weird news

Chris Knight's avatar

A man in Great Britain spent 84 nonstop hours watching EVERY episode of the television sitcom Friends.

Steve Misiura, 31, did it in an attempt to win a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. The current record is 72 hours.

Was it worth it?

He said he experienced nausea, stomach cramps and hallucinations while watching the adventures of Ross, Rachel and friends.

“I love ‘Friends,’ but this did indeed hurt. At around 72 hours I wanted to die,” Misiura said.

“I started hallucinating,” he said. “I was saying to my friend, ‘What’s happening to this room? The wall keeps disappearing.’

“I was also getting quite delirious and not knowing what I was doing, but it helped that every hour I was updating my photo log,” he said.

I want to see my sister try to do this 😛...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

A seven-year old lad in Plain City, Utah decided that it was too hot to go to church earlier this week.

So the kid sped off on a joyride in his dad’s car.

911 calls soon flooded the Weber County Sheriff’s Office about the pint-sized motorist. A dash-mounted video camera caught the following footage of the boy, who came to a stop and then dashed off (perhaps to find his mommy)…

Hey, that kid is driving better at 7 than I ever was at 16 😛...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

In what has to be one of the more bizarre bits of medical news we’ve heard lately, the blue dye used to give blue M&Ms their color has been found to help mend severe spinal injuries.

Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York discovered that when tested on laboratory rats, Brilliant Blue G blocks the action of a chemical that causes more damage to neural tissue around an already injured area. Rats with damaged spines who received injections of BBG eventually regained the ability to walk, while those that did not receive the BBG treatment never recovered. The one side effect found so far: injections of BBG causes the skin to temporarily turn bright blue.

Research is still being conducted, but it’s thought that human trials with BBG may begin within the next few years.

(I wonder if Brilliant Blue G can counteract all those ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

For the first time ever, it is not a joke.

Michael Jackson’s prosthetic nose has disappeared. It was discovered gone as the late performer’s body lay in a Los Angeles morgue. In its place was “a small, dark hole surrounded by bits of cartilage”: what remained of Jackson’s decades of plastic surgery.

But the good news is that a security camera at the morgue caught this image of two individuals who are suspected of heisting Jackson’s nose…

(Okay, that’s actually a still from Woody Allen’s 1973 classic comedy film Sleeper, which was the first thing that came to mind after I read this story 🙂...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Demetrius Jones, just turned all of three years old, was on a camping trip with his family in the British Columbian wilderness when he went out for a lil’ spin on his battery-powered miniature Chevrolet Silverado.

And then young master Demetrius chose to attempt to turn his Chevy into an amphibious vehicle.

Demetrius drove his toy truck into the nearby river and was swept away by the current. His frantic family and Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched an intensive search for the tyke, expecting the worse…

…but three hours later Demetrius Jones was found alive and laughing and 13 kilometers (a little over 8 miles) away by a group of fishermen. Demetrius had clung to the truck – what he called his “boat” – for the entire crazy ride. After being treated for mild hypothermia at the hospital, he was soon released.

Incidentally the toy truck was pulled from ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

The Mail Online has published a series of photos taken by the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department during its 2003 raid on Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.

This might be the creepiest photo I’ve ever seen associated with the “King of Pop”…

Jackson slept in this bed and on the wall over it hangs a rendition of The Last Supper. Except this version of the famous painting has Michael Jackson sitting in place of Jesus Christ. Elvis Presley and Abraham Lincoln are also depicted as being among the disciples.

I don’t want to even try to imagine how such a “work of art” possibly comes into being....

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Sounds like a bad Fifties B-movie, doesn’t it?

But in reality, something slimy and ominous is lurking in the sluiceways of the capital of North Carolina.

Behold the horror that was recently discovered by a maintenance “snake camera”…

This video has gone viral bigtime in the past day or so, with some speculating that there might be an alien organism breeding beneath the streets of Raleigh. Personally, I thought it looked a lot like something out of the video game Dead Space, or maybe the insides of that giant worm from Gears of War 2.

But as it turns out, it’s actually a colony of tubifex worms, which are said to be common in sewers but rarely documented in such up-close detail.

Still looks pretty dang deees-gusting though 🙂

(Thanks to Lex Alexander for the fascinating find!)...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

A seventeen-year old girl is dead after being electrocuted in her bathroom in a freak accident while plugging in a laptop computer that she was using to Twitter.

Maria Barbu of Brasov, Romania was found by her parents laying next to the laptop, and police think she “may have tried to plug in the computer’s mains power lead with wet hands after the battery ran down during a long Twitter session”.

Here’s what I have to ask in case no one else has: why was this girl Twitter-ing from a bathroom to begin with?...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

In one of the more bizarre stories to come out of Iran in the past week or so, it’s being reported that the country’s state-run Channel Two is running a marathon of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, intending to keep protesters off of Tehran’s streets and watching the adventures of Frodo and Sam instead. The average citizens of Iran are quite fond of movies from the United States and Europe, but usually only get to watch them once or twice a week on television. Since the protests began, Iran’s ruling regime has increased it to two or three movies per day.

Methinks that this might not be a good move on the part of the Iranian government, especially since one of the bigger messages of The Lord of the Rings is that “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future” 🙂...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Sounds like a Fifties B-movie, or maybe the genesis of a new Spider-Man villain: the country’s most contaminated nuclear waste site has provided building material for swarms of wasps building their nests and now the nests themselves are loaded with radioactive isotopes of cesium and cobalt. The Hanford nuclear reservation near Yakima, Washington is currently being cleaned up and workers are having to deal with the nests, which fortunately have already been abandoned by the wasps.

I must admit: ‘twould have been a pretty awesome sight to see the skies of Yakima filled with giant glowing wasps 😛...

Read more