Strange But True Category
Weird, offbeat and bizarre news from around the world. Funny, strange & odd news stories that make you wince, laugh and fear for humanity.
Someone stole the amputated toe from the Sourtoe cocktail
Amateur drinkers drink cocktails. They’re the Happy Hour dross fuel, the drinks the witless and bovine sup at moments of enforced joviality and acute self doubt. At Dawson City’s Downtown Hotel, Yukon, Canada, the cocktail of choice is Sourtoe Cocktail Club. It might well be the perfect anti-cocktail cocktail, a lampooning of the usual pretentious swill . The Sourtoe cocktail is 1 oz of whisky, mostly a decent bourbon, with a severed toe.
You don’t drink the toe – it’s not pureed. You just chin the proper booze and let the toe touch your lips. It’s the literal kicker to the hard liquor slap.
And now it’s gone. Not swallowed. Stolen. Someone has stolen the toe.
“We are furious,” says Terry Lee, the hotel’s Toe Captain. “Toes are very hard to come by.” No, they’re not. You just need to look in the right places. The inside of rugby boots, graves and building sites have plenty. The original Sourtoe toe was found in a jar.
CBCNews has more:
The hotel says the suspect is from Quebec and had earlier boasted about wanting to steal the toe. Lee says the man reportedly coaxed the bartender to serve him the drink after the nightly 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. “Toe Time.”
“One of the new staff served it to him to be nice. And this is how he pays her back. What a low life.”
If you can’t trust a toe sniffer, who can you trust? But, then again, all cocktail drinkers lack spirit in the hard drinkers’ race to the bottom.
Posted: 21st, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Strange But True | Comment
Chicago says: ‘Ohio will be eliminated’
The Chicago Transit Authority has issued a threat: “Ohio will be eliminated”
Spotter: Reddit – r/softwaregore
Posted: 21st, June 2017 | In: Strange But True | Comment
North Korea wakes its citizens with this eerie alarm call
Cock your ear towards Pyongyang, and in the morning you can hear the city’s PA systems waking citizens up to another rosy-fingered dawn. The North Korean regime’s choice of alarm is, well, alarming:
Spotter: Richard Littler
Posted: 20th, June 2017 | In: Music, Strange But True | Comment
‘May Your City Be Overrun By Trees’: man gets revenge on mayor who cut down his 30-year-old tree
To Redondo Beach, California, where a man lamenting the city’s destruction of his 30-year-old pepper tree has exacted revenge.
Spotter: Imagur
Posted: 20th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Advert for man looking for a wife in 1865 sets pulses racing
In 1865 an 18-year-old man from Aroostook County, Maine, was looking for a wife. It was the “Chance for a spinster” to gain a husband. He had a “good set of teeth”. His “potatoes are bully”. He “believes in Andy Johnson, the star spangled banner and the 4h of July”. He has “nine sheep”. He wants to spoil a woman but “I don’t know how to do it”.
Posted: 20th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True | Comments (3)
Shopper uses great keepy-uppy skills at the supermarket
To Brazil, where a local man is demonstrating how to shop with style. Forget the 5p bag and go native. And get me a dozen eggs… Game on!
Posted: 20th, June 2017 | In: Sports, Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
80 years of New York city side by side in this neat video
The New Yorker has created this neat video of showing how New York City has changed from 1930s until today.
Spotter: Open Culture, Flashbak,
Posted: 19th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology, The Consumer, TV & Radio | Comment
A camera falls from an airplane and lands in a trough for pigs
A camera falls from an airplane and lands in a trough for pigs.
Una cámara cae desde un avión y acaba en un abrevadero para cerdos. pic.twitter.com/WxqTWDmgSL
— Enrique Coperías (@TapasDeCiencia) June 17, 2017
Spotter: @robertoglezcano
Posted: 18th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Artist creates brain-controlled sperm
If you sperm start swimming towards the front door and then onto Massachusetts, this is why? Ani Liu reveals her plan:
Reflecting on the cultural and scientific discourses that shape notions of the female body, and in an expression of female empowerment, I seek to challenge this status quo by engineering a system by which I, a woman, can control something inherently and symbolical male: spermatozoa (sperm). Through the use of a brain-computer interface, I control the movement of sperm along an XY axis with the agency of my thoughts.
