It's a buyer's market for hot cross potatoes

1 potato, 2 potato

It's a buyer's market for hot cross potatoes

It is usually the uniqueness of quasi-deified food items that makes the bidders go crazy on eBay. The grilled cheese with the image of the Virgin Mary. The cruci-fish sticks. But now eBay buyers have their choice of competing potatoes, which in cross-section, seem to bear crosses. Jim Gross says his wife was peeling a potato in Marion, Iowa, on Dec. 31 when she found the cross, above. So he went straight to the computer and set a minimum bid of $2. But by then, it had been almost a week since Dennis Bort of Brunswick, Ohio, had found a simpler cross in a potato on Christmas. He listed his for $1,000. Stay tuned.

Dept. of bad ideas

'Joke' ends up ruining vacation

A 42-year-old German man thought it would be hilarious if he told airport security agents in Stuttgart that he had explosives in his underwear. Get it!?! Because it was just days after the failed attempt to blow up a plane going to Detroit? Surely everyone got a good laugh. Especially during the full body search of the man. And when the airline refused to let him, his wife and daughter on the plane, even after he was found to be clean. And then when he was told that the airline would not refund their airfare for their planned vacation to Egypt. Then when he was told he could expect a fine of up to $1,444, plus the cost of police operations. Good times, good times.

A little foreclosure

Rule 1: Check the address twice

Nilly Mauck, 31, returned to her Las Vegas condo after a ski trip to Colorado and found it cleaned out. Like everything. It was not the work of a thorough burglar, but a real estate company that had cleaned it out as a foreclosure. The problem was, they emptied out the wrong condo: It was Mauck's neighbor that was in foreclosure. The company said sorry, and when that didn't settle everything, it offered her $5,000. She said they took things that were irreplaceable, and countered with $200,000, reports the Las Vegas Sun. The company said it isn't $200,000 sorry, but may be $20,000 sorry. Eventually, a judge will probably decide just how sorry the company is.

Police reports

Swedish cops catch left shoe bandits

Police in Malmo, Sweden have arrested two men who were part of an international shoe-stealing group. Apparently, it was their job to steal left shoes, and they were good at it, stealing seven left shoes in Malmo on Saturday. The shoes were worth $1,400, according to the newspaper Sydsvenskan. Police say it isn't unusual for thieves to steal one shoe, and that after stealing left shoes in Sweden, thieves were to travel to Denmark and steal the matching right shoe. Despite the police explanation, it sounds pretty unusual.

Compiled from Times wire services and other sources by staff writer Jim Webster, who can be reached at jwebster@sptimes.com.