Wednesday Weirdness

For a change of pace, I thought I would see if I could find odd news without using any of the ubiquitous stupid criminal stories. Some weeks that type of news seems to be the only thing out there and stupid criminals are always good for a laugh, to be sure, but it gets old. Amazingly enough, I have managed to find several non-crime based oddities out there.

We start with a story out of Houston.  Obstetricians are expecting a baby boom.  Why? It's nine month since Hurricane Ike, that's why. Ike put Houston in the dark for a week or more in some parts of the city.  Without TV or open restuarants or malls, what else was there to do?

From the man who brought you Dippin Dots, I give you coffee dots.  Just add hot water. With the recession and a series of lawsuits, the creator of Dippin Dots, Curt Jones, is looking for ways to expand his business.  He thinks flash freezing fresh brewed coffee may be the ticket.  I can't see it.  How do you sell these things?  Certainly not in the format we've all come to know with Dippin Dots. I think the jury's out on this one.

Next is a confused moose from Maine.  He got spooked and jumped over the wrong section of guardrail along I-95. Instead of landing in a field, he landed on Hinckley Road.  This isn't the funny part.  The funny is the person who called 911 to report a moose falling from the sky. It must have been fairly freaky to be in the underpass and see a moose fall in front of you.

I think I may send the next story to our office administrator. She gets the lovely quarterly job of cleaning out the refrigerator.  In San Jose, the smell was so bad from the dirty fridge 911 was called in on a report of noxious fumes.  The hazmat team responded and 7 people ended up in the hospital. Interestingly, the person cleaning the fridge wasn't one of them.  Her allergies kept her from smelling a thing.

These next two involve that lovely time honored tradition known as Prom.  An Ohio school tried to revisit "Footloose" by suspending a student who went to a Prom at another school.  Tyler Frost was suspended from Heritage Christian School and prohibited from attending graduation because he took his girlfriend to her Prom. His school bans dancing, rock-music and hand-holding but Tyler thought it would be okay. One has to wonder why he is attending a fundamentalist Baptist school if he thinks that they wouldn't mind about a little dance.

As bad as that is, a school in Pennsylvania did something far worse.  They gave away shot glasses as Prom souvenirs.  The assistant principal now admits that this probably gave the wrong impression. Ya think? He blames the Junior classes lack of funds and notes that the purchase order did not detail what the principal was signing off on.

And last we end with a lovely story about the little website that could.  Shane Fitzgerald, a student at a Dublin University, decided to see how accountability and accuracy faired in our Internet age. He posted a phony quote on the Wikipedia page for Maurice Jarre following the composer's death in March.  His quote was picked up by bloggers and newspaper website in Britain, India and Australia.  Wikipedia, however, caught the fake quote and removed  it within minutes. Fitzgerald told the newspapers a month after he posted the quote that it was faked. Only one so far as publically admitted its error. Some removed the quote without mentioning why and others have done nothing. Just goes to show you that you can't trust everything you read on the Interwebs.

That's it for this week.  See you next time!