Column: Dr. Ruehl's Realm of Bizarre News

Tabloid Baby pal and contributor Dr. Franklin Ruehl, Ph.D. returns with his roundup of the week's wildest stories:

This Week's
"Realm
of
Bizarre News"
Top 13

* Horrible experience! Man got trapped in a restroom for 4 days at a lawn bowling club near Aberdeen, Scotland when the door jammed and the outside handle fell off! A custodian finally freed him. The rescued man said he wished he had been trapped in the club bar instead!

* Smart trout at a fish farm in Hampshire, England have been filmed leaping 3 feet into the air into a metal feed tube, swimming 30 feet against the current in the tube, and escaping into a waterway! They apparently did not want to become someone's dinner.

(Trivia Q: What is a group of trout called? In inverse alphabetical order, is it a shiver, quiver, or hover? Answer below...)

* He bragged too much! An 80-year-old holy man in Chittour, India claimed that his right leg was magical, that anyone touching it would be immediately cured of any illness they have. Last week, two men cut off that leg below the knee with a sickle and made off with it, presumably to avail themselves of its special powers. The yoga survived and is recuperating in a hospital.

* After their pet Dalmatian named Bingo was killed by a car, a couple in Pribislavee, Croatia have painted their home with black and white spots to honor their beloved pooch!

* New hotel in Lishui, China is configured like a mausoleum with the beds shaped like coffins! Appropriately, the building stands adjacent to a graveyard! The female designer wants to give folks a foretaste of death. Heart patients are banned and mental patients must be accompanied by a companion!

* Madonna has announced she is going on a porridge diet, yes, I said a porridge diet, to lose weight! For the record, porridge is meal or cereal boiled in water or milk until it is thick and mushy! Personally, I am staying on my chocolate candy diet.

* Discovered! A dino that had a "vacuum cleaner" mouth with 500 tiny, sharp teeth for eating plants! Incredibly, it had 8 replacement teeth behind each primary tooth in case one broke off! The Nigersaurus fossil was found In Niger in West Africa. The dino, some 30 feet in length, was a smaller cousin of the Brontosaurus (aka Apatosaurus).

* Unfair! Popular doorman at a swank Manhattan apartment building was suspended for a day without pay for heaving halitosis! Couldn't they just have a given him a pack of breath mints? Unfair!

* While touring the Civil War Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield in Cobb County, Georgia, two history buffs reported seeing a phantom soldier astride a horse which rode right through a fence and dematerialized. Repeated sightings of ghosts at this and other war sites are termed "residual hauntings" because the spirits of those who died traumatic, premature deaths cannot leave!

* In what may become the case of the year, police officers in Tre Arroyos, Argentina, recently observed a UFO and 4 alien beings! Independently, a 12-year-old girl fishing in the area with her family snapped a photo of a possible contingent of extraterrestrial spacecraft!

* UPS drivers avoid left turns, which waste both gas and time, by using special directional software. The company, which has a fleet of approximately 95,000 vehicles, reveals that the policy is saving $millions!

* Meow! Bionic cat Baby, 6, in London now has four bionic legs! Two metal plates were inserted in her rear legs recently after a 21-foot fall, which complements an earlier pair in her front legs, inserted after a similar fall when she was a kitten!

* Please don't do this! A man was decapitated by an airplane propeller in Papua New Guinea when he raced toward the twin-engine plane. It is not clear if he was endeavoring to catch the plane for a flight or intent on suicide. Again, please don't follow suit!

(Trivia answer: It is a "hover" of trout, a "quiver" of cobras, and a "shiver" of sharks!)

Click here to see my demo reel. May the Power of the Cosmos be with You!

-- Dr. Franklin Ruehl, Ph.D.