Weird Universe Archive
July 2008
July 15, 2008
The Uroclub
A camouflaged portable urinal, designed to be discrete, sanitary and create an air of privacy! It looks like an ordinary golf club and comes equipped with a unique removable golf towel clipped to the shaft that functions as a privacy shield!
I've got to admit, it is practical. But a bit pricey at almost $50.
Posted By: Alex - Tue Jul 15, 2008 -
Comments (1)
Category: Bathrooms, Inventions, Sports, Products
Chuck’s Hand-Picked Overnight Weird News for Tuesday
Update: California death-row inmates' web pagesFrom the Los Angeles Times: "Scott Peterson's Web page features smiling photos of himself with his wife Laci, whom he was found guilty of murdering and dumping into San Francisco Bay while she was pregnant with their unborn son. It also links viewers to his family's support site, where Peterson has a recent blog posting on his 'wrongful conviction.'" Looking for pen pals: Randy Kraft (condemned Orange County slayer of 16 young men), northern California serial killer Charles Ng (who describes himself as shy), and the tattooed and muscled Richard Allen Davis (whose abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas helped trigger California's "three strikes" law). But (in the specific admonition of one condemned man), pen pals should be "nonjudgmental." Los Angeles Times
Comments 'inmate_penpals'
Update: The Boston firefighters' disability scam grows
This time it's fire inspector Albert Arroyo, on tax-free disability since March from an unwitnessed on-the-job injury, who apparently heroically overcame his condition and in May finished 8th in the 2008 Pro Natural American bodybuilding championships. (Said his lawyer, time in the gym was a way to get his mind off the depression over not being able to work!) (A Boston Globe investigation in January found 102 firefighters with mostly-mysterious job injuries, taking full retirement, with some doing a paperwork shuffle to a temporarily higher grade so their retirement pay would be higher.) Boston Globe
Comments 'boston_firefighters'
Forgiveness Is Divine
Gang members broke into a home in Modesto, Calif., at about 6 a.m. and beat and stabbed the 32-yr-old resident before realizing, oops, their bad, wrong man, apologizing and leaving. And during a flight from Poland, Newark, N.J., Catholic priest Tomasz Zielinski, allegedly fondled a 16-yr-old girl and attempted to pull her pants zipper down (requiring her to change seats), but then a few minutes later walked over to her new seat and sought forgiveness. (No can do, said she.) Modesto Bee // Star-Ledger
Comments 'forgiveness_divine'
Your Daily Loser
Victor Marin, 20, was reduced to getting down on his knees in the hallway and sticking a procession of dollar bills under the door of retired rabbi Yaakov Kanelsky's apartment, begging, please, that since he's now returning all the cash he just swiped, can Kanelsky kindly give him back the wallet he left on the bed during the burglary? Marin had snatched 92 $1's in addition to the larger bills, and thus the whole thing took a while, and police got there before he was done. New York Post
Comments 'victor_marin'
More Things to Worry About on Tuesday
The scrap-metal market is also paying good money in, er, Afghanistan, where young boys dash out in the middle of firefights to scoop up spent cartridges from U.S. Army machine guns . . . . . Griffin, Ga., is pretty far from the coast and not the place where you'd expect to see six dead sharks on the side of the road (missing all their teeth) . . . . . The family bathroom was basically dismantled, by firefighters, because that was the only way to get little Seth's fingers unstuck from the bathtub drain . . . . . A highway truck tumble in Atlanta: 21 tons of Dos Equis (but not a drop wasted!) . . . . . In Ohio, a man was hospitalized when a nearly-five-ton microscope fell on him (Bonus: at the Nat'l Institute of Occupational Safety and Health). Today's Newsranger: Paul Music
Comments 'worry_080715'
Posted By: Chuck - Tue Jul 15, 2008 -
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Category:
July 14, 2008
The Grass Scanner
In wealthier neighbourhoods, the size of the house and how well maintained the garden is, often represents status. The Grass Scanner is a device designed to measure how green the grass is. It takes reading from 3 random patches of the grass and outputs a Pantone* colour code for one to reference and compare. With the codes, one can then refer to the PARKTONE** cards which contains true grass colours of Royal Parks and other green areas in the UK for people to match up with their own garden.
Where it might fail is on fake lawns, which are becoming increasingly popular here in Southern California. Though fake lawns aren't cheap, so having one might indicate a moderate level of status. (via We Make Money Not Art)
Posted By: Alex - Mon Jul 14, 2008 -
Comments (2)
Category: Inventions, Technology
What do women look at?
One of the earliest eyetracking studies was conducted by the Visual Research Laboratories at Drake University during the 1940s. They used light beams to follow the eyeball movements of women shown a picture of a man. The subjects were all customers at the Marshall Field department store in Chicago. Check out this diagram they produced titled "How a Woman Looks at a Man" (from Look magazine, 1944).
