Dateline: FloridaA Florida man was arrested for calling 911 to complain about the size of his dinner. According to the Stuart Police Department, a 51-year-old man was charged with misusing the emergency services line last month after calling twice to complain about the portion size of his dinner at a restaurant called Crabby’s Seafood Shack. The man reportedly told a 911 dispatcher that he had been served clams that were “extremely so small” and didn’t want to pay for them. The dispatcher told the man to call a non-emergency line, but he told police he’d forgotten the number. The man was not placed in custody, but is scheduled to be in court later this month.Dateline: PennsylvaniaA woman was given a $284 billion electricity bill last week. Mary Horomanski, of Erie, Pa., told The Washington Post that she was shocked when she received a bill from her local electricity company showing an account balance of “284,460,000,000,” with a first payment due of $28,176. According to the bill, the full amount wasn’t due until Nov. 2018. Horomanski told reporters that her first reaction was to assess her family’s electricity usage, wondering about the Christmas lights that were strung on the outside of their home. She texted an image of the bill to her eldest son, who contacted the electric company, who confirmed that the bill was a mistake. A spokesperson for the company said the cause of the error has yet to be discovered, and it was the first time the company had ever issued a bill for billions of dollars. The correct total was $284.46, which Horomanski says is still high, compared to the previous month.Dateline: HawaiiTwo men who have been best friends for 60 years recently found out they were brothers. Alan Robinson, who was adopted as a child, and Walter Macfarlane, who never knew his father, first met in the sixth grade. The two have been best friends over the last six decades. While using a family history and DNA-matching website in an attempt to learn more about his ancestry, Macfarlane reportedly discovered a near-perfect genetic match in a man with the username Robi737. In an interview with local news station KHON2, his daughter told reporters that Macfarlane instantly knew who the other person was because Robinson went by the nickname “Robi” and was a pilot who flew 737s for Aloha Airlines. The two learned that they share their birth mother, a revelation they made public last week at a gathering of friends and family. Dateline: Dominican RepublicMourners attending the funerals of a group of people who died ingesting tainted homemade liquor reportedly drank the same liquor and also died. Officials in the Dominican Republic say a number of people died last month after drinking a homemade liquor made from sugarcane which contained methanol, a highly toxic liquid used in the production of formaldehyde and antifreeze. Methanol can cause blindness if ingested. Following the initial deaths, authorities say at least a dozen others died and at least 21 more were hospitalized when the tainted alcohol was served at the funerals of some of the victims. The deaths occurred near the border with Haiti and an unknown number of people there have reportedly died as well. Authorities in the Dominican Republic say they have yet to find the source of the tainted liquor. Dateline: DenmarkDanish police are saying that a man carrying a large amount of cannabis got into a police car because he thought it was a taxi. Last week, Copenhagen police tweeted that an alleged drug-dealer was hurrying home when he mistook a police car for a taxi cab and entered the back seat. According to reports, the man was carrying around 1,000 joints at the time. The incident happened in Christiania, a district of Copenhagen known as a center for drug trade, according to the BBC. It is illegal to possess or distribute cannabis in Denmark. Law enforcement officials originally tweeted that the man would face a fine, but later said he could face a custodial sentence. Police have been conducting raids in Christiania in recent months, even using drones to fight the illegal trade of cannabis.Dateline: FloridaA Florida man was arrested for punching an ATM after it gave him too much money. Cocoa police say a Wells Fargo automatic teller machine caught surveillance footage of a man hitting the device’s touch screen late November. The man reportedly contacted the bank later in the day to apologize for the incident and tell the manager that he had punched the screen because the machine was dispensing too much money and he didn’t know what to do. Bank officials say the man’s attack cost over $5,000 in damages and pressed charges against him. He was arrested for criminal mischief by Cocoa police nearly a month after the attack.
Compiled by Joshua Lee. Email your weird news to josh@alibi.com.
