Archive for the ‘Strange and Bizarre’ Category
Nelson, Georgia Family Protection Ordinance Approved, Would Make Gun Ownership Mandatory For Some
The city council in a small north Georgia town voted Monday night to make gun ownership mandatory – unless you object.
Council members in Nelson, a city of about 1,300 residents that’s located 50 miles north of Atlanta, voted unanimously to approve the Family Protection Ordinance. The measure requires every head of household to own a gun and ammunition to “provide for the emergency management of the city” and to “provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants.”
Not that every household must go out and purchase a firearm.
The ordinance exempts convicted felons and those who suffer from certain physical or mental disabilities, as well as anyone who objects to gun ownership. The ordinance also doesn’t include any penalty for those who don’t comply.
But backers said they wanted to make a statement about gun rights at a time when President Barack Obama and some states are pushing for more restrictions in the wake of the Connecticut elementary school massacre in December that left 20 children and six educators dead.
via Nelson, Georgia Family Protection Ordinance Approved, Would Make Gun Ownership Mandatory For Some.
Two-headed bull shark – Boing Boing
A Gulf of Mexico fisherman opened the uterus of an adult bull shark and found a two-headed shark pup inside. According to Michigan State University researchers, this is the first two-headed bull shark confirmed by scientists. “”Given the timing of the shark’s discovery with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, I could see how some people may want to jump to conclusions,” Michael Wagner, MSU assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife, wrote in a report in the Journal of Fish Biology. “Making that leap is unwarranted. We simply have no evidence to support that cause or any other.”
Pond Circles Appear In Western New York (VIDEO)
Crop circles in a pond? That’s the first impression one might have thought upon seeing the mysterious impressions that formed in the cold water in Eden, N.Y.
Local resident Peggy Gervase was standing on the deck of her home Friday evening when she first noticed a series of perfectly circular holes in a nearby pond behind her house.
“I took a couple pictures of the pond and I put it on Facebook because I’d never seen this before in our pond,” Gervase told Buffalo NBC TV affiliate WGRZ. “It’s eerie, in a way, and cool in a way. It’s crop circles, crop, pond, water, ice circles — just circles.”
Crop circles are widely known as patterns of circular formations that have appeared in the fields of many countries. Explanations ranging from man-made to natural phenomena to alleged extraterrestrials all purport to reveal what created the circles.
Cow sees reflection rival, jumps into kitchen – The Local
German police called to a break-in had to deal with a runaway cow rather than robbers, after the bolshie bovine jumped through a window and landed in an old woman’s kitchen.
The cow had escaped from her field near Quickborn in Schleswig-Holstein on Wednesday, and wandered into the woman’s garden – where she spotted what she thought was another cow also on a midweek jailbreak.
Enraged, she charged into what was actually her own reflection in the window of the woman’s house and crashed through the double glazing, police said on Friday.
Passersby who saw the smashed glass called the police, who arrived to find the cow calmly chewing cud in the kitchen with just a few scratches to show for her mix-up.
There was glass all over the floor and the window was completely destroyed – but the woman who lived in the house was not at home at the time.
via Cow sees reflection rival, jumps into kitchen – The Local.
Frogs Make Horses Faster — Say What? – Science News – redOrbit
Here’s one for the “weird” column…
Horse trainers have been allegedly juicing up their horses with a performance-enhancing drug with an interesting origin: a frog’s back.
As for how the connection was made between horse racing and frog jumping, the world may never know.
According to the New York Times, racing regulators had been hearing reports about this kind of activity happening in darkened stables, but after months of post-race testing, no trace of painkillers or PEDs could be found. That is, until a lab in Denver changed the way they tested for these drugs. Now, more than 30 horses from 4 states have tested positive for the froggy substance.
While trainers haven’t been formally charged, the race regulators expect it to happen sooner rather than later.
Called “dermorphin,” the frog juice is said to be 40 times more powerful than morphine, helping the horses run even faster.
As it’s such as potent drug, able to affect the outcome of a race, the regulators are saying the use of dermorphin could be considered one of the industry’s most serious drug violations.
Director of testing at Louisiana State University, Dr. Steven Baker, gave the New York Times the money-quote: “We hear about some pretty exotic stuff. Frog juice — this is exotic.”
While these kinds of drug scandals are (sadly) commonplace in other sports, such as baseball and football, this news comes as the industry is trying to separate themselves from this kind of behavior.
Try as they might, these latest accusations of frog juicing are just the latest in a long line of illegal PEDs which have been found in racetracks.
For instance, Cobra Venom has also been found in post-race tests. This venom is said to act as a nerve block, deadening any pain the horses may feel. The less pain a horse feels, the faster they are inclined to run.
via Frogs Make Horses Faster — Say What? – Science News – redOrbit.
