THE ODD, STRANGE, AND WEIRD- A break from the serious!!

Sometimes our daily grinds get us into the rut of the all too serious and we need a chuckle to break out.

A guest evangelist at First Baptist Church in Forest [Ohio] was preaching about penance and asking for a sign on Tuesday night, when the church's steeple was hit by lightning, setting the church on fire and blowing out the sound system.

"It was awesome, just awesome," said church member Ronnie Cheney, 40, of rural Forest, who was in the church at 206 N. Martin St. when the lightning struck. "You could hear the storm building outside ... He (the evangelist) just kept asking God what else he needed to say," Cheney said. "He was asking for a sign and he got one."

At about 7:45 p.m., lightning hit the church's steeple, went through the electrical wiring and blew out the church's sound system. Cheney said the lightning traveled through the microphone and enveloped the preacher, but he was not injured.

Afterward, services resumed for about 20 minutes, but then the congregation realized that the church was on fire and the building was evacuated.According to Forest Fire Chief Doug Hawkin, his crew, along with the Kenton and Wharton fire departments, responded to the scene.

After firemen arrived they saw flames coming from the steeple. Firemen doused the blaze, remaining at the scene about three hours.

"It was kind of interesting hearing the preacher talk about what had happened," Hawkin admitted. [The (Findlay) Courier, 2003] HT: Snopes

Now that you've heard of an act of God, how about an act of man for comparison.

An Ontario, California Transportation Security Administration worker noticed how some older people had problems walking through the metal detector without their metal canes or walkers (Andrew Silva, Daily Bulletin). Having a hobby of making handsome wooden canes, Bill Hanlon would leave a few at the metal detector so those needing assistance could walk through with some aid. But because he sold some attractive canes on the side (though not to travellers) they had to be removed--a blatant conflict of interest, you see. But how does one make sense of an absurd policy to begin with?

Then there are those who've decided to make a change to their domain names, to reflect a change in their business ...

• Well, Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales, Australia, opted for a domain name which didn't quite work: molestationnursery.com.
• When Powergen, the UK's leading utility, opened an Italian subsidiary they acquired the appropriate domain name for it - www.powergenitalia.
• When techies at Experts Exchange, an IT web site, choose a domain name they failed to read the print finely: expertsexchange.com.
• And who represents?, a search site for information about agents, managers, and publicists and who they represent, wondered why people thought they were a porn site: whorepresents.com.

Moral: getting a domain name go to a site like wordsmith.org and check out their Internet Anagram Server to see words you don't know about!

Now, don''t you feel better?