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A lady called the emergency room because her little daughter had eaten several ants. The receptionist tried to calm the hysterical woman, telling her the ants wouldn�t be able to chew on her daughter�s stomach because they would quickly die. The lady replied she knew they would die quickly because she made her daughter eat ant poison to kill them.
Fortunately, they got the little girl quickly to the hospital and everything ended up okay.
About once a month, the owners of the Marina del Rey Sportfishing bait shop in California reap a windfall. According to a January Los Angeles Times story, a Tibetan Buddhist study group drops by in a caravan after meditating on the "liberation of beings" and plunks down $1,000 to $2,000 to buy as much live bait as they can, after which they go to Marina del Rey Harbor and, in their terms, free the bait.
[Los Angeles Times, 1-18-04]
A dead, 50-ton, 50-foot-long sperm whale, being transported by flatbed truck through Tainan City, Taiwan, to the National Cheng Kung University in January exploded because of a buildup of gases from decomposition, drenching bystanders and nearby cars in an awesome deluge of blood and innards.
[BBC News, 1-20-04]
[Taiwan News, 1-27-04]
A woman was reporting her car as stolen and mentioned that there was a car phone in it. The policeman taking the report called the phone and told the guy that answered that he had read the ad in the newspaper and wanted to buy the car. They arranged to meet, and the thief was arrested.
45 year-old Amy Brasher was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, after a mechanic reported to police that 18 packages of marijuana were packed in the engine compartment of the car, which she had brought to the mechanic for an oil change. According to police, Brasher later said that she didn't realize that the mechanic would have to raise the hood to change the oil.
Oklahoma City - Dennis Newton was on trial for the armed robbery of a convenience store in a district court this week when he fired his lawyer. Assistant District attorney Larry Jones said Newton, 47, was doing a fair job of defending himself until the store manager testified that Newton was the robber. Newton jumped up, accused the woman of lying and then said, "I should have blown your [expletive] head off." The defendant paused, then quickly added, "-- if I'd been the one that was there." The jury took 20 minutes to convict Newton and recommended a 30-year sentence.
R.C. Gaitlin, 21, walked up to two patrol officers who were showing their squad car computer equipment to children in a Detroit neighborhood. When he asked how the system worked, the officers asked him for a piece of identification. Gaitlin gave them his driver's license, they entered it into the computer, and moments later they arrested Gaitlin because information on the screen showed that Gaitlin was wanted for a two-year-old armed robbery in St. Louis, Missouri.
Police in Chicago sent Cubs tickets to people with outstanding arrest warrants. When they arrived at the game, they were promptly arrested.
Despite the 39-day waiting list for brain operations at the Queens Medical Center in Nottingham, England, the hospital suspended neurosurgeon Terence Hope in March after 18 years of service. It was not for substandard work but because he had been accused of taking extra croutons for his soup in the hospital cafeteria, without paying. (The suspension was lifted three days later.)
[Daily Telegraph (London), 3-25-04]
After an investigation, the FBI concluded that a motion sensor found on the tracks near Philadelphia's 30th Street rail station just after the Madrid train bombings was not related to terrorism but was put there by a employee trying to sleep on the job who was worried about a supervisor catching him.
Walt and Kathy Viggiano of Wichita, Kansas, convinced Judge James Burgess to return their four children from foster care in 1999, following their removal because of excessive unsanitariness of the family's mobile home. Unlike many such cases, Judge Burgess realized the Viggianos loved their kids, had not abused them, and had no alcohol or drug problems. Also, according to police who made the initial investigation, Walt and the kids seemed to have warm conversations, even though they were entirely in Klingon (from "Star Trek").
[Wichita Eagle, 7-11-99, 12-2-98]
A black bear went on a binge at a campsite in the US state of Washington, guzzling down some 36 cans of beer.
Campground workers were stunned to come across the bear sleeping off the effects in their grounds, surrounded by dozens of empty beer cans. However, this was no ordinary case of a bear with a sore head at Baker Lake resort, 80 miles (129km) northeast of Seattle.
He had apparently tried out and rejected the mass-market Busch beer in favour of local brand Rainier.
The bear appeared to have got into campers' cool boxes and used his teeth and claws to puncture the cans.
Fish and wildlife enforcement Sgt. Bill Heinck said the bear tried one can of Busch and ignored the rest and then got into three dozen cans of Rainier.
