Bell Is All It Was Cracked Up to Be

For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Liberty Bell has rung again--sort of. Students at Pennsylvania State University have replicated the bell’s original tone, which had not been heard since the bell cracked 153 years ago.

Professor Gary Koopmann asked his engineering students to duplicate the sound of the bell on a computer by crunching complicated mathematical formulas and tinkering with digital models.

They started with some basic information. The bell weighs 2,080 pounds, is made of copper and tin, and has a 3-inch-thick lip. They also knew it was designed to sound like a melding of G sharp, E flat, F sharp and B flat.

Then again, who could prove them wrong? “No one’s ever heard it,” Koopmann said. “So we can just say, ‘This is what it sounds like.’ ”

Skunk Device Used to Deter Rapists: Smell like a skunk to frighten off sex offenders? That’s the idea behind an unusual self-defense device being launched in Sweden.

The Recoil Protector can be worn around the neck or attached to underwear and broken in case of attack, releasing a powerful liquid that stinks of skunk.

The device, originally from Canada, is a small glass ampul containing 0.1 milliliter of so-called skunk oil. It will sell for $36 in Sweden.

“The idea is that it will be difficult to continue the attack when it smells so bad,” a spokeswoman said.

If the Shoe Stinks, Steal It: A Singapore man who stole smelly shoes because he was addicted to their odor has been sentenced to 25 weeks in jail.

Truck driver Zainal Mohamed Esa stole footwear out of a “burning desire, akin to that of a drug addict, to sniff used pairs of shoes,” his lawyer said. Zainal kept the shoes until the smell waned, then gave them to the Salvation Army, the lawyer said.

Bird Disrupts Mail: A postman is refusing to deliver mail to a Welsh village after being terrorized by a pheasant.

The bird, nicknamed George by locals, flapped his wings and chased the postman on his rounds. So the villagers now have to collect their mail from a nearby post office.

“We stop deliveries if there is a dangerous dog, and it’s the same with this pheasant,” a Royal Mail spokesman said.

News McNuggets:

* A federal jury awarded nearly $4 million to a New York chef who claims a propane explosion left him too frightened of gas to cook.

* A Kenyan thief who stole the collection at a Sunday church service in Nairobi was killed by a bus as he fled with the loot.

* A court in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan sentenced a man to death for murdering and eating one of his tenants.

* Rio de Janeiro has launched a program to sterilize unwanted pets by sending a roving minivan called the “Castramobile” into the streets of its teeming slums.

* A Massachusetts minister has been accused of breaking the jaw of a math teacher who gave his daughter a poor grade in conduct.

* A music professor has sued an Ohio university, alleging it violated his 1st Amendment rights by refusing to let him wear a thong-style swimsuit in the school’s pool.

Wide World of Weird is published on Sundays. Off-Kilter runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.