Score One for the Hockey Fan

Obligatory Valentine’s Day Tale: Jessica Wright and Luis Leon went to a hockey game and a marriage broke out.

During a bloody contest between the rival Glens Falls, N.Y., Red Wings and Albany, N.Y., River Rats, Leon rigged it so that girlfriend Wright would be called to the ice as a special contestant to shoot at an open net for a secret prize.

While Wright, 21, stood on the gleaming ice and quietly waited her turn, Leon, 30, was waiting nervously off to one side. Organizers put a blindfold on Wright. She shot, she scored.

Then she took off the blindfold.

Stretched across the net was a banner: “Jessica, will you marry me? --Luis.” She accepted. “I don’t know how on earth he did it,” she said.

More Valentine’s Stuff: Every February, post offices in the Valentines, Lovings and Cupids of the nation are deluged with mail from people who want those postmarks on their greeting cards.

Juliette, Ga., and Romeo, Mich., have added another twist by offering matching postmarks. When a Valentine is mailed from one, it is forwarded to the other at no extra charge.

Juliette has a postmark in the form of a female silhouette, while Romeo uses a male figure. The program was begun by Romeo Postmaster Alex Stubbs after a clerk discovered America’s only Juliette, an unincorporated burg near Macon, Ga.

Signs of an Animal Revolt?: Hundreds of voracious porcupines have been wreaking havoc at a palm oil plantation in the center of the huge island of Borneo.

“Due to the attack, more than 500 oil palm trees were destroyed,” a plantation official said. No explanation was offered for the sudden destructiveness of the porcupines. However, the rampage’s timing coincided with a flock of sheep charging a British farmer’s wife and pushing her over a cliff to her death as she was bringing them food.

Signs of Animal Friendship: Lulu, a 150-pound potbellied pig who saved her owner’s life, received an award from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for going above and beyond the call of the wild.

In 1997, Lulu ran into the street outside her owner’s mobile vacation home on Lake Erie and fetched a passing motorist to rescue her master, JoAnn Altsman, who was having a heart attack.

Lulu lured the good Samaritan by lying in the middle of the road and doing her “dead piggy trick”--four feet sticking straight up in the air. The rescuer, still unidentified, called the police, and Altsman was taken to a hospital. Doctors said she could have died if help had come much later.

Dumb Crook of the Week: A man suspected of robbing a convenience store in Fort Smith, Ark., made several blunders. But perhaps the worst was to wear a hard hat with his name emblazoned on the front.

“We were able to arrest him rather rapidly,” a police spokesman said. “Other than the guy driving to the Police Department and admitting he robbed the store, this is the next best thing.”

News McNugget:

* A painting of a nude woman on display in Yellow Springs, Ohio, was removed by the artist after someone taped paper clothes over it.

Wide World of Weird is published on Sundays. Off-Kilter runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (but is on vacation until March 1).