College Student Assigned Paris Hilton’s Old Cell Phone Number

For months, Shira Barlow’s cell phone was flooded with wrong-number calls and text messages, mostly between 2 and 4 a.m. on weekends. Told they had reached a college student, callers refused to believe it.

Barlow’s story began on Valentine’s Day during a night out with friends. She was carrying her phone in a back pocket when it fell into a toilet. When she replaced it, her wireless company insisted on assigning the San Francisco native a new number with a 310 area code rather than 415.

Barlow had been given a recycled phone number that used to be Hilton’s. The practice stems from efforts to conserve phone numbers to minimize area-code splitting.

Just after Barlow got her new phone close to Hilton’s February 17 birthday, a flurry of calls and texts arrived. “Oh my God,” one caller said. “Where’s the party?”

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Man’s smelly feet trigger police raid

 German police broke into a darkened apartment fearing they would find a dead body, after neighbors complained of a nasty smell seeping out onto the staircase.

The shutters of the apartment had been closed for more than a week and the mailbox was filled with uncollected mail.

But instead of a corpse, they found a tenant with very smelly feet, asleep in bed next to a pile of foul-smelling laundry, police in the southwestern town of Kaiserslautern said on Sunday.

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Oregon man takes lawn chair up to 13,000 feet, travels 193 miles

Last weekend, Bend gas station owner Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some drinks and snacks – and a parachute.

Attached to the lawn chair were 105 balloons of various colors, each 4 feet around. Bundled together, the balloons rise three stories high.

Couch carried a global positioning system device, a two-way radio, a digital camcorder and a cell phone. He also had instruments to measure his altitude and speed and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as a ballast – he could turn a spigot, release water and rise.

Destination: Idaho.

Nearly nine hours later, Couch was short of Idaho. But he was 193 miles from home, in a farmer’s field near Union, having crossed much of Oregon at 11,000 feet and higher.

Couch, 47, is the latest American to emulate Larry Walters – who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons.

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