In March, the manager of a Hartford, Conn., senior citizens’ home told residents in the monthly newsletter to “please stop throwing rice in the garbage disposals” and that repairs for such “negligence and carelessness” would be billed to the tenant. But the Spanish-language version of the same newsletter was different (as translated): “You have to get used to the fact that you do not live in Puerto Rico, where leftovers were given to the pigs. We do not have pigsties, but we do have garbage cans.” “If (using the garbage can) is too hard for you to do, move and continue with the customs of Puerto Rico.” The manager, Carmen Aponte, who is of Puerto Rican ancestry, later apologized.

Can’t possibly be true

A 50-year-old construction worker in Knoxville, Tenn., survived his Jan. 14 impalement by a 3-foot-long, 3-inch-thick metal rod that fell off a bridge and went point-first through the man’s skull and neck, coursed down his trunk, and stopped only when completely embedded in his body. He was semiconscious at the scene but talkative later at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. The man was not wearing the required hard hat.

 Rod Yellon, a political science professor at the University of Manitoba, was fined in February for protesting a postponement of the trial in his four-year-long constitutional challenge over a $25 (U.S.) traffic ticket he had been issued in Winnipeg for rolling through a stop sign. Yellon had challenged the law as too vague, in that a “stop” sign did not “specify sufficiently” what drivers were supposed to do when they encountered one.

 Lithuania’s gender-equality ombudsman, Ms. Ausrine Burneikiene, announced in January that she would fight to end the country’s requirement that women need a gynecological exam to get a driver’s license. The exams apparently are based on the belief that some gynecological illnesses manifest themselves suddenly or cause unconsciousness and therefore would be dangerous to other motorists. (And a study reported in November in Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Daily, from a professor at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah, concluded that women are responsible for about 50 percent of Saudi traffic accidents, even though they cannot legally drive cars; the professor was referring only to women as distractions and backseat drivers.)

 H. Beatty Chadwick, 65, has served more than 6 1/2 years in jail in suburban Philadelphia for contempt of court for not being able to produce $2.5 million that he was supposed to split with his divorced wife. He was scheduled to be released in February, but a federal appeals court blocked that order. (The U.S. record for contempt is believed to be held by a Chicago man who was released in 1997 after staying in jail for 10 years in order not to reveal the whereabouts of his daughter.) Chadwick said he lost the money in a bad investment, but his ex-wife believes that the money was not lost and that Chadwick is willingly sitting in jail in order to protect its now-multiplied value.

Least competent people

Chaddrick Dickson, 25, was hospitalized briefly in December in Monroe, La., after being wounded by the .22-caliber bullet he was fooling around with. Dickson said he was trying to remove the gunpowder by smashing the bullet’s casing against the floor. He said he needed the gunpowder because he wanted to mix it into his dog’s food to make the dog meaner.