Small Bits of News You Didn’t Know you Needed

Swingers forced to flee club in sheets
A commercial building housing a swingers club went up in flames Friday morning forcing the evacuation of 10 people.
The fire started shortly before 6:40 am in the building's basement where the saunas of Auberge 1082 were located.
Smoke wafted upwards, hitting the second floor of the building and firefighters had to climb ladders to rescue five people trapped inside.
"They had sheets on them but they didn’t have a lot of clothes on coming down (the ladder)," said fire department spokesman Gilles Ducharme.
"I don’t know how many of them were not dressed, but there were a few of them — maybe five or six — that had only sheets on them."
.
Suicidal man saved by internet
A suicidal man in Oxfordshire was saved by police after a tip-off from a woman 10,000 miles away in Australia.
The 23-year-old man from Wantage posted messages in an internet chat room with the words: "I will kill myself in 15 minutes".
The woman spoke to the man over the phone. She contacted a friend in Cambridge who managed to discover the man's postcode.
Police found the man with a cord around his neck, which was cut by an officer.
'Very depressed'
The Australian woman had made contact with the man in a chat room but became alarmed when he left messages saying he would take his own life.
By exchanging messages she managed to get his phone number and the pair had a brief conversation before the man hung up.
The woman then called a friend in Cambridge.
The friend, who wanted to be known only as Andy, said: "I rang him and spoke to him. He was very depressed and I didn't really know what to do.
"While I was on the phone to the police, he texted me his postcode. I then passed that to Cambridgeshire Police."
.
I don't want Dad's ashes so it's on eBay
William Ireland is taking revenge on the dad he says abandoned him as a child - by auctioning his ashes on eBay.
William, 50, claims he was six when dad Ken left his mum and broke contact to start a new life. He later tracked him down.
The bidding for his ashes starts at 99p. William said: "I spent a lot of childhood pining for dad.
'Abandoned family' ... Ken
Caters News Agency
"When I found him we started seeing each other then he died in 2006. I found out his estate was going to the woman he left my mother for and their son.
"I thought he might have made it up to me. Obviously he never cared."
William, of Atherstone, Warks, got the ashes after paying for the funeral.
Ken's wife and family are thought to want them back. The ad suggests turning the carbon in the ashes into a diamond.
It reads: "Here are the ashes of my father, Kenneth Ireland, an adulterer who left a wife, two children and just £17 in her pocket. He never paid a penny towards his kids' upbringing."
.
NIH Funds $423,500 Study of Why Men Don't Like to Use Condoms
The federal government is spending $423,500 to find out why men don't like to wear condoms, a project government watchdogs say is a nearly-half-a-million-dollar waste of taxpayer money.
Researchers at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, are investigating why "young, heterosexual adult men" have problems using condoms. 　
"The project aims to understand the relationship between condom application and loss of erections and decreased sensation, including the role of condom skills and performance anxiety, and to find new ways to improve condom use among those who experience such problems."
But it has government watchdogs rolling their eyes at what they say is a clear waste of taxpayer money.
"This government is so out of whack with what the priorities are that this actually makes sense that we'd be wasting money on a condom study rather than the real problems facing the country," said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste, which tracks wasteful spending in the federal budget.
.
Police nab man driving 3-MILES DOWN I-5 ... in reverse
Police arrested a driver Thursday night who was cruising along Interstate 5 — in reverse.
The 41-year-old man drove at least three miles backwards on Interstate 5 before his arrest around 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Cowlitz County Sheriff’s deputy Ryan Cruser said.
Police said they saw the man laughing as they approached the vehicle, which came to a stop in the middle of three northbound lanes at milepost 55 — not far from a rest area by the Cowlitz County-Lewis County border, according to Cruser.
The nearest on-ramp was at milepost 52, Cruser said, though police didn’t know where the man entered I-5. It’s unclear how fast the man was traveling because the vehicle was stopped when police found it, Cruser said.
.