Watercooler Stories

Teen sends thousands of texts a month

CANTON, Ohio, June 25 (UPI) -- An Ohio teenager has such a talent for texting that she sends about 15,000 messages a month.

Paige Horn, 15, told WEWS-TV in Cleveland that she doesn't need to look at the phone while she sends messages.

"I just don't look," she said. "I guess I had the phone a long time and I just know

where the buttons are and I just hit them."

Paige does have a time limit. Her parents shut off the phone at 9 p.m. on school nights.

A high school student in the Canton area, Paige said she has a 3.0 grade point average and plays on the school volleyball and basketball teams, so texting hasn't completely taken over her life, the television station said.

She told WEWS-TV she didn't realize her volume is unusually high until her phone went dead. When she took it in for repairs, she was told the number of text messages she had been sending was responsible for the breakdown.

90-year-old clown considers retirement

SANTA ANA, Calif., June 25 (UPI) -- The world's oldest clown, after 50 years of Southern California birthday parties, is thinking of hanging up his umbrella hat and parking his merry-go-round.

Andy Beyer of Santa Ana, now 90, became Bumber the Clown half a century ago, The Orange County Register reported. He created his own costume and face paint and bought a small second-hand merry-go-round in Boston, paying for the cross-country trip by selling rides on the way back to California.

A former vacuum cleaner salesman and school custodian, Beyer at first became Bumbo only on weekends. Now he does birthday parties on weekends and travels through poor neighborhoods during the week.

He has been at it so long that he recently played a 50th birthday party for a man he entertained on his 5th birthday.

A recent bout with pneumonia forced him to take a break after he came home from a party and told his wife, "I'm exhausted."

Now, he is thinking of making the break a permanent one -- something his family would like.

But Beyer is still unsure.

"You take life as it comes, I guess," he said. "While I'm here on Earth, I made a lot of people happy."

Man charged with drunken lawn mowing

NORTH POLE, Alaska, June 25 (UPI) -- An Alaska man has been charged with going for a drunken joyride on a riding lawnmower.

Wayne Lewis, 20, was arrested early Sunday morning by state troopers, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Police had received a call from a woman near Fairbanks.

"I was woken at about 1 in the morning by hearing a lawn mower outside my window," said Anne Sterle of North Pole, Alaska. "And it scared the heck out of me, because my husband was out of town. The first thing that went through my mind was someone was stealing our mower. And then I thought, wait a minute, we don't have a riding mower."

Sterle watched from a window as Lewis got caught on some decorative rocks, staggered off the mower and freed it. When police came, he had moved on to the next property.

Megan Peters, a police spokeswoman, said that the trooper who responded followed Lewis using his lights and siren and sometimes hit speeds of 5 miles per hour. She said the officer "was too embarrassed to call it a pursuit over the airwaves."

Skull found in old house's attic

TOOELE, Utah, June 25 (UPI) -- A couple repairing the roof of their 1910 Utah home say they discovered a human skull hidden behind a wall in the house's attic.

Police in Tooele, Utah, are now trying to track down the survivors of a previous family that had lived in the house for about 65 years, the Salt Lake Tribune reported Wednesday.

After the discovery, police brought in cadaver-sniffing dogs to see if any other body parts could be found on the property, but came up empty. The skull, believed to be that of a small adult or a child, has been sent to the Utah Department of State Antiquities and Archaeology to be identified, the newspaper said.

Records indicated the house's former owners were also not its first.