Spelling Fanatic Brings 'Bomb' to Teachers' Office

Not all terrorists are religious extremists; some, it seems, are spelling extremists. Employees at the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission had a very strange morning yesterday, when a man walked into the office, plopped a pressure cooker with wires sticking out of it on the counter, and explained that he'd been trying to use the device to blow up a sign outside over a spelling error, the Statesman Journal reports. The sign is missing the "d" in "and."

Leonard Burdek, 50, said his bomb hadn't worked, and went on to complain about misspellings in the online instructions for it—implying that the Commission ought to be alarmed by the educational failure this indicated. The office's executive director asked Burdek to leave, and he hastily did so when he noticed another employee dialing 911. Police soon found him and his pressure cooker, which, it turns out, wasn't actually a bomb. "It looks like he was just trying to get attention," a policeman said. (More weird crimes stories.)