Wednesday started out normally enough... It was even normal all the way until dinner... Then things started going downhill... Literally...

It started when Mark Ewing of Sagle, Idaho, decided to pick up a pizza for dinner... He got home, got out of the car, and started walking towards his house... That's when his dog Charlie - a black Labrador - decided to take his car for a ride! The dog hopped in thru the open window of the car...

"He somehow got the car into neutral," Ewing said... "My car just went boom, down an incline and into the drink..." Straight into the Pend Oreille River, to be specific... Completely submerged... "There's nothing weirder than looking at your car cruising down your driveway when you're not in it and seeing your dog jump out and then watching your car go splash," Ewing said...

Well, shows what he knows... Because it got weirder...

He called a tow truck... The tow truck driver showed up and got ready to swim to the car... Apparently so as not to lose them, the driver asked Ewing to hold his dentures!!! "My car's in the drink, I've got dentures in my hand and this guy Keith from Clyde's Towing goes swimming," Ewing said...

The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you... Pretty simple... But some people never learn... Like the guy who tried to rob a taxi driver in Aldenhoven, Germany... He had just mugged the driver and stolen his wallet when the driver began to fight back... A scuffle ensued and the driver escaped back into his taxi with his wallet - and the thief's wallet to boot!!! The thief, now locked out of the taxi and without his wallet, could only watch while the cabbie called the police... The police, for their part, were quite surprised to still find the thief there when they arrived shortly thereafter! "He wanted his wallet back," a police spokesman said...

Fifty years ago today, Wham-O Inc. changed the name of a toy from "Pluto Platter" to "Frisbee"... And the rest, as they say, is history!

It all started with Walter Morrison, the man who started tossing around a popcorn lid at a Thanksgiving gathering in 1937... He thought that was cool and moved on to using cake pans... Then he decided to make his own design for a flying disc... Which led to the "Flyin-Saucer" - his first commercial model... After tweaking the design a little more, he started calling it the "Pluto Platter"...

Wham-O got the marketing rights to the "Pluto Platter" in January of 1957... They were influenced by kids from New England who sometimes threw empty pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company, and who also called the "Platter" a "Frisbie"... So they decided to capitalize on that by renaming the product to "Frisbee"...

Morrison, however, was not enthused... "I thought Frisbee was a terrible name," Morrison says... I thought it was insane..."

But after 50 years of collecting royalties on the "Frisbee," he's come around... "It just goes to show I am a bad judge of names..."

I heard this week that Mr Wizard (Don Herbert) had died... I grew up watching him in the 80's on Nickelodeon... Apparently he also had a similar show back in the 50's and 60's! I didn't realize he was that old!

And last month there was all that press when Jerry Falwell died... And the month before that it was Boris Yeltsin...

It's getting hard to keep up with who's alive and who's dead...

Thankfully, there's DeadOrAliveInfo.com! Finally, a one stop shop to find out who amoung the stars, personalities, authors, etc is dead - and who's still kicking... There's even a nifty search system where you can search by:

• Name - Arthur C. Clarke is apparently still alive!
• By oldest still living - Albert Hofmann, despite discovering LSD, has lived to be over 100!
• By youngest death - Amber Hagerman only lived to age 9, but her death led to the creation of Amber Alert system for kidnapped kids...
• By cause of death - Amazingly, only 7 people are listed as having died of "old age"... Ouch...
• Time alive - find out who lived longer or shorter than you based on days alive... Apparently I have "outlived" Bob Marley by 78 days...

So check it out - you never know when the subject of someone being dead (or alive) might come up in a conversation...

"Please read and follow package instructions," the memo to Seattle, Washington city employees says... "Stay by the microwave and listen to the pop, to know when to stop..."

Yes, Seattle government employees got a memo on how to pop microwave popcorn... Or more specifically, a warning not to burn the popcorn when they pop it... Why? The memo covers that too: "We continue to see a high number of instances of employees burning microwave popcorn and triggering the building smoke alarms... This is a serious issue which requires Fire Department emergency response, building evacuation and resetting of building systems..."

And this isn't an isolated event, either... Apparently burnt popcorn has caused the evacuation of City Hall, the Seattle Municipal Tower, and the Justice Center... The Justice Center was the most recent, making 8 times in 3 years! So the city's Fleets and Facilities Department is looking for options...

And while no one is planning a vote on a ban quite yet, even the Mayor's office is chiming in on the issue... "We've had some issues," mayoral spokesman Marty McOmber said, "If this continues, we'll have to look at that... It's been pretty disruptive..."

[Yep, popcorn... Pretty soon the FAA will ban it from planes... Just imagine if terrorists got hold of something so "disruptive"!]

It all started when a man was diagnosed with compartment syndrome: a condition where swelling in the limbs begins to restrict blood flow and can cause localized tissue and nerve damage... The only way to fix it is to create small incisions to relieve the pressure... Which is what doctors in St Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, Canada, were attempting to do when they got something of a shock... The man was bleeding green!

"During insertion, we normally see arterial blood come out... That’s how we know we’re in the right place... And normally that blood is bright red, as you would expect in an artery," Dr Alana Flexman said... "But in his case, the blood kept coming back as dark green instead of bright red. It was sort of a green-black. Like an avocado skin maybe... We were very concerned, obviously..."

Unfortunately, the man was not determined to be a Vulcan... Instead, they attributed the green blood to large doses of sumatriptan causing a case of sulfhaemoglobinaemia - when sulfur is absorbed into haemoglobin in red blood cells, making them appear greenish...

(Oh well... And I was just getting ready to go looking for Zefram Cochrane)

First things first - just because something is shared does not mean you get to take it home with you... But apparently, that was missed by the thief (or thieves) who absconded with the bathtub from a shared men's bathroom at the Kominato Hotel Mikazuki in Kamogawa, Japan... And before you wonder why people would steal a bathtub, let's add that this is a tub made from 18-karat gold and worth over $988,000 (over 120 million yen)!

To make it more interesting, the tub was on the 10th floor of the hotel... And there's no evidence of how the thief got it out of the hotel! No scuff marks on the ground, even though the tub weighs over 175 pounds (79.5 kilograms)... No video surveillance... And no witnesses, even though the thing is the size of, well, a bathtub... "We really don't know how this happened at this stage... But what we can assume now is that more than one person was involved in this incident," a police spokesman said...

(Sooo... A bathtub is stolen... And there are no clues as to who or how... [insert obvious pun here])