In 1996, a Californian judge ruled against James Pflugradt's estate and in favor of the deceased's former landlord. The judge allowed the landlord to keep Pflugradt's $825 security deposit because he died without giving 30 days notice.

Troy Matthew Gentzler confessed to tossing rocks at cars from an overpass on Interstate 83 near York, Pennsylvania. But his lawyer claimed he was the victim of "Roid rage," erratic emotional swings caused by steroid use.

In October 1996, Charles S. Shapiro begged the Montgomery County, Maryland, court to allow him to change his plea to not guilty of hiring a hit man. He claimed his judgment had been impaired because he had ingested tranquilizers along with a bottle of Tums before confessing.

A Saint Louis, Missouri, man argued that the reason the jury found him guilty of stealing court documents wasn't that it had been prejudiced against him. The man claimed he was demonized because the judge allowed the jury to learn he was a lawyer.

The Ice Hotel at Jukkasjarvi, Swedish Lapland, offers the ultimate in cold comfort - a building constructed out of ice where the average room temperature is minus four degrees centigrade. The beds are made from packed snow topped with spruce boughs and reindeer skins. The hotel melts every April and has to be rebuilt the following winter.

The six-story Elephant Hotel at Margate, New Jersey, is in the shape of a huge elephant, complete with trunk and tusks.
It was built in 1881 by James V. Lafferty as a real-estate promotion. The 65ft-high concrete elephant, named Lucy, was used as a tavern before being converted into a hotel. The reception area is in her hind legs and a staircase in each leg leads up to the main rooms.

The Pineapple Lodge stands in Dunmore Park, Central Scotland.
The lower part of the building is an ordinary octagonal tower but from the tops of the columns sprout stone, spiky leaves, transforming it into a 53ft-high pineapple. It was built in 1761 at the request of the Fourth Earl of Dunmore for reasons known only to himself.

Sir Thomas Tresham was obsessed with the power of numbers and in 1597 ordered the building of a triangular lodge at Rushton, Northamptonshire, in which everything relates to the number three - a homage to the Trinity. It has three sides, each of which measures 33ft, three gables on each side, three stories and triangular or hexagonal rooms decorated with trefoils or triangles in groups of three. All of the Latin inscriptions have 33 letters.

The Crocodile Hotel near Ayers Rock in the heart of the Australian outback is a building complex in the shape of a crocodile. The 'eyes' protrude from the reception area, the rooms run along the 'body' to the 'tail' and the hotel swimming pool is located in the creature's 'alimentary canal.'

These names are completely genuine and have been corroborated in the catalogues of the British Library and in the American National Union Catalog, as well as other authoritative sources.

Ole Bagger

Stanka Fuckar

Gottfried Egg

Dr F.P.H. Prick van Wily

Baron Filibarto Vagina d'Emarese

A. Schytte

Mme J.J. Fouqueau de Pussy

Simon Young-Suck Moon

Tit Wing Lo

NEW YORK - It's not a surprise that no one has ordered the new omelet on the menu at the swanky Le Parker Meridien hotel - it costs $1,000, plus tip. "I couldn't believe it was the price when I first saw '1,000' on the menu. I thought it was the calorie count," Virginia Marnell, a customer at Norma's restaurant in Le Parker Meridien hotel said. The omelet, called the "Zillion Dollar Frittata," is made of six eggs, a lobster, and 10 ounces of sevruga caviar. It costs the restaurant $65 an ounce for the caviar.
"Since we knew it was going to be a very expensive dish, we decided to have some fun with it," Norma's general manager, Steven Pipes said. "It's not just a gimmick, though. It tastes good." If a grand is a little more than you wish to spend on breakfast, you can opt for the "budget" version of the omelet for the low price of $100.

The last public execution in America was the hanging of a 22-year-old black man named Rainey Bethea. He was executed at Owensboro, KY, in 1936 after being convicted of killing a 70-year-old white women. Twenty thousand people showed up to witness the execution.

The last person hanged in the U.S. for being a pirate was Capt. Nathaniel Gordon, in New York City on March 8, 1862. Gordon had been smuggling slaves into the US.

The last person to be burned at the stake was Phoebe Harrius. Harrius was convicted of coining false money and was burned at the stake in front of Newgate Prison in England in 1786.

The last public execution by guillotine was on June 17, 1939.
Eugen Weidman was executed before a large crowd in Versailles, France. The last nonpublic use of the guillotine in France, at Baumetes Prison, in Marsailles, was the execution of convicted murderer Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant, on September 10, 1977.

During WWII Private Eddie Slovik was tried by court-martial and sentenced to death for desertion. He was shot by his own unit, the 28th Infantry Division, in a small town in northeast France.

[Courtesy of netscape.com]

A student attending a college in Idaho fell from his window while mooning a friend. The student then sued the college, claiming that it had not provided adequate information about the dangers of upper-story windows.

A California woman sued a grocery store after she dropped a six-pack of beer on her feet. The woman was not injured, but she said that it hurt. She won the lawsuit.

A construction worker in Tulsa intentionally cut his hand off with a circular saw. When he was taken to the emergency room, he told doctors not to reattach the hand, saying that it was possessed. The man is now suing the doctors for not reattaching his hand, claiming that the doctors should have known he was psychotic.

A Blue Cross-Blue Shield worker sued IBM, claiming that their keyboard's "faulty design" had caused pain in her hand that kept her from working.

A man riding his bike from work at night with no lights, only reflectors, was hit by a Jeep after the driver ran a stop sign. The bicyclist sued the bike manufacturer because he was not warned that reflectors might not be enough to prevent an accident. The man was awarded $6 million.

Robert Lee Brock, an inmate in Virginia, has filed a lawsuit against himself, claiming that he violated his own civil rights by getting arrested. He is suing for $5 million and asking the state to pay, since he can't have an income in prison.

A man filed a suit against his son's baseball team when he was asked to stop smoking so close to his kid's dugout. The father claimed that this caused his son great emotional distress. The judge fined the man and his lawyer $2,250 for filing a frivolous suit.

Chris Morris brought a suit against the state of Michigan for $1 million. Morris claims that he caught a cold in the rotunda (a large, round room) of the state capitol building.
He was there to observe an art exhibition.

Back in 23-70 AD, Roman nobleman Pliny the Elder believed that if you took two small worms from the body of a certain species of spider and attached them -- wrapped in deer skin, mind you -- to a woman's body before sunrise, she would not conceive.

It was believed in ancient times that if a woman spat three times into a frog's mouth she would not conceive for a year.

Supposedly, a pebble clasped in the hand during coitus would also stop conception.

St. Albert the Great (1193-1280) advised women to eat bees as an effective contraception procedure.

Aetios of Amida (fl. 527-565) suggested that a man should wash his penis in vinegar or brine before having sex and that a woman should wear a cat's testicle in a tube across her navel to avoid contraception.