Monty Anderson got word that the trip was on two weeks after rushing home to California from Ukraine for emergency open-heart surgery. He didn’t ask his doctor if it was OK to take another trip so soon. He told him he was going.

Eighty-year-old Joan Youmans heard about it when she picked up her phone messages after a trip to Indonesia. She canceled a few doctors’ appointments and booked immediately.

When Joe Walker learned the trip was a go, he said he “just gave them my credit card number and told them to fill in the amount.” Cost him seven grand, he figures.

That desire to poke their noses into unusual spots drove them to board an Air Koryo flight from Beijing to Pyongyang, buckling up on a creaky, Soviet-made Ilyushin 62 for the 90-minute trip. The airliner has averaged a crash every two years since coming into service in the early 1960s, a safety record that may explain the exclamation mark on the glowing red “Fasten Your Belts!” light above the seats.

As counterfeiting capers go, this one was not particularly noteworthy.

A group of young people got together, made about 227 fake $20 bills, spent them around town and got indicted by a federal grand jury.

But then one of the conspirators’ lawyers raised this routine federal case out of the ordinary with a unique legal argument: The U.S. Secret Service had “illegally seized” his client’s thoughts when he confessed.

That was what attorney Mark A. Sindler had been prepared to argue Friday in U.S. District Court on behalf of his client, Angelo Armenti, 24, of Millvale.

The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brendan Conway, said in court papers he looked forward to the debate.

But it didn’t happen. Instead of appearing at a suppression hearing, Armenti decided to plead guilty to passing a counterfeit $20 at the Family Dollar in Millvale last year.

Best part: the attorney says he plans to use the same argument if he has a future client with similar circumstances.

I always wondered where the last pylon was located.

RIVER RANCH ACRES - Forty years ago, a large Florida land developer subdivided 44,800 acres of wilderness in Polk County into 11/4-acre lots and sold them to people all over the world, many with dreams of one day retiring here.

Hard-sell land peddlers solicited prospective property owners by phone or on the streets, from New Haven and New Orleans to Rome and Hong Kong. But the 70 square miles of land, a portion of it under water, was never developed. It was one of Florida’s great land scams.

Today, thousands of these land owners and their descendants still own a tiny piece of Florida, but with little benefit. For the past 25 years, the property has been controlled by a group of hunters and others intent on keeping it the way it always has been: a gated enclave with absolutely no government and few rules.

“I don’t know any place like it where you got this kind of freedom,” said Becky Surls, 62, a retired school bus driver from Okeechobee who has owned land inside River Ranch since 1984. She transported her grandmother’s cabin and rebuilt it about 4 miles inside the heart of the property. “And so far, we still got that freedom.”

Freedom to be weird, I suppose.

The 911 dispatchers from four metro-area counties huddled by the phone with one another, trying to tie the threads that would lead them to the pair lost in a snowstorm.

They spoke brusquely and compassionately to Michael Wamsley and Janelle Hornickel. They chuckled among themselves about the bizarre descriptions detailed by the couple, who later tested positive for drugs.

They called Hornickel’s mother in Ord, Neb., hoping for insights. They sent officers to the couple’s apartment in Omaha and directed deputies frustratingly close to where the couple died some 20 miles from Omaha.

They tried whatever they could think of, and it wasn’t enough.

The transcripts are both horrifying and almost farcical sometimes. Haven’t listened to the audio yet.

Gov. Jim Doyle’s point man on eliminating government waste rang up $2,385 in cell phone charges over two months last year because of a bureaucratic foul-up, state records show.

Administration Secretary Marc Marotta made calls costing $972 in May and $1,413 in June.

The bills came in so high because Marotta’s staff put him on the wrong plan when he switched cell phone providers last spring, said Marotta, charged by Doyle to cut the state’s costs on cars, planes - and cell phones.

Marotta’s staff caught the problem after the second bill arrived. Marotta did not personally review the bills at the time, he said.

Tripoli - As the hour neared midnight and the bonfire burned down to embers last night, the aides began to glance nervously past the sleeping camels into the big tent behind them.

Prime Minister Paul Martin had been inside Libyan dictator Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s tent for more than an hour. The meeting, utterly unscheduled and spontaneously ordered by Col. Gadhafi over dinner, had no agenda or topic. A protocol officer threw his hands in the air. No Canadian leader had ever visited this mercurial leader, and things had very much not gone according to plan.

