News of the Weird: U.S. Open tennis match went to pot – Star Tribune

October 7, 2023 ndowd

Tennis pro Alexander Zverev noticed an unexpected odor when he arrived for his match Aug. 29 at the U.S. Open — cannabis, the Associated Press reported. The court “definitely (smelled) like Snoop Dogg’s living room,” he said. The match was being played on Court 17, which is on the periphery of the Flushing Meadows complex in New York City and lies right next to a park. The odor became so strong that another player, Maria Sakkari, complained before her match, but tournament officials found no evidence that anyone inside the facility was smoking, and the match went on, with Sakkari’s approval. “I mean, it’s something we cannot control because we’re in an open space,” she said.
As officials in New Delhi, India, prepared for this week’s G20 summit, part of the discussion involved monkeys, Reuters reported. Rhesus monkeys are a menace on many of the city’s streets, often attacking pedestrians. By law, the monkeys cannot be harmed or removed, so the government has installed life-size cutouts of langurs — bigger primates — around the city to scare away the monkeys. The New Delhi Municipal Council also has employed “30 to 40” people to mock the langurs’ sounds so that the monkeys will believe they are real.
Two employees of television outlet Univision Chicago who were filming a piece about armed robberies in the Windy City were robbed at gunpoint on Aug. 28, the Washington Post reported. The reporter and photographer were in the Wicker Park neighborhood when an SUV and a sedan pulled up and three suspects “wearing ski masks and displaying firearms” jumped out. They took the photography equipment and personal items, returned to their cars and fled. The suspects are still at large; no injuries were reported.
Lay off the accelerator if you ever drive through Coffee City, Texas. The town has only about 250 residents, but it employs 50 full- and part-time police officers, KHOU-TV reported on Aug. 30. The town’s budget reveals that it collected more than $1 million in traffic fines in 2022, which were the result of more than 5,100 citations the officers wrote. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my professional career, and I’ve seen a lot,” said Greg Fremin, a retired Houston Police Department captain.
It wasn’t exactly a repeat of Geraldo Rivera’s 1986 disappointing opening of Al Capone’s safe on network TV, but it came close. Officials at West Point hyped an event scheduled for Aug. 28: livestreaming the opening of a time capsule from the late 1820s. The Washington Post reported that the box was installed at the base of a monument to a Polish military engineer who aided the United States during the Revolutionary War. When archaeologist Paul Hudson lifted the lid, “The box didn’t quite meet expectations,” he said. It contained mainly silt, from which Hudson eventually unearthed six silver American coins dated between 1795 and 1828 and one Erie Canal commemorative medal. Hudson said he intends to analyze the remaining sediment to find out whether other items inside had been destroyed by moisture.
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