In a bid to get into the Guinness Book of Records, determined taxi driver Fred Goble has written down every number from one to a million. The oddball hobby has used up 2,500 sheets of paper, 300 ballpoint refills, and six years of his life. But his efforts add up to a big zero because the editors have a rule that numbers be written out as words, rather than digits. The Briton, who did all his number-writing while watching TV and waiting for customers at the taxi rank, has started meticulously writing out each word...

Shy society matron Madeline Shueller was so embarrassed when she accidentally broke wind at a ritzy dinner party that she rushed home and killed herself! According to friends, the humiliated woman gasped and ran out of the restaurant, returned to her swanky apartment, and shot herself.

As a joke, Dallas disc jockey Ron Chapman invited listeners to send him $20, promising 'absolutely nothing' in return, but urging them to 'beat the deadline.' Within a couple of days he had received $240,000.

Convicted murderer Michael Godwin, 28, successfully had his sentence reduced from electrocution to life imprisonment in a South Carolina prison. In his cell he sat naked on a metal toilet seat while attempting to fix a television set, bit through a live wire and was instantly electrocuted.

Judge A. Dow Owens reduced the sentence on estate agent Charlotte S Joyce, who had been convicted of defrauding her clients, because, he said, her judgement had been distorted by eating too much junk food.

James Samuel Montgomery died after a bizarre accident in Umtali, Rhodesia. Mr Montgomery, who weighed 18 stone, rode a tricycle, but as he did not trust the effectiveness of its brakes, had a native servant walk behind him with a rope attached to the tricycle, acting as a human brake. On coming to a steep hill, he shouted to the servant to hold on, but as he gained momentum the servant let go and Mr Montgomery plunged over a precipice to his death.

Doran Whitney (30), held police near Cincinnati at bay for two hours and threatened to kill his children after a football match between the Cincinnati Bengals and Seattle Seahawks because he was upset that the Seahawks had lost.

Jose Martins was convicted in Ontario of counterfeiting US and Canadian dollars. He was discovered when he failed to keep up the payments on an new Canon colour photocopier; when the machine was repossessed, the suppliers found samples of his work hidden inside.

HT Mathis, the 85 year old mayor of Florala, Alabama, was removed from office on charges of mismanagement and improperly pardoning drunk-drivers. He did not help his cause by proclaiming a National Voodoo Day and performing a ritual in front of the city's courthouse with a table of candles and a number of snakes taped to his shoulders.

Francois Bascon was rescued from a hole next to his home five days after he stuck his head into it to find his watch.

Eugene Cross was indicted in Chicago for stabbing to death Jimmy Lee Short, 68, his friend for 40 years. According to the police, Short was dining at Cross's apartment when he saw a cockroach and blurted out an expletive which Cross warned him not to repeat . When Short swore again, Cross seized a butcher's knife and plunged it into his heart.

An 18-year old man in Florida was sentenced to 10 years in prison on a charge of drug-related murder. He claimed that he had been driven into a life of crime because, 'people expected me to live up to my namesake.' His father said he had named him Adolph Hitler Clark, 'because he was famous.'

Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates suspended officer Juan Gomez for breaking wind in the faces of two people he arrested. Gomez blamed his problem on indigestion, but his supervisor declared that he was 'feloniously flatulent.' One of those arrested accused Gomez of preceding one blast with the words, 'Check this out!'

A new 195-cell jail being built for Duval County, Florida, had no provision for doors because none were included in the original plans. Director of Jails Michael Berg said he wasn't sure how it happened, but that it would cost $1.5 million to put right.

In Paris, France, magician Henri Darque managed to extricate himself from a pad-locked box... after three weeks! The illusionist had himself strapped inside a straitjacket and locked in the container, as a large audience looked on. Darque was supposed to escape within five minutes, but he never emerged. He left strict orders with his assistant never to help him out of the box. So three weeks later, he climbed out of the box... the bored audience had left after the first night.

A German court rejected an £18,000 claim against a group of cleaners at a Dusseldorf art gallery who had allegedly destroyed a valuable sculpture. The judge ruled that the exhibit, a five-pound lump of rancid butter, was not art.

Several members of the Seminole Health Club, a nudist camp, also belong to a Christian group led by missionary Elijah Jackson who comments, 'We're not trying to start a cult here, but I think nudity adds something to Christianity .'

John Matlock (35) and Pamela Sheppard (31) had sex in Matlock's car as it stood idling in his garage with the heater running. They both fell asleep and suffocated from the fumes.

Gary M Lewis (23) was serving on the jury in a murder trial in Baltimore. As he passed a metal detector, a cigarette lighter he was carrying triggered an alarm and a police guard who asked him to empty his pockets arrested him on the spot as he removed 30 packets of cocaine.