An eyetracking study conducted in 2005 by the Nielsen/Norman Group (described in Online Journalism Review) produced similar results. When shown a photo of baseball-player George Brett, womens' eyes focused on his face. By contrast, when men were shown the same photo, they focused also on his crotch. The researchers noted, "Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site." (This is one of those factoids that doesn't make me feel proud to be a man.)
But what about less tame material? Of course, science has explored this area as well. A 2007 study funded by the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience analyzed the viewing patterns of men and women shown sexual photographs. Strangely enough, the viewing patterns were not the same as in the earlier studies. From Science Daily:
Researchers hypothesized women would look at faces and men at genitals, but, surprisingly, they found men are more likely than women to first look at a woman's face before other parts of the body, and women focused longer on photographs of men performing sexual acts with women than did the males...
"The eye-tracking data suggested what women paid most attention to was dependent upon their hormonal state. Women using hormonal contraceptives looked more at the genitals, while women who were not using hormonal contraceptives paid more attention to contextual elements of the photographs," Rupp said.
"The eye-tracking data suggested what women paid most attention to was dependent upon their hormonal state. Women using hormonal contraceptives looked more at the genitals, while women who were not using hormonal contraceptives paid more attention to contextual elements of the photographs," Rupp said.
Posted By: Alex - Mon Jul 14, 2008 -
Comments (0)
Category: Sexuality, Experiments
Unsolved Mysteries: The Fermilab Puzzle
The enigma began last year when a plain envelope with no return address arrived at the world-famous physics laboratory outside Chicago, addressed simply to "Fermilab." Inside was a single sheet marked by pen with a bizarre series of hash marks, numbers and alien-looking symbols. No one at the lab could make sense of the letter. Was it a joke? A threat? A hint at some exotic new theory?
The lab eventually posted the puzzle on its website, and the online community within days had partially solved it. The first part says, "FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE." (referring, apparently, to a physicist who used to work at Fermilab). The bottom part reads: "EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN." The middle section remains unsolved.
Unfortunately, these messages are as cryptic as the code itself. If you like puzzles, see if you can be the one to shed light on this enigma.
Posted By: Alex - Mon Jul 14, 2008 -
Comments (1)
Category: Science, Unsolved Mysteries
Amazonian Miracle for Sale!
Posted By: Paul - Mon Jul 14, 2008 -
Comments (15)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, History, Inventions, Medicine, Science, Technology, Comics, 1920s
Chuck’s Hand-Picked Overnight Weird News for Monday
Strip-searching a 13-yr-old girl in school, to see if she has ibuprofen, is unconstitutional. . . er, that is, by a vote of 6 to 5 (among the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit). Hey, it was prescription-strength ibupofen they were looking for, said the dissenters! Plus, said the dissenters, there was an informant! (We all know how reliable middle-school students are!) Arizona Daily Star
Comments 'strip_search'
Urban legend come to life, sorta
A woman named Patches Wegmann, 22, was arrested in Houma, La., for supposedly making two men light-headed after they sniffed the perfume she said she was selling on the street. But neither man was robbed, so it's not quite the urban legend. Houma Today
Comments 'houma_perfume'
A "multimillion dollar industry with professional dealers": collecting, er, famous people's hair
Westport, Conn., collectibles dealer John Reznikoff buys and sells the usual gamut of postage stamps, first editions, things like that, but his prize possession ($500K, he says) is a strand of Abe Lincoln's hair, taken on his deathbed. He has lots more but can't afford to display the inventory in his shop: "I'm concerned clients might not take me seriously if they see me selling [hair]." Che Guevara's went at auction last year for $119K. Reznikoff appraised locks that Britney Spears had hacked off (during her fit last year): $3.5K. New York Times
Comments 'hair_collectors'
Nashville's best-kept secret: Police can tranquilize perps at will
A WSMV-TV investigation surprised nearly everyone when it reported that for almost two years now, police have had discretionary authority to inject the drug Midazolam (aka Versed) into unruly perps. That's an off-label use; it's normally an anesthetic for, e.g., colonoscopies. (Bonus: It induces amnesia and so has the added benefit of being unchallengeable legally 'cause you can't remember what the hell happened to you) WSMV-TV via MSNBC
Comments 'police_tranquilize'
Opera for the deaf
We at Weird Universe are all for creating mainstreaming opportunities for the disabled, but these guys in Finland are facing quite a challenge. Certainly, Signing will help, but still . . . the producer specifically said he needed "a baritone [and] a soprano." Reuters via Stuff.co.nz
