Refrigerated Camels

Instead of using refrigerated trucks to deliver medical supplies to people who live in the deserts of Africa, inventors have built solar-powered refrigerators that can be carried by camels, and so the medicines are delivered via refrigerated camel.

Apparently it wasn't that easy to build a camel-carried refrigerator. It had to be lightweight, but also sturdy enough to survive the motion of being on the camel as well as the extreme desert conditions.

More info: ABC News, inhabitat.com

Posted By: Alex - Wed May 31, 2017 - Comments (4)
Category: Animals, Inventions, Medicine, Transportation, Africa

New American Dictionary of Collegese:  1963

Here is another one of those attempts by journalist "squares" to understand the lingo of youths.

Many more entries at the link.

Posted By: Paul - Wed May 31, 2017 - Comments (5)
Category: Languages, Slang, Teenagers, 1960s

Anti-Safety Device

It's a combo seat-buckle alarm stopper and bottler opener. So that you can crack open a cold one when you get in the car, and then drive seat-belt free. You can find tons of them for sale on eBay, where they go for as little as 74 cents each.

They should give these away as a freebie when you buy a cellphone to make it a trifecta of unsafe driving.

Posted By: Alex - Tue May 30, 2017 - Comments (4)
Category: Motor Vehicles, Cars

A Brief History of Westernized Snake Dances

Choose your favorite.













I believe that "Janik and Amaut" are really Harold and Lola Leibman, as seen in the final clip. More about their eccentric careers here.

Posted By: Paul - Tue May 30, 2017 - Comments (2)
Category: Animals, Sex Symbols, Dance

Graves will be open Memorial Day

I came across this ad while browsing an old National Lampoon True Facts book, which described it as being from an "unidentified Kansas newspaper":



After a bit of research I tracked the business down. It was Graves Drug Store in Emporia, Kansas. And it's still around.

The Emporia Gazette - May 26, 1977

Posted By: Alex - Mon May 29, 2017 - Comments (2)
Category: Death, Advertising

Mystery Illustration 47

All of these women either won or competed for the same Beauty Queen title. What was that title?

The answer is here.

And after the jump.


More in extended >>

Posted By: Paul - Mon May 29, 2017 - Comments (3)
Category: Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Contests, Races and Other Competitions, 1970s

News of the Weird (May 28, 2017)

News of the Weird
Weirdnuz.M529, May 28, 2017
Copyright 2017 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.

Lead Story

Breaking News (Rare Fetish!): Jordan Haskins, 26, was sentenced to probation and sex counseling in May after pleading guilty to eight charges arising from two auto accidents in Saginaw, Mich. Prosecutors said Haskins described "cranking," in which he would remove a vehicle's spark-plug wires to make it "run rough," which supposedly improves his chances for a self-service happy ending. Haskins's lawyer added, "[Cranking] is something I don't think we understand as attorneys." [MLive.com, 5-9-2017]

The Entrepreneurial Spirit!

Le Plat Sal ("the dirty plate") restaurant in the Marais district of Paris features specialties actually containing dirt--or as Chef Solange Gregoire calls it, "the mud of the earth that caresses our toes . . . the sand kissed by the sun . . . rocks." Mused an NPR host in April, "What's left? People are already eating snout-to-tail, leaves-to-roots . . .." Gregoire extolled her 4-star dishes, including pastry crust a la Mont Lachat rock and a Boue Ragout stew simmered with silt from the River Seine. (NPR also noted that the founder of The Shake Shack was "quietly" planning a new American chain, "Rock in Roll.") [NPR, 4-1-2017]

Goldman Sachs analyst Noah Poponak's 98-page paper (leaked to Business Insider in April) touted the wealth obtainable by capturing the platinum reputed to be in asteroids. The costs to mine the stone (rockets, launch expenses, etc.) might have dropped recently to about $3 billion--a trifle next to the $50 billion worth of platinum Poponak said a single asteroid might contain. (On the other hand, experts point out, such abundance of platinum might crash the worldwide price.) [Business Insider, 4-6-2017]

The Twisted Ranch restaurant in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis, Mo., saw crowds swell in March after it revamped its menu with more than two dozen items made with ranch dressing (including ranch-infused Bloody Marys). As one satisfied visitor put it, "Ranch is everyone's guilty pleasure." [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3-29-2017]

Unclear on the Concept

Yale University graduate students (well, at least eight of them), claiming "union" status, demonstrated in front of the Yale president's home in April demanding better benefits (beyond the annual free tuition, $30,000 stipends, and free health care). Some of the students characterized their action as an "indefinite fast" while others called it a "hunger strike." However, a pamphlet associated with the unionizing made it clear that strikers could go eat any time they got hungry. [Chronicle of Higher Education, 5-9-2017]

Smooth Reactions

(1) Police in Cleveland, Ohio, are searching for the woman whose patience ran out on April 14th awaiting her young son's slow haircut at Allstate Barber College. She pulled out a pistol, took aim at the barber, and warned: "I got two clips! I'll pop you." (She allowed him to finish up--more purposefully, obviously--and left without further incident.) (2) Barbara Lowery, 24, was arrested for disorderly conduct in Cullman, Ala., in May after police spotted her standing on a car, stomping out the windshield and smashing the sun roof. She said it was a boyfriend's car, that she thought he was cheating on her, and that she had spent the previous night "thinking" about what to do, "pray[ing] about it and stuff." (However, she said, "I did it anyway.") [WOIO-TV (Cleveland), 4-28-2017] [AL.com (Birmingham), 5-2-2017]

