Cat Cleans Oven, Burns Down House: Weird News & Oddities – Patch
ACROSS AMERICA — A “pee bandit” is on the loose in Pasadena, California, where for the past two years, someone has been leaving full bottles of urine on an electrical box, according to a local filmmaker who has been trying to figure out the mystery.
“For the past two years an electrical box in my neighborhood had been overrun with bottles of piss,” Derek Milton explained in his first of six TikTok videos chronicling the saga. He made clear he wasn’t talking about “your normal run-of-the-mill truck driver bottle of piss” but rather “an assortment of different size bottles, different colors and sometimes complemented with a hand-drawn note.”
Milton and his friends, including filmmaker Grant Yansura, disguised themselves as construction workers, put up trail and security cameras and went about sniffing out the culprit, who managed to stay a step ahead in various ways that added to the intrigue of the mystery urine.
Milton and his fellow sleuths are undaunted, but they’re not the only ones on the case. City workers installed a pyramid cap on the electrical box to deter the pee bandit but found it disassembled and the bottle of urine in its usual place.
And so it goes.
This is not a typical ugly duckling story, and the Bubbles, a 70-year-old Eastern box turtle, did not turn into a swan. He just looks more like a turtle than a duck these days under the care of the Turtle Rescue of the Hamptons in Jamesport, New York.
The lifelong companion of a New York City grandmother who bought him in 1954 when she was a child, Bubbles suffered the consequences of a poor diet that caused him to develop physical deformities, including a beak that made him look like a duck, the turtle rescue group said.
When Bubbles was surrendered to the rescue group by the woman’s grandchildren in July, he was unable to eat, drink or walk on his own. Due to a severe anemic condition, the turtle’s eyes were white instead of red, as is typical for his species.
Three months later, Bubbles’ beak and nails, which had grown into his flesh, have been trimmed. He is no longer in pain and is eating and drinking on his own. The rescue group is optimistic that with daily physical therapy, the turtle they affectionately call “Mr. Bubbles” will one day walk on his own. In captivity, Eastern box turtles can live to be 100.
A family cat in northern Michigan almost burned the place down after somehow pushing the self-clean buttons on an oven while its family slept inside the home on Burnt Mill Road (honest, we’re not making that up) near Traverse City.
Almira Township fire officials said smoke alarms alerted the family, who used a fire extinguisher to put out the fire, which was confined to the oven. No one was injured.
Homeowner Brian Adams said in a post on the fire department’s Facebook page that the oven is poorly designed.
“I would have just woken up to a really clean oven, but I cooked bacon yesterday morning and put the pan in the oven because I didn’t want the cat getting into the grease,” he said. “In hindsight, a greasy cat would have been much better.”
A gray cat living an extraordinary life of visits to the beach and trips to the lake went on his biggest adventure alone: traveling hundreds of miles from Wyoming to California.
But how the feline named Rayne Beau — pronounced “rainbow” — made it home two months after getting lost in Yellowstone National Park during a summer camping trip remains a mystery.
Benny and Susanne Anguiano and their two cats arrived at Yellowstone’s Fishing Bridge RV Park on June 4 for the felines’ first trip to the forest. But soon after they arrived, Rayne Beau was startled and ran into the nearby trees. After four days of futile searching, the crushed couple had to drive back to their home in Salinas, California.
“We were entering the Nevada desert and all of a sudden I see a double rainbow. And I took a picture of it and I thought, that’s a sign. That’s a sign for our rainbow that he’s going to be okay,” she said.
Sure enough, the Anguians received news in August that their cat had been found and was at a shelter in Roseville, California, about 900 miles from where he had disappeared, and 200 miles from his home in Salinas.
The great candy corn debate has pitted neighbor against neighbor Halloween after Halloween. There’s not a lot of middle ground on the sugary pyramids of yellow, orange and white. People either loathe candy corn or they love it.
For those in the latter group, would you sleep in candy corn? If so, Brach’s has a sweet deal for you. (And, just for the record, a Brach’s spokesperson told Patch that surveys show 64 percent of Americans plan to snack on candy corn this Halloween season.)
The candy maker has teamed with Great Wolf Lodge in Gurnee, Illinois, to create a suite (top photo) that looks straight out of a bag of candy corn. Great Wolf Lodge has a similar suite available at a resort in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.
The suites come with a fully stocked pantry that has plenty of candy corn and other perks.
Eight bulls recently escaped from a rodeo at a mall in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, charged through a crowded parking lot, jumped over a perimeter fence and headed for the woods.
One of the bulls was caught shortly after his flight for freedom, six more were found a few hours later and the eighth bull eluded his captors until the following day. A missing-pet tracking service was used to locate the final bull.
“I have to say I’ve never went out looking for a lost bull. This is one for the books,” Samantha Beckman of Wandering Paws K9 said, according to The Associated Press.
A mob of emus was recently rescued in Seldon, New York, before they were hit by cars on busy roadway. The birds were rounded up within a couple of minutes by Strong Island Animal Rescue founder Frankie Floridia,
Once inside the cab Floridia’s truck, the emus caused about $100 worth of damage and destroyed his daughter’s homework. It’s all part of the work of rescuing animals, Florida said.
No one has stepped forward to claim the emus, which are now being cared for at Sweetbriar Nature Center in Smithtown, New York. Rescuers suspect the birds, which are indigenous to Australia, were kept as unlicensed pets and owners are reluctant to step forward and claim them.
“Nobody has put it out there,” Sweetbriar wildlife rehabilitation director Jeanine Bendicksen said. “If you lost emus, you are going to put it out there on Facebook Unfortunately, no one is coming forward.”
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