Bulldog Edition : strange news

What will you do with YOUR immortal soul?

bulldog — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 15:09:00 GMT

You can buy just about anything on eBay. You can buy used stuff and new stuff. You can find vintage and antique items, and the latest thing. You can find the most common things…and you can find the most unusual things.

Take for example, the item Lori N. from Albuquerque, N.M. posted for sale. She's a freelance writer who's had a little misfortune lately, and decided to sell something she thought would bring a pretty penny – her immortal soul.

The listing, which featured a starting bid of $2,000, has been removed. Apparently, eBay has a strict policy regarding human remains, although there is nothing included about souls.

No word yet whether Satan entered a bid.

And the freak train just keeps rollin'...

bulldog — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 16:37:00 GMT

A Massachusetts man has been arrested and charged with domestic assault and battery and assault after police say he threw a pair of jeans into his girlfriend's face after an argument. But the jeans weren't just regular jeans. They were covered in wasabi sauce.

The woman received a text message from a male friend, which reportedly set the man off. He threatened to throw a pair of her jeans, worth $200, outside. The man then doused the jeans in wasabi sauce, and after taking her cell phone from her, threw the jeans in her face.

The woman is apparently OK, but feeling a little spicy.

Other headlines that caught our eye this morning:

• Salma Hayek shows cleavage, wears yoga pants

• Charlize (Theron) shaved her head

• Miley Cyrus shows major cleavage

• Farmer blames death rays for cows' deaths

• Bear catches peeing man

• Four! – Women arrested for baring breasts on golf green

• Woman shoots herself – Without a gun

Manic Monday: Headlines to make you go, "Hmmm…"

bulldog — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:46:00 GMT

Schools catching cheaters with Web service

More than 150 schools in the U.S. now use an online cheat-checking service. The services run student assignments through a massive database, which will detect whether a student plagiarized material from Internet sources or other students.

'Cupid' expected to make full recovery

Apparently, cats land on their feet, no matter what – even if you shoot them with an arrow.

A stray orange tabby in Houston, Texas earned the nickname Cupid because he survived a piercing shoulder wound, which ran from shoulder to shoulder. The 2-year-old feline had residents chasing him for three days before he was finally caught and taken to a local vet.

The vet X-rayed the feline and found no internal organs were harmed, and Cupid underwent surgery. The vet who treated him, however, said a shot like this wasn't an accident – someone meant to shoot him. The person didn't mean, however, for Cupid to survive. He's expected to make a full recovery.

Flaming tampons attack on car

A woman was arrested in Pennsylvania after she attempted to blow up a vehicle outside of a bar by using flaming feminine hygiene products. The tampons were soaked in gas and had been used to attempt to ignite the gas tank.

The woman and a male accomplice knew the owner of the car, and the woman was, according to her Facebook profile, "out for some revenge."

Weird News Wednesday: Fact is stranger than fiction

bulldog — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:50:00 GMT

This is weird stuff. We couldn't make it up if we tried. You've been warned.

In Chinese legend, tea leaves picked by fairies using not their hands but just their mouths yielded brewed tea that would bring prosperity and cure diseases, and now the historic, picturesque Jiuhua Mountain Tea Plantation (in Gushi, Henan province) has promised to hire up to 10 female virgins to provide the equivalently pure and delicate tea leaves, picked with the teeth and dropped into small baskets worn around the women's necks. According to an April report in London's Daily Mail, only virgins with strong necks and lips (and a bra size of C-cup or larger), and without visible scars or blemishes, will be considered for the $80-a-day jobs (an almost unheard of salary in China, especially for agricultural field work).

Homeless Charles Mader, a convicted sex offender in Albuquerque, was arrested in May for failure to report his change of address, as required by law. Mader had moved out of his registered address, which was a Dumpster, into a community shelter.

Louis "Shovelhead" Garrett is an artist, a mannequin collector and a quilter in the eastern Missouri town of Louisiana, with a specialty in sewing quilts from women's panties, according to a report in the Hannibal Courier-Post. After showing his latest quilt at a women's luncheon in Hannibal recently, he told the newspaper of his high standards: "No polyester. I don't want those cheap, dollar-store, not-sexy, farm-girl panties. I want classy – silk or nylon."

The local board of health closed down the Wing Wah Chinese restaurant in South Dennis, Mass., briefly for various violations. The most serious, said officials, was the restaurant's practice of draining water from cabbage by putting it in cloth laundry bags, placing the bags between two pieces of plywood in the parking lot, and driving over them with a van. Said Health Director Ted Dumas, "I've seen everything now."

These news stories just leave us speechless

bulldog — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:09:00 GMT

The latest weird news we've found from all over the place...

