having to buy my own equipment. I was lucky I didn't have heart problems.
Mr Williams, from Staplehurst, paid £3.45 for a pair of tweezers. He said he let the hospital keep them, because it must be feeling the "credit crunch".
A hospital spokesman said: "We are sorry there were no tweezers small enough in the department and thank Mr Williams for offering to help solve the problem."