...Jose Velasquez's Mufflers 4 Less shop got more excitement than they bargained for Monday -- the first customer of the day was a masked man with a gun.
"He had his gun out, walking in the office," said mechanic Antonio Diaz.
The three mechanics on duty told him they didn't have any money and the owner would have to come in to open the safe. The man gave them his cell phone number.
"He just told us he would give us the number, and we would have to call when the owner was here and the money was going to get here," Diaz said....

BORDEAUX, France (Reuters) - The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.

In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish."

It added: "Offenders will be severely punished."

* Phone not included.

From the Orange County Register story:

Brian Newell had a dream.

No, it wasn't a Martin Luther King Jr. kind of dream.

It was a dream to adapt to the live stage an embarrassingly bad 1964 movie, "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" – a cross between science-fiction and holiday films.

Newell, 41, wasn't a rookie. The theater impresario/cinephile had been adapting movies to the stage for years. Accomplishments include "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Oh, and there's the live stage version of "Father of the Bride."

But to adapt a film that has been listed by multiple sources as one of the worst movies of all time, to make it entertaining, and to do it in time for the holidays – now that was a real challenge....

Lobbyist Says Squirrel Had Him At "Hello"

In what may go down as the strangest news in ITK history, last week a 60-year-old registered lobbyist insisted that a squirrel said “hello” to him on Capitol Hill.

Major-general of the reserve of the Russian Federal Custodial Service Boris Ratnikov tells that Russia and other countries work on making special devices that turn humans into zombies....