Technology is displacing the telephone directory from American households. Environmentalists and households, among others, are now questioning the wisdom of printing 2,000 pages of phone numbers hardly touched by consumers who prefer speed dialing features of their mobile units or Internet search engines to find a contact number. A number of apartment buildings in South Boston reported 2008 editions of newly delivered phone books remain untouched in foyers.

study by a sociologist revealed that more and more women in Italy are opting to lead a hermit's life and turn their backs from the modern world. Sociologist Isacco Turina, a professor at the University of Bologna, said there are over 1,000 hermits currently in the country and many more all over Europe and the United States, a majority of whom are women. But these modern hermits no longer wear long beards and hide away in caves, instead they live in apartments and surf the Internet.

Guinness Book of World Records world's fattest man has confirmed he lost 230 kilograms or at least half of his original weight. Manuel Uribe, the world's fattest man was overwhelmed with this development and would throw a party in his Monterrey house.

A 26-year old man named Russell who hated Brussels sprouts all his life has decide to get even with the food he admonish most by changing his last name to - Sprout. Now officially known as Russell Sprout, claims that he had always been called Sprout by his friends who eventually dared me to change my surname to Sprout.

Marie Smith Jones, 89, the last Eyak Indian, has died and with her the Eyak tongue; one of 20 languages spoken in northwestern Alaska. "She understood as only someone in her unique position could, what it meant to be the last of her kind," Michael Krauss, a linguist at the Alaska Native Languages Center, told the Anchorage Daily News. "I don't know why it's me, why I'm the one. I tell you, it hurts. It really hurts," Jones once said of being the last one to talk the language.