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.
May 16 2020: The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will make a smiley face in the sky over North America
This May 16, a crescent moon beneath Venus And Jupiter will form a smiley face in the sky. The occultation, says ABS-CBN News, will only be visible from the USA and Canada.
Posted: 29th, March 2020 | In: Key Posts, News, Strange But True | Comment
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper – the Coronavirus Years
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper – the Coronavirus years.
Spotter: https://www.facebook.com/anticajaepetrella
Posted: 13th, March 2020 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Coronavirus: taking out a virus with guns
The Coronavirus can be defeated. Like anything else, you just needs bigger guns:
Posted: 11th, March 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Woman snorts 500 times LSD dose thinking it’s cocaine – case study
The woman who snorted 550 times the average dose of LSD thinking it cocaine has lived to tell the tale. The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, tells of the middle-aged woman who believing it to be cocaine snorted 55 milligrams of pure LSD. This, we read, is 550 times the usual recreational dose of LSD.
The women, who had been taking morphine for a decade to treat “foot pain”, was decidedly unwell, blacking out, vomiting and being otherwise immobile for 12 hours. She then felt “pleasantly high’ for the next 12 hours (with infrequent vomiting)”. Adding: “The collateral report from the roommate revealed that she sat mostly still in a chair with her eyes either open, closed, or rolled back, frothing at the mouth, occasionally vocalizing random words and vomiting frequently. Ten hours later she was able to converse.”
And then she felt good. Pain in her foot was music reduced. She ceased taking morphine, experiencing no withdrawal.
Do not try this at home.
Posted: 4th, March 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment
18 Syrians* found living inside takeaway boxes in a Darlington hedge (*Syrian hamsters)
How did twenty hamsters inside takeaway food containers come to be living in a hedge in Darlington? The 18 Syrian and two dwarf hamsters were noticed in Park Crescent, Darlington, last Sunday. Volunteers for the National Animal Sanctuaries Support League (NASSL), in Newton Aycliffe, say the creatures were “traumatised” but doing well.
Posted: 3rd, March 2020 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
Demons in the bedroom – illuminated Medieval intrigue and the birth of Merlin
These images from illuminated Medieval manuscript tell the story of the birth of Merlin. Upset by so many souls being released from Satan’s bondage thanks to Christ’s harrowing of Hell, demons plotted to undo Christ’s work by breeding an antichrist, a figure who will perform as their puppet in the world. So a demon squires a virtuous sleeping woman. But the plot is ruined because she is so true of heart and a priest named Blaise baptises the boy at birth. The child is, of course, Merlin, who lives to do good deeds.
Spotter: Sleeping With the Devil – Medieval Illuminations of Demonic Sex
Posted: 2nd, March 2020 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Misbehaving Whilst Black: Six-year-old girl handcuffed and arrested in Florida
To Orlando, Florida. It’s September 2019 and police are carting off a six-year-old girl. Kaia Rolle is under arrest. The child is filmed by the copper’s bodycam as she’s retrained with zip ties and led to a police car. Her alleged crime: misbehaving in class. The story goes that she had thrown a tantrum and kicked and punched three school employees.
The Orlando Police Department investigated. The arresting officer has been sacked. Officer Dennis Turner failed to adhere to the correct protocol, which states that a police officer must have their supervisor’s approval to arrest any child under the age of 12.
Turner, who was fired days after the arrest became national news, had worked in OPD’s Reserve Unit, which is made up of retired officers who are required to work a certain amount of hours at the agency per month and can pick up extra-duty jobs for pay.
Over the course of Turner’s 23-year tenure at OPD prior to retiring last year, he was disciplined seven times for violations of department policy that ranged from unsafe driving to a child-abuse arrest in which he was accused of injuring his 7-year-old son, record released Tuesday showed. He was also accused of sending threatening text messages to his ex-wife in 2009 and racial profiling, records show.
Lawyer’s repressing the child’s family have released the following footage.
