Comment One of my stranger hobbies is collecting interesting and weird anecdotes I find in the news. I have a few areas that always fascinate me, such as finding people who miraculously escape certain death, or items about human memory and cognition, or eccentric individuals who embody some strange aspect of the human condition.

Some of my favorites, though, are the stories of folks who lose something and then have it returned to them, years or sometimes decades later. A German man lost his suitcase in 1979 while traveling in Senegal. Twenty-four years later, police in Dusseldorf found his luggage and notified the 61-year-old. At first he didn't want to reclaim the suitcase, since it was stocked full of disco-era clothing that he didn't want to see, but his wife convinced him to go ahead and be a sport. There was no word on how well the orange leisure suit fit.

A fourth-grader at Connoquenessing Elementary School in Butler, Pennsylvania, sent a laminated card aloft in the 1980s by attaching it to a green balloon. The note asked the finder to send it back to the school. Twenty years later, a farmer named Robert Brindle, who lived about 170 miles away from Butler, sent the card to the school, who passed it along to the now 30-year-old man who had launched it years earlier... more >>>