Bart Simpson on Trial Judge Burns

Bart Simpson/Mr.Burns

Sometimes, when life imitates art, an otherwise lamentable situation can be transformed into something incongruously hilarious.

Case in point: A man named Bart Simpson, accused of carrying a prohibited firearm, was recently called to appear before a U.K. judge named Mr. Burns.

Simpson (full name Barton Simpson) was caught in possession of a revolver at Birmingham Airport last year, according to an earlier report by the Solihull Observer. The 56-year-old company director, who pleaded not guilty to the charge, stood trial this week in front of Judge Recorder Burns. No other details of the ongoing trial have been revealed. 

"It's a bizarre coincidence that Bart Simpson is actually on trial in front of Mr Burnsbut it'll proceed as any other criminal case would," a court worker told the South West News Service. "There were some eyebrows raised when the court list was published."

Ghost saves Mother

Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's Strange Encounter

The Legend:
 Dr. Silas Weir Mitchel was an extreememly well-known physician in the city of Philadelpha, PA, in the United States, during the 19th century, and a story is told of a very strange event that happened to him one night.
 It was a Winter evening, and Dr. Mitchell had fallen asleep in a chair after a long day in surgery. Awakened by the bell, he found a thin, shivering girl clutching a threadbare shawl around her shoulders on his doorstep. She begged him to come help her mother who, the girl explained, was very ill. Dr. Mitchell gathered his equipment and then followed the girl through the snowy night to an old tenement, and then upstairs.
 The girl's mother turned out to be a former house servant of Dr. Mitchell's. He immediately recognized the signs of pneumonia, and sent for the medicines needed to save her. He then made her as comfortable as possible, and congratulated her on having such a dutiful daughter.
 At this, the woman looked surprised. Her daughter, she informed the doctor, had died a month previous. The woman pointed to her dead daughter's shoes and shawl that were in a little cupboard. Dr. Mitchell inspected the shawl; it was undoubtedly the same he had seen the girl wearing earlier, but was dry and warm... it could not have possibly been out in the snow that night. The girl that had led him to the woman was nowhere to be found.

TREE SWASTIKAS

Germany's infamous giant swastika of trees in a forest north of Berlin just will not die. Two days after the government said it had obliterated a 200-by-200-foot swastika of golden larch trees visible only from the air, a local pilot said Wednesday that it could still be clearly seen. "It is just as clear as it was before," said Lutz Priebsch, a local pilot who flew over the Nazi symbol Tuesday after foresters tried to disfigure the symbol by chopping down some of the trees. "I took photographs yesterday and there is no noticeable difference with what it was before." A devoted Hitler follower planted the swastika 60 miles north of Berlin in 1938.