It's multi-colored toilet paper!

Madison.

This can't go by without comment, I'm afraid. Oh, the things we do when we're not in our right minds: An old man flushes a fortune down the toilet.

To sum it up: a "slightly bewildered" German man decided to get rid of what he thought were 60,000 worthless German marks. (Roughly $38,000, and still perfectly valid for exchange at any bank.) So, he decided to flush them down the toilet. When investigators were looking into a blocked pipe (blocked with wads of bills), they noticed that this man had reported a blocked pipe at his house. Police managed to convince him to take the rest - with another 14,000 euros - to the bank for safe keeping.

It's just a wonderful series of slightly unusual errors that, in combination, become hilariously funny. Money? Actually worth quite a tidy sum, though you can't use it to buy a newspaper at the corner shop. So, it's got to go. Feel silly hauling trash bags full of paper to the curb? Just flush it! But money, of course, is designed to put up with more abuse than your average sheet of newspaper, and doesn't tend to break up in water.¹ Add on the "slightly bewildered" retiree, an apartment full of loose cash², and you're on the fast track to comedy headlines, world-wide.

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¹It's like the ever-so-charming British pub trick, where some joker decides to offer you £20 if he can put out a lit cigarette on your arm. You get the money when it burns a hole in the bill. The trick, of course, is that the bill won't burn, so you'll get a scar and no cash. Oh, that dry British wit!

²The AP doesn't mention if he kept it all in the mattress. Or if the man looks anything like C. Montgomery Burns. But that just leaves more room for imagination.