Human Ashes, Bone Chips Smeared On Disney Ride [Weird News & Oddities] – Patch.com

April 18, 2024 ndowd

ACROSS AMERICA — A trip to Disneyland wasn’t exactly a trip to the “Happiest Place on Earth” for some recent visitors, who found a popular ride smeared with bone chips and ashes — the cremains of someone who apparently loved the place a lot.
Dusting the Anaheim, California, theme park with the cremains of loved ones seems to have become a thing, and Mickey and Minnie would like for everyone to just stop it. For the record, no one at Disney has ever said this is OK. California state law doesn’t, either.
The creepy discovery at the “Rise of the Resistance” was the latest in a string of cremains scatterings that include dustings on the “It’s a Small World,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and — this one gives us pause — “Haunted Mansion” attractions.
Ashes “won’t stay where you drop them” a park worker commenting on the creepy practice on a Reddit thread called “Ashes on Attractions.” Grandma — or whomever — will likely be “swept up and dumped,” the person said.
A fellow in Naples, Florida, is pretty sure a piece of trash that was part of a 2.6 metric ton pallet jettisoned from the International Space Station hit his house, narrowly missing his son. NASA engineers are analyzing the 2-pound object to determine if that’s what damaged Alejandro Otero’s home.
When delays prevented a controlled journey back to Earth, NASA tossed the pallet of spent batteries from the space station in 2021 and it has been careening around Earth since. NASA had expected the contents of the pallet to burn up harmlessly, but its counterpart European Space Agency had said some pieces of it could reach the ground, though the chances of it hitting a person were “very low.”
Harvard and Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell questioned NASA’s decision to jettison such an enormous piece of trash and send it back in an uncontrolled reentry.
“NASA was rolling the dice … and they made an unlucky throw,” McDowell told Gizmodo. “So you had this 2-ton thing that reentered the atmosphere and this is some small fragment of it that survived and went through this poor guy’s house.”
Southern Californians are looking for an explanation for the mysterious lights they saw streaking across the sky just after midnight Tuesday.
Theories on social media ranged from a meteor shower so bright the shooting stars out shined city lights to something connected to a SpaceX rocket launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base on the Central Coast. But that launch happened around 7:30 p.m., long before the mystery lights appeared.
Another guess: Chinese space junk reentry.
The foul-mouthed owner who drops the f-bomb, the s-bomb and every other profane bomb she can think of is just part of the charm of Mark’s Kitchen, a Fresno, California, institution since 1972.
Helen didn’t stop cursing at her customers until about 10 years ago, and it has made her social media famous. In one video, she insists a customer eat three bites of a steaming plate of food.
“Bring you ass right here,” she says in one video, insisting a customer eat at least three bites of the steaming plate of food she set before him. He does as he’s told. “Everything’s beautiful,” he says. “I’m coming back.”
A small fortune may be lurking in your email junk folder. A 56-year-old Saginaw County, Michigan, woman who checked her folder found a message from state lottery officials telling her she had won a $227,383 jackpot.
The woman checked her email after getting a voicemail informing her of the win. “I didn’t know what to think,” she said, according to a Michigan Lottery news release. “I told myself if it was real, I’d have some other sort of notification.”
The manufacturer of Legos has warned a California police department to stop playing around with its intellectual property in social media posts that showed arrestees’ faces in mug shots replaced with Lego minifigure heads.
Obscuring suspects’ faces in social media posts has been a practice for several years at the Murrieta Police Department, which has also used emoji faces and images of The Grinch and Barbie. The department says it does so to protect the suspects’ rights as they go through the judicial process. The social media posts featuring these altered images come with an often entertaining and irreverent cautionary tale and seem to go over well with the public.
The practice aligns with a new California law prohibiting police agencies from sharing mug shots of non-violent offenders unless specified circumstances exist.
Toads that could kill pets and other small animals are becoming established in Florida, according to the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission. The cane toads, as this species native to Central and South America is known, were brought to Florida in the 1930s and 1940s to control pests in sugar cane fields.
The large, warty amphibians weren’t particularly good at it, but were s worthy opponent in the competition with other animals for habitat. Cane toads are found widely in central and southern Florida, thriving in urban and suburban as well as agricultural areas.
It’s OK for people who find them on their property to kill them as long as it’s done humanely and doesn’t violate animal cruelty laws, wildlife officials say. And do wear protective clothing, including Latex gloves. The milky poison that can be lethal to animals that attempt to bite or eat them isn’t good for people, either. The chemicals in the poison, known as bufotoxin, include bufagin, which affects the heart, and bufotenine, a hallucinogen.
The bufo, as the toad is known for obvious reasons, isn’t the only invasive creature in Florida. Tussock moth caterpillars, whose prickly hairs can cause itchy rashes on humans, are also out of control.
We started this roundup of Weird News & Oddities at Disneyland and we’ll end there, too. Which is worse? People who scatter cremains at the park and on rides, or, as Patch previously reported, people who drop trou’ and take a poop while waiting in line. You be the judge.