crap shoot

+-------------- Bizarre Historical Accounts ---------------+  

DAILY RECORD (15th MAY 1992)  
Frank Perkins of Los Angeles made an attempt on the world flagpole-sitting record in 1992. But after he came down, he not only discovered he was eight hours short of the 400-day record, but also that his sponsor had gone bust, his girlfriend had left him, and his phone and electricity had been cut off.  

INDEPENDENT (19TH DEC 1996)  
A rapturous welcome awaited Antonio Gomez Bohorquez and Pascual Fuertes Noguera when they returned home to Murcia in southern Spain after pioneering a new route up Mount Sisha Pagma in the Himalayas. On studying specialist publications, however, they had to sheepishly admit that they had, in fact, climbed the wrong mountain.  

DAILY MIRROR (28TH SEPT 1995)  
Another armed robber, jailed for eight years in Argentina, decided to hire a private detective to trace the father he never met. The detective discovered the man's father was the warder of the prison in which he was incarcerated  

WESTERN MORNING NEWS (28TH SPR 1994)  
Ian Lewis, 43, of Standish, Lancashire, England, was also interested in finding out about his family. He spent 30 years tracing his family tree back to the seventeenth century. He traveled all over Britain, talked to 2,000 relatives and planned to write a book about how his great-grandfather left to seek his fortune in Russia and how his grandfather was expelled after the Revolution. Then he found out he had been adopted when he was a month old and his real name was David Thornton. He resolved to start his family research all over again.  

INDEPENDENT (26TH JULY 1995)  
Markku Tahvainen drove his family 250 miles to a zoo in Finland in order to see the bears. Whe they returned home, though, they discovered footprints and droppings in their garden which revealed that in their absence they had been visited by a bear which had eaten their ducks.  

NEWS OF THE WORLD (21ST AUG 1988)  
Martin Reeves traveled 8,000 miles to India to find parts for his 1957 Morris Cowley. His mission was succesful, but when he got back to Brighton, England, he found the car had been stolen.  

DAILY MIRROR (25TH MAY 1990)  
Securitymeasures bring their own headaches. In Broadway, Worcestershire, England, in 1990, a safe was unlocked for the first time since its key had been lost in 1942. All it contained was a note urging people not to lose the key.  

REUTERS (20TH JULY 1994)  
Likewise, a Dutchman who invested more than $1,000 in a police trained guard dog to protect his house in Schalkhar woke up two days later to find the house had been broken into. The only thing the burglars had taken was the dog.  

DAILY TELEGRAPH (25 JUL 1986)  
A fireman in Bath, Somerset, England, using a metal detector to trace a fire hydrant which had been covered in tarmac after road resurfacing, dug seven holes in the wrong place before realizing the device was being set off by the steel toe-caps in his boots.