The 20 Weirdest News Stories of 2014 – Mentalfloss
Almost every Friday, you can catch The Weird Week in Review here at mental_floss. The time has come to go back through those weekly columns and select the most memorable so we can take another look at year’s end. There were probably some weirder things that happened in the world that never made the list, because I tend to skip stories that are overly prurient or tragic, and stories that are not available in English. That leaves about 300 news items to select from. So let’s check out the 20 weirdest of the weird news stories of 2014.
Photograph from Scottsville Veterinary Adoptions/Facebook.
Lenny the cat has a story that most cats can’t match -he suffered a failed adoption because he farts too much. Lenny was found at a park in Rochester, New York, in February and taken in to Scottsville Veterinary Adoptions in Scottsville. He was adopted out, but was returned two days later. His Facebook update said,
The veterinary clinic could find no problem with Lenny, and did not notice him to be overly gassy. But the story has a happy ending. Lenny has since found a new home.
A UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch report revealed an incident in February in which a pilot was landing a small commuter jet in Belfast when his arm fell off.
The pilot lost control of the plane only briefly and still guided it to a safe and bumpy landing using one arm. He promised to secure his arm better in the future.
The Mount Tabor Reservoir in Portland, Oregon, was taken offline in April because a man was seen on security video urinating into it one Wednesday morning about 1AM. Two other men tried to scale the fence, one successfully. As a result, 38 million gallons of clean water were flushed from the reservoir. This is not the first time the Mount Tabor reservoir has been drained because a man peed in it. An incident in 2011 caused 7.8 million gallons to be replaced. Federal regulations now say that water reservoirs must be covered, a project that Portland plans to complete in 2015.
Lois Matykowski of Wisconsin lost her diamond wedding ring six years ago. She searched everywhere, as the ring was fairly new and not insured, but never found it. This past June, her ten-year-old dog Tucker swallowed a popsicle stick. Tucker is famous for stealing food and eating anything that isn’t nailed down. A veterinarian advised her to feed the dog a Vaseline sandwich, which she did, and he threw up the popsicle stick. Two days later, the dog threw up again, and this time, Matykowski’s wedding ring came up! It had apparently been inside the dog all those years. The veterinarian says the popsicle stick must have dislodged it. Now Matykowski is getting jokes from friends who are jealous that she has a dog that pukes up diamonds.
Photograph by Linda Spears.
Cheryl Crausewell of Dora, Alabama, found that someone had TPed the trees in her yard one night in January. The family tried to clean up the mess, but some of the toilet paper in a magnolia tree was out of their reach. What to do? Maybe they should have tried a ladder, but instead they set it on fire. A small piece of paper drifted out to the yard and ignited the grass.
The video at WBRC shows the scorched yard and toilet paper still in the trees, as well as the house, which is a total loss.
Guillermo Reyes was driving home from a bar in Mexico City when he encountered a DUI traffic stop. When police talked to him, they heard a voice from inside the car saying, "He's drunk! He's drunk!" They shone a light into the car, but there were no other passengers, just Reyes' parrot. Apparently he'd heard people say that phrase enough to learn it. The cops gave Reyes a Breathalyzer test, and concluded that he was, indeed, driving while impaired. Reyes was sent to the drunk tank overnight, and the parrot was allowed to accompany him. The original story is in Spanish at El Universal. Google translation.
Photograph by George Strother.
George Strother and his wife, of Escondido, California, thought they felt an earthquake early on December 10th. It was only when an Escondido police officer knocked on their door that they found out a car had crashed through the roof of their garage! A BMW had broken through the roof and landed on Strother’s Nissan Pathfinder. His Mazda Miata was also damaged by the falling roof. The driver of the BMW, which was loaned out from a car dealer, didn’t stick around to face the damage. The Strothers' home sits around twenty feet below a roadway, and police estimate that the driver of the BMW took a turnoff too fast. The garage can be repaired, but the two cars were totaled.
James Grant of Colac Bay, New Zealand, was spear fishing with friends when he was attacked by a shark. He stabbed the shark with a knife, which caused it to leave. When he got out of the water, he saw a deep gash in his leg where the shark bit him. Grant, a junior doctor, removed his wetsuit and stitched up the wound, using supplies from a first aid kit. Then he and his friends went to the Colac Bay Tavern. The bar staff gave him a towel because his wound was bleeding onto the floor. Sometime afterward, he went to a hospital for a proper re-stitching. Grant planned to return to the water as soon as the stitches are out.
In March, the Jackson County, Missouri, Spelling Bee finally came to an end -after two weeks and more than 90 rounds of elimination. Or actually, attempts at elimination. The final two contenders, fifth-grader Sophia Hoffman and seventh-grader Kush Sharma, went 66 rounds and spelled their way through the entire list of available words during the initial spelling bee in February. Officials called a delay while they gathered more words. Two weeks later, the two students went another 30 rounds to decide a winner.
In the end, Hoffman was eliminated by the word “stifling,” and Sharma correctly spelled “definition” and will advance to the national bee. But officials should start preparing now because both students will still be eligible to compete next year.
Photograph by Jennifer Lapier.
