What's more, Rogers doesn't think she's cursed. Rather, she thinks she's got an angel perched on her shoulder.

"People think I'm a little paranoid when I walk a mile to avoid a manhole or won't walk under a ladder," Rogers said. "There's so many things I won't do because I know what can happen."

But how exactly does it happen, you ask?

In the case of the bat hat, she was just walking along the road with her son when the winged rat plowed, kamikaze-style, into her long, bushy mane. She said she remembers her kid yelling, "Mommy, funny bird!"

Funny bird indeed.

So funny, in fact, that it stayed there as she walked from house to house to find a dude who could get it out. But every time a door was answered, she was greeted by a woman who would scream, causing the bat to scratch and pee on her head.

Eventually, she made it to a local vet who smoked the critter out.

As for her cruise ship fall, she was simply taking pictures with a friend and her family on a boat ride to Martha's Vineyard when she backed up too far on the planks, slipped and fell over the railing into the briny deep.

But instead of rescuing her, the boat went along its merry way.

Why?

Because the only person who had seen Rogers fall was her friend, who slipped and knocked herself out as she was running to get help.

It wasn't until the pal came to and was questioned about Rogers' whereabouts that she remembered to send someone to get her floating friend.

In hindsight, that might be funny, but no one was laughing when she pulled a cord on the swimsuit of Fred Rogers at a YMCA pool in Hartford, Conn.

The famed TV host was depantsed when someone called "Rogers" over the intercom and both he and Jeanne scrambled to get out of the pool and answer the call.

In her haste, Jeanne yanked the cord and the drawers went down.

"Dying doesn't scare me, but living scares the crap out of me," Rogers said.

Amen to that.

By Taylor Timmins

Trash talk

Revenge is a dish best served as a heaping pile of garbage.

More than a year after British comedian John Cleese insinuated that death was preferable to a stay in a New Zealand city, the people of Palmerston North named a big, stinking trash pile after him at their local dump.

The fetid mound was punctuated with the "Mt. Cleese" sign randomly one night as a joke, but satisfied passersby have yet to remove it, the AFP reports.

"It's popped up overnight, and nobody has said to pull it down. People just smile and leave it there," Palmerston North waste and water manager told the Manawatu Standard.

The insult swap began when Cleese brought his theater show to the city late in 2005.

Apparently unimpressed with his stay, he later lamented the "thoroughly bloody miserable time" he'd had there on his Web site.

"If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick," he wrote.

By Taylor Timmins

This just in from the Dept. of What's-the-matter-with-kids-these-days

Doesn't it make you mad when your mom makes you clean your room?

Like mad enough to cry?

Like mad enough to use your two-year-old brother as an attention-getting accessory and have him sit with you in front of your bedroom window looking pitiful with a sign begging for random passersby to call the police?

If so, you might be crazy ... Or you might just be this kid in Germany.

Police say a 9-year-old girl in the central city of Braunschweig got so miffed when her mom asked her to tidy up her room she got the police involved, Reuters reports.

Concerned pedestrians saw the conniving kid crying in her window with her brother, holding a sign that read "Help! Please call the police!"

Officers rushed to the home, only to find the petulant priss pouting in her pigpen.

Needless to say, they were less than amused.

"The room looked like a battlefield," a police spokesman told Reuters. "Officers told the girl to tidy her room. When they came back two hours later to check, it was all cleaned up. And the mother and daughter had made up too."

By Taylor Timmins

If at first you don't succeed ... maybe you're a crazed fool

Behold: The incomparable authority-trumping capabilities of my ... um ... my banana flag.

Jan Bucquoy, a Belgian artist with a yen for anarchy, unsuccessfully attempted to carry out a coup d'etat in Flanders this week ... for the third time, the AFP reports.

And just how did this master of mayhem plan to overthrow the reigning regime?

By placing a red and black flag with a banana on it the royal palace's garden.

Duh.

Arrgh! Avert thine eyes! Your crowned powers are useless against them!

Apparently Bucquoy is famous in that country for decapitating a statue of a former king and making funny movies.

He also attempted to form a political party called Banana that proposed top government jobs be handed out by lottery.

Thanks to extensive hype on the Internet before the drive-by banana-ing, Bucquoy was promptly busted by police and taken in for questioning.

Viva la Revolucion!

By Taylor Timmins