News of the Weird

Oops!
In December, Idaho State University sent certified-mail letters to its adjunct faculty to disclose (as required by law) that some of them would soon be laid off. However, only the first-class mail fee was billed to the university, leaving each professor to pay on receipt the certified-mail surcharge in order to find out what the university would send them that was so important. (The Idaho State Journal reported that it was the Postal Service's error.) [The Olympian, 12-25-08]

Jailers Not Paying Attention: Christian Colon, 21, had a plea deal worked out to testify against alleged murderer Joel Rivera in exchange for a lighter sentence, but suddenly decided in February that he would not take the stand. The change of heart came right after Colon was accidentally housed in the same Milwaukee County Jail holding cell with Rivera. (With no plea deal, Colon got 46 years.) [Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee), 2-26-09]

At least Colon is still alive. A 23-year-old inmate at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary was found beaten to death in March after being mistakenly assigned to the same cell as his ex-partner-in-crime, against whom he had testified in a 2002

A News of the Weird Classic (October 1999)
From a May 1999 police report in The Messenger (Madisonville, Ky.), concerning two trucks being driven curiously on a rural road:

A man would drive a truck 100 yards, stop, walk back to a second truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the first truck, stop, walk back to the first truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the second truck, and so on, into the evening. He did it, he told police, because his brother was passed out drunk in one of the trucks, and he was trying to drive both trucks home, at more or less the same time. (Not surprisingly, a blood-alcohol test showed the driver, also, to be impaired.)