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News of the Weird
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Restaurant Servers Food in Toilet Bowls
Walking in through an arched door, diners are greeted with a giant toilet bowl sitting between two urinals. White ceramic toilet seats comfortably accommodate their bottoms, and urinals grace the walls. Giggling helplessly, high school student Chen Yi-lin gulps down a chocolate ice-cream sundae served in a miniature Asian-style squat toilet, and admits that she is smitten. "This is fun," she says. Wang, 26, opened the Marton last year after a roadside prototype a stand offering toilet-shaped ice cream cones achieved runaway success. Now, he says, he has moved decisively upmarket. "Diners come and walk away with the special experience," he said. "Many try to create more fun, stirring up curry and rice so it looks exactly like when you forget to flush the toilet. Then they gulp it down." For all its scatological excess, the Marton is following in the noblest tradition of Taiwanese novelty restaurants. Other successful ventures have purposely confined scores of contented diners to coffins or jail cells, or exposed them to full-scale pictures of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, Taiwan's political nemesis until his death in 1976. [Associated Press, 6-3-05] Top
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More than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks, and scientists still have no explanation for what's causing the combustion, an official said Wednesday. Both the pond's water and body parts of the toads have been tested, but scientists have been unable to find a bacteria or virus that would cause the toads to swell up and pop, said Janne Kloepper, of the Hamburg-based Institute for Hygiene and the Environment. "It's absolutely strange," she said. "We have a really unique story here in Hamburg. This phenomenon really doesn't seem to have appeared anywhere before." The toads at a pond in the upscale neighborhood of Altona have been blowing up since the beginning of the month, filling up like balloons until their stomachs suddenly burst. "It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie," Werner Schmolnik, the head of a local environment group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily. "The bloated animals suffer for several minutes before they finally die." Biologists have come up with several theories, but Kloepper said that most have been ruled out. The pond's water quality is no better or worse than other bodies of water in Hamburg, the toads did not appear to have a disease, and a laboratory in Berlin has ruled out the possibility that it is a fungus that made its way from South America, she said. She said that tests will continue. In the meantime, city residents have been warned to stay away from the pond. [Associated Press, 4-17-05] Top
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The Secret Service's uniformed division, which provides protection for the White House and Treasury building, has set up metal guard rails to protect the nest, which has attracted the notice of tourists on their way to see the White House. The duck has been provided with a water bowl and seems oblivious to all the attention, sitting calmly on its nest on top of the mulch pile that surrounds one of the new trees planted along Pennsylvania Avenue as part of a renovation project. Treasury Secretary John Snow stopped to pay his respects this week on the way back from a congressional hearing, Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols said Friday. "He had been briefed on the duck and he stopped to pay a visit," said Nichols. The eggs are expected to hatch the last week of April at which time the duck will be relocated nearer water. But until then, the duck will occupy some of Washington's prime real estate. "Foreign leaders, members of Congress, everybody who visits Treasury has to pass by the duck," Nichols said. [Associated Press, 4-8-05] Top
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The competition was fierce and foolish, but a man who accidentally sawed through a live wire and topped that by wrecking his truck hours after buying it more than earned the honorary title "Village Idiot." Mark Carmichael's blunders won him the good-natured award that's been handed out for years in the tiny Brown County town of Story. The winner is whoever gets the most votes from regulars at the Story Inn's saloon. Carmichael, the inn's maintenance man, won in part for an incident in which he cut through a live wire while using a circular saw to replace the inn's galvanized steel roof. But he also damaged his just-purchased 1998 Dodge truck the day after he got it by getting it stuck atop a whiskey barrel planter outside the inn. His foolishness earned the 27-year-old a $100 bar tab at the Story Still. Rick Hofstetter, who owns the inn about 40 miles south of Indianapolis, said the competition for this year's award was fierce. For example, two Story Inn regulars were nominated for knocking themselves unconscious while opening their car doors. Another was nominated for burning down his front porch after not fully extinguishing a cigarette in a full ashtray. Bartender Evan McMahon was nominated for opening an $80 bottle of Chalk Hill Chardonnay to make a $6.50 wine spritzer for a bar patron. Not to be outdone, Story Inn housekeeper Kathy Newhall earned her nomination for using French truffle oil from the kitchen, which costs $50 for a 3-ounce bottle, to quiet a squeaky toilet seat. But it was Carmichael who came out on top. The bar's patrons had more than enough evidence to give him the honor not least of which was the pig roast incident. "I cooked a couple of hogs out there on some bed springs once," he explained to a dismayed visitor. Carmichael had cut the carcasses in half with a chain saw, then used a pitchfork to turn the meat as it cooked. He ended up serving up the portions with a hatchet. "People loved it," he said. "We called it Louisiana style." [Associated Press, 4-9-05] Top
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Eccentric British rock musician Genesis P-Orridge (born Neil Megson) and his wife and partner, Lady Jaye Breyer, are gradually transforming themselves surgically into gender-neutral human beings ("pandrogynous") resembling each other, so that eventually they will be indistinguishable, to demonstrate how overrated gender is as a point of reference. (For example, he wore a lace dress at their wedding, and she dressed as a biker guy, with moustache, and for Valentine's Day 2003, each got breast implants.) P-Orridge told SF Weekly in October that their goal is to jointly become a third person, distinct from either of them. [SF Weekly, 10-27-04] Top
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Mr. Ilker Yilmaz, 28, of Istanbul, inspired to bring pride to Turkey by achieving a Guinness Book world record, decided to challenge Canadian Mark Moraal's 8.7-foot mark for squirting milk out of his eye. In October, exploiting what he called an anomaly in his tear gland, he sucked milk up his nose and pinched it 9.223 feet out of an eye socket in front of several witnesses and is now awaiting official recognition. [Associated Press, 10-4-04] Top
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It was one of the classics, but it happened anew, in Bloomington, Ill., in October. Donald R. Hilger was arrested and charged with robbing 11 local businesses over the previous two weeks. He was picked up shortly after a robbery of a Jewel/Osco store, and police brought two of that robbery's witnesses by the arrest scene to see if they could identify him. According to police, however, as soon as the employees spotted Hilger, Hilger pointed at one of them and blurted out, "That's the one I robbed." [Pantagraph (Bloomington), 10-15-04] Joel Crytzer, 63, was charged with marijuana possession in November in Butler, Pa., when officers spotted some on the floor of his car, which they had stopped because Crytzer had been cruising down the road, seemingly oblivious of the fact that his car had only three tires. And Kevin Martzett, 39, was charged with robbery in Cass County, Neb.; according to police, besides taking money from the victim, he also forced the victim to cash a $75 government check made out to "Kevin Martzett." [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11-19-04] [Associated Press, 11-19-04] Top
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Among the unsuccessful 2004 write-in presidential candidates (according to a November report on NJ.com): Jack Grimes of Maryland, who admires the leadership methodology of Saddam Hussein but would rely on telepathy and astrology to make tough presidential decisions; Sterling Allan of Utah, who alphabetized and then numbered every word in the Bible and said that the codes he produced told him to return the United States to the gold standard, among other insights; and Randy Crow of North Carolina, who says that despite a government-implanted chip in his brain, his administration would crush the "Omega Agency," which steals from people, which staged the Sept. 11 attacks, and which may have the ability to vaporize everyone. [NJ.com, 9-1-04] |
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