Weird World: Meat-eating sponge, bat in cornflakes, dead man wakes, balloon hobbit house – Birmingham Mail
What would you do if you had 2,600 balloons and a lot of free time on your hands? For Jeremy Telford, a father of three from Utah, the answer was obvious: build an inflatable replica of Bag End, the home of the character Bilbo Baggins from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Telford, a 34-year-old professional balloon artist from Pleasant Grove who happens to be a Tolkien superfan, spent nearly 40 hours over three days re-creating the hobbit retreat in his living room using a hand pump to inflate all the building materials.
For these and other stories… via Weird World: Meat-eating sponge, bat in cornflakes, dead man wakes, balloon hobbit house – Birmingham Mail.
Spiders vs conkers: the definitive guide – The Reaction – entertainment and engagement with chemistry
Last year the RSC launched a huge public investigation into a matter of national importance: are spiders afraid of conkers? Here’s all the evidence for and against, and the conclusion we came to
A national competition led to hundreds of letters, emails, photos and videos, and some more creepy things, being sent to the RSC, and we eventually ruled that the best evidence provided showed the old wives’ tale to be false.
This year has seen much activity in the spider/conker sphere, so I’m going to use this opportunity to lay out everything we considered, and our reasons for coming to the verdict that no, spiders are not afraid of conkers.
A short history of nearly everything (spiders- and conkers-related)
Several people in the RSC offices were passing around tips as another wet, warm British summer gave way to a wet, warm British autumn. The weather was perfect breeding conditions for house spiders, said the papers at the time, so many were complaining of the recent influx, and searching for a solution.
According to sources such as “my mum”, “my grandmother” and “the guy next door”, the most effective way of deterring autumnal arachnids was to strategically place fresh conkers (also known as horse chestnuts) around the home. The office rumour became more widespread and filtered its way through to the press office, whose first thought was, of course, “I wonder if there’s any chemistry in that?”
Alyson Bair Sleepwalks Into Snake River – TWICE
Alyson Bair has vivid nightmares — so vivid that many of them turn out to be real.
In two terrifying incidents over the past couple of months, Bair has woken from her dreams in the Snake River, unable to breathe or touch the ground, according to ABCNews.com. Her sleepwalking has forced her family to barricade the doors — from the inside — and install alarms to make sure she doesn’t sleepwalk herself into more danger.
In early August, she suffered her first drowning nightmare.
“I thought I was dreaming, but then I realized I wasn’t and I was scared,” she told the site. “It was deep and I couldn’t touch anywhere and I was getting tired. I had to keep turning around and floating on my back.”
She eventually crawled onto the riverbank near her home in Burley, Idaho, and waited there until someone found her in the morning.
The 31-year-old mother of two says her family has taken every precaution to stop her late night escapades, but her sleepwalking self takes every advantage of mistakes. On Aug. 20, when her husband left the door open due to the heat, she sleepwalked out the door again and went straight to the river. She was found at 7:30 a.m., a quarter mile away from home on the riverbank, hypothermic and tired.
‘UFO’ shapes shown in NASA vision – The West Australian
White disc shapes revealed in images from NASA’s Curiosity rover earlier this month have excited UFO enthusiasts.
The white rounded shapes were transmitted to Earth by NASA in images taken during its trip to Mars on August 5, the Huffington Post has reported.
Alien Disclosure Group UK’s Stephen Hannard posted a video of four of the shapes online and highlighted them using a filter.
Mr Hannard describes the spots as “possible UFO sightings”.
“What are these four objects? UFOs, Dust particles, or something else? As always you decide,” he said.
However, the site reports the shapes have been dismissed as image “anomalies” or dead pixels by video analyst Marc Dantonio.
“All CCD [cameras] have them, and in a bland atmosphere like that at Mars, they would be very obvious as opposed to an active atmosphere like Earth, where they could end up hidden for a long time before anyone noticed them,” Mr Dantonio said.
NASA is not believed to have commented on the footage.
via ‘UFO’ shapes shown in NASA vision – The West Australian.
83-Year-Old Man Beats 94-Year-Old Roommate to Death for Singing
Just because a man is 83 and recovering from hip surgery doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.
William Leo McDougall was so fed up with 94-year-old Mahn Van Nguyen singing in Vietnamese that he grabbed a wooden rod from the closet and hit him repeatedly in the head.
Both men were recovering from surgery at the Palm Terrace Healthcare Center in Laguna Woods. A nurse intervened but Nguyen later died from the trauma he endured.
via 83-Year-Old Man Beats 94-Year-Old Roommate to Death for Singing.