Posted: 26th, February 2020 | In: Key Posts, News, Strange But True | Comment
Exceptional Asteroids Versus New York City
Some of those asteroids hurtling through space are pretty large. 3D animator Alvaro Gracia Montoya has made this video comparing exceptional asteroids (classed as ‘minor planets’) to New York City.
Posted: 25th, February 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Sekre bags contain ruined letters of note
Finally someone had found a use for old paper in the digital world. The Times says a company called Sekrè – tagline: “Every woman needs a secret” – has made handbags from dead animals and old paper, and is charging the knowing a few grand sterling (£2,700) for the privilege of owning a recycled gem.
If you buy one of these bags and you’re secret is “I’m a dickhead” then – get this – the secret’s out. Because that’s not any ordinary paper in your reassuringly expensive posing pouch, like a snotty Handy Andy or a Papa John’s flyer. Each bag features an “authenticated letter by a famous historical figure”. The boffins at Sekrè add part of an artefact to each bag. Letters from the likes of Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, Giacomo Casanova, Charles Lindbergh, Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich and Brigitte Bardot have been ripped up for bag cladding.
For added personalisation Old Mr Anorak says he’ll lob in pair of used pants from the many VIPs who’ve stayed over at Anorak Towers. After all, Sekre is an anagram of REEKS.
Posted: 24th, February 2020 | In: Fashion, News, Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Spank the Peacock: The Songbook of Zeghere van Male
The Songbook of Zeghere van Male, also known by its call number MS 125-128 in Cambrai’s Mediathèque Municipale, consists of four complementary part-books: Superius, Altus, Tenor, & Bass. The chansonnier became part of this public collection after the French Revolution, beforehand it was in the Bibliothèque de Saint-Sépulcre, also in Cambrai.
The MS contains 229 compositions, extremely varied, some of them present only in this source. The special aspect of this manuscript is its marriage of music, art and culture: drawings adorn each folio. Executed by quill and with lively colors the drawings describe realistic scenes of daily life, leisurely activities, and include animals and monstrous creatures, obscene depictions and vegetal decorations. With mixed elements inherited from the Middle-Ages, the Antiquity and the vogue of the grotesque, they are a testimony of the prevailing taste in Flemish civil society in the first half of the 16th century”
Text via here.
Posted: 19th, February 2020 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Sexology – a 1953 guide to spotting lesbians
In October 1953, readers of Sexology were taught about the “three classes of lesbians”.
Spotter: Flashbak
Posted: 11th, February 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment
How to blow a massive soap bubble
In the journal Physical Review Fluids we read the research and findings of physicists at Emory University. Their mission: to find the perfect way to blow a massive bubble. The University says that besides being a lot of fun, their findings “could potentially lead to improving processes such as the flow of oils through industrial pipes and the clearance of polluting foams in streams and rivers”. That’s how you get finding to blow bubbles.
“This study definitely puts the fun into fundamental science,” says Justin Burton, associate professor of physics at Emory University and senior author of the paper.
Fluid dynamics is one of the focuses of Burton’s lab. “The processes of fluid dynamics are visually beautiful and they are everywhere on our planet, from the formation and breakup of droplets and bubbles to the aerodynamics of airplanes and the deep-sea overturning of the world’s oceans,” he says…
“We basically started making bubbles and popping them, and recorded the speed and dynamics of that process. Focusing on a fluid at its most violent moments can tell you a lot about its underlying physics…
“The polymer strands become entangled, something like a hairball, forming longer strands that don’t want to break apart. In the right combination, a polymer allows a soap film to reach a ‘sweet spot’ that’s viscous but also stretchy — just not so stretchy that it rips apart…
“We did the physics to explain why and how polymers can make a fluid film stretch as far as 100 square meters without breaking.”
Bubble, eh. We’re mad for ’em:
Spotter: Emory University
Posted: 5th, February 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Mind-blowing high resolution images of the sun’s surface
The above image is of the surface of the sun. Each cells is roughly the size of Texas. The National Science Foundation took the images and others with its Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. the Foundation explains how it works:
To achieve the proposed science, this telescope required important new approaches to its construction and engineering. Built by NSF’s National Solar Observatory and managed by AURA, the Inouye Solar Telescope combines a 13-foot (4-meter) mirror — the world’s largest for a solar telescope — with unparalleled viewing conditions at the 10,000-foot Haleakala summit.