Jennifer Lapier of Colleyville, Texas, was contacted by police New Year's night and was told that someone had entered her business, Lone Star Collision Repair. That someone was driving a GMC Yukon. The SUV had crashed into a sedan and then into the building, right under the sign.
The shop was open the next day, and Lapier said no cars were damaged, but the storage room had a big hole in the wall. The unnamed driver of the SUV was taken into custody. Police believed that alcohol may have been a factor.
A gray rat snake was found in a chicken coop in north Georgia. The snake had two large round objects in its stomach, which, from the fact that it was in a chicken coop, you’d think would be chicken eggs. The snake apparently thought so, too, but they were golf balls. Now here’s the really weird part: the chicken owner took the snake to get help for its problem! A team of veterinarians at the Sea Turtle Center on Jekyll Island performed surgery and removed the golf balls from the snake. The reptile recovered, and was to be returned to the wild when deemed healthy. No doubt it headed straight to the nearest chicken coop- or a golf course.
A pickup truck came very close to plunging into the Arkansas River in Tulsa, Oklahoma in February. The truck, belonging to a man identified only as Scott, was parked on a hill. While Scott was inside a house, his two dogs Luna and Roscoe were left in the truck.
The truck was stopped by the brush along the river. The vehicle was badly damaged. Roscoe and Luna were uninjured, and were let go with a warning.
Photograph by Jeremiah Heaton.
Bir Tawil is a stretch of land between Egypt and Sudan that neither country wants. Jeremiah Heaton of Abingdon, Virginia, now claims it as his own. Last winter, Heaton’s six-year-old daughter Emily asked him if she could be a princess. He said yes, and has worked since then to make it so. To that end, Heaton has claimed the 800-square-mile territory of Bir Tawil, renaming it the Kingdom of North Sudan. He planted a flag there on June 16, Emily’s seventh birthday. That makes him the king, and Emily a princess.
The area is desert, but Heaton plans to turn it into an agricultural area, which should please both Egypt and Sudan. Read about Heaton’s journey to his new kingdom at the Washington Post.
Photograph from People's Daily via Twitter.
October first is National Day in China, commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. As part of the celebration in Beijing, 10,000 pigeons were released over Tiananmen Square. But first, each pigeon had to undergo a security check, which included an anal probe. The process was videotaped by authorities. The procedure drew widespread derision on social media.
That last sentence should make anyone wary of booking a flight out of a Chinese airport.
The Russian firm ADVtruck sells advertising on large trucks. As a promotional stunt intended to show how noticeable the ads are, 30 trucks were decorated with a picture of a woman’s breasts. In the first day that the trucks were deployed in Moscow, 517 traffic accidents were blamed on the distracting image. Moscow police were dispatched to impound all the trucks until the pictures were removed. The ad agency says that the company will compensate drivers for any damages that their insurance does not cover.
Prominent Sydney human rights lawyer Seth Richardson died at age 52 and the funeral was held a couple of days later in November, but not without incident. During funeral preparations, a man jumped into the hearse and drove off- with Richardson in a coffin in the back! Richardson’s brother Tobias called police, who at first thought he was reporting a murder when he said a man drove off with his dead brother.
The driver turned out to be a man with dementia who had walked away from his nursing home. He was taken to a hospital and no charges were filed. The incident was resolved in 20 minutes, and the funeral proceeded on time.
Read the rest of the story at the Sydney Morning Herald.
Photograph from the National Corevette Museum at Facebook.
Of all the places a sinkhole can open up and swallow cars, would you believe it had to be in the National Corvette Museum? Western Kentucky is full of underground holes, the most famous of which is Mammoth Cave. On February 12th, another one was born, right under six rare 'Vettes owned by the museum and two on loan from General Motors.
No one was injured. The Corvettes were pullled from the hole in March.
Seventeen-year-old Ashiq Gavai of Buldhana, India, suffered a growth and pain in his jaw, but local doctors could not diagnose the problem. Fearing cancer, his father took him to J J Hospital in Mumbai, where doctors diagnosed Gavai with composite odontoma, a tumor in the part of the jaw that produces teeth.
Gavai was left with only 28 normal teeth, but will require followup surgery to repair the hole in his jaw. The hospital is going to forward the case to the Guinness Book of World Records for the most teeth extracted from one person. See more pictures here.
Photograph by Scottish Water.
Scottish Water, a national public utility, has found some unusual objects blocking the sewers underneath Scotland over the past year. That includes a huge plush Winnie-the-Pooh bear in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire. But they say the list also contains a fax machine, a bike, a snake, and blue jeans. How does anyone get such items down the drain? But the most common objects that block a sewer are grease, diapers, and baby wipes. A new public awareness campaign hopes to discourage people from putting anything into the sewer system that will cause blockages. Unstopping the pipes costs the utility more than £7 million every year.
Photograph by Nicole Dorling, Lort Smith.
In September, Dr. Tristan Rich at Lort Smith Animal Hospital in North Melbourne, Australia, performed surgery to remove a tumor from a goldfish. The hospital explained the procedure in a Facebook post.
The goldfish, named George, is ten years old. The surgery to remove the tumor from the fish’s head is the first of its kind for Lort Smith, and possibly anywhere.
See also: Miss Cellania’s Top 20 Weird News Stories of 2013, 2012, and 2011.
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