Bizarre News - December 16, 2015

Greetings fellow Bizarros:

Imagine you are an older married woman, and you come home to find a young woman, in your husband's pajamas, sleeping in your bed.

You might immediately assume your husband is cheating on you, but when you confront the woman she tells you she was only sleep-walking and doesn't remember wandering into your house, showering, changing into your husband's pajamas and climbing into your bed.

So you decide that just to get her out of your house you will give her a ride home.

Now that story is bizarre enough, but to qualify for Bizarre News things had to get a little bit weirder.

As it turned out the young woman, Eryn Rice, was not having an affair with the elderly gentleman. She was fleeing police. Earlier that day she was observed shoplifting several hundred dollars worth of cosmetics from a CVS pharmacy in Deltona, Florida.

Rice was apprehended outside of the pharmacy by a sheriff's deputy who managed to half arrest her. He cuffed one of her wrists before Rice pushed him to the ground and took off running.

Rice headed to a house in the neighborhood. It's unknown why she picked this certain house. She slipped inside, washed her clothes in the washing machine but left a pair of socks and panties, took a shower, put on a pair of the flannel pajamas she found and then napped in the bedroom where she was found by the homeowner.

You can just imagine the telephone call between the elderly woman and her husband when Rice was discovered (wearing handcuffs on one wrist, no less). But no story that poor old guy could have come up with could possibly beat the truth.

Later that day the older couple flagged down deputies and asked them if they were looking for a young woman. The couple told deputies where they had driven the woman, and when deputies went to the house they arrested Rice and an accomplice who attempted to flee.

Bizarrely,
Lewis

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*-- Chinese restaurant caught charging customers to breathe clean air --*
ZHANGJIAGANG, China - Officials in a Chinese city ordered a restaurant to stop charging customers to breathe clean air amid intense smog in the country. The restaurant in Zhangjiagang was found to be adding an "air cleaning fee" of about $0.15 to each customer's bill to offset the cost of the eatery's new air filtration system, which was installed amid smog warnings in the region. Customers complained to the city's Consumer Pricing Bureau, which ordered the restaurant to cease the practice. An official told the state-run Xinhua news agency the filtered air could not be sold as a commodity because diners were not given the option of whether or not to breathe inside the facility. Smog in the capital, Beijing, was so thick last week that the city issued its first-ever red alert for air quality. The alert involved a three-day closing of factories, construction sites and schools.


*-- Florida man in French maid costume arrested in prostitution sting --*
LAKELAND, Fla. - A Florida man dressed in a French maid costume and a dog collar was one of 95 people arrested in a prostitution sting, police said. The Polk County Sheriff's Office said an investigation dubbed Operation Naughty Not Nice resulted in the arrests of 95 people between the ages of 15 and 68 during the week-long sting. Investigators said the suspects were lured to a hotel by undercover officers posing as prostitutes and potential customers. The arrest report said one of the suspects, David Marsh, arrived at the hotel on a bicycle and was wearing a French maid costume, a dog collar and a chastity belt. He was seeking a prostitute to dominate him, investigators said. "He rode a bike clear across Lakeland wearing his French maid outfit with his dog collar around his neck," Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in a news conference. The sheriff's office said other suspects arrested in the sting include a Lakeland High School teacher, two sets of twins and a mother who left her two-year-old child in the car with her significant other when she came into the hotel. Judd said one of the suspects, Maurice Laws, was previously arrested in a similar operation at the same hotel last year.


*-- READER COMMENTS --*
From the 'You can't make this stuff up' file... "A North Carolina town has rejected a proposal for a new solar farm over public fears that it would 'suck up' all the energy from the sun. In a public comment session on the proposed solar farm, Woodland resident Bobby Mann claimed the farm would absorb all the solar energy in the area, which would drive away business."
[Sounds reasonable.]

hey. i've been reading your newsletter now for a couple of months, and i've never read something so weird as the story about the school in canada banning tag because of injuries. it's outragious. regardless of which physical activity you do, somewhere down the line their are going to be scrapes. what are this school planning next. ban sports day because the races are unsafe, ban the swings because you might fall off? it's outragious. i love your newsletter a lot. keep up the work. -emily
[The school (and the taxpayers who fund it) can't be liable for some little moron breaking his neck from falling off the swings. If you want your kids to play on a swing set you should home school them.]

LEWIS; Sadly it seems that all too often schools will ban any playground activity that's fun. At the Chicago Public School I attended Red Rover was banned as a playground game.
[If you had ever seen some poor, little sucker's shoulder get yanked out of the socket from that brutal game you wouldn't be so eager to defend it.]

Lewis, How did people like me ever survive our childhood when we would be out all day running around and playing games. Today you fall and get a scrap and it's the end of the world. With their kids now sitting in front of a t.v. playing video games all day they then wonder why their kids are getting so obese! Great column. -Tom
[Yeah, but a steady diet of McDonald's and pop might have something to do with it, too.]

*-- END OF READER COMMENTS --*
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