Focusing 13 kilowatts of solar power generates enormous amounts of heat — heat that must be contained or removed. A specialized cooling system provides crucial heat protection for the telescope and its optics. More than seven miles of piping distribute coolant throughout the observatory, partially chilled by ice created on site during the night.
Spotter: moss & fog
Posted: 30th, January 2020 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
The Entartete Kunst – when Nazis banned ‘degenerate’ art and music
The Nazis were not ones for jazz and free expression. They damned all as entartete kunst (degenerate art). To let fellow Ubermensch know what wrong thinking looked like, the Nazis created a travelling exhibition called – predictably – Entartete Kunst. The show opened in Munich in 1937, displaying works deemed to be “an insult to German feeling”. How they flocked to be educated and disgusted by stuff purged from museums and stolen by the State for the common good. More than two million visitors attended the exhibition from July 19 to November 30, 1937, in Munich alone.
Part of the purge was listed in the 10 Rules for Combatting Jazz. The whole shebang of depravity formed a brochure, of which London’s V&A holds the only known copy of a complete inventory of Entartete Kunst.
The museum notes:
The list of more than 16,000 artworks was produced by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) in 1942 or thereabouts. It seems that the inventory was compiled as a final record, after the sales and disposals of the confiscated art had been completed in the summer of 1941. The inventory’s two typescript volumes provide crucial information about the provenance, exhibition history and fate of each artwork.
The inventory consists of 482 pages (including blank pages and a missing page), split into two volumes. The entries are organised alphabetically by city, institution and artist’s name. Volume 1 covers the cities Aachen to Görlitz, while Volume 2 covers Göttingen to Zwickau.
It’s pretty much a guide to everything you should enjoy.
Spotter: Flashbak
Posted: 30th, January 2020 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Strange But True | Comment
Whodunnit? Ham sandwich posted through letterbox in Wisbech
On the Wisbech Discussion Forum news: who posted a ham sandwich through a man’s door? “Right I’m not happy!,” says Mr Brazil. “Whoever has put a ham sandwich in my letterbox, I suggest you come and retrieve it now before I go to the authorities. You have 10 mins…”
Two days on, nothing…
File under: spam.
Spotter: Facebook
Posted: 25th, January 2020 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Microblading gives woman felt tip-style eyebrows
To Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Shannon Bozell has paid $350 for an eyebrow ‘improvement’ process called microblading. She alleges Anne Hicks, salon owner and microblading artist, didn’t do such a great job. Hicks says she a professional and offered to do extra work on them.
“I went from having zero eyebrows to having these monster eyebrows, and it’s hard to swallow,” says Bozell. “They’re big caterpillar eyebrows that don’t fit my face.”
Which begs the questions: whose face would they fit? And can they be hired out?
Spotter: CBS Austin
Posted: 22nd, January 2020 | In: News, Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
FBI masterclass: how to spot a liar by their body language
Former FBI agent Joe Navarro says he can detect a person’s intentions and true nature by their “body language”. Navarro has a book out so you can take what he says with a little pinch of marketing salts. But the video above is interesting to hear how an agent looks for spies in our midst. The aim of any spy, of course, is to be forgettable.
The upshot seems to be that we like to wear masks and often lie to ourselves. Some thing you cannot hide, like holding a bunch of flowers a certain way – Joe says in Eastern Europe you hold them stems up. (I always hold them this way; it protests the petals and keeps them proud). The hard part is spotting if the other person is up to no good.
Posted: 21st, January 2020 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
Brenda from Waddington solves global warming
Brenda from Waddington, Lincolnshire is 89. She knows what caused global warming: space travel.
Spotter: @angrypiln
Posted: 19th, January 2020 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
The incredible story of the Soviet hero who removed his own appendix
In 1961, Leonid Rogozov (14 March 1934 – 21 September 2000), was forced by extreme pain and the absence of another doctor for 1,000 miles to remove his own appendix. This diary entries set the scene.