Two Los Angeles bus drivers, one male and the other female, were robbed by a couple of men who stripped the woman, tied her up and smeared tartar sauce on her body.

In Louisiana, a man described by a judge as 'the most inept counterfeiter I ever heard of' was put on probation for five years for cutting the corners off a $20 note and pasting them on a $1 note!

77 year old Pearl Kamm was taking her driving test. As she started out, she backed into a tree before hurtling through the window of the test office, killing one person and injuring four others.

Burglar Frank Gort was caught, convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. However, he begged the judge not to sentence him to seven years because seven was his unlucky number. The judge was more than willing to comply with the criminal's plea...and changed the sentence to eight years.

Police were reported to be searching for a man described as 'middle-aged' and 'flabby', who had gained entry to various all - female groups, including a women's college, by claiming he was a freelance male stripper. Once inside he had taken off his clothes, covered himself with baby lotion and fondled himself in front of the women present.

In New York, a man wearing only a large nappy has been approaching children and asking, 'Where's the masquerade party?' A police spokesman said, 'We want to talk to him.'

A gang of robbers near Venice installed a huge digging crane across the road to stop an armoured car containing about $1m. But when the car ploughed into the crane, decapitating all three occupants, the gang, apparently appalled by the carnage they had caused, fled empty-handed.

A woman in Wisconsin sued her former psychiatrist because he convinced her she had more than 100 personalities and billed her insurance company for group therapy. The psychiatrist told Naden Cool that some of her 120 personalities included a duck, Satan and angels. Dr. Keneth Olson claimed her multiple personalities deserved a 'group therapy' billing since he was counselling more than one person. The final bill is estimated at $300,000 most of which Blue Cross Insurance has paid. Cool claims the treatment left her suicidal and haunted by false memories.

J. Douglas Cresswell (51), was sentenced to 25 years in prison for three robberies, the last of which went dramatically wrong. Having failed to cut eye-holes in the plastic rubbish bag he wore over his head, his getaway from the bank was foiled as he flailed helplessly inside the bag.

Using a toy gun, Paul Bernier attempted to rob the Lafayette Co-operative Bank in Swansea, Massachusetts. He fainted during the robbery and was arrested, but according to police he would not have escaped anyway, having locked the keys in his getaway car.

A man who made headlines in 1993 when he survived four train wrecks in two months, died recently, when he was electrocuted as he played with his son's electric train set! 42-year-old Juan Veras was rigging up the miniature train's electric transformer when the fluke accident occurred. Setting it up on the bottom of the swimming pool may have had something to do with it.

Mariel Hemingway throws herself bodily into the roles she plays . 'When we were doing Personal Best, Robert Towne, the director encouraged us to burp and fart a lot,' said Mariel of one particularly challenging part. 'He had been observing female athletes and that's one of the things they do. I was great in the fart department.'

Fortune Magazine reported that employees of Merrill Lynch's New York office were so incensed at the inefficiency of their inter-office mail that they took to sending memos from floor to floor by Federal Express, via Memphis, Tennessee (more than 1,000 miles away.) It proved to be quicker.

Former bus driver Bruce Allen Lyons, 33, was charged with robbing 21 Los Angeles businesses and forcing female employees to give him their knickers.

Russia says it's winning the space race with the United States despite problems with its Mir space station and America's success in landing a probe on Mars. Russian scientists say they've found something in the Ural mountains that hasn't been found on Mars - an alien. A Russian newspaper says the scientists found mummified remains of a creature about 40 centimetres tall with a bulbous forehead and huge white eyes. It says the creature had no ears, navel or sexual organs. But no tests have been carried out on the creature to confirm that its from outer space.

Doctors in Scotland cut open a dog's stomach and pulled out the severed lip of a three-year-old girl - and then sewed it back onto the child. The dog, a bull mastiff, leapt up and bit the girl on the face as she was walking along a street in nearby Arbroath eating an ice-cream cone.

A Moscow man has been hospitalised after stabbing his mother to death, eating her entrails and jumping out the fourth-floor window of their apartment. The man apparently became enraged when his mother began to curse Russian government policies after dinner. The newspaper says after killing her, he carved up the body, ran some of the entrails through a meat grinder and ate them while watching television. Several hours later he tried to kill himself by jumping out the window.

Danish cyclist Jett Rand took wide-eyed spectators by surprise when, feeling the effects of a Greek heat-wave, she stripped off minutes before the start of a women's World Cup track cycling race. She was fined around 300 Drachma after standing naked for several minutes, before re-dressing for the 500 metres time-trial race.