People are the strangest folks I know

Okay, here's a confession. It's after midnight and the Blog muse turned in hours ago, but I simply cannot disappoint my faithful readers (neither one of them) so I turn once again to News of the Weird. Somehow that fits the week I've had.

A New Hampshire woman who brought her mother's ashes to bingo games for good luck is hoping for their return after the urn containing them was stolen. Police say the urn was stolen from Diane Bozzi's van Tuesday morning in Rochester by someone targeting unlocked cars. Bozzi says the urn was in a bag that she was planning to take to her bingo game later in the day. She and her mother loved playing bingo together. Before her mother died in 2002, Bozzi promised her she would take some of her ashes with her to play. Her mother agreed, saying she would bring Bozzi luck. For everybody but Mom, I guess.

Rhode Island residents have complained for weeks about foul odors wafting from the state's main landfill, so state lawmakers are pledging to investigate and see where their noses lead them. The General Assembly announced Wednesday that a commission that will try to put an end to the rotten-egg smell at the Johnston landfill. The odor has prompted complaints from as far away as Attleboro, Mass., about 14 miles away. The agency that operates the landfill blames recent rains for the smell and has installed vents to trap gasses coming from it. Okay, let's see if I get this straight. The county dump smells bad. Really?

A Utah bird hunter was shot in the buttocks after his dog stepped on a shotgun laid across the bow of a boat. Box Elder County Sheriff's Deputy Kevin Potter says the 46-year-old Brigham City man was duck hunting with a friend when he climbed out of the boat to move decoys. Potter says the man left his 12-gauge shotgun in the boat and the dog stepped on it, causing it to fire. It wasn't clear whether the safety on the gun was on at the time. Can I take a guess? Potter says the man wasn't seriously injured, in part because he was wearing waders. Just be glad he wasn't out hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney.

A Georgia man preparing for the Christmas season spent a night in jail after he was arrested for shooting at mistletoe outside a Decatur shopping mall. William E. Robinson, 66, was charged with reckless conduct and discharging a firearm on someone else's property after he opened fire on a tree that held a sprig of the plant, which is commonly used as a Christmas decoration. Robinson said that he was merely following a holiday tradition when he used his double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun to knock the plant out of a tree outside the North DeKalb Mall. "Every year I go somewhere to get some mistletoe to decorate the house," Robinson told the station. "I get some for my friends that can't get mistletoe. The best way to get it is with a shotgun." And how glad we are that he was not in the Mall shopping for an X-Box?

A 31-year-old Florida man allegedly attempted to shoplift four steaks and a pair of candles by hiding the items in his trousers. Officials arrested Naples resident Dannial Ashley last week after grocery store employees spotted him stuffing the meat and candles -- unlit, of course -- into his pants. When one store worker confronted Ashley, the would-be thief ditched his stolen goods and attempted to escape on foot; an employee reportedly chased down Ashley and convinced him to walk back to the store. Is that a romantic dinner in your pants or are you just happy to see me?

But the story that wins this weeks Weirdness Award is:

Zany experiments testing scientific theories in real-world settings have earned the TV show "MythBusters" a devoted following, but a stunt gone awry met with an unhappy audience when an errant cannonball went shooting through a California family's bedroom. Sheriff's deputies are still measuring how, exactly, the cannonball flew from a bomb range in the rolling hills flanking a suburban San Francisco Bay area neighborhood and rocketed into the front door of a home and through its master bedroom before landing in a neighbor's parked minivan.

Hosts for the Discovery Channel show fired the cannonball Tuesday as they filmed an episode testing whether other types of projectiles shot from a cannon would pick up the same speed and have the same impact as the steel ball. Later, the production team plans to film flying stone cannonballs at a rock quarry in Northern California. Instead of hitting a string of water-filled garbage cans, however, the cannonball passed over the barrels, crashed straight through a protective cinderblock wall and careened off the hill behind it, said Alameda County Sheriff's Department spokesman J.D. Nelson. "It missed the target and took kind of an oddball bounce," Nelson said. "It was almost like skipping a rock on a lake. Instead of burying it into the hill it just went skyward."
 
So see? Your day is not going so bad after all.