NEWS OF THE WEIRD
Bus Driver Solution
In Summit County, Colorado, schools are struggling to find bus drivers, but Josh Smith, 12, has a solution. Smith, who lives with his parents in Silverthorne, approached them about kayaking to school across Lake Dillon, rather than having them drive him the long way. “I have a 12-year-old who wants to be adventurous, wants to do something none of his buddies would do, and how can I say no to that?” said Jason, Josh’s dad. KDVR-TV reported that on Josh’s first commute, he arrived almost on time. “I was late to one of my classes, and everyone was like, ‘Josh, where were you? We were worried,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, I was kayaking to school,’” Josh said.
Oopsie
A funeral home in Ahoskie, North Carolina, was reportedly trying to apologize to the family of Mary Archer after an incident at her viewing on Sept. 7, the New York Post reported. When Archer’s two daughters arrived at Hunter’s Funeral Home, they found a woman wearing Archer’s clothes in the casket — but it was not Mary. “There’s no similarity in the person,” Jennetta Archer said. “Their size was way off ... she was so small compared to my mother.” At first, funeral home personnel argued that it was indeed Mary in the casket, but then they found her body in the embalming room. While the funeral home claims to have reached out to apologize, the sisters say they haven’t heard from the business.
Inexplicable
Doctors at Klaipeda University Hospital in Lithuania were shocked to discover the source of a man’s abdominal pain through an X-ray, The Guardian reported on Oct. 1. Apparently as a response to giving up alcohol about a month ago, the man had swallowed more than a kilogram of metal objects: nuts, nails, bolts, screws and knives. It took surgeons three hours to remove the pieces and repair the inner walls of the stomach. The unnamed man is being kept under observation and has been offered psychological assistance.
Mistaken Identity
Animal control officers were called to a home in San Mateo, California, on Oct. 3 to rescue a stranded tarantula on the roof, United Press International reported. But according to the Peninsula Humane Society, when the officer climbed up to capture it, she instead found an old Halloween decoration. “It looked like it had been up there for a while,” said Buffy Tarbox, communications manager for the Humane Society. “Everyone thought it was real.” The fake spider turned up for a few days on various desks at the Humane Society offices, then hit the circular file.
It’s
WRAL-TV reported on Oct. 4 that several drivers along Highway 147 in Durham, North Carolina, had experienced a shower of brown, greasy, bad-smelling liquid hitting their vehicles and subsequently damaging the paint. “It had sort of a bleach smell,” said Heather Toler. “It was raining down on top of the cars. It seems to be acidic based on how it’s eating away the paint on the car.” The mystery was solved two days later, when representatives of the chemical wholesale company Brenntag informed WRAL-TV that several of its employees had been depressurizing and disconnecting an empty sulfuric acid railcar at the company’s facility next to the highway, causing acid vapor to be released into the air.
a Mystery