Ten things which raised an eyebrow 18-10-13
EP brings you a brief round-up of some of the news items which were perhaps as surprising as they were enlightening
- From the lady concerned that her toilet was “leaking and making strange noises” to the particularly vexed gentleman whose “friend” had thrown his shoe on the roof of a Tesco store, the recordings of absurd 999 calls received by the London Fire Brigade are as hilarious as they are preposterous
- A Chinese official has lost his job after photographs emerged of him accepting a “piggy-back” through flood waters from a local resident while inspecting damage in the typhoon-hit Zhejiang Province – he later admitted he did it because he didn’t want to get his shoes wet!
- When asked about innocent Tweets shared between a Democratic senatorial candidate and a woman known to be a stripper, a senior staffer for Steve Lonegan (R) commented that his Democratic opponent must be homosexual for not pushing the conversation to something more “sensual” and furthermore that unfettered access to women’s bodies was one of the “perks of office”
- Eight months ago a meteorite roared across the Russian skies and hurtled into Lake Chebarkul – earlier this week scientists pulled the 5ft long, 1,255lb rock from the water and promptly broke it
- Uri Geller wants to build a 12ft statue of a gorilla made from spoons in his garden – A public appeal for cutlery donations has seen 5,000 spoons delivered from all over the world to his Berkshire home in less than 10 days
- As the shutdown continues in America so too the “control desk” at NASA is not being manned – so when astronauts in the International Space Station reported seeing a strange cloud forming behind an object passing the window no one was available to tell them who had launched what, only that something had indeed been launched from somewhere!
- The entire village of St Cyrus, Scotland was forced to go without electricity for two hours when engineers opted to cut all power to save a cat stuck up a pole
- As names for company mascots go “FUKUPPY” is perhaps not the greatest choice, but it’s what an Osaka-based refrigerator manufacturer decided to call their egg-faced talisman
- An Iranian man sentenced to death for drugs smuggling is to be re-executed after workers in a morgue realised he was still alive a day after he had been hanged and pronounced dead
- “Numberland” is a list of lists of interesting (and absurd) facts about the world we live in – for instance, did you know you could burn 150 calories in an hour by banging your head against a wall? Or that Stalin only had 3 teeth left when he died? Or that in 1896 it took Britain 38 minutes to defeat Zanzibar in the shortest fought war in history.