Etc...

I swear, I'm innocent

Krister Nylander is adamant: He won't pay the $160 he has been billed for a parking violation in Warwick, England, June 22. And he thinks he has a good case, even though all the information on the ticket appears to be accurate. For starters, Nylander lives in northern Sweden, where he's a mechanic and farmer, and says he has never been to Warwick. Then, too, the license number cited is that of his snowmobile.

Anyone who seriously wants to "get away from it all" might consider Mongolia, the world's least densely populated country. Average number of people per square mile: 4.5. Earlier this summer, Andre Tolme, a civil engineer from New Hampshire, completed a "round" of golf there. He didn't need to yell "Fore!" once as he played shot after shot, following not fairways but dirt tracks and nomadic herding trails in his 1,320-mile, cross-country journey. Driving a Jeep, he completed the trek - dubbed "adventure expressionism" on his www.golfmongolia.com website - in about 12,000 strokes. The world's most sparsely populated countries in density per square mile:

1. Mongolia 4.5
2. Namibia 5.7
3. Australia 6.6
4. Botswana (tie) Surinam 7.0
6. Mauritania 7.1
7. Iceland 7.2
8. Libya 7.9
9. Canada 9.0
10. Guyana 9.2
- www.aneki.com