“It seems that I have appendicitis. I am keeping quiet about it, even smiling. Why frighten my friends? Who could be of help? A polar explorer’s only encounter with medicine is likely to have been in a dentist’s chair…
“I did not sleep at all last night. It hurts like the devil! A snow storm whipping through my soul, wailing like 100 jackals…
“Still no obvious symptoms that perforation is imminent, but an oppressive feeling of foreboding hangs over me… This is it… I have to think through the only possible way out – to operate on myself… It’s almost impossible… but I can’t just fold my arms and give up…
“I’ve never felt so awful in my entire life. The building is shaking like a small toy in the storm. The guys have found out. They keep coming by to calm me down. And I’m upset with myself – I’ve spoiled everyone’s holiday. Tomorrow is May Day. And now everyone’s running around, preparing the autoclave. We have to sterilise the bedding, because we’re going to operate…
“I’m getting worse. I’ve told the guys. Now they’ll start taking everything we don’t need out of the room…
“My poor assistants! At the last minute I looked over at them. They stood there in their surgical whites, whiter than white themselves. I was scared too. But when I picked up the needle with the novocaine and gave myself the first injection, somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn’t notice anything else.
“The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time… Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up… I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every four to five minutes I rest for 20 – 25 seconds.
“Finally here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst… My heart seized up and noticeably slowed, my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it’s going to end badly and all that was left was removing the appendix.”
Read more on Flashbak.
Posted: 16th, January 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Sex toy mishap at Bongo’s Bingo rips out woman’s eyelashes
Eyes down for news from Newcastle. The headline in the local Chronicle: “Woman’s eyelashes ripped out after sex toy hits her at Bongo’s Bingo in Newcastle.” Says Tegan Denham on twitter:
“You actually couldn’t write my life, tonight I went to Bongo’s Bingo and got hit in the face with a double ended dildo and it took a full lashes work of extensions off. What. The. Heck.”
One for the family album. Wye-eye!
Posted: 15th, January 2020 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
Avian Arsonists: the three Australian birds that start fires to flush out prey
Bird experts have identified the three types of birds that start fires in Australia:
Black kites (Milvus migrans), whistling kites (Haliastur sphenurus) and brown falcons (Falco berigora) all regularly congregate near the edges of bushfires, taking advantage of an exodus of small lizards, mammals, birds and insects — but it appears that some may have learnt not only to use fire to their advantage, but also to control it.
“At or around an active fire front, birds — usually black kites, but sometimes brown falcons — will pick up a firebrand or a stick not much bigger than your finger and carry it away to an unburnt area of grass and drop it in there to start a new fire,” says Bob Gosford, an ornithologist with the Central Land Council in Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory, who led the documentation of witness accounts. “It’s not always successful, but sometimes it results in ignition.”
Spotter: @christopherjobs
Posted: 15th, January 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment
A girl’s 1940s ledger of her Cat’s Whiskers
These pictures show us a handmade book by Janet Gnosspelius. The book contains her cats’ whiskers. Janet collected the whiskers she found in her home from 1940 to 1942. She then wove each and every whisker into the pages of her book and catalogued them, noting when, where and how they were found.
Janet Gnosspelius had artistic pedigree. Her mother was Barbara Collingwood, granddaughter of W.G. Collingwood, John Ruskin’s secretary. She was one of the first women to attend the Liverpool School of Architecture. Archivists say the meticulous nature Gnosspelius exhibited in creating her book remained throughout her life as she worked in “local history and building conservation, regularly posting samples of masonry to Liverpool City Planning Office, neatly labelled with their provenance and date, demanding their restoration.”
Gnosspelius continued her love of cats. At age 40 she wrote a diary. “The diary is no ordinary one,” says her archivists. “It is written from the perspective of her beloved ginger cat Butterball, recording the dates of his fights, illnesses, and stays with friends: ‘9 March 1965: wrapped my mouse in the mat outside kitchen door.’”
