No, it wasn’t Santa Claus. It was a would-be burglar in Alice Springs, Australia, who got trapped in a chimney there.

Staff at the Grapeview Hotel heard the man moaning when they opened the business at 8:30 AM on December 28.

“He was like a grub in a cocoon when we found him,” said Alice Springs fire station officer Mark James.

“When we finally got the prickwick (sic) out he was really wedged in there.”

The unidentified man, believed to have been trying to break into the hotel bar to get alcohol, had been stuck on the smoke shelf, with his knees jammed tightly into his chest.

“He was that wedged … it was a life and death situation,” James said.

“He was pretty embarrassed and ashamed so he didn’t say much when we got him out, he was obviously feeling sore and sorry for himself.”

When firefighters showed up, some of the hotel staff had made their way to the roof and were talking with the man.

“As they had walked through the building they’d heard noises, moaning and calling for help,” said Mr James.

“They were on the roof talking to him through the walls, and he told them that he’d tried to get in about midnight last night.”

This meant that the man had been stuck in the chimney for more than 10 hours.

“Imagine being in the tightest ball you can and being in that position for 10 hours,” said James.

Firefighters and paramedics spent an hour and a half trying to free the man and James said that in the end they had to remove a section of the chimney with jackhammers.

“We went through a few different ways of trying to get him out,” he said.

“Because we’ve never been confronted by anything like this before, (it was) a little bit daunting, but we just worked through it and he’s fine.”

Police in Williston, Vermont, say that they have arrested a man who showed up at the police barracks there drunk.

Police allege that the man, identified as 65-year-old David Barnes, drove to the station to update his sex offender registry photo on December 20. When he arrived, police say that they suspected that he had been drinking and administered a Breathalyzer test. According to police, Barnes’ blood-alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit.

He was arrested on charges of driving under the influence.

I can’t think of a dumber thing to steal. Can you?

Police in Amityville, New York, learned that a man had stolen a global positioning device after they used the thing to track down its rightful owner.

Police allege that after the man, identified as 33-year-old Alex Batista, was discovered to be in possession of the device while riding his bicycle, they activated “home” function and followed it to the device’s real owner, according to the December 29 issue of New York Newsday, a newspaper there.

Upon arriving at the home, the owner told officers that he didn’t know that the van that the GPS device belonged to had been vandalized.

“He says, ‘It’s mine. It should be in that van over there,’” Sergeant Brian Scott said of the early December 29 crime.

Police then arrested Batista on charges of larceny and criminal possession of stolen property, Newsday said.

In addition to the two misdemeanor charges, Batista was also issued a ticket by police for using his bicycle at night without a light.

A burglary suspect in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who gave authorities a fake address when he was arrested ended up being a victim a robbery himself — and gave them his real address when reporting the crime.

Authorities there say that they arrested three people accused of robbing the suspect. They then obtained a search warrant for his address — yes, the real one — and found computer equipment that had been stolen from a university and power tools that had been pilfered from a theater there.

The suspect, identified as Daniel Cabral, was arrested December 26 and charged with burglarizing a building at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and that is when he gave police the bogus address. He got robbed at gunpoint on the way home from his arraignment.

As of this writing, Cabral is free on his own recognizance.

A 29-year-old man in Wenatchee, Washington, told police that a pterodactyl caused him to crash his car into a streetlight around 11:30 PM December 27.

Police cited the unidentified man with first-degree negligent driving. A breathalyzer test revealed  “a minimal amount of alcohol,” according to Sergeant Cherie Smith.

Witnesses told police that the man was driving northbound on Wenatchee Avenue and drifted into a southbound lane for less than a block. Oncoming traffic stopped and waited for him to pass, Smith said.

He then totaled his car by crashing it into a streetlight, Smith said.

When police asked the man what caused the accident, his one-word answer was “pterodactyl,” according to Smith. A pterodactyl was a giant winged reptile that has been extinct for over 65 million years.

The man was treated and released at Central Washington Hospital, hospital officials said.

Police in Columbus, Ohio, allege that a man tried to rob a Wendy’s restaurant there. His attempt was foiled by modern technology when his screams activated an employee’s Bluetooth cell phone.

The man, identified as Keith Allen Sturgill, was yelling at the worker not to answer her ringing phone, according to police. Sturgill also had trouble with the safe, which employees couldn’t open because it was on a timer, and with an automatically-locking door that kept him outside once he had left the eatery, The Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper there, reported.

Police say that Sturgill accosted restaurant employee taking out the garbage at 8:30 AM on December 26, forcing him inside at gunpoint. When employees told him that the safe was on a timer, Sturgill settled down to wait.

His yells about the ringing cell phone resulted in the Bluetooth answering the call and an employee at a nearby bank, a friend of the Wendy’s employee, realized that something was not normal and called the police.

When the cops showed up, Sturgill first took an employee hostage and then threatened to shoot himself, according to police. He was eventually convinced to give himself up and arrested on charges of armed robbery and kidnapping.

A resident of Xi’an, China, called police the night of December 22 after coming home to find a stranger stuck in her window.

Police immediately suspected the stuck man of attempting to break into the woman’s home.

The man, identified only by his last name, Meng, told police that he is 26 years old and a migrant worker from Hubei Province in Central China. He said that he was tired of manual labor and instead learned how to pry open doors and windows so that he could break into houses.

“I am too fat, otherwise you would not have caught me,” Meng told police.