While at first glance the idea of controlling sperm might be absurd, it is my hope that it causes the viewer to reflect on the very real absurdities of control happening to the bodies of women. Genital mutilation, forced sterilization, sexual abuse, rape, and contraceptive regulation currently occur as forms of control projected onto female bodies. In creating a subversive counter-narrative to these practices of control, this work presents a hope for reimagining and shifting our notions of gender.
Spotter: MIT
Posted: 16th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
Man sues date for texting during Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
Brandon Vezmar is suing his date for $17.31, the price of the movie ticket he bought her. Vezmar claims the woman’s behaviour on their night out “is a threat to civilized society”.
Vezmar, 37, of Austin, Texas, is unhappy that whilst on a date at Barton Creek Square cinema, the woman, 35, became disinterested in the 3D showing of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 and began texting.
He talks to the American-Statesman. “It was kind of a first date from hell,” he says. About 15 minutes into the movie she took out her phone and texted. “This is like one of my biggest pet peeves,” he adds. In his small claim’s law suit Vezmar claims the woman “activated her phone at least 10-20 times in 15 minutes to read and send text messages”. This, he states, was a “direct violation” of the cinema’s policy on mobile phone use.
He says he asked her to stop. She refused. He invited her to text outside, which she did. She left and never returned. She took off in the car she and Vezmar had shared to reach the cinema, leaving him to make his own way home.
“I had my phone low and I wasn’t bothering anybody,” she says. “It wasn’t like constant texting. I’m not a bad woman. I just went out on a date.”
This being America, the woman says “she planned to file a protective order against Vezmar for contacting her little sister to get the money for the movie ticket”.
This one will run and run.
Posted: 16th, June 2017 | In: Film, Money, Strange But True | Comment
Rabbi takes a ‘kill pill’ to become MMA fighter
Mazel tov, Rabbi Yossi Eilfort on winning your first MMA fight.
UFC fighter Thierry Sokoudjou tells us: “I never thought that a rabbi would be interested in fighting. But I was stoked. He never quits.”
Posted: 16th, June 2017 | In: Sports, Strange But True | Comment
Kansas inmate freed after dead ringer found 17 years later
Ricky Amos (left) and Richard Jones (right).
It wasn’t me. I was someone who looks just like me. It wasn’t Richard Jones, who in 1999 was found guilty of aggravated robbery and sentenced to 19 years in choky. At his trial, Jones’s lawyer argued that his client was innocent. It wasn’t him. It was a man who looked just like him. He was right:
In 2015, other inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility began telling Jones there was another inmate who looked like his twin. On top of being doppelgangers, the other man had the similar-sounding name of Rick.
Jones contacted attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project and the Project for Innocence at the University of Kansas Law School. They tracked down Ricky Amos, the lookalike who lived on the Kansas side of town.
In booking photos, the two men looked nearly identical, with the same facial hair and cornrows. They are both close to 6-feet-tall and weigh around 200 pounds. The two men are also roughly the same age: Jones was born in 1976, while Kansas corrections records show Ricky Lee Amos was born in 1977.
Jones is now free.
Posted: 14th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Free your mind with 12 hours of ambient New York traffic noise
For you New Yorkers away from home, missing the noise and the visible air, help is at hand. Thanks to YouTuber “Cheesy Nirvosa” you can chill out with the sound of “ambient geek sleep aids.” These looped pulsing sounds continue for 12 hours, ensuring a proper night’s sleep. This one is of New York City street traffic at night.
Spotter: Flashbak – which has ways to make you dream like you’re in space.
