Well!  Let's see if I can get this blog going again -- and make it interesting.

When I was a bit younger, I wanted to collect all the world's ghost stories of legend and supposed reality -- and put them in a book.  One book.  Actually, one chapter of a book on weird stuff.  Needless to say, I'd bitten off more than I could chew.

By now, it feels like I've hunted down every book, magazine, and article on earth about interesting and unusual events.  I can pick and choose from a vast field of paranormal reports, fortean phenomena, true crime, historical oddities, and folk tales to put in my hypothetical anthology.  Say 10 or 12 interesting tales from each broad category, like Ghost Stories or Urban Legends.

So I started on the category of Stupid Criminals, but -- I came to this story in The World's Stupidest Criminals (edited by the Editors of the Fortean Times) , and I just stopped.  This guy was all I needed out of life.

Seems that on the morning of August 14, 1992, in Sunderland, England, a man entered Lloyds Bank.  Even though he wore a ski mask and carried a pistol, the tellers flatly refused to give him any money, so he left.  Shortly after that, he entered a savings and loan, but the tellers simply ducked under the counter (presumably behind bulletproof glass), so he fled again.  Just before noon he tried a savings and loan in Spennymoor, a nearby town.  This time he received $300.00.  However:

"As he ran off, three men tackled him, ignoring his gun, which turned out to be a water pistol.  Apart from recovering the stolen cash, they pulled off his watch, ski mask, gloves, and shirt, which contained $300 of the robber's own money.  The bungling bandit dived over a fence with a 20-foot drop on the other side, and was last seen hobbling away."

Well -- he did get away!