Be careful what you order over the Internet. While shopping from home seems like a good thing, it can sometimes result in getting more than you bargained for.
An aspiring musician in Washington, D.C., ordered a flat screen TV over the Internet.
When UPS delivered the long flat box to his apartment, he thought the box looked a little small to be holding the 39-inch model that he purchased.
Upon opening it, he found that he had been shipped a fully assembled, military grade assault rifle.
The man called police who told him it was illegal in D.C. to own such a weapon and promptly confiscated it from him.
Follow-up calls to UPS and the third-party that he had ordered the TV from through Amazon revealed that the weapon had been intended for a gun shop in Penn and that the man’s TV was lost somewhere in transit resulting in a claim needing to be filed. Hope he wasn’t hoping to watch the Olympics on his new set.
Interestingly enough, the Web page that I was reading the story on had an ad where you could send for material telling you how to embark upon a career as a gunsmith.
A seaside NJ town is considering importing a herd of goats from Maryland to eat the poison ivy that grows along the shore of Barnegat Bay.
The town of Seaside Park, is considering the unusual move because burning or spraying noxious plants would be environmentally unsound.

Environmental goats
The herd of 15 to 18 goats would come with two handlers, and would require two to three weeks to eat all of the weeds at a cost of between $15,000 and $20,000.  
Environmental officials fear that the goats would also eat rare and desirable plants, so they should not be employed. The town council has not made its decision.
A Pittsburg area housing complex was treated to a fire alarm serenade when the strobe lights and sirens began wailing on a Sunday evening, and it was some 15 hours later when the alarm was finally shut off.
The Allegheny County Housing Authority explained the control panel for the alarm system was in a room that they did not have the key for because it also contained access for an ATM machine in the complex, so they had to wait until bank employees could access the room on Monday
Lastly, from our “Does anybody pay attention at work” department; a state road crew in Pennsylvania painted a double yellow line over a dead raccoon on a two-lane road near Johnstown.  
A PennDOT spokesman said that normally a crew has a supervisor who travels ahead of the paint crew who would normally remove dead animals and other debris from the road surface in advance of the truck.
This particular crew was operating without a supervisor, and when they spotted the carcass, it already was too late.
The spokesman went on to say that due to the narrowness of the road and its “squirrelly geometry,” the crew was unable to turn the rig around, remove the animal and repair the paint job.  
At least it wasn’t a skunk. That would have looked like a multi-hued pound sign.

Jim Robertson is a longtime Harrison resident, a member of Harrison City Council, and a weekly columnist for The Harrison Press.