The Weird Week in Review

Bad Review from 1863 Finally Retracted

This newspaper retraction took 150 years to see print, but like they say, better late than never. The Patriot News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, published a bad review of a local speech which they referred to as "silly remarks" that "deserved the veil of oblivion." That speech was later known as the Gettysburg Address, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the new Soldier's National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Yesterday, the newspaper published an apology for its earlier review, even going so far as to use the style of the Address as a framework for its own mea culpa. The paper could be forgiven the original remarks: after all, the president himself said that "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here," which also turned out to be wrong.

Batman Suparman on the Wrong Side of the Law

Batman bin Suparman changed his name legally to reflect two comic book superheroes a few years ago. Now it appears that the crime-fighting moniker has had little influence on his life. A judge in Singapore sentenced the 23-year-old Suparman to two years and nine months on charges of breaking and entering, theft, and heroin use. It all started when his older brother reported $650 missing from the bank account behind his ATM card. An investigation led to the arrest of Suparman after he was observed on a surveillance video taking money from GF Billiards & Marketing during a break-in. He was arrested on August 19th, at which time the heroin charge was added. If he had taken some inspiration from his name, he might have tried wearing a mask or at least using a secret identity.

Police Respond to IKEA Assembly

If you thought the confusion one confronts when assembling IKEA furniture was because the instructions are Swedish, this story should reassure you that they are just as baffling to Swedes as to the rest of the world. A family in Strömstad, Sweden, on the country's western coast, were assembling furniture at 1AM. The banging, or possibly the swearing, woke their baby, who began screaming. The neighbors, alarmed at the commotion, called the local police.

When officers arrived on the scene, they found the couple was engaged in that most Swedish of activities, assembling Ikea furniture, and that the crying did indeed come from an infant child. It remains unclear if the baby was simply crying in need of attention, or whether it too was frustrated by the complexity of the Ikea instructions.

The police understood completely.

Executives Watching Porn Is a Leading Cause of Corporate Malware

Ah, the perks that come from being the boss! Surfing for porn on the internet is a fireable offense for most employees, but who is going to report a CEO? A survey of security analysts at 200 firms finds that 40 percent of the respondents have had to remove malware from a senior executive's computer or mobile device after they perused porn. Senior executives who open spam emails were also a significant cause of malware in the workplace. However, the IT department is wary of reporting such incidents: 57% of data breaches are not publicly reported.

Impersonating a Police Officer to Get Discounted Donuts

From Florida comes the story of 48-year-old Charles Barry, who apparently has a habit of demanding a discount on donuts from his local Dunkin' Donuts outlet in Pasco County. Employees say that Barry had presented himself as a U.S. Marshal on several occasions, in order to receive a discount. When he came in on a weekend and demanded a discount for his whole family, the management rescinded his privileges. But Barry kept demanding his "police discount," and even showed a badge and flashed a gun at the drive-through window a week ago. By then, police had set up a surveillance operation to catch Barry in the act, and he was arrested as he left the donut shop. Barry has been charged with impersonating an officer and improper exhibition of a firearm.

Deer Leaps Through Trailer Wall

An unnamed woman from Las Vegas was driving through Utah when she felt as if her vehicle had hit an animal or something, although she didn't see anything. She called the local sheriff's office, which sent Conservation Officer Micah Evans to investigate. He found the trailer with a hole torn in the front of it -about four feet off the ground. There was no blood visible on the trailer. Evans went inside the trailer, half expecting to find a scene of carnage. Instead, there was a deer standing there, seemingly uninjured!

"I can hear the jaw moving, and I can hear the tongue working," Evans said. "It was either licking its front leg or licking something that spilled on the floor. And as I'm looking at this animal, I'm thinking, 'Man, how the heck am I going to get this thing out of the trailer?'" Standing in the doorway, Evans took a picture with his camera of the buck. The flash went off and the buck sprang toward the doorway, Evans jumped out of the way, then the buck leapt over a barbed wire fence and ran away, according to the sheriff's office.

The deer, a three-point buck, declined to tell his side of the story.