The 10 weirdest local news stories of 2022 – The Spinoff
Just how weird has the news been in 2022? Let Alex Casey count the ways.
Check any news site any time of day in 2022 and you’ll be smacked in the face with images of war, crime, civil unrest, climate catastrophe and economic strife. But, every now and again, there is a ray of light in the darkness. Sometimes it’s an interesting object stuck up a nose. Other times it’s a searing op-ed about a sausage roll. Most of the time it’s a cat on public transport. Let us take a moment to celebrate 2022’s strangest news stories – the Odd Stuffs, the Sideswipes, the stories that piqued our curiosity and threw a bit of bizarro among the badness.
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This story from March 2022 detailed the experience of an Auckland woman who spent $75 on a pouch of Port Royal, only to find that it was filled with a mouldy old sandwich. New World didn’t believe her story, so she took her complaint straight to British American Tobacco. “I was like, ‘look, you’re not going to believe me, and it sounds ridiculous, but there was a peanut butter sandwich in place of my tobacco’,” she told Stuff. “And in the saddest, most woebegone voice he said, ‘Sophie, I do believe you. This is an ongoing problem we’ve been having’.” Turns out the old sandwich switcheroo is a prolific scam across the world, and we can only hope to have more awareness around bread-based-bamboozlement in 2023.
In 2021, Dug the potato was a symbol of hope for Aotearoa after a particularly shitty year. The tank of a tuber set the country, and soon the world, abuzz with his gargantuan girth – could humble old New Zealand have just unearthed the biggest potato in history? Alas, celebrity is a mask that eats into the face and it was only a matter of time before things turned sour. In March it was revealed that extensive DNA testing done on Dug found him to not be a potato at all, but a variation of gourd. “It’s been a real roller-coaster of potato-rama,” said Dug’s owner (father?) Colin. “We hopped on the roller-coaster eyes wide open and enjoyed the ride and this was the last real twist.” We were all there with you Colin, we were all there with you.
In September, nine-year-old Barnaby Domigan introduced the world to Dead Fred, a one metre long earthworm that he found in his back garden in Christchurch. He told Checkpoint that it was “slimy and squishy and stuff like that” and that he “thought of it as like an amazing discovery and I could not believe my eyes.” Neither could we. After slandering the big worm in Live Updates, The Spinoff was forced to apologise to Dead Fred after the biodiversity community took umbrage at our description of him as “nightmare fuel”, a “dirty earth snake” and a “hell monster”.
I know it’s gauche to include one’s own work in such a list, but I managed to write 3,500 words on International Women’s Day about an imported $2,400 ham that was found on a sleepy suburban street in Hobsonville Point. Nine months later I am still no closer to the truth (sexist!) but I did get an update from Raf, who found the ham while out walking with his dog. “We kept the ham for maybe a month or so before throwing a homemade pizza dinner at our place where we made an honest attempt at getting rid of most of it,” he said. “We never found out who bought it, nor why it was disposed of. It will forever remain a mystery.”
Including the BULLer River???? Come on!!!!!!
There have been so many terrific cat stories out there that it is hard to choose just one. The 2022 crimewave appeared to extend to the feline community, as Stuff reported in May that kleptomaniac cats in Tauranga were found to be working together in a “cat gang” to steal socks, underwear and… mops? Further south, the ODT had a stunning piece on mafioso mob boss Bowie, known as the “gangster cat” of Lawrence. But the greatest cat news came from the first man himself, who shared captivating footage of a cat called Charcoal who simply adores being buried up to his neck in sand. “That’s about the most random thing I’ve seen. And I’ve seen some things!” one commenter wrote at the time.
Gravel maggot > Goblin mode. In May, this extremely rare species of sea slug washed up on the West Coast and our lives were never quite the same. Named Smeagol Hilaris after the pallid Lord of the Rings character, everyone had an opinion on Smeagol. Some thought he looked like Guylian chocolate. Others thought he looked like coke bottle lolly with the sugar granules sucked off. Whatever he looks like, he is our precious and he lives in all of us.
It’s been a great year for masks, and not just because Mikey Havoc revealed on The Masked Singer that he has a collection of over one hundred masks. In July, a masked baby on an Air New Zealand flight went viral on social media for being both very cute and very mysterious. “Gotham has Batman, Metropolis has Superman – now New Zealand has The Mask,” wrote Stewart Sowman-Lund on his quest to unmask the Masked Baby. “I may never know for sure. But I do know that in these confusing orange light, omicron-infused times – this is the hero New Zealand deserves, even if it’s not the one we need right now.”
Humans have been talking for tens of thousands of years but only now has this combination of words been put together in this order. In November, Stuff reported that influencer, former television host and Hobsonville Ham informant Erin Simpson has been dangling a raw egg in a sock in the corner of her son’s crib to ease his teething pain. I’m less interested in the TikTok pseudo-science here and more concerned with the fact that this is not the first time Erin Simpson has made headlines for challenging egg-based behaviour. Third strike and you’re out, Simpson.
In June, archeologists dug up a bunch of old objects in Christchurch’s CBD including a chamber pot, glass bottles and a gaggle of scary dollies called “Frozen Charlottes”. These girlies from the late 1800s were inspired by an creepy poem called “A Corpse Going to a Ball”, about a young woman who froze to death on her way to a New Year’s Eve ball. That poem then inspired a folk ballad named Fair Charlotte, which then inspired millions of corpse dollies named FROZEN CHARLOTTE, which eventually ended up here in modern day Aotearoa where don’t need any more BAD THINGS. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Put. Them. Back.
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