POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Cecil, always enjoy your column, however you’ve got this [airplane and conveyor belt business] absolutely wrong. 'strafe, via the Straight Dope Message Board It’s all about the interpretation of the question. Unfortunately, Cecil commingled...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - A fairly sophisticated colleague just completed a five-day water fast, something he does two or three times a year to “purge his body of toxins.” A Harvard-educated client of mine keeps going on fruit-juice-based fasts'again to purge the toxins....

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - A motel clerk in Anchorage, Alaska, told police that a man with short blond hair, a puffy red coat and blue face paint pulled a knife and demanded money, but when the clerk retreated into an office and locked the door, the man left empty-handed. An officer...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Reacting to an increase in the number of reports of herds of elephants destroying African villages for no apparent reason, some scientists said that they believe the attacks might be payback for years of abuse. “They are certainly intelligent enough...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - When I’m reading novels of, say, the antebellum south and there’s a guy who goes around on a cart selling blocks of ice, how the heck did he get it? I mean, they didn’t have the fridge to rely on. Did they go way up north and cut blocks...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Ontario police were able to capture a suspect they were chasing because he stopped to get a haircut. Nathan Clifford Myles, 25, of Thunder Bay was observed driving erratically but refused a uniformed officer’s order to pull over. Instead, he drove...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Do you ever wonder: in those houses built strategically next to graveyards, are the occupants drinking residual waste products (or atoms that the body is composed of) of those buried next to them? Think about it'if they’re drinking well water, coffins...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - This is going to take a while to explain, so bear with me. My kid is a fan of the Age of Empires series of computer games, which give you a bird’s-eye view of the landscape on which your armies cavort. You can see an amazing amount of detail, but...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Police in Levittown, N.Y., said that Frank Traina, 36, walked into a Chinese restaurant, pointed a handgun at the owner and demanded cash. When the victim noticed water dripping from the gun barrel, he realized it was a water pistol, which Traina apparently...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Two masked men with semiautomatic handguns burst into a credit union in Benicia, Calif., ordered employees to drop to the ground and demanded money. The men left after being told that they had picked a “cashless credit union,” where there...