What were these two men doing? What deals were made in this huge Arab tent, ringed by armed soldiers, on a Libyan army base? What had the Prime Minister got himself into?

It was a strange climax to a very strange day.

While a neatly organized Canadian schedule had called for a conventional one-day state visit filled with official meetings, visits to factories and signings of contracts, Mr. Martin ended up spending a good part of the day seated on couches in a tent listening to Col. Gadhafi’s unorthodox theories. At one point, as their talks dragged on, two camels mated clumsily just outside the tent.

State House Republican Leader Sam Smith got a call earlier this week from former Steelers wide receiver Lynn Swann, who said he was thinking about running for the GOP nomination for governor in 2006.

“He told me he was exploring the idea,” Smith, of Punxsutawney, told reporters at the Capitol today. “He wanted to make it very clear he wasn’t making a commitment to run but he did want to put feelers out.”

Well, I suppose if Steve Largent can run for governor of Oklahoma, Swanny can run for governor of Pennsylvania. Of course, Largent - elected to the U.S. House - lost his primary, something Swann will likely face if he gets into the race.

It’s 2:58 on a gorgeous fall afternoon, and US Marshal Anthony Dichio is 35 miles from the federal courthouse in Boston where he works. As he steers his government-issued sport utility vehicle along the leafy roadways of Westford, Dichio lazily hangs his left arm out the window.

He’ll be home in three minutes, having put in a total of three hours and one minute in the office.

For Dichio, it was a short, but not the shortest day he worked during 10 recent days on which the Globe observed him. On two of the days, he didn’t go into the office at all.

On this day, Dichio arrived for work at 9:41 a.m., left at 12:42 p.m., and spent a leisurely two hours on the way home shopping at a Verizon Wireless store and dining alone at a Bertucci’s restaurant.

The Globe investigation found that Dichio, who is paid $129,000 to protect judges, juries, and jailed suspects at Massachusetts’ three federal courthouses, rarely puts in a full day on the job.

Wait for it … he’s a political appointee.

Voting a Straight Republican Party Ticket is not as easy as you might think!

To vote a straight Republican ticket, you will need to vote 7 times. That’s right 7 times!

We are calling this the Lucky Seven as an easy catch phrase for you to remember how to vote for the entire Republican ticket.

To vote for a straight Republican ticket, please select the following Lucky Seven on the ballot:

1. President George W. Bush
2. Straight Republican Party Ticket
3. John M. Tyson (Supreme Court Associate Justice)
4. Paul Martin Newby (Supreme Court Associate Justice)
5. Bill Parker (Court of Appeals Judge)
6. Alice C. Stubbs (Court of Appeals Judge)
7. Barbara Jackson (Court of Appeals Judge)

Simply selecting the “Straight Republican Ticket” on the ballot will not include President George W. Bush and the five Republican judicial candidates.

Wow, that is really rough. I hope voters have the stamina to make it through.

At a time when he was supposed to be looking into apparent misconduct by Cass County Attorney James Barry, the head of the statewide group that polices the ethics of Iowa prosecutors suggested that someone needed to investigate the driving record of the journalist who first disclosed Barry’s questionable practices.

E-mails obtained by the Des Moines Sunday Register show that Corwin Ritchie, a lawyer in the Iowa attorney general’s office who oversees investigations for the state’s prosecutorial standards and conduct committee, had received at least partial reviews of the driving record of Des Moines Register reporter Clark Kauffman from two county attorneys.

Pesky reporters. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that these brainiacs even discussed this tactic or that they did it using official state e-mail accounts. Iowa’s open records law makes the contents of state e-mails available to the public.

From the Pensacola News-Journal.

I tried to speed up to get a picture with my digital camera, but perhaps the driver was a former intelligence agent, because he/she immediately pulled away from us and we couldn’t catch up before turning off onto I-70. But who would want to refer to a notorious East German spy organization on his or her license plate? I wish I knew, because then I could inform that person of the availability of the former Stasi headquarters building in Berlin (asking price: 1 euro). Sounds like just the thing for the Stasi fan.

“People are watching closely at what is taking place at Pitt,” said Arthur Caplan, chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want to see if they can move forward without triggering too much controversy.” Nationally, research on the brain-dead is very rare, he said.

Well, yeah. But Pitt has plenty of volunteers.

If you see DodgeBall this weekend (June 25-27), send in your movie stub to the California Republican Party, and we will send you a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker.

I wonder what the crossover demographic between those two is…