A retired forest ranger set off an explosion while he was showing fifth-graders at upstate Lake Placid Elementary School how early American pioneers built fires using flint and a powder horn.

The school was evacuated, and former ranger Gary Hodgson was hospitalized with burns to his face, hands and chest.

This could have been a reel disaster.

A man fishing at a lake in Lawrence, Kan., hooked a 20-pound pipe bomb.

The gunpowder- packed pipe was 16 inches long and 2 inches in diameter and had three slender propane tanks attached with duct tape.

And despite having been in the water, it was still “extremely dangerous” because it was designed to keep the gunpowder from getting wet, said the local bomb squad commander, who couldn’t figure out how or why the deadly device ended up in the lake.

Relatives of Vivian Shulman Lieberman were stunned when they visited her final resting place in a Houston, Texas, mausoleum and discovered the cedar chest containing her ashes was missing – and replaced by a can of sour cream-and-onion potato chips.

Officials of the Congregation Beth Israel mausoleum have no idea how the switch was made. The ashes were kept in a niche behind a locked glass door.

It sounds like a baaaa-d idea to us.

A British bus company thinks it can reduce harmful nitrous oxide emissions by adding sheep urine to bus exhaust fumes.

“This is the latest in green technology,” said an official of Stagecoach South, which is testing the pee-brained idea on a bus in Winchester.

A man in a speeding car drove under parked planes and forced a taxiing airliner to swerve to avoid a collision at an airport on the southeast coast of Cyprus.

“The car was heading straight for us,” said the pilot of the taxiing Cyprus Airways jet, which had just landed at Larnaca International Airport.

Turns out the man driving the car was making a getaway – after being spotted stealing cookies from a nearby bakery.