Odds & Ends

Dateline: Romania—A Romanian soccer team is demanding a refund after the player it traded for 35 pounds worth of pork sausages quit. Defender Marius Cioara retired a day after the second division team UT Arad sold him to fourth division Regal Hornia for a pile of meat. After the deal was confirmed, a spokesperson for Regal Hornia told reporters, “We gave up the team's sausage allowance for a week to secure him, but we are confident it will be worth it.” But, a day after the deal was leaked to the national media, Cioara announced he was giving up soccer and leaving the country. “The sausage taunts all got too much,” he said. “They were joking I would have got more from the Germans and making sausage jokes. It was a huge insult. I have decided to go to Spain where I have got a job on a farm.”

Dateline: Arkansas—A homeless man has been arrested after trying to steal a sheep from the Little Rock Zoo. A security guard at the zoo called police last Tuesday evening after spotting a man carrying a trash can with a sheep in it. When officers arrived, 32-year-old Grady Allen Carnahan told them he was a doctor and the sheep was sick. He said he was taking the animal to a veterinary clinic. Carnahan fought with officers as they tried to take him into custody. He was arrested on a felony charge of violating an animal facility and on misdemeanor charges of criminal trespassing, cruelty to animals, resisting arrest and theft of property.

Dateline: Michigan—A 12-year-old visitor to the Detroit Institute of the Arts stuck a wad of chewing gum to a $1.5 million painting, leaving a stain the size of a quarter. The boy was part of a charter school group visiting the museum, when he took a piece of Wrigley's Extra Polar Ice gum out of his mouth and stuck it to Helen Frankenthaler's 1963 abstract painting “The Bay.” According to the Detroit Free Press, the museum's conservation department will research the chemicals in the gum to decide which solvent to clean the painting with. Holly Academy Director Julie Kildee said the boy has been suspended from the charter school. “He is only 12 and I don't think he understood the ramifications of what he did before it happened, but he certainly understands the severity of it now,” said Kildee.

Dateline: Pennsylvania—Late last Thursday afternoon, a man and a woman entered the Giant Eagle Get Go! convenience store in McKeesport. The man asked the clerk, “Can you microwave something for me? It's a life-or-death situation.” The man asked for paper towels, wrapped an object in them, and had the clerk microwave the item for 30 seconds, according to an account the female clerk later gave police. When it was finished, the clerk handed the item back and caught a glimpse of what she thought was a severed penis. The terrified clerk called police, and a search for the couple and their severed member began. The next day, when news reports began airing, a woman called McKeesport police and admitted that she was at the convenience store and that the “severed penis” was actually a prosthetic device filled with urine that she was planning to use to pass an employee drug test. According to the woman, the couple stopped to warm the device in a microwave so the urine would “pass the body temperature test.” McKeesport Police Chief Joseph Pero said police weren't sure why the woman was storing the urine in a device shaped like male genitalia. The chief added that the woman planned to come into the police station for an interview. Police have not ruled out filing charges, including harassment and disorderly conduct. The owners of the convenience store said the microwave in question would be discarded.

Dateline: Louisiana—In order to uncover the joker behind an office prank, a Baton Rouge hospital is ordering 25 employees to undergo DNA testing or be terminated. Officials at Woman's Hospital say a man who works in Building Operations returned from several weeks vacation to find that someone had urinated in his toolbox. After hearing about the incident, administrators sent out a memo demanding that the 25 employees of Building Operations undergo DNA testing. The DNA testing, to be conducted by ReliaGene Technologies of New Orleans, will cost the hospital $25,000.

Dateline: Iowa—According to police in Des Moines, motorist Kimberley Du, 36, has been charged with faking her own death in order to avoid paying parking tickets. KCCI News reports that Du was caught a month after her “death” when she got stopped by police for yet another traffic violation. Investigators said Du faked her own obituary and forged a letter to a judge explaining that she had died in a car crash. Du's alleged obituary was even designed to look like a webpage from The Des Moines Register's website. Now, instead of facing the $500 in parking fines she used to have, Du could spend up to five years in prison for fraud.