Free Republic

A local family is devastated after their pet pig Princess got loose and was killed for meat by an opportunistic community member. Now that person could be facing charges. “She’s very sweet,” Princess’s owner Carrie Hogan told the Outpost, still referring to the animal in the present tense. “She’s not aggressive. She likes to be around people.” Last Saturday morning, Princess, a near-400 pound Hampshire cross pig, escaped from her pen at a residence on Park Street on Fickle Hill in Arcata and took a high-profile jaunt around the neighborhood, occasionally stopping to graze in open front yards. The swine’s...

OAKLAND — A man apparently locked out of his West Oakland apartment was seriously hurt when he tried to rappel down the roof of the building into a back window and fell four stories, fire officials said. Fire fighters responded to calls of the man's fall around 1:40 a.m. today in the 700 block of Peralta Street, across from the Main Oakland Post Office. The man, whose age was not immediately known, apparently lived in the building and had been locked out of his apartment, officials said. He went to the roof and rigged an orange electrical extension cord, which...

A 25-year-old Dubuque woman suffered serious injuries Wednesday afternoon after she slipped beneath a backward-rolling vehicle at Kirkwood and West Locust streets. Police say the woman, whose name was not being released as of presstime, was transported to Mercy Medical Center-Dubuque. Capt. Scott Engleman said the last update he received was that health care providers were preparing to send the woman to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. The woman's vehicle, police say, was unable to operate in reverse. It was parked in a driveway on Kirkwood at about 2:20 p.m., when the woman tried to...

A 37-year-old woman fell to her death early Friday while trying to get into her fourth-floor apartment by climbing through the window, the police said. The woman, whom a neighbor identified as Marta Perez, was apparently locked out of her apartment at 152 West 76th Street around 4 a.m., the police said. She went to the roof and tried to get in using a cable, but lost her grip and fell to the ground into a neighbor’s backyard, the police said.

There are some days that I encounter patients whose actions, driven by an utter absence of common sense, cause me to leave a treatment room shaking my head in dismay and mumbling to myself. I'm not talking about the basic run-of-the-mill honest mistakes here. These are not the "I thought I had shut off that circuit before cutting the wires" kind of crowd. These are the runner-ups for the Darwin Awards who tried very hard to kill themselves but failed through sheer incompetence, thus disqualifying themselves from glory. Their survival was not so much a matter of God mercifully wrapping...