Quirky Stories

And now for some tales we have been holding in our quirky stories file...

PENALTY KICK IN THE WALLET: A soccer team in Romania shooting for more money now finds itself looking for a new job. The owners of a soccer team in the European country have fired all the players after they asked for a nine dollar per month raise. Executives with the club were so irate with the financial request they let go of every player and have since put an ad in a newspaper looking for new players. The team is owned by the council in the city where they play.

A NEW WAY TO GET RID OF HICCUPS: Shane Shafer won't be able to hiccup the money needed to pay for his recent operation. The 50-year-old Shafer became so fed up with a case of hiccups that plagued him for seven months, beginning last November, that he had surgery to get rid of them.

The Texas resident traveled to New Orleans two weeks ago where doctors placed an electronic machine in his chest called a vagal nerve stimulator that eliminated the hiccups. The stimulator is traditionally used on people with epilepsy, but doctors felt it could also disrupt hiccups. So far, the surgery has been a success, although the procedure has left Shafer with a quiet voice.

FAKE DEATH CATCHES UP WITH ONE MAN: William Arksey is not dead, but he is dead meat. The 53-year-old Arksey pleaded guilty Wednesday in Putnam County, New York to forgery after he admitted he filed his own death certificate so he wouldn't have to serve jail time for a prior drunken driving conviction.

Arksey never showed up to court in June, 1997 after he had been arrested for driving drunk, so a warrant for his arrest was issued, but revoked when officials claimed the death certificate had been filed in September of that year. However, while officials couldn't unearth a body, they did eventually learn the truth.

He recently had to serve time behind bars in Pennsylvania on another charge. Officials in Pennsylvania ran his fingerprints in a national database that matched ones from his earlier arrests. That's when authorities in New York realized Arksey was still alive and kicking. Assuming he doesn't croak again, Arksey is set to be sentenced August 11.