It must be true...

I read it in the tabloids

■ A 48-year-old Englishman who ran out of money while partying in Thailand asked his friends to beat him up and pose as kidnappers so his family would send a ransom. Police said Ian Robbie Day had his buddies repeatedly punch him in the face to create bruises and sent videos showing them wearing masks and holding him hostage. Instead of sending money, his panicked family called police, who burst into Day’s hotel room. “When we arrived,” a police spokesman said, “they were having a party.” All were charged with drug possession and faced deportation.

■ A Bellevue, Wash., man triggered a bomb-squad visit when he offered to donate a 1950s rocket designed to carry nuclear warheads that he’d been keeping in the garage. After the man asked a military museum if it wanted his rusty Douglas AIR-2 Genie, its staff contacted police. The bomb squad determined that the rocket—which the man said he purchased at an estate sale— had no warhead attached and was harmless. “And we think it’s gonna be a long, long time before we get another call like this again,” the police quipped.

■ British police stopped an apparent thief who was running in the street with a refrigerator strapped to his back, only to find he was training to run a marathon. “Is that a fridge on your back?” one of puzzled officers asked Daniel Fairbrother of Hertfordshire. Fairbrother explained that he was training to break a Guinness World Record for running a marathon while carrying an appliance, and the police let him carry on. “Understandably,” Fairbrother said, “they had not seen anything like it before.”