'So Chicago It Hurts' And A Rat Hole Wedding: Weird News And Oddities – Patch

June 24, 2024 ndowd

ACROSS AMERICA — About that “rat” embedded in a Chicago sidewalk that we told you about in Weird News And Oddities a couple of weeks ago: In a city crowned the capital of rat infestations, fairly or unfairly, the varmint flat-out refuses to be vanquished.

To catch up, a photo of the rat-shaped blemish in the Roscoe Village sidewalk became a viral sensation. Someone who either wasn’t amused or was just a jerk by nature filled the Chicago Rat Hole with quick-dry cement. Neighbors were ticked off and surreptitiously restored the local landmark.
“New York has jokes about rats,” Jonathan Howell, who discovered the person’s handiwork, told Patch. “Chicago has jokes about rats, but to have an actual Rat Hole is so Chicago, it hurts.”
In fact, the Rat Hole is so Chicago that Raj Sarathy decided to have his wedding there. He had always wanted to get married against an iconic Chicago scene.
“I know (the location) is kind of wild and unique, but nobody in my life — my friends, family, my wedding coordinator — was surprised at all,” Sarathy told Patch “My husband was not surprised, either. I’m always, pretty much always up for a new adventure. I’m always doing the craziest things in my life. I’m always traveling all over the place and am always getting myself into trouble, so I don’t think anyone was too surprised by me picking a very unique destination.”
If you’ve been marked safe from Stanley cups, plant your flag. Not everyone has. In scenes reminiscent of the Xbox meltdown on Black Friday a few years ago, the mad scramble for limited edition Valentine’s Day Stanleys led to near brawls at Target, where they’re exclusively available.
They’re pretty good and maybe even excellent travel cups, a kind of sippy cup for bigs, but are they worth $35 retail or, from a price gouger selling them online, hundreds of dollars? Apparently so.
Stanley 1913, which has seen a meteoric rise in sales since social media influencers discovered the cups, has given customers another reason to breathe fire with its limited-edition nod to Lunar New Year of the dragon-themed cup. It comes in a couple of new colors and, presumably, will be met with unfettered joy among its fandom.
Southern Californians have been dazzled with a killer sight at sea for the past several weeks — a beautiful, breathtaking, and sometimes bloody display put on by the ocean’s top predator. It’s unprecedented for orcas, or killer whales as they’re often called, to remain this far north of their southern waters for this long.
“It’s unprecedented — this long visit by these killer whales from southern waters,” marine biologist Alisa Schulman-Janiger told Patch. “They’re extremely rarely seen.”
Tourists are curious and intrigued as well. Donna Kalez, chief operating officer of Oceanside Adventures, told Patch orcas are usually seen only about once a year.
“It’s increased business in all ports so much because people are excited and looking to see rare orcas off our coast,” she said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime treat and people are ready! Orcas, in my opinion, are the most thrilling whales to see, and you never know what they will do.”
Authorities in Fort Myers, Florida, are keeping a funeral urn with human remains in the evidence storage area for “safekeeping” until someone comes forward to claim it.
The urn turned up among donations to a Goodwill thrift store. “We would like to make sure it gets to its rightful owner,” the Lee County Sheriff’s Department said, urging anyone with a clue as to whom it belongs to call 239-477-1000 and ask for the evidence department.
Police in Sturgis, Michigan, say an Amish family’s horse and buggy was returned to them after they were stolen from the parking lot of a Walmart store while they were inside shopping.
Police said they were tipped off by a truck driver who said he’d a woman hoist herself to the buggy seat, grab the reins and trot away around sunset Saturday last. A 31-year-old woman, whose name was not released, was arrested later and charged with larceny and larceny of livestock, police said.
Like Pooh and his fabled misfortune with a honey jar, a juvenile coyote in California got its head stuck in a bucket and, worse, was swept up in torrential flooding in the Tijuana River Valley.
The San Diego Humane Society reached the pup by boat, gave him a couple of sedatives and removed the bucket. He was dehydrated and tangled up in cactus vines but is expected to recover.
… or loud, anyway. Billions of periodical cicadas will tunnel to Earth’s surface in synchronicity this spring, heralding their arrival as they do every 13 or 17 years, depending on the brood, with an up to 100-decibel mating song. This year’s emergence will be a scientific oddity, with two broods of cicadas emerging simultaneously, which hasn’t happened since 1803. Some truly weird stuff happened when periodical cicadas came out last time in 2021.
Some — in our fancy, disobedient youngsters banished to remote underground tunnels for the last few years of their nymph-hood — got into the equivalent of magic mushrooms in the bug world. It took them on a long, strange trip in which they may have heard angels, or at least Grateful Dead, singing, and those poor creatures just copulated until their genitals fell off, and even that didn’t stop them from trying. And less morbidly but downright strange to a lot of us, people ate ’em — not those particular cicadas, but healthier ones fresh out of the ground, and called them delicacies.
All kinds of weird things could happen in the animal world on April 8 with the total solar eclipse. As the moon passes between the sun and Earth and daytime turns to dusk, it may feel as if the world turned upside down in the animal kingdom.
Horses, cows and other farm animals may head to their nighttime quarters and expect to be fed. Expect the air to be thick with chirping, chattering and buzzing. Some event planners in the 15 states in the path of totality are encouraging eclipse chasers to listen to the sounds of nature as part of what promises to be the party of a lifetime for millions of Americans.
Read more: Weird News And Oddities On Patch