Posted: 13th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Daily Express leads with scoopiest scoop of all time
What news from the Daily Express? Well, the investigative team has been in full cry:
It’s going to be hotter in the summer! Get me an ice-cream – and make it double, no, a treble scoop!
Posted: 13th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True, Tabloids | Comment
Regret the error: the Hampshire Chronicle spots a UKIP ‘c*nty councillor’
The Hampshire Chronicle regrets referring to UKIP’s Martin Lyton as something like a “county councillor” that “looked like a crude remark”:
Spotter: @dderbyshire
PS – Is the Times‘ Caitlin Moran moonlighting on a local rag?
Posted: 8th, June 2017 | In: Politicians, Strange But True | Comment
A Tube-style diagram of major Roman roads, ca. 125 AD
This map of Ancient Roman roads (ca. 125 AD) in the Tube / Metro / Subway style is the work of Alexandr Sasha Trubetskoy, an undergraduate economics student at the University of Chicago. Using Stanford’s ORBIS model, the Antonine Itinerary, The Pelagios Project and a little bit of educated guesswork, Alexandr’s map will help any time traveller get around the Roman Empire.
Spotter: CityMetric
Posted: 7th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Saudi censors turn woman a in swimming pool advert into a ball
Saudi censors have been busy adapting an advert selling a swimming pool. The man is dressed. The children are ready for school. And the woman’s been turned into a Winnie the Pooh ball:
Spotter: @omar_quraishi
Posted: 6th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Dominoes falling show us how changes happen
Something about butterflies and things getting bigger:
No, me neither. But I like the video
Posted: 5th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
Jeremy Corbyn ‘looks forward to an asteroid wiping out humanity’
In 2004,Jeremy Corbyn was one of three signatories on an anti-human motion.
Early day motion 1255
Session: 2003-04
Date tabled: 21.05.2004
Primary sponsor: Banks, TonySponsors:
That this House is appalled, but barely surprised, at the revelations in M15 files regarding the bizarre and inhumane proposals to use pigeons as flying bombs; recognises the important and live-saving role of carrier pigeons in two world wars and wonders at the lack of gratitude towards these gentle creatures; and believes that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again.
Nice opinion to the electorate, Jeremy.
Tory Peter Bottomley amended that to the hope that “humans and other creatures may with luck have the chance to live together again”.
Posted: 5th, June 2017 | In: Politicians, Strange But True | Comment
After London Bridge: the geezer who ran with his pint didn’t spill a drop
After the London attack: Geezer Watch:
People fleeing #LondonBridge but the bloke on the right isn’t spilling a drop. God Bless the Brits! pic.twitter.com/ceeaH0XxeX
— Howard Mannella (@hmannella) 3 June 2017
At £6 a pint, who can blame him?
Posted: 4th, June 2017 | In: Reviews, Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
BBC admits to ‘election rigging’
Finally! The BBC has admitted what so many suspected: they’ve been ‘rigging” the election:
Astonishing that the BBC are so blatant about it pic.twitter.com/tJVTMJbndG
— Andrew McFadyen (@apmcfadyen) June 2, 2017
Posted: 3rd, June 2017 | In: Strange But True, TV & Radio | Comment
Idiot throws glove at Tower of London guard: Beefeater responds in style
To the Tower of London, where a woman has dropped her glove close to one of the serving soldiers who guard the place. Did she toss the glove to see what the soldier would do? A Beefeater approaches:
Humour works better:
Posted: 3rd, June 2017 | In: Royal Family, Strange But True | Comment
Parent’s Kiss: How to retrieve small things stuck up a child’s nose
How do you get small items from inside a child’s nose, where they’ve become stuck? Beth Skwarecki, You perfore the Parent’s Kiss:
Step 1: Use your finger to close the nostril that doesn’t have the object stuck in it.
Step 2: Press your lips over your child’s mouth.
Step 3: Blow a quick blast of air into their mouth (think back to the last time you tried to shoot a spitball through a straw).
Step 4: get a snake:
Posted: 3rd, June 2017 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
