Stoned Dog, Let John Oliver Eat Cake: Weird News & Oddities – Patch
ACROSS AMERICA — Would it be weird to cut out a piece of “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver’s face and have it for dessert? Not if you ask people in Kingston, New York, who are grabbing John Oliver bear cakes as fast as Deising’s Bakery can make them. They are adorable.
How this all came about is a little weird, though. Stick with us.
It started with the closure of a Red Lobster restaurant in Kingston, and bakery owner Eric Deising’s interest in buying a flat griddle and convection oven from the chain, which is facing bankruptcy over its “endless shrimp” promotion.
He left a note on the door, which a Hudson Valley News 12 TV reporter found when investigating Oliver’s announcement on his June 2 program that he had acquired furniture and equipment from the shuttered restaurant and rebuilt it inside his studio. The studio restaurant had a single menu item, biscuits, and offered them at a buck apiece and no seconds, a jab at the chain’s bankruptcy over an “endless shrimp” promotion that caused $11 million in losses.
Oliver got wind of Deising’s interview. The restaurant interiors had been donated and didn’t include the items the baker wanted, but he was willing to barter. If Deising’s would bake a bear cake with his face on it, the snow would buy the griddle and convection oven.
“It was insane,” the bakery owner’s nephew Peter Deising told Patch. “We had no clue we were going to be featured on the show until I woke up early Monday. I looked at my phone and I had 3,000 notifications. I said, ‘Guess we’re making a bear cake.’ ”
The people who like the periodical cicadas — and that’s by no means everyone — really, really love them. And when these people find something as rare as a blue-eyed cicada during this year’s dual emergence in Illinois, they’re over the moon. Weird News & Oddities previously featured a blue-eyed cicada discovered by a lover of exotic living things.
The odds of finding a blue-eyed cicada among the usually red-eyed bugs are about 1 in 1 million, but with billions of the usually red-eyed bugs coming out of the ground, it stands to reason more than one person might find one.
Intrepid cicada reporters from Patch’s Illinois team know of at least three more blue-eyed cicadas — two of them found by the same boy, 5-year-old Jason Prange, who has been having a blast in the spring blizzard of cicadas.
“He’s been waiting a year, he knew they were coming,” his dad told Patch. “He loves most insects and is on Cloud 9 with all the cicadas we have.”
A 7-year-old girl in Oak Lawn who wants to be a scientist named her find “Bluey.” She found the bug at a birthday party while the other kids were playing games and eating cake.
“My trick is I always check the eyes,” Ava, who has studied plenty of the run-in-the-mill red-eyed kind, told Patch. “I found a blue-eyed cicada. My friends were taking pictures. Other people were screaming and cringing.”
Kelly Fowler isn’t happy that the investigation into why her 1-year-old dog, Teddy, came home stoned from a grooming appointment has been closed and remains a mystery. When she picked up Teddy “seemed a bit off” and wasn’t wagging his tail as usual, Kathy said.
Blood and urine tests at the vet’s office confirmed Buddy had “high levels of marijuana” in his system. There’s no evidence he ingested the pot at the groomer’s, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
“I’m very upset,” Fowler said. “I know something happened to my dog while in their car — and it could have been accidental — but when I picked him u he was already half asleep and falling over. They called me two times to pick him up in a 45-minute period. I feel they knew he wasn’t feeling well. I’ll never know now what actually happened.”
A Connecticut family has its own “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” story. A family of three bears strolled into a home in Simsbury. The bears were making themselves at home when wildlife officials arrived. They were tranquilized for relocation — a fortunate outcome for the bears.
Not long before, another bear had to be euthanized after a home invasion because the animal had become accustomed to being around people. And in another incident, a business owner shot and killed a charging bear in self-defense after while it was raiding a dumpster.
When an alligator crawls into a place it doesn’t belong, evacuating it is often a big deal. Not so when it’s just a baby. Police just used a broom to sweep a tiny but feisty alligator out of a restaurant lobby in Bradenton, Florida, down the sidewalk and behind the building, where it was pushed “to a more comfortable wooded area,” officials said.
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