NEWS OF THE WEIRD
Least Competent Criminal
As over-the-road truckers protested COVID-related mandates in Canada’s capital city, a 20-year-old Akron, Ohio, man wanted to get in on the action. So, on Feb. 7, he called in a bomb threat — to the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, in Ottawa ... Ohio. The man said he was going to set off a bomb in Ottawa, then called back a second time and said he’d been shot, The Lima News reported. “When he found out he was talking to Ohio and not Canada, he said he hadn’t been shot but was simply trying to waste (Canadian authorities’) time and resources because he didn’t agree with their mask mandate,” said Sheriff’s Office Cpt. Brad Brubaker. He also admitted there was no bomb. “You’d think with him being from Ohio, the 419 area code might have rung a bell,” Brubaker added.
Inexplicable
On Feb. 6, a man in Raleigh, North Carolina, was stopped at a red light when the woman in the car next to him exited her car and approached his passenger window. She screamed at him, “Fix my car. Fix the problem,” he reported to ABC11-TV. “Once I locked the car, she got more aggressive.” The man wanted to drive away, but he was boxed in by cars. “Next thing I know, I seen the knife coming out — the big machete knife — she pulled it out from the sleeve” and started beating his passenger-side window with it. Eventually, she broke through the window. “I was just pressed against my driver-side seat ... until I could step on the gas,” he said. When the light changed, he drove to a police station, where he filed a report. Raleigh police are investigating.
New World Order
An unnamed woman from Paterna, Spain, received a $570 fine in January for not picking up her dog’s poop while she visited Benalmadena last August, Oddity Central reported. Aside from the irritation of the financial hit, how did they connect the dots ... er, drops? The notice included the street where the excrement was found and the date. Turns out, ADN Canino, a Spanish company that maintains a database of canine DNA, works with authorities all over the country — mostly in the service of finding owners of lost dogs and preventing abuse, but now also tracking down offenders of poop-scooping laws. The woman in this case was quick to register her pet with ADN in case he was ever lost. Authorities in Benalmadena took samples and matched her dog — and she’s out $570.
The Neighbors
On Feb. 6, according to Kyong Moulton, 66, she returned to her home in Palm Bay, Florida, and found leaves on her lawn, ClickOrlando.com reported. Assuming the neighbors across the street had put them there, she fetched her leaf blower and blew them back over into their lawn. The man across the street and his mother went outside to confront Moulton, and his sister joined them. The arrest report said Moulton slapped the sister and stabbed her in the leg with a steak knife; as the man tried to help his sister, he was allegedly stabbed in the arm. Moulton also pushed the mother to the ground. Moulton denies stabbing anyone; surveillance video does not show a stabbing, and no knife was recovered. Nevertheless, Moulton was charged with two counts of aggravated battery and one count of battery on a person 65 or older.
The Neighbors and the Devil
In the Bolivian city of El Alto, David Choque has alarmed his neighbors with his new decorating scheme, Reuters reported. Choque, a miner, hired an artist to create sculptures of long-horned skeletal devils from cement and wood and mount them on the outside of his home. Choque told Reuters that the sculptures hearken to life in Bolivian mines centuries ago, when indigenous men were forced into digging for silver. Colonial masters would use devil images to scare the men into working. But some neighbors fear that his decor signals satanic worship. Maria Laurel said she has heard about naked rituals in Choque’s house: “The truth is, it frightens me.” Choque pooh-poohs this idea: “Closed-minded people will think it’s something supernatural, but people need to open their minds and see it as a tourist attraction, something that can improve the area.”