Sounds like a vacation to me

NEW YORK - A time-lapse video of a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours has become something of an Internet sensation after surveillance camera footage emerged after nearly a decade.
"After a certain period of time I knew that I was in pretty big trouble because it was the weekend," Nicholas White said Monday on ABC-TV's "Good Morning America."
Video of his Oct. 15, 1999, ordeal in an elevator in New York's McGraw-Hill building was posted online to accompany an article in the April 21 edition of The New Yorker. It can be seen on the magazine's Web site and had been viewed more than 280,000 times on YouTube by Monday morning.
White said he understood why the video has captured people's attention: So many have wondered what they would do if it happened to them.
Edited to a soundtrack of classical piano music, the video shows him pacing, trying to climb the walls, lying down, curled up in a fetal position, prying apart the doors. (He said he relieved himself down the shaft when the doors were open.)
White sued the managers of the midtown skycraper and the elevator maintenance company and won an undisclosed settlement.
He was a production manager for Business Week when he left his office about 11 p.m. Friday for a cigarette break. According to the article, it was never determined exactly why the elevator stalled though there was talk of a voltage dip.

It's like the Cannonball Run

LONGMONT, Colo. - A discharged patient was accused of stealing an ambulance, then speeding away at up to 100 mph while unknowing drivers yielded the right away was arrested Tuesday after he lost control and crashed.
Another ambulance took the man to a hospital under police guard, police spokesman Tim Lewis said. "We didn't want another ambulance driving away," he said.
Mickey Stevenson Terry, 35, had been released from a hospital in Lafayette when he apparently found an ambulance outside the emergency care department, Lewis said. The suspect jumped in the ambulance while its crew was taking another patient inside the building, he said.
Boulder County sheriff's deputies stopped the ambulance and spoke to the suspect, but he sped away with lights and siren on, driving 80 to 100 mph as other vehicles yielded to it, Lewis said.
The ambulance came within about 2 feet of hitting an officer on foot who tried to stop cross traffic so the ambulance wouldn't hit those drivers, Lewis said.
After officers called off the pursuit, the ambulance came to a clogged intersection on Colorado 119, lost control, glanced the front of a stopped car, left the road, hit a median and landed in boulders and broke an axle, Lewis said.
The suspect fled on foot and was detained by citizens. The suspect had leg and rib injuries and lost consciousness at the scene, Lewis said. He was being treated at a Longmont hospital Tuesday.
Lewis said Terry is from Montana. Lewis did not know his hometown, why he was in Colorado or the possible motive.
He said Terry had originally been taken to a hospital from Weld County on an "unstable mental health hold," Lewis said.

It's like the Cannonball Run

LONGMONT, Colo. - A discharged patient was accused of stealing an ambulance, then speeding away at up to 100 mph while unknowing drivers yielded the right away was arrested Tuesday after he lost control and crashed.
Another ambulance took the man to a hospital under police guard, police spokesman Tim Lewis said. "We didn't want another ambulance driving away," he said.
Mickey Stevenson Terry, 35, had been released from a hospital in Lafayette when he apparently found an ambulance outside the emergency care department, Lewis said. The suspect jumped in the ambulance while its crew was taking another patient inside the building, he said.
Boulder County sheriff's deputies stopped the ambulance and spoke to the suspect, but he sped away with lights and siren on, driving 80 to 100 mph as other vehicles yielded to it, Lewis said.
The ambulance came within about 2 feet of hitting an officer on foot who tried to stop cross traffic so the ambulance wouldn't hit those drivers, Lewis said.
After officers called off the pursuit, the ambulance came to a clogged intersection on Colorado 119, lost control, glanced the front of a stopped car, left the road, hit a median and landed in boulders and broke an axle, Lewis said.
The suspect fled on foot and was detained by citizens. The suspect had leg and rib injuries and lost consciousness at the scene, Lewis said. He was being treated at a Longmont hospital Tuesday.
Lewis said Terry is from Montana. Lewis did not know his hometown, why he was in Colorado or the possible motive.
He said Terry had originally been taken to a hospital from Weld County on an "unstable mental health hold," Lewis said.

