“After 32 years of surveying Interstate 95 from his perch atop a pest control business, Rhode Island’s big blue bug is getting a promotion – and a makeover to go with it. The towering termite named Nibbles Woodaway now sports a necktie, a sartorial step up befitting his new stature as corporate namesake. New England Pest Control owner Stephan Goldman said Monday he’s changing his company’s name to Big Blue Bug Solutions to honor the blue behemoth that long ago achieved iconic status in Rhode Island. ‘Everyone knows the big blue bug. The bug is more famous than the name of my company,’ Goldman said after unveiling Nibbles’ new neckwear, a spotted tie that nicely matches his compound eyes.” w/ photo

“A Carlisle woman faces arson charges after police say she tried to burn down another person’s house… Alexandria M. Roberson, 26, was charged with two counts of felony arson, loitering and prowling and recklessly endangering another person after an incident that occurred at 1:08 a.m in the first block of C Street. According to police, Roberson intentionally set a fire in the front of an apartment. Newspapers and a red pillow were set on fire by an unknown device, directly in front of the front door. When one of the residents opened the door to investigate, they were met by knee-high flames, police said. The fire was put out by the resident and no injuries were reported, according to police.” w/ photo

“A traffic stop took an unexpected turn Friday, after a Philadelphia man was discovered concealing contraband in the most intimate of places, police said. Folcroft police said Ray Woods, 23, was ordered to take off his pants at Sharon Hill police headquarters, which revealed 89 bags of illegal drugs tied to his penis, authorities said. Woods, of the 7300 block of Theodore Street in Philadelphia, was requested to remove his pants after borough police saw a large bulge in the front of his jeans during the traffic stop along Chester Pike on Friday night.” w/ photo

“Police in this staunchly conservative West Texas city are keeping close tabs on a young entrepreneur’s recently opened cleaning service that offers nude maids. Lubbock police Sgt. Jonathan Stewart said the owner of Fantasy Maid Service of Lubbock doesn’t have a permit to operate a sexually oriented business and officers are watching for any violation, which would bring a $2,000 fine. But owner Melissa Borrett insists she’s not operating such a business. Customers pay $100 an hour for one maid or $150 an hour for two maids, and no touching is allowed, she said. “I run a maid service,” the 26-year-old entrepreneur said. “We really just clean houses. These girls are not performers. They’re maids.” The West Texas native and mother said she started the business about a month ago because she was struggling as a waitress to make ends meet. She had even been living at the Occupy Lubbock encampment near Texas Tech University’s campus in Lubbock. “I just decided to go a little bigger, work a little smarter,” she said.” w/ photo

“It seems we now know where elephants came from and where they go when they pack their trunks – Mars. A rock formation on the red planet has astronomers laughing as it really does look like an elephant head. The picture is a form of what is called pareidolia, where we see things that aren’t really there – it’s more often the face of Jesus on a slice of toast rather than pachyderms on planets. This Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image shows a lava flow in Elysium Planitia, the second largest volcanic region on Mars. An elephant can walk away from Earth’s slowly advancing lava flows but those with a vivid imagination might think Nelly got trapped on her travels by the much more rapid lava on Mars.” w/ photo

“A Florida man has created his very own Egyptian sarcophagus – and plans to be mummified before he is put in it when he dies. Fred Guentert, 89, from Orlando, has spent a quarter of a century making the 21st, 7ft long tomb out of prime cedar wood. He crafted the casket by teaching himself expert carpentry skills from scratch and studying ancient Egyptian designs through second hand textbooks. Painted in the royal colours of the ancient Pharaoh’s, Mr Guentert plans to be placed inside his macabre labour of love when his number’s up. “This has been a great hobby and I am almost finished,” he said. “I do have one last wish before I am placed into the box; that everyone makes sure I am dead before they close it.” Mr Guentert says his life-long fascination with ancient Egypt stems from being born in 1922, the year Howard Carter discovered King Tutankhamen’s tomb.” w/ photo

“With drought affecting much of England – despite bank holiday downpours – one racecourse scrapped a 91-year-old point-to-point horse-racing event for a camel derby. Races between four of the animals were run over 655ft as jockeys struggled to keep their balance and dignity. But, despite the bumpy journey for the riders – with one thrown off – the camels appeared at home in what were described as ‘desert conditions’ at Marks Tey course, near Colchester in Essex. Daisy Fossett from Joseph’s Amazing Camels, which supplied the traditionally bad-tempered beasts for yesterday’s rain-soaked festivities, said the jockeys learnt quickly. ‘It’s very different riding a camel but it’s still easier if you can ride a horse,’ she said. ‘Only one person was thrown off.” w/ photos

“If you ever fancied the face of one of history’s most notorious figures nestled between your buttocks then your prayers have been answered. Cheeky Georg has been heavily criticized for his Adolf Hitler toilet paper, with naysayers declaring that it trivialises the crimes of the dictator and his Third Reich movement. However, Georg, from Bunn, Germany, disagrees as he has been getting a considerable amount of interest, both at home and abroad. He said: ‘I am getting e-mails now and orders from as far afield as America and Australia. ‘I’m just really pleased that my idea was so popular but I wish some people who are attacking me would loosen up a bit.” w/ photo

“There are feelings you get when you enter an Ikea store. The vertiginous experience of getting lost in their craftily designed labyrinth. The surprise of wandering into something you hadn’t intended to buy. The discomfiting almost-warmth of a fake apartment. The faintly reassuring sense that your children and your car are in someone else’s hands. Then the odd realization that you’re really inside a high-security structure on the distant edge of town… “We are in keeping with the Ikea philosophy: We don’t want to produce for the rich or the super-rich; we want to produce for the families, for the people,” says Harald Müller, the head of LandProp, the property-development branch of Inter IKEA, the company that invests the profits from the furnishing giant. ‘Our approach must be to get the right housing and office prices while delivering very good quality at the same time, he added. ‘We want to be smart enough in our design that we can offer the product for a reasonable price.” w/ photos

“A team of engineers at Purdue University has set the world record for ‘Largest functional Rube Goldberg machine’ with a mind-boggling contraption that takes 300 steps to inflate and pop a balloon. In doing so, they bested themselves, as they had the previous record, with 244 steps. While they’ve captured the current record as set by the World Records Academy (which has more than 2,300 records listed online and more than 250,000 in an offline database), they’re still waiting on verification from Guinness World Records, which is a lengthy process. (They achieved the Guiness in March 2011.) They broke the record on March 31 at the National Rube Goldberg Machine Competition, after six months and thousands of attempts for the individual components. The machine had its first perfect run on March 29 and the video [here] records that.” w/ photos + video