Wasted Daily News

OMAHA, Neb. – Police have arrested a man suspected of leaving greasy, graphic imprints on the windows of stores, churches and schools in a small Nebraska town. A 35-year-old man was caught in the act by police early Wednesday morning, Cherry County Attorney Eric Scott said Friday. The man hasn’t been charged yet, but authorities believe he is the vandal some townsfolk have dubbed the “Butt Bandit.” Read the rest of this entry →

BARTONVILLE, Ill. – The owners of Endsley Funeral Home in Bartonville wanted to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the business by putting a little “fun” into “funeral.” So, for their open house Saturday, they put a replica of Elvis Presley‘s 650-pound casket on display and hired Elvis impersonator Dave Stovall to dance around it and sing a few of the King’s most famous songs. Read the rest of this entry →

Tours at a 163-year-old home-turned-museum are sometimes disrupted by a grumpy groundhog. The furry critter’s digging has foiled some of the Saginaw Valley Historic Preservation Society’s attempts to refurbish the house on the city’s east side.

“We put in a walkway, and part of that collapsed due to Grumpy’s efforts,” preservationist Thomas Mudd told The Saginaw News.

Construction workers leveled a mound of soil that Grumpy the Groundhog had settled into, “but Grumpy still has his hole under the handicap ramp,” Mudd said. Read the rest of this entry →

A dozen Chinese teenagers have been caught in a failed plot to sneak into Canada by masquerading as kung fu masters from the famous Shaolin Temple, state media reported Friday.

The 12 had no martial arts experience but joined a team of genuine kung fu performers from a school in Henan province, also home to the 1,500-year-old temple, that was leaving for a tour of Canada, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

They had paid up to $90,000 each to a human smuggler, or “snakehead,” and two coaches from the martial arts school who often accompany students on trips abroad, Xinhua said. Read the rest of this entry →

Outside it was a sticky 111 degrees, but Ali Hamdan was shivering under two parkas as he sipped hot chocolate, surrounded by tables and chairs made of ice.

Chillout, its owners say, is the Middle East’s first ice lounge — the latest venture in this desert Gulf emirate, which has been transformed by a mania for the biggest, first or most outlandish.

Gulf men in traditional white robes with wives covered in black cloaks, teenagers eager to experience their first cold blast and Westerners who miss the chill are flocking to the bar-restaurant to hang out in what amounts to a freezer.

Everything is made of ice: the walls, tables and chairs; cups, glasses and plates; the art on the wall, the sculptures depicting Dubai’s skyline, the beaded curtains, the 7-foot-chandelier and the bar. Read the rest of this entry →

Big Ben’s bongs fell silent Saturday as workers rappelled down Parliament’s iconic clock tower, beginning a month of maintenance work on the clock and its world-famous bell.

Time briefly stood still as the clock’s hands were frozen shortly after 8 a.m. They then were wound to 12 o’clock as a team of specialist “industrial rope-access technicians” descended to clean the clock’s four latticework faces, part of maintenance ahead of its 150th anniversary in 2009.

Although the clock soon will be ticking again, the famed bell that sounds the hour at Britain’s Houses of Parliament will be silent for four to six weeks as engineers replace bearings in the clock mechanism.

This is the first time since 1956 that both Big Ben’s sonorous hourly bongs and the chimes that mark each quarter-hour will be silent, robbing London of one of its most distinctive sounds.

Parliament’s neo-Gothic clock tower, designed by Charles Barry, is popularly known as Big Ben, although the name refers only to the 13.5 ton Great Bell inside.

Cast at the Whitechapel Foundry in east London, Big Ben first rang out in July 1859. Soon after, it cracked — as an earlier version had during testing. Officials simply turned the bell so the hammer wouldn’t strike the crack. That same bell, crack and all, remains in use.

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On the Net:

Big Ben and the clock: http://www.parliament.uk/about/history/big_ben.cfm

Best-selling Canadian author Yann Martel, worried about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apparent lack of interest in the arts, sent him a book on Monday and said he would continue doing so once a fortnight.

Martel, who wrote the novel “Life of Pi,” was upset that Harper had paid no attention during a recent parliamentary ceremony to honor Canadian artists.

Harper, whose Conservatives won the January 2006 election, is a rather wooden figure who has expressed little enthusiasm for the arts. Read the rest of this entry →