Weird Financial News

Lest you be focusing just on the more serious stories in the financial press, such as Krispy Kreme Doughnuts' precarious position or Intuit's winning streak, here's a brief recap of some weird financial news of late:

• Many times here in Fooldom, we have covered the topic of the music industry's battle against illegal music downloads. Here's how bad things seem to have gotten lately: In West Virginia, an 83-year old woman, Gertrude Walton, has been sued for illegal online music trading. Her daughter insists that Gertrude didn't even know how to turn on a computer, and, moreover, she's dead, having passed away recently. The Recording Industry Association of America now plans to drop the case. Good decision, guys.
  
  
• Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT  ) may be trying to please everyone as it expands into new regions and offerings, but making a Georgia store's lawn and garden center more naturalistic by adding snakes may be going too far. OK, OK, the snake was not planned. But the young rattler allegedly bit a customer before it was escorted off the premises. Local animal control officer Linda Cordry offered this worrisome tidbit about snake-ular surprises: "Sometimes, when little old ladies move their plants inside into the heat, a snake in the plant will wake up."
  
  
• Look out, Weight Watchers (NYSE: WTW  ) ! There's new competition in town, and it's not a diet company. Researchers have found that sleeping more may help people lose weight. Thinner people tend to sleep more than fatter people. This may be good news for mattress maker Select Comfort (Nasdaq: SCSS  ) , which was highlighted in our Motley Fool Hidden Gems newsletter.
  
  
• If any drink makers out there, such as Allied Domecq (NYSE: AED  ) , Diageo (NYSE: DEO  ) , or Anheuser-Busch (NYSE: BUD  ) , have been thinking of boosting sales volume by promoting new uses for alcohol -- ideas like, oh, say, enemas -- they might want to reconsider. In Texas, a woman apparently unintentionally killed her husband by administering a sherry enema and thereby upping his blood alcohol level to 0.47.
  
  
• It's often fun to laugh or shake your head at the phone company, even in Poland. There, a Pole is trying to get a pole removed -- a telephone pole, in his kitchen. The Pole in question, Piotr Kardys, built his house around the pole, which had been installed on his property without his permission. Now, with Poland's Supreme Administrative Court on his side, he wants it moved, but the phone company is filing an appeal. American phone companies might want to avoid installing poles in homes, lest residents complain.

If you think these stories are just plain silly and you crave some serious stock investment ideas, check out our suite of stock and mutual fund newsletters, which deliver promising recommendations each month. Or just curl up with an informative and amusing Fool book.

Longtime Fool contributor Selena Maranjian owns shares of Wal-Mart.