New World Order

The Drone Economy: (1) A Netherlands startup company announced in March its readiness to release drones capable of tracking freshly-deposited dog poop (via an infrared glow from the pile) and, eventually, be guided (perhaps via GPS and Artificial Intelligence) to scoop up the deposits and carry them away. (2) Potentially, Unemployed Bees: Researcher-inventor Eijiro Miyako announced in the journal Chem in March that he had created a drone that pollinates flowers (though requiring human guidance until GPS and AI can be enabled). Miyako's adhesive gel lightly brushes pollen grains, collecting just enough to touch down successfully onto another flower to pollinate it. [The Register (London), 3-29-2017] [CNN, 3-9-2017]

Social critics and futurists suggest that the next great market for computerization (already underway) will be selling "human improvement" (alas, perhaps merely helping already-successful people to even greater heights). Some sports teams are experimenting with "transcranial direct current stimulation" as a way to put athletes' brains into constant alert, and KQED Radio reported in May that about a third of the San Francisco Giants players have donned weak-current headsets that cover the motor cortex at the top of the head. The team's sports scientist (Bonus name: Geoff Head!) said players performed slightly better on some drills after the stimulation. (One the other hand, at press time, the Giants were still next-to-last in the National League West.) [KQED, 5-8-2017]

The Aristocrats!

(1) Recent alarming headlines: "UK woman who urinated on Trump golf course loses case" (Associated Press [London] via U.S. News & World Report, 4-5-2017) "Fish thief on unicycle busted by DNR [Department of Natural Resources]" (MLive.com [Battle Creek, Mich.], 5-5-2017) And, from the Northwest Florida Daily News (Fort Walton Beach, Fla.), all on the same day (5-16-2017): (1) "Man throws fork at woman in fight over dog poop" (2) "Senior citizen punches husband for taking Lord's name in vain" (3) "Two people busted for creating fake football league, lawmen say" (4) "Man denies defecating in parking lot despite officer witnessing deed" [via Orlando Sentinel, 5-17-2017]

Inexplicable

Clearing the Conscience: (1) In February, a 52-year-old man who, arrested for DUI and taken to a police station in Germany's Lower Saxony state, wound up spontaneously confessing to a 1991 cold-case murder in Bonn. Police confirmed that, after re-opening the files, they found details matching the man's account, though the man himself was "not quite clear" why he had confessed. (2) A game warden in Titus County, Tex., reported in December arresting a man for possessing a shotgun (the man's third arrest as a convicted felon with a firearm). The warden had spotted the weapon only because the man "out of the blue" approached him and asked if he wanted to inspect his hunting license (which, it turns out, was in order). [The Local (Berlin), 3-2-2017] [Beaumont Business Journal, 12-16-2016]

Weirdo-American Community

A 22-year-old Los Angeles makeup artist who calls himself Vinny Ohh has, according to his several TV and YouTube appearances and much social media presence, transformed himself into a "genderless," extra-terrestrial-looking person via around 110 bodily procedures (so far), costing him at least $50,000. He says his appearance is merely an "all-in" representation of how he feels inside. (The "genderless" Vinny has yet to specify a pronoun preference.) [Metro News (London), 3-6-2017]

Update

The impending retirement from public life of Britain's Prince Philip, announced in May, has likely quashed any slight chance he will visit the Yaohnanen people on Tanna (in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu)--tragic, of course, because Tanna's "Chief Jack" and his followers continue to believe Philip descended from their own spiritual ancestors and has thus dominated their thoughts for the last seven decades. In fact, when Tanna was in the path of Cyclone Donna in May 2017, the Yaohnanen were quickly reminded of Philip's continuing "powers." (Philip has never visited, but Tannans have long prayed over an autographed photograph he sent years ago.) [Reuters, 5-6-2017]

News of the Weird Classic (October 2013)

The story of Kopi Luwak coffee has long been a News of the Weird staple, begun in 1993 with the first reports that a super-premium market existed for coffee beans digested (and excreted) by certain Asian civet cats, collected, washed, and brewed. In June [2013], as news broke that civets were being mistreated--captured and caged solely for their bean-adulterating utility--the American Chemical Society was called on for ideas how to assure that the $227/lb. coffee beans had, indeed, been expelled from genuine Asian civets. Hence, “gas chromatography and mass spectrometry” tests were finally developed to assure drinkers, at $80 a cup in California, that they were sipping the real thing. [http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/usaedition/2013-09-12-method-aims-to-authenticate-civet-coffee0_st_u.htm]

Thanks This Week to Jon Maxwell and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Posted By: Chuck - Sun May 28, 2017 - Comments (4)
Category:

Do Girls Get In Your Hair?

The Daily Tar Heel - Oct 16, 1960

Playboy - 1960 -- via Hair Hall of Fame

Posted By: Alex - Sun May 28, 2017 - Comments (3)
Category: Advertising, 1960s, Hair and Hairstyling

Unique Real Estate Negotiations

Original story here.

Posted By: Paul - Sun May 28, 2017 - Comments (0)
Category: Buildings and Other Structures, Domestic, Marriage, Supernatural, Occult, Paranormal, Stupid Criminals

Brick:  “Summer Heat”

"That summer heat makes me want to get down! The moonlight's making it easier for me to see/That it's time for love--or Mother Nature's playing tricks on me!""

Wikipedia page here.

Posted By: Paul - Sun May 28, 2017 - Comments (1)
Category: Music, 1980s, Cacophony, Dissonance, White Noise and Other Sonic Assaults