Weird News - Things that make you go 'hmmm'

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/30163294

Non-paywall link: [ https://archive.is/1XjBq ]

“It’s a beautiful thing that for the first time in history you can see a saint dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. That’s a great message,” Father Carlos Acácio Gonçalves Ferreira, the shrine’s rector, said at the time. A Franciscan monk based at the tomb, noted that “many young people” were visiting.

Now get rid of the homophobia, sex abuse scandals, sexism, and anti-choice bullshit, mmkay?

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — An 81-year-old Montana man faces sentencing in federal court Monday in Great Falls for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to illegally create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.

However, the sentencing memorandum also congratulates Schubarth for successfully cloning the endangered sheep, which he named Montana Mountain King. The animal has been confiscated by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services.

“Jack did something no one else could, or has ever done,” the memo said. “On a ranch, in a barn in Montana, he created Montana Mountain King. MMK is an extraordinary animal, born of science, and from a man who, if he could re-write history, would have left the challenge of cloning a Marco Polo only to the imagination of Michael Crichton,” who is the author of the science fiction novel Jurassic Park.

Meanwhile IVF is north of $25k...

Impromptu running of the bulls

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/29541820

A man who was abducted as a six-year-old while playing in a California park in 1951 has been found more than seven decades later thanks to the help of an online ancestry test, old photos and newspaper clippings.

The Bay Area News Group reported on Friday that Luis Armando Albino’s niece in Oakland – with assistance from police, the FBI and the justice department – located her uncle living on the US east coast.

Albino, a father and grandfather, is a retired firefighter and Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam, according to his niece, 63-year-old Alida Alequin. She found Albino and reunited him with his California family in June.

On 21 February 1951 a woman lured the six-year-old Albino from the park in West Oakland, where he had been playing with his older brother, and promised him in Spanish that she would buy him candy.

NSFL warning

This year, in a bizarre effort to make the Oklahoma State Fair smell even worse than it already does, Dent Source sponsored and organized a competition called the Stinkin’ Sentra Giveaway.

Similar to the B.O. GEO competition of years past, the premise is simple: four people are sent to live inside one Nissan Sentra in an outdoor fair exhibit. The contestants are only allowed to leave the car once every three hours for a 15-minute bathroom break, and anything they bring into the car—like discarded food, trash, or a carnie scalp—has to stay in the car. The last person to leave wins the car.

According to local media reports, the competition concluded this past weekend. The winner was Brian Richmond, who outlasted the other three contestants and, according to witnesses, looks like he smells like a Walmart:

...

Brian’s victory in the Stinkin’ Sentra competition didn’t come without some smelly and disgusting controversy.

Meet Chris Deschner. He’s the guy who finished second in the competition, leaving the car after 80 hours of being trapped inside.

In a Facebook video, Chris claims he exited the vehicle only after Brian went full Mr. Hankey and brought a cup of human excrement from the port-a-potty into the car following a bathroom break!

Yep, you read that right. The winner brought a cup of human excrement from the port-a-potty into the car following a bathroom break. If you need to take a quick break to throw up in your mouth, feel free.

Chris protested Brian’s septic stunt to contest organizers, but after holding a quick tribunal—hopefully while wearing hazmat suits—the Dent Source team determined that bringing human excrement into the Sentra was a violation of competition rules, but not enough to disqualify Brian.

They removed the cup from the car and told Chris and Brian to resume play.

Unfortunately, Chris couldn’t mentally recover from this clear violation of the laws of man. Claiming he had “more self-respect than that,” he dropped out of the competition like a loose turd, handing Brian the victory and a new, shitty car.

...

If you ask me, Chris probably realized he had no chance of winning once he witnessed the sewage-level depths his opponent was willing to go for victory, so he quit under protest to try to sneak a win and save face.

Honestly, I don’t blame Chris for this move. In fact, I consider him the winner! Not only does he still have his dignity, but even better—he won’t have to drive a Nissan Sentra.

Should've used Go.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17610946

The squirrels jumped on the Great Western Railway (GWR) 8.54am train from Reading to Gatwick on Monday, forcing passengers to flee to other carriages.

The passengers alerted staff, who tried to lure the squirrels off the train at Redhill with snacks, before trying to force them off with brooms - but to no avail.

They subsequently called the journey off entirely.

Not just a short drive, either.

Gross.