Comments 'opera_deaf'
Japan's killer work ethic strikes again
Another man has died for Chuck's Camry, sorta. A local gov't organization ruled in June that a worker's 2006 death was because Toyota made him work too hard: up to 114 hours a month of overtime (in Japan, unpaid!) in the six months before he bought the farm. (Last year, the widow of another Toyota worker, who died in 2002, won compensation for his wrongful death caused by overwork.) Washington Post
Comments 'japan_overwork'
Super-concierge service at a Canadian hotel
Lawyers and the judge were flabbergasted when a woman stood up in a Moncton, New Brunswick, courtroom and said she was there to represent a man to request a postponement of his hearing. Was she his lawyer? No. Then? The man was staying at the Delta Beausejour hotel and had called down to the desk to ask a staff member to please run down to the courthouse for him. Moncton Times & Transcript [3rd story]
Comments 'super_concierge'
Your Daily Loser
Name unknown (he got away), but there he is on video at a drug store in Port Richey, Fla., handing the clerk a robbery note, only he apparently forgot to write anything at all on the paper, and the clerk, sensing the man's loserhood, called 911 right in front of him, sending him scurrying. St. Petersburg Times
Comments 'blank_note'
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Police curtailed the string of performances of John Clifford, 30, in the lobby of the Velvet Mills apartment house (Manchester, Conn.), in which he would cavort in socks and baseball cap and, er, enjoy himself, after he had pillaged the laundry room for women's undies. Hartford Courant
Comments 'john_clifford'
More Things to Worry About on Monday
Police in Pontiac, Mich., believe that the reason a man shot in the mouth is still alive is because his braces deflected the bullet . . . . . A woman parking her car in Athens, Ga., opened the door to lean out and talk to another driver, but fell out and ran over herself (she survived) . . . . . Windsor Hills Baptist Church (Oklahoma City) canceled the annual semiautomatic assault rifle giveaway it holds for teenagers (to bring more kids into the pews) . . . . . The local school board in La Mesa, Calif., is sensing a problem with Helix High, in that four (4) teachers now have had student-sex issues in less than two yrs. Today's Newsrangers: Bob Pert, Josh Levin, Joel Walz, Ginger Katz, Roger Gulbransen
Comments 'worry_080714'
Posted By: Chuck - Mon Jul 14, 2008 -
Comments (0)
Category:
July 13, 2008
Happy Hula-hooping!
Posted By: Paul - Sun Jul 13, 2008 -
Comments (3)
Category: Anniversary, Business, Products, Customs, Decades, 1950s, Fads, History, Inventions
Daring Polish Aviator—Times Two!
Synchronicity in the creative arts is pretty weird. The independent invention of very similar things. Charles Fort, one of the masters of all things weird, even had a term for it: "steam engine time." Fort's notion was that when an era was ripe, it called forth certain creations multiple times, without coordination among mere humans.I was reminded of this recently in a small way while watching the 1942 film TO BE OR NOT TO BE. In this film, Robert Stack plays a dashing Polish aviator named Lieut. Stanislav Sobinski.
What other fictional dashing Polish aviator premiered right at this time? None other than Blackhawk, who debuted in August of 1941.
Could it be a simple case of the Blackhawk comic influencing the scripter of To Be or Not to Be? Unlikely, given the short span between the debut of Blackhawk and the release of the Robert Stack film, which had to be in production for some time prior.
It's more likely that the plight of Poland under Hitler's invasion called forth the notion of a national hero. But why aviator? Just the romance of aerial combat, I suppose.
Posted By: Paul - Sun Jul 13, 2008 -
Comments (11)
Category: Art, Comics, Celebrities, Decades, 1940s, Forteana, History, Historical Figure, Hollywood, Inventions, Movies, Synchronicity
Art Garfunkel’s Library
Art Garfunkel has kept a record of every book he's read since 1968. If you want, you can download the entire list. Yes, this is THE Art Garfunkel, of Simon and Garfunkel.The guy has read an impressive amount, but I don't find it to be a particularly interesting selection. The bulk of it is stuff you might find in a college literature course (i.e. "The Classics"). There isn't much of what gets labeled as genre literature, such as science fiction or horror. Personally, I think some of the most imaginative literature gets produced in those genres.
Garfunkel's list is also relatively light on non-fiction academic works from the sciences and social sciences. I guess the problem is there are just too many interesting books. No one has time to read them all. (via Reality Carnival)
Posted By: Alex - Sun Jul 13, 2008 -
Comments (0)
Category: Literature, Books, Music
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Chuck Shepherd Chuck is the purveyor of News of the Weird, the syndicated column which for decades has set the gold-standard for reporting on oddities and the bizarre. Our banner was drawn by the legendary underground cartoonist Rick Altergott. Contact Us |
