weird news

Chris Knight's avatar

A police officer in Great Britain is weathering international ribbing after calling in for reinforcements to help with a potentially dangerous situation… that turned out to be nothing more than the light of the silvery moon!

From the story at The Inquisitr:

According to Independent Online News, the story was originally picked up by Police magazine, which brought the cop’s startling encounter with the moon to the masses. In the article, the officer in question didn’t realize his mistake until after he’d told his co-workers that he might require backup.

“While single-crewed on night duty in Worcestershire a PC called up his sergeant letting him know that he was going up into the Clent Hills to investigate a ‘suspicious bright light’ that he could see shining from the other side of the hills,” the magazine revealed. “The call was for safety reasons as he might need back-up once he

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Chris Knight's avatar

Hey guys: wanna live longer? Lose the family jewels.

(I tried to find an accompanying image for this, but the only ones readily available pertained to barnyard procedures, “shock” websites and full-color medical techniques…)

Discovery.com is reporting a new study about castrated men which finds that eunuchs live quite a bit longer than, errrr… “normally equipped” males. The researchers delved into records of Chinese dynasties, including the last of the court eunuchs from a century ago. From the article…

The researchers found that the eunuchs lived 14 to 19 years longer than other men did. Three even lived to 100 or more, a feat of longevity that remains relatively rare among men even today.

The effect wasn’t just due to fine palace living either, since kings and other male members of the court had the shortest lifespans of all. The eunuchs also spent time both inside the palace and out.

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Chris Knight's avatar

Police in Rome, Georgia (a town that I have some firsthand knowledge of) are on the lookout for none other than the Burger King himself, who allegedly stood outside the McDonald’s restaurant there and commenced to handing out free hamburgers.

From the CBS News story…

Police were called to a local McDonald’s in relation to a disturbance caused by a man dressed as the Burger King.

In a police report provided to the Rome News-Tribune, officers indicated that they were summoned to the fast-food restaurant around 1 p.m. on Monday, in response to a call about a suspicious person on the premises.

The person was allegedly resplendent in full Burger King regalia.

Police stated that, upon his arrival, the Burger King mascot reportedly began to hand out free hamburgers to customers, and stopped to take pictures with several children.

Officers were additionally told that one child ran away from

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Chris Knight's avatar

The government of Iran is really trying to goad us into attacking them this time.

Never mind their nuclear facilities: look at what showed up in an OFFICIAL photo from Iran’s government-controlled Mehr News Agency…

You may have to click it to see it depending on what device you’re using. But anyhoo: there’s Jar Jar Binks, the much-maligned Gungan hippie that Ahmed Best portrayed in the Star Wars prequels, amidst the clouds of exhaust from Iran’s ballistic missile test (which is also obviously Photoshop-ped).

Iran had better tread carefully. I mean, Osama Bin Laden was found to be cavorting with Sesame Street‘s Bert shortly after 9/11… and we all know how that turned out for Bin Laden a year ago, aye?

Tip o’ the hat to my girlfriend Kristen for passing this along 🙂...

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Chris Knight's avatar

The Swarm, a new roller coaster set to open at an amusement park in London later this month, might have to be toned down a bit. This after crash test dummies put on the coaster had their arms and legs torn off by the horrific G-forces the Swarm generates during ride.

And then there’s this lil’ baby…

The Euthanasia Coaster, designed by Lithuanian engineer Julijonas Urbonas, is a concept (it only exists on paper, thank God) intended to give terminally ill people one last thrill ride.

After a precipitous drop, the coaster would take its passenger through a series of ever-tightening loops that increase the forces on the person’s body, starving him/her of oxygen until death results.

Read more about the Euthanasia Coaster here.

Can you imagine one of these things at Disney World? Well, maybe under Michael Eisner…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Here’s one of the stranger stories that I’ve read today (and I’ve found plenty)…

Four Arrested After Exorcism Goes Bad – UPDATED
By: Erika Odell

Russellville, AL – Four people in Franklin County have been arrested after what Sheriff Shannon Oliver calls an exorcism gone bad.

54 year old Dianna Brewer, 39 year old Christie Wahl, 36 year old Ginnie George and 20 year old Zachary Bryant are all charged with 3rd Degree Domestic Violence.

According to Franklin County Sheriff’s investigators it all started Tuesday morning when deputies were sent to a home on Highway 61 in Spruce Pine on a domestic violence call. When deputies arrived, they found the front door wide open, with a Bible lying on the front porch and saw a scuffle inside. That’s when they learned there had been a dispute when George and Wahl accused their mother, Diana Brewer of being Satan.

Officials

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Chris Knight's avatar

Immediately following his death in 1799 at the age of 67, a plan was proposed to reanimate the corpse of George Washington.

The strange but true tale of raising up the first President of the United States as one of the undead is found on IO9.com’s Secret History feature. It’s long been known that Washington likely died from waaaay too much bleeding at the hands of physicians who were trying to treat the great man’s case of sore throat. Back in the day it was prevailing wisdom that one of the primary causes of illness was “bad blood”. Get a flu or fever or something and the village doctor would come over with his bloodlettin’ instruments (or in some cases, live leeches) and commence to draining the precious red vino of life from your veins. And that’s what happened to poor George, who probably would have survived the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Bunches of e-mails, tweets and Facebook discussions today about some downright mystifying patterns that users of Google Earth have spotted carved into the floor of the Chinese desert.

Gizmodo has been on top of this story since it first came to light and you can find pics of many more odd structures. Some readers have also pointed me toward SlashGear’s discussion of the patterns. Some of these configurations are huge: one has been measured at being approximately 18 square miles (or 29 square kilometers for our Brittish brethren and others using Metric reckoning)....

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Chris Knight's avatar

An eight-foot tall LEGO “minifigure” was found on the beach at Siesta Key Village, Florida earlier this week…

From the story at Boing Boing…

Boing Boing reader Jeff Hindman says he chanced across a “giant Legoman washed ashore” today while strolling on the beach at Siesta Key Village, Fla.

“It is very big, about 8 ft. tall,” Hindman said. ” … I worked with Lego in my younger days, but this piece is amazing, it’s still there on the beach.”

A photo of the creature shows it beached on a sandbank, in otherwise good condition. On its chest is the message, “No real than you are.”

This suggests it has the same origin as Lego men who washed ashore in Zandvoort, Holland, three years ago, and then in Brighton, England.

Doesn’t look like the LEGO man is in any distress from his ordeal. I mean, look at how big ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Hey Jenna St. Hilaire, hate to tell you this girl but your hometown is in the news again for all the wrong reasons…

A homeless man in Bellingham, Washington nearly became a nominee for the Darwin Award when the guillotine he was building in a wooded camp “unexpectedly” cut off his arm. At right you can see the photo that police released of the decapitation machine.

Feel free to post whatever jokes cross your mind about giving this guy a hand etc. But seriously: why was a homeless man building a guillotine at a campsite? And just look at that thing: it’s easily one of the more sophisticated guillotines that I’ve seen built by a layman. Something like that takes some skills to pull off. As much as I have to wonder about his motive, I have to also wonder why he wasn’t putting that kind of ability ...

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