Spotter: Colossal, Flashbak, The Collingwood Archive of the Cardiff University Special Collections
Posted: 7th, January 2020 | In: Books, Key Posts, Strange But True | Comment
‘#Babyintheoven’: pregnant Spanish influencer uses Holocaust to boost her celebrity
Simon Hunter shares news of the “pregnant Spanish influencer” who he claims captioned a photo of herself ‘doing’ the Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial with the hashtag #babyintheoven.
Hellen Tabalda seems to have amended her post and – irony of ironies – added the hashtag “#neverforget”.
Lots more photos of people posing by the memorial to the millions who were tortured, raped and murdered here.
Posted: 3rd, January 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Ghost boat with two human heads on board washes ashore on Sado Island
A modern mystery: how did five human corpses and two severed human heads come to be on a boat shipwrecked on Japan’s Sado Island? The boat’s name has not be confirmed, but there are Korean letters on the side.
How long the boat had been at sea is hard to say, but the corpses are “partially skeletonised”.
Were the bodies eaten, perhaps, by a North Korean crew seeking refuge in Japan or South Korea?
The BBC speculates the the boat is a fishing vessel and the crew were forced by the country’s oppressive regime and a desperate need for food to fish too far from shore.
Boats are made from wood. They have no GPS technology. In November 2017, eight men were found alive on a boat at Yurihonjo marina, Japan. They claimed to be fishermen from North Korea who had gotten into trouble at sea. They are all sent back to North Korea.
In 2016, North Korea sold the fishing rights in some of its territorial waters to China. Japanese media reported in September 2019:
But with Chinese ships now operating along the coast, North Korean fishers are forced to risk venturing farther out, often in foreign waters.
Since September, Russia has apprehended more than 800 North Koreans fishing within its exclusive economic zone. A ship and motorboat seizure late that month turned up about 30,000 illegally caught squid, according to Russian media. In another incident, Russian border guards were injured as crew members of a detained vessel resisted arrest. South Korea has seen a surge since this summer in North Korean fishing operations near the Northern Limit Line, the disputed maritime boundary between the two Koreas. The number of illegal crossings swelled from 51 in all of 2018 to more than 400 so far this year, data from the South Korean military shows.
Can fishing trigger a war?
Posted: 28th, December 2019 | In: Strange But True | Comment
White academic says ‘geek’ should be a hate crime on par with racism
When you hear that an academic has said calling someone a “brainbox” or “geek” should be classed as a hate crime, do you think they’re anything but white? Dr Sonja Falck, of the University of East London, says: “Insulting slurs about age, disability, religion and gender identity remained in widespread use until relatively recently. Society at the time turned a blind eye to their impact by passing them off as harmless banter. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we realise how wrong we were. The same can be said about anti-IQ words like nerd, brainbox, geek, egg-head, smart-arse and dweeb.”
Got that? Anti-semitic slurs – race hatred against the Jews; a grim story backed by hundreds of years of persecution (the Inquisition; pogroms; the Holocaust) – were “until recently” “harmless banter” on a par with calling someone “brainy”. Calling a black woman a n***** – a word constructed on enduring racist policies that sought to cast blacks as sub-humans, offering a State-endorsed acceptable excuse when they were raped, tortured and murdered by their colonisers and owners; the systematic horror of slavery that lasted for centuries; institutional racism in the police force – is on a par with calling the bloke who did well at maths a “geek”. Verbally abusing a disabled person – the ugly, murderous mistreatment of the disabled is a scar on humanity – is no worse than calling you a “dweeb”, or the “D-word”, as we should call it.
Dr Falck is billed as a “Harley Street psychotherapist”. Her new book is called Extreme Intelligence. It is “a study of discrimination against those with very high IQs”.
Do we now talk about what IQ tests are, if they’re worth a dime and how they impact on thoughts around eugenics and race?
The only way a comment on intelligence can ever be prejudicial is when people look at the demise of Jeremy Corbyn’s racist Labour Party and tell you those “clever Jews” were behind it. Anything else is idiotic.
Posted: 18th, December 2019 | In: Key Posts, News, Strange But True | Comment