And he's not even good looking

COMMERCE TOWNSHIP, Mich. - Police say a man dressed as a woman repeatedly crashed his car into a suburban Detroit lingerie store that had refused to hire him earlier this year.
Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe said Jeremy McIntosh, 27, was arrested Saturday night outside the Intimate Ideas store in Commerce Township, 25 miles northwest of Detroit. Damage to the store was estimated at $3,000.
McCabe said McIntosh was wearing "facial makeup, lipstick, blue Capri pants, red 'flip-flops,' a flowery blouse and a matching flowery women's bra." McIntosh told deputies he is homeless and wanted to go to jail because he had nowhere else to go.
McIntosh remained jailed after his Monday arraignment on charges including malicious destruction of property and reckless driving. McCabe says McIntosh doesn't have a lawyer yet.

A rose by any other name

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Who lost it on Lost Temper Creek? What horror befell the village of Eek? Does it have anything to do with another town being Chicken?
Native traditions and colorful settlers have given Alaska an extra helping of oddly named places. Try Nunathloogagamiutbingoi Dunes or Dakeekathlrimjingia Point, unpronounceable and unexplained other than being of Eskimo origin. Then there's Sagavanirktok, a North Slope river named after an Eskimo word for strong current.
"It just rolls off your tongue — at least my tongue," said Donald Orth, a retired geographer and cartographer with the U.S. Geological Survey. He wrote the book on Alaska place names more than four decades ago, and now that book is getting freshened up.
"Dictionary of Alaska Place Names," published by the USGS in 1967 and reprinted with minor revisions in 1971, is an enormous guide though the mundane and the quirky.
An Anchorage-based publisher plans to create an updated version of Orth's long-out-of-print book. Flip Todd, owner of Todd Communications, hopes to have it out by 2009.
Supplements to Orth's thousand-plus-page monograph were published until 1994, listing additional place names recognized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
All place names in the U.S. can be viewed online on the board's Web site, but there's no way to peruse the entire text for the simple pleasure of discovering the stories behind odd or whimsical names.
That's a deficiency that needs fixing as far as Todd is concerned.
"There are still too many advantages in this low-tech device called a book," he said.
In the original, Orth included variant names and sometimes humorous stories behind many geographic monikers.
Mishap Creek, aka Big Loss Creek, is Unimak Island stream named for a lighthouse keeper who stripped naked to cross the water, then tried to throw his clothes to the other side, only to watch helplessly as they landed downstream and disappeared.
There's Chicken, an old mining town established during the Klondike Gold Rush. A detailed history of the name is not in Orth's dictionary, but according to oft-told lore, miners wanted to call the community Ptarmigan after a bird common to the area, but no one knew how to spell it. So they settled on Chicken, since miners also called ptarmigans "tundra chickens."
Atlasta Creek was inspired by a remark uttered by the wife of the owner of a nearby roadhouse after the first building was completed: "At last a house."
Lost Temper Creek, an Arctic Slope stream, was named over a "camp incident." Eek, a western Alaska village, was derived from an Eskimo word that means "two eyes." Big Bones Ridge, in the Talkeetna Mountains, came from the large fossil mammoth or mastodon bones found at the site.
Orth's book came about as a centennial commemoration of the 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia. He led a team of researchers, but he had already begun collecting place names as a hobby during his time surveying Alaska's Brooks Range for the USGS in the 1950s.
Alaska is the focus of Orth's most extensive place-name work, but he has worked on projects covering all 50 states during his long career. The subject holds no end of fascination for the former executive secretary of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
"Language, history, geography, all of those things come together," he said during a phone interview from his Falls Church, Va., home. "Place names are part of the language, part of our psyche."
What stands out about Alaska for him are the numerous native names given by the state's indigenous people, besides other influences from explorers and settlers.
Also, Alaska is so vast and wild that a multitude of mountains, lakes, streams and other geographic features have no names, and might never get them.
That's as it should be, said state historian Jo Antonson, who works with the state board that considers new place-name proposals.
"There really has to be a good reason to name something in a designated wilderness area," she said. "The philosophical concept is that wilderness is untouched, unaffected by the technology of man."