Librarian Graham Barker, 45, of Perth, Australia, casually revealed to a reporter in October that his hobby of 26 years – harvesting his own navel lint daily, just before he showers – has now won acclaim in the Guinness Book of World Records. His three-jar collection (a fourth is in progress) has been sold to a local museum. His pastime, he told London's Daily Mail in October, "costs nothing and takes almost no time or effort so there is no compelling reason to stop." Barker, who also collects McDonald's tray liners, said he once did a "navel lint survey," and "a handful of respondents" "confessed" to the hobby. "One guy might have persisted, but he got married, and his wife ordered him to stop."

Bolivia's president Evo Morales, the former union leader and coca farmer known for hard-nosed political combat, is also a fanatical soccer player and drew worldwide video attention in October for an incident during a supposedly friendly match between his pals and a team headed by the mayor of La Paz. After absorbing a vicious foul 5 minutes into the contest (resulting in a leg gash), Morales confronted the offender and kneed him in his (as local media described it) "testicular zone," leaving the player curled on the ground. Afterward, Morales' bodyguards briefly threatened the gasher with arrest.

Real Father: In September, a judge in Kent County, Mich., finally ordered Howard Veal, 44, to prison to serve at least two years for failure to pay child support. He is more than $500,000 behind in payments to 14 mothers for the 23 children he has fathered. Authorities suspect there are even more.

Fake Father: French officials arrested a 54-year-old immigrant in September on suspicion of welfare fraud. They had recently begun to notice the man applying for government benefits for 55 children by 55 different mothers. (He may have fathered none at all.)

Swiss artist Gianni Motti has been displaying a bar of soap at Zurich's Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, claiming it was made from fat that had been liposuctioned from Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Motti said a clinic employee had surreptitiously given him the fat following Berlusconi's treatment in 2004, but the clinic has denied any involvement.

David Rees draws the political cartoon "Get Your War On," but in his new day job, he is an artisan – of pencil-sharpening. "With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat," he complained to the Los Angeles Times in August. For $15 (postage paid), Rees will lovingly, painstakingly sharpen a customer's favorite pencil or one of his own classic No. 2's and ship it in a secure tube to protect its newly super-sharp point. Rees also gives periodic exhibitions, wearing safety goggles and apron, to demonstrate his guarantee of "respect" for the instruments – "an authentic interaction with your pencil."

The investigative journalism Web site ProPublica.org, curious about the workers being hired in the mortgage industry's massive, rushed re-examination of home loans previously foreclosed upon but which may have been processed illegally, began scouring the classified ads in October and November. Result: Though most employers "preferred" college graduates with credit-industry experience, it was clear from the entry-level wages offered that many were accepted only with high school educations, with at least some barely familiar with the concept of mortgages. (One staffing agency, offering $10 to $12 an hour, sought a "Supervisor of Foreclosure Department," but that position, also, required only a high school diploma.)

Life Imitates 100 Sci-Fi Movies: At a conference in Vancouver in October, University of California, San Francisco researcher Charles Chiu disclosed that a never-before-detected virus that partially wiped out a monkey colony in a lab in Davis, Calif., recently appeared to have "jumped" from its species onto a human scientist at the facility. However, Chiu and his research team said there is "no cause for alarm at this time."

Smooth Reaction: In November, after her fourth grade son was allegedly slapped by his teacher at a Kansas City, Mo., elementary school (son, black; teacher, white), Lisa Henry Bowen submitted a 40-page list of reparations she expects from President Obama and two dozen other officials. Included in the many demands: $1.25 million in cash, $13,500 in Wal-Mart gift cards, free college education, Disney World vacations, private tennis lessons, an African safari, her mortgage paid off, home remodeling, nine years of free medical and dental coverage, and a nine-year "consulting contract" with the school district at $15,000 a month. Anticipating criticism that she had gone too far, she added that opponents can "kiss my entire black a**!!!!!! I haven't begun to go far enough!!!!!!!"

Centuries ago, women who devoted themselves to the Hindu goddess Devadasi were priestesses from upper castes, but over time, the temples began to use "Devadasis" merely as prostitutes to raise money, according to a new British documentary by Sarah Harris, who was interviewed in September by London's The Independent. As before, girls are offered to the temples by their parents by age 3 and perform chores, but nowadays, at puberty, the temple begins to cash in on them. India made this practice illegal in 1988, but it endures, largely because the "Devadasis" (now, almost exclusively from lower castes) have, as career alternatives, only farm labor and latrine-cleaning.

Incoming University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley told reporters in September of encountering one unexpected problem: staph infections caused by "the worst shower discipline of any team I've ever been around." He said he had recently run a clinic on "application of soap to the rag" and "making sure you hit all your body."

Wow. We have no words.