Watercooler Stories

Calif. city mulls restricting home colors

LA PALMA, Calif., Sept. 1 (UPI) -- A small Southern California town is considering limiting the palette from which homeowners can chose repainting their homes.

A controversy erupted after Adnan Essayli decided to paint his La Palma home a color resembling the stone-walled homes in his native Beirut, the Los Angeles Times reported.

He painted his house a mix of deep-toned golds, with red trim to highlight the windows, in a neighborhood otherwise filled with homes coated in subdued earth tones.

The community of about 16,000 residents recently held a meeting over the proposed ordinance. Joe Mendoza, who moved to La Palma six years ago, said he lives in a pastel green house in a quiet neighborhood that suits his quiet lifestyle.

"Different cultures enjoy different colors," he told the crowd.

Another resident, Rex Hand, said he doesn't want his neighborhood to look like another country.

"I want it to look like the United States," said Hand, 73, who lives in a tan home.

He said before he lived in La Palma, he lived in other nearby communities that deteriorated.

"The color of the houses is always how it seems to start," he said.

Video game is theme of couple's wedding

JERSEY CITY, N.J., Sept. 1 (UPI) -- The video game "Bejeweled" helped bring about the weekend wedding of a New Jersey couple.

Tammy Li said her fiance, Bernie Peng, reprogrammed the Nintendo DS video game to have it offer his marriage proposal to her in digitized format, The Jersey Journal reported. The question popped onto the screen when Li reached a certain level while playing the game.

In return for Peng's creative proposal last December, Li said Wednesday she had a cake made for their wedding Saturday in the form of the video game. Li said cake designer Anne Heap recreated the Nintendo DS with almond cake and sugar paste.

"I just thought that he had worked so hard, and I was trying to think of a way I could do something for him," Li said.

The Journal said as an added bonus, the company behind "Bejeweled" was so impressed that Peng adapted its game in such romantic fashion that it is paying for the $500 cake.

Cannon salute at wedding backfires

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Sept. 1 (UPI) -- Swedish police say a cannon salute to a newly married couple backfired, with a wedding guest suffering a broken leg and burns.

The woman was injured when the cannon exploded during the Saturday reception near Stockholm, the Swedish news agency TT reported.

Police received a call just after 6 p.m. that a woman needed to be rushed by helicopter to Karolinska University Hospital.

"The breech of the canon flew off and hit her in the thigh. She broke her femur and suffered burns," Bjorn Engstrom of the Stockholm police told TT.

Is Jack the Ripper buried in Australia?

BRISBANE, Australia, Sept. 1 (UPI) -- A local official in Australia says he believes the London killer nicknamed Jack the Ripper is buried in Brisbane.

Paul Tully, a member of the local council in Ipswich City in Queensland, has found the image of what appears to be a knife-wielding man on the gravestone of Walter Thomas Porriott in Toowong Cemetery, The Brisbane Times reports.

Porriott was in London at the time that five prostitutes were stabbed, and left the city not long after the series of killings, Tully says.

The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was killed Aug. 31, 1888. Four more women died through November, all in Whitechapel, a poor area of London's East End.

Tully, who is writing a book about the case, said Porriott was a bigamist and a thief as well as a killer. He was sentenced to prison for manslaughter in Britain in 1940 and died Aug. 29, 1952.

"This guy was a conman and a killer and was around Whitechapel at the time of the killings and could well have been the world's first recognized serial killer," Tully said.

Various theories have been floated about Jack the Ripper. One is that he was a member of the British royal family or some other powerful person who was protected by police.