I guess a couple of pilots got their messages mixed up in Roanoake, VA yesterday when they were figuring out who had runway privileges. Each thought that the runway was his domain and just as the inbound aircraft was about to touch down the outbound plane pulled under it. The move was timed so perfectly that the first aircraft landed right on top of the other, lodging its propeller into the lower fuselage and coming to a halt directly on the other roof.

Amazingly, nobody was injured, but I'm willing to bet there a couple of seriously embarrassed private pilots in Virginia tonight. Check out video of the accident below.

Cash and Treasures, as mentioned in a previous post, is a Travel Channel show that often features kid friendly places. Host Kirsten Gum, an engaging sort, heads to where you can dig up treasure. I've been watching every Wednesday for the past several weeks, finding out more and more about the bounty one can find above and below ground. The finder gets to keep all of it for a price.

Episode: Digging for black opals

What are they? Stones of a variety of color ranging from black to blue with the shades in between that shine up into various patterns and designs. The design influences their value. Most of the opals in the world--95% come from this part of the world.

Location: Lightning Ridge, Australia--a small mining town that's a bit of a poke to get to. Gum said it took 11 hours through the Outback.

Digging details: Gum started her quest by heading to Black Opal Tours located in Lightening Ridge. This tour establishment is a place to find out about the various types of opal patterns and their value, as well as the history of opal mining in the area. While Gum was in Lightning Ridge, besides digging, she hob-nobbed with some of the miners and downed some beers, "stubbies," to find out about the miners experience and secrets. They kept the secrets to themselves. None of them looked like they are getting rich.

I recently found out that Leuven, Belgium has trumped Cincinnati, Ohio. In 2007, Epybird, the two guys that orchestrate mentos geysers, turned Fountain Square into more than 500 bottles of simultaneously shooting Diet Coke.

On April 23, 2008, a group of Belgian students donned blue raincoats, and, with the help of Epybird, turned Ladeuzeplein Square in Leuven into a mentos Diet Coke mess. It's reported that 1,360 people participated in this latest Guiness World Record-breaking endeavor.

I generally find Spain very laid back and relatively lagging in the world of technology -- it's what I often enjoy about being here.

It's somehow possible to stay away from the high-tech hysteria everywhere else, be it use of technology in your personal life (I don't know anyone here who cares about the iPhone), or in the professional sector (when I went to pick up my resident card in Madrid, my appointment had been noted on 3 different hand-written(!) lists.

So when I read that a group of tourists who were robbed in Barcelona about a year ago are finally going to get justice by testifying via webcam(!) from their respective country, I almost fell off my chair!

According to the Guardian, 24 British, Belgian, German, Danish, Portuguese, American and Australian alleged victims of a Romanian gang who posed as police to rob tourists in Barcelona last year, will see the culprits punished, assuming the case is revolved. Time differences between the countries are being coordinated, webcam identification of the criminals, and stories of the victims, are being heard. Apparently, all this "tech-justice" process was devised to quicken clearing the backlog of nearly 270,000 such pending cases in the country.

Tourists often get robbed when traveling and can never do much about it because they are leaving the country shortly, this webcam justice initiative by Barcelona has taken things to a new level -- I would never have expected such a thing to come out of Spain. Bravo!

I'm still trying to get my head around how this was possible: a couple and two grandparents FORGOT their 2-year old whilst trying to catch a flight from Vancouver to Winniepeg in Canada.

With only 10-minutes left for boarding, the family was running towards the gate, and apparently each of the 4 adults thought that the baby was with one of the other three.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? Were they running so far from each other not to notice the absence a child? Also, their child is 2-years old, if you are adults running to catch a flight, surely you'd take him in your arms -- couldn't they see that no-one was running with a baby!? AND, even if you are not sitting together on the flight, how can you not realize that one of you is missing!? What world are you in!? This stuff is only allowed to happen in movies!

Anyway, the good news is that Air Canada took control of the situation well: they found the child, figured out who he belonged to, and put him onto another flight to regroup him with his family.

I think this is inexcusable and such families shouldn't have children at all.

Cruise lines undoubtedly have many ways to pass the time, including, on some, rock climbing walls.

But Mindy Jordan, a 46-year-old passenger on a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship, apparently wanted a different kind of climbing challenge: While trying to climb between balconies this past Sunday, as the ship made its way through a bad storm, she fell overboard off the coast of Atlantic City, NCL officials told the media.

The Coast Guard scoured the area for seven hours before calling off the search because of the storm. The woman is presumed dead.

The cruise was heading from New York City to Bermuda.

Jordan's boyfriend called her family from the ship to report the accident.

Venice has been ultra-progressive lately, especially when it comes to quality of life issues. Not only did they finally prohibit pigeon-feeding, but they have also just caught the mysterious serial female butt snapper, who has been walking behind women in Venice in a hooded shirt, taking photos through a small hole in the side of the bag.

He doesn't seem like your typical bottom snapper, mind you. This man has been doing this for two years and has accomplished to take more than 3,000 pictures of the various bottoms of female tourists in Venice.

The man was stopped after police became suspicious of a large bag he was carrying as he followed women through St Mark's Square. He has been charged with infringement of privacy, BBC reports. It is a cheeky crime, which could earn this 38-year-old Italian (married, with two kids, by the way) from six months to four years in jail.

This guy should have really gotten together with the serial bottom-pincher, who is currently on the run in the UK. What a team of superheroes those two could form!

I was surprised Parisians have accepted the new smoking ban as willingly as they have.

There is, however, one resistance movement: Hookah bars. Some of them have continued to break the law by continuing to offer customers tobacco in water pipes, IHT reports.

Hookah or shisha bars, which began springing up in France more than a decade ago, became increasingly popular across Europe, both among immigrants from Islamic countries and among the hip student crowd. France had 800 hookah bars before the smoking ban, half of them in Paris or its suburbs, but perhaps one-third have closed since the ban took effect.

So far, Sarkozy's government shows no inclination to negotiate since declaring in December that there would be no exceptions to the smoking ban. Apparently, "it's a matter of public health."

That seems harsh. These are, after all, as close to private smoking clubs as you can get.

We're slowly starting to see more stories of airline crews getting fed up and kicking people off flights for using their mobile phones, but none are as controversial as this.

A Texas businessman named Joe Jones was recently arrested following a Southwest Airlines flight on which he refused to get off of his phone prior to landing. Flight attendants had repeatedly asked the man to stop the conversation and turn off his mobile, receiving a "kiss my ass" in return each time they asked. Frustrated, they had state police meet him at the gate, where he continued to make a ruckus.

As his spokesman later explained, however, Jones had just received word that his father's heart had stopped beating and was wildly trying to contact the hospital. Given the life and death situation, he felt it necessary to make the phone calls.

And I can empathize with that situation -- if I knew that my parents were gravely ill and had to call the hospital, I can totally see how I would be trying to call the doctor in panic. My questions are as follows: how did Jones get the message in the first place? Was he on the plane with his phone on when a text came in or did he get the call before he boarded? And isn't interfering with an aircraft landing with your mobile phone signal also a life and death situation?

What strange things have been found on planes?

Click the image to read the bizarre story...