weird news

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Cave Funeral Services in Allendale, South Carolina is out of business after that state’s funeral board revoked its license following the discovery that the mortuary had cut off a tall man’s legs in order to fit in inside a casket…

The body of James Hines was exhumed earlier this year because of rumors that circulated after he died in 2004. His widow said investigators told her his legs had been cut off between the ankle and calf to fit the coffin.

If you’re a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, you probably are already shaking your head in disbelief since this is something straight out of his short story “In The Vault”....

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Rather bizarre story from WebMD.com…

Cancer Drug Erases Man’s Fingerprints

Traveler Was Stopped at Border Because of a Side Effect of Xeloda
By Bill Hendrick
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

May 27, 2009 — A 62-year-old Singapore man was temporarily denied entry into the U.S. because a cancer drug he was taking had made his fingerprints disappear, according to a letter published in the Annals of Oncology.

Eng-Huat Tan, MD, a senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore’s National Cancer Center, says his patient, identified as “Mr. S,” had been taking the drug Xeloda since July 2005 to prevent recurrence of advanced cancer that had responded well to chemotherapy.

The cancer patient was detained by U.S. Customs officials for four hours in December 2008 because they could not detect fingerprints. The Customs officials later determined that the man was not a security threat.

Tan

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Thanks to a newly-tested and approved recycling system aboard the International Space Station, its long-term crews are now able to drink water recovered from urine, sweat and breath exhalation. It’s the first time that water has been acquired and imbibed in space in such a manner.

The new system takes the combined urine of the crew from the toilet, moves it to a big tank, where the water is boiled off, and the vapor collected. The rest of contaminants – the yucky brine in the urine – is thrown away, said Marybeth Edeen, the space station’s national lab manager who was in charge of the system.

The water vapor is mixed with water from air condensation, then it goes through filters, much like those put on home taps, Edeen said.

When six crew members are aboard it can make about six gallons from urine in about six hours, Edeen

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Over in Belgium, that country’s bodybuilding championship has been canceled after drug testing officials showed up… which caused all the competitors to split the scene.

A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

“I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again,” doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.

Twenty bodybuilders were entered in the weekend competition.

Cooman says the sport has a history of doping “and this incident didn’t do its reputation any good.”

According to the article at Breitbart.com, three-fourths of all the entrants at last year’s event tested positive for drug use....

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Any parent who puts this on their child in order to make him or her study should be chemically castrated with the harshest drugs possible. If they must rely on something like the Study Ball (shown at right) then they haven’t a damn clue about what it means to be responsible parents at all!

(Yeah I know: this might just be one of those “tongue in cheek” gag products. But even so: I’d never want to hear of it being taken too seriously…)

The Study Ball is based on the old-fashioned “ball and chain” that prisoners were made to wear so as to inhibit any escape attempts. In the case of Study Ball though, it’s meant to keep a child anchored in one place for a predetermined span of time: purportedly studying for exams instead of watching television, etc. Parents fasten the 21-pound Study Ball to a kid’s ankle and ...

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A Swedish company won’t be prosecuted but must pay $3000 in fines after one of its factory robots nearly killed a man. From the story…

A worker was about to fix a broken rock-lifting robot. He’d shut the power off, but the machine suddenly woke up and grabbed the man by the head.

“The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life,” prosecutor Leif Johansson told the TT news agency.

Perhaps a review of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics is in order:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the

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A 13-year old middle-school student in Des Moines, Iowa apparently got a bit too carried away with the Twilight books. He was remanded to juvenile corrections after trying to bite and suck the blood out of 11 fellow students.

Twilight is the first book in a series written by Stephenie Meyer about a clan of “vampires”. No, I haven’t read the books. But these alleged nosferatu aren’t afraid of sunlight, aren’t repelled by garlic, aren’t stopped by running water and aren’t turned away by crucifixes. Those aren’t vampires: they are, at most, people with severe eating disorders. Anyhoo the books are wildly popular (but y’all know that already right?) and Twilight just became a hit movie.

And to think that some people say I go too far with Star Wars 😛...

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The Discovery Channel’s popular show Mythbusters gave a fright to the residents of a small California town when a detonation being performed for an upcoming show wound up making a bigger bang than expected. They set off 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate. A mile away, people in Esparto were literally thrown from their couches and the bang even shattered windows of houses (which the Mythbusters staff had replaced the same day).

The purpose of the explosion was to see if socks could literally be “blown off” of a mannequin. Can’t wait to see that ‘un 🙂...

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An east London pub was evacuated after city water engineers spotted an object that looked like an undetonated hand grenade. Bomb experts were called in and spent nearly an hour examining the item.

And in the end, the experts concluded that it was nothing more than a replica of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

No word yet on whether a killer rabbit was also spotted in the immediate area....

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When the Space Shuttle Discovery blasted into orbit two days ago, it might have taken this bat along for the ride. NASA technicians spotted the flying rodent clawed up against the vehicle’s external tank during inspections. And it was thought that it would eventually take fly off on its own.

But as Discovery roared from the launch pad, a tiny black speck was spotted clinging to the side of the tank. Sure enough, it was the bat.

Nobody has seen the bat since Discovery cleared the tower, but it was last seen still holding on to the vehicle.

Remember kiddies: hitchhiking can be dangerous…....

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