"We noticed a bear sleeping on the common lawn and wondered what was going on until we discovered that there were a lot of beer cans lying around," camp worker Lisa Broxson was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying.
She said the bear was chased away by wildlife agents but returned the next day.
The agents decided to trap the bear with doughnuts, honey, and of course, two cans of Rainier beer. It did the trick, and he was captured.
"This is a new one on me," Sgt. Heinck said in an Associated Press report. "I've known them to get into cans but nothing like this. It definitely had a preference."
GAINESVILLE, Florida - A man jumped in a pond and stabbed a 6-foot alligator with a pocketknife to force the reptile to release his dog from its jaws.
Matthew Goff, 29, said he was walking Sugar, a tan-colored bloodhound, Shar-Pei mix, in a park when the attack occurred Wednesday evening. The unleashed dog wandered to the edge of the pond, and the gator grabbed its head.
"I couldn't stand by and watch it happen, and I had the pocketknife, so I decided to try and save her," Goff said.
The gator released Sugar when Goff stabbed the reptile in the eye. The dog then ran home, escaping with three teeth marks on and about her head. Goff had a few scratches.
Two hippos, which had escaped from the Bolsherechensky State zoo in the region of Omsk, gave two drunken fishermen the fright of their life when they disturbed their morning sleep.
The fishermen, who were dozing peacefully behind their fishing rods on the Bolshoy river, were horrified by the unexpected sight of four "periscopes" - the round ears of the hippos - coming to the surface just three meters away. They looked on as the huge mouth of Malvin the hippo opened wide above the water. Seeing the hippo first, one of the fishermen started yelling, and grabbing hold of his bicycle, raced away. His friend forgot about his bike but somehow managed to get back to the village first.
It turns out that the hippos, which were being held temporarily in a river enclosure, had broken through a hole in the fence and escaped.
'Kenigs' and 'Malvin', who were first brought from Kaliningrad in 1988, were found grazing peacefully in a grassy meadow.
Heavy rains around Dunn, N.C., in mid-August pounded soap-based runoff from the H&H Products facility just off U.S. 301, creating an awesome wall of white bubbles at least 20 feet high that obscured not only Jonesboro Road but the telephone poles alongside. A few drivers tried to go through the mess but most avoided it until firefighters cleared the foam to the side of the road with their hoses.
[Daily Record (Dunn), 8-17-04]
A Quad City Times columnist in Davenport, Iowa, reported in September on a man who recently drove into his housing community at 10:30 p.m. to discover about 500 14-inch-high, ceramic-faced Ronald McDonald dolls neatly lined up in the middle of six streets, two to three feet apart, with no witnesses or explanation as to how they got there or why. The columnist, Bill Wundram, discovered only that the dolls were probably taken from the warehouse of a promotions company in nearby Camanche, Iowa, but is still stumped as to motive.
[Quad City Times, 9-15-04, 9-24-04]
A 1998 Los Angeles Times report described the unusual sustained success in turbulent economic times of the Cat Theater of Moscow, Russia, whose 300-seat shows remained sold out weeks in advance. Despite conventional wisdom that cats are untrainable, proprietor Yuri Kuklachev had them climbing poles, walking tightropes, pushing toy trains, leapfrogging over human backs, and balancing atop tiny platforms.
[Schenectady Gazette-L.A. Times, 1-23-98]
A reportedly true story heard on Q107:
A man was driving from his home up to Thunder Bay, Ontario, to visit friends. While there, he was involved in a collision with another car, but the other driver left the scene of the accident. He reported it to the police, who looked into it and told him the next day that the car that hit him was a stolen vehicle. The man was able to drive his pickup truck home only to find when he got home that, lo and behold, his car was stolen. Sure enough, the car that hit him several hundred miles from home was his own.
In 2002, News of the Weird mentioned a Wall Street Journal dispatch from Cuba suggesting that Fidel Castro's 1987 vision of "apartment cows" was still a ways off. Castro had pushed farmers to breed small cows, not much larger than dogs, that families could keep in small homes to supply their minimum daily quantities of milk. Two months after that story ran, a farmer in Rockwell, Iowa, said he had bred such miniature cows but that they were not good milk producers. Cut to September 2004: An Associated Press dispatch from San Juan Y Martinez, Cuba, touted rancher Raul Hernandez, who has now apparently successfully created a small herd of 28-inch-high cows that can deliver about five quarts of high-quality milk.
[Billings Gazette-AP, 9-12-04]
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