Police Investigate Suspicious Package

Swedish police got all hot and bothered over what they thought was a bomb, but it turned out to be someone’s sex toy.

The janitor of an apartment building in Goteborg, Sweden’s second largest city, found the package in a garage and alerted police, according to spokesman Jan Strannegard.

The package was humming and vibrating suspiciously, so the bomb squad was called out to disarm the package on Wednesday. The team of explosives experts cordoned off the area, then opened the package with bomb disposal equipment.  But instead of explosives, they found a battery-operated sex toy.

“The package was vibrating when the janitor found it, but it sort of died out by the time it was disarmed,” Strannegard said.

From the “Nothing Else to Worry About” File:

Fuzzy dice are one thing, but Virginia says fuzzy er… ah… well just read on.

A Virginia state delegate, Lionel Spruill introduced a bill January 15 to ban the display of replicas of human genitalia on vehicles. He said this causes a safety hazard because it may distract other drivers.

The display would be termed a misdemeanor, and display on a motor vehicle would be punishable by a maximum fine of $250.

The idea came, Spruill said, from a complaint by a constituent, whose young daughter spotted the testicles on a trailer hitch and asked her father what they were. The constituent told Spruill, “I didn’t know what to tell her.” 

Spruill has vowed to stop such displays.  “I said, ‘Sir, I’m going to be a laughingstock, but I’m going to do it,’” he said.

Spruill, who is a delegate for the Virginia General Assembly, has had some experience with offbeat bills. He is best known for his bill three years ago to outlaw baggy pants worn so low they expose underwear.  The bill failed.

The 61-year-old delegate said he wouldn’t hesitate to bring a set of $24.95 trailer testicles with him for a legislative show-and-tell. 

“I’m going to do it,” Spruill told reporters after the January 15 session of the House adjourned.  “I’m going to bring them out here and show them to you till they tell me to stop.”

That’ll teach him not to smoke!

Police in Kokomo, Indiana say a man who tried to rob a convenience store there accidentally shot himself in the groin.

The clerk in the Village Pantry told police early January 15 a man carrying a semiautomatic handgun entered the store and demanded cash and a pack of cigarettes.

After putting the cash in a bag, the clerk turned to get the cigarettes, and as her back was turned, she heard the gun discharge.

Police said a surveillance camera shows the man shooting himself in the groin as he placed the gun in the waistband of his pants. The clerk wasn’t injured.

The robber, Derrick Kosch, 25, was found at a home a short time later with a gunshot wound to his right testicle and lower left leg.  He is expected to have surgery at a hospital, and police plan to charge him with armed robbery.

Is Carrying a Snake Cruel?

A Long Island man, Curtis Dewberry, 35, has been arrested for walking on a highway with a 14-foot long python wrapped around his body.

Suffolk county police say Dewberry, of Wading River, was spotted by an officer for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as he was out January 15 walking with his pet.

The officers were called because the snake is considered a danger to the public. He was charged with animal cruelty and failure to protect the public against dangerous wildlife, and is being held pending arraignment January 16 because of his lack of a lawyer.

There was no telephone listing for him.

Doh!

Berlin, Germany - A 56-year-old man in northeastern Germany learned the hard way that alcohol and gasoline don’t mix January 14 when he set his apartment on fire.

The man, who asked not to be identified, grabbed the wrong flask and took a drink of gasoline. He spat it out when he realized his mistake, and the gas hit a lit cigarette, igniting a fire in his apartment police said. The Gross-Godems man suffered serious burns.

And That Goes for Your Lawnmower Too!

A New Zealand man who may have studied at the Party On School of Driving was charged with driving a lawn mower while drunk January 15.

Richard Gunn, 52 of Dargaville, was driving the mower down a street late Monday evening when police stopped him, spokeswoman Sarah Kennett said.

Gunn’s breath alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit for drivers, and he had previously lost his driver’s license, Daraville police said. Since then he had been using the mower to get around town.

“I thought I was safe,” Gunn said later.

Speed was evidently not a necessity since, according to Gunn, even bicycles went faster than his lawn mower’s five miles per hour. 
“I’ve watched them go past me,” he said.

Gunn is scheduled to appear in court sometime this week for charges of driving while disqualified, careless driving and driving with excess breath alcohol, and faces a potential prison sentence if convicted.

The lawn mower was impounded for 28 days.

Mona Lisa Model’s Identity Confirmed

One of the art world’s biggest mysteries may have been solved, say
German academics.

The identity of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” they say, has been proven.

Art historians have long speculated that one or another of several possible suspects were the model for the portrait.

One is Lisa Gherardini, the wife of wealthy Florentine merchant
Francesco del Giocondo.  Others include da Vinci’s mother, a lover, or even da Vinci himself.

But now experts at the Heidleberg University library have found dated notes scribbled in the margins of a book by da Vinci in October 1503. 

They are convinced once and for all that Lisa del Giocondo was the model for the sixteenth century portrait.

In a statement January 14, the library told reporters: “All doubts about the identity of the Mona Lisa have been eliminated by a discovery by Dr. Amin Schelchter,” a manuscript expert.

Since there had been “scant evidence” from sixteenth-century documents, “this left lots of room for interpretation and there were many different identities put forward,” the library said.

The notes were found in a collection of letters by the Roman orator Cicero, and were made there by a Florentine city official, Agostino Vespucci, an acquaintance of de Vinci’s.

Comments in the book compare da Vinci to the ancient Greek artist
Apelles.  They refer to three paintings, one of them a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. Since the painting has already been dated to this time, art experts say the Heidelberg discovery is a breakthrough and the earliest mention linking the merchant’s wife to the  portrait.

Italian official Giorgio Vasari first linked the painting to Gherardini around 1550, the library said, but added that there had been doubts about his reliability, since his comments had been made five decades after the portrait had been completed.

“There is no reason for any lingering doubts that this is any other woman,” Leipzig art historian Frank Zoellner told German radio.  “One could even say that books written about all this in the past few years were unnecessary, had we known.”

A spokesman for the library said the Heidelberg notes were actually discovered over two years ago in the library by Schlechter. Even though the notes had been printed in the library’s public catalogue, they received little attention, the spokeswoman said, and hadn’t been widely publicized until a German broadcaster decided to do some recording at the library.

 And even though the painting’s official name is “Mona Lisa”, it is
also known as “La Gioconda”, meaning the happy or joyful woman in Italian; this title suggests the woman’s married name.

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