weird news

Chris Knight's avatar

This is why I still cherish my Game Boy Advance.

I found this story at Not The Bee: the “real life news” daughter site of The Babylon Bee, one of my favorite places on the whole heapin’ World Wide Web.  Seems that 13-year old Vlad Skuridin of Cypress, Texas was playing a game on his computer.  Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck his house and blew him out of his chair.  For good measure the lightning strike also set a small fire in the attic and knocked a hole in the wall.

Here is young Vlad describing the incident to KPRC reporter Corley Peel:

Okay, let’s be clear: playing the video game itself did not cause lightning to strike Vlad.  It doesn’t sound like the bolt was channeled through his computer and from there jumped to Vlad.  He just happened to be touching a metallic surface when the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Lots of crazy stuff in the news this past week.  I’ve been sharing them with friends on Facebook, where they have engendered no small amount of mirth and merriment.  So I thought I’d post about them here too!

First up is this recall notice about a brand of honey that is being pulled off the shelves because somehow, somewhere along the manufacturing process, an active ingredient in erectile dysfunction medication made it into the finished product.
Next up is a story from Colorado about a man who is suing Walmart after claiming to be severely injured.  The man apparently bought raw bake-to-eat sourdough bread without first warming it up in an oven.  The bread expanded inside his stomach and allegedly brought on immense pain and suffering.
I saw that in an old episode of Emergency! awhile back.  Johnny and Roy got called to help a guy who ate unbaked
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Chris Knight's avatar

Y’know, I really need to post more crazy stuff.  I used to do it all the time.  It adds some variety to this place.  But I don’t want to over do it.  In the past few years The Knight Shift has become more an intimate thing for me.  Although I need to post more “from the heart and mind” pieces too.  Just something I’ve noticed.

But back to weird stuff…

From Italy comes this story of a “youthful whippersnapper” who did a bad bad thing.  A man in Italy, 56 and an unemployed nurse, has been found to have been dressing up as his three-years dead mother in order to impersonate her and get her pension checks.  It’s as bizarre a story as has come about lately.

From the article at Daily Mail:

An Italian son has been accused of dressing up as his dead mother in an effort

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Chris Knight's avatar

Time was, that I used to make a lot of posts about weird and unusual news items.  For awhile around 2009 I was posting an average of three and a half times every day and more often than not they were wacky stories I found around the Intertubes.  The notion has crossed my mind at times that maybe I should do more of that.  Blogging doesn’t seem to be as big as it used to be but this is still my real estate in cyberspace and I do my best to tend to it.  So maybe a bit of fresh soil would be nice…

With that in mind here’s a story I found on X/Twitter today, about an interesting-sounding chap who prefers his meat rare:


So Game Wardens in Texas have arrested this guy, 39 year old Ethan McNeely from Oregon. 

He was crouched in the woods attempting to

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Chris Knight's avatar

 Word on the street is that there is a remake in the works of Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.

This might be the LAST movie that comes to mind where remakes are concerned.  Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is a 1991 film starring Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson as two bikers in the then-future 1996 who put together a bank heist in order to save their favorite bar from foreclosure (by the same bank).  There is more to it than that, but I won’t spoil the pure over-the-top ridiculousness of it all.

Then again, with the right cast and direction this might work.  In addition to Rourke and Johnson the original film also starred Tom Sizemore, Giancarlo Esposito, and Vanessa Williams.  That wasn’t too bad a collection of talent.

By the way, the remake may be starring Jason Momoa and Tom Hardy.  I’m only reporting what ...

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The people of Celeron, New York are condemning… and that may be too nice a word… a bronze statue of hometown heroine Lucille Ball.

Here is said statue:

Ye gods, what a monster!!  It looks like something out of The Walking Dead.  Makes me wonder if this is what June Cleaver would be like envisioned by H.P. Lovecraft.  That is nothing like the stunning beauty, amazing actress, comedic legend and all-out wonderful person that Lucille Ball was.

To sum up: Celeron does not love this Lucy.

The statue has been up since 2009.  No real notion as to why only now is it getting the attention it is (maybe it’s ‘cuz in recent days a Facebook page about it has been created and racked up a zillion likes).  New York Daily News has more about this bronze monstrosity.

And I can’t help but wonder if it works for ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

I did something like this coming through Atlanta alone several years ago.  Except instead of what this guy did or having a mannequin, I used a pillow wearing my leather jacket and I went the whole way through the high-occupancy lane with my left hand on the wheel and my right one holding the pillow up and in sight.

How I cleared Atlanta while doing that, I’ll never know.

From the Associated Press via Q13Fox News in Seattle…

Most Interesting Man in World’ fails as carpool lane ruse

FIFE, Wash. (AP) — A Washington State Patrol trooper says it’s by far the best carpool scam he’s seen, but it didn’t work.

A motorcycle trooper parked along Interstate 5 near Tacoma on Monday
afternoon spotted a driver and a rather unusual “passenger” pass by him
in the carpool lane.

When the trooper stopped the car, he discovered the “passenger” was

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Chris Knight's avatar

One of the things I’ve always wanted to do with this blog is post interesting stuff.  Or at least those things that are intriguing to me.  Admittedly, that has slacked off a lot in the past several months.  Between writing my book (a project that devoured most of 2014) and then Dad’s passing a month and a half ago, this hasn’t  been the best of times to even look for neat/odd material, much less post about it.  Maybe I can do better about that in the coming year.

And fortunately good friend Scott Kelly has come to the rescue with something to kick it off with:

Cue James Earl Jones voiceover: “THIS… was CNN.”
I first heard weird stories about “the CNN doomsday tape” around the time of the Gulf War in 1991.  Allegedly, CNN founder Ted Turner has made a video that would be the very last thing that
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Chris Knight's avatar
Gowron, not David Waddell
(but Gowron should have
resigned too, when you
think about it…)

That does it: if I ever run for office again and win, I’m going to give my acceptance speech in High-Elvish Sindarin!

Indian Trail is a nice town near Charlotte here in North Carolina.  And one of its city councilmmembers – one David Waddell – had decided that “enough was enough” about the way the officials of Indian Trail were handling what he considers to be development run amok, among other things.  Exasperated by it all, David Waddell decided to resign his seat.

Except that he did it using the Klingon language: the tongue spoken by the proud warrior race from the Star Trek franchise.

Here’s the story from The Charlotte Observer:

An Indian Trail councilman decided to boldly go where no
politician has gone before – and tendered his resignation this week

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Chris Knight's avatar

A man in Brazil has died after a cow on top of his roof crashed through the ceiling of his house and crushed him in his bed.

From the story at The Telegraph…

The cow is believed to have escaped from a nearby farm and climbed onto the roof of the couple’s house, which backs onto a steep hill on Wednesday night.

The corrugated roof immediately gave way and the one-and-a-half-ton animal fell eight feet onto Mr de Souza’s side of the bed.

His wife, and the cow, both reportedly escaped unharmed.

Rescuers took Mr de Souza to hospital with a fractured left leg but no other
obvious injuries, reporting that he was conscious and talking normally.

Hours later however he died from internal bleeding while still waiting to be
seen by doctors, according to his family.

Mr de Souza’s brother-in-law Carlos Correa told Brazil’s Hoje em Dia

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