Guest Blogger – Page 12 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Guest Blogger

KAZAKHSTAN WINS GOLD MEDAL, BORAT’S VERSION OF NATIONAL ANTHEM PLAYS

Sacha Baron Cohen's character "Borat" has upset the country of Kazakhstan once before.

Just when the country thought they were done with Sacha Baron Cohen’s character “Borat” that led to a national upset from the way this character, and the Borat movie, portrayed their country, it comes back around and annoys them once more.

This time, Mr. Cohen didn’t even have to do anything.

The organizers of this sports gala and award ceremony in Kuwait unfortunately downloaded the wrong version of the Kazakhstan National Anthem to play when Maria Dmitrienko won the gold medal in shooting.

The incorrect song had phrases like-

“Kazakhstan home of Tinshein swimming pool. It’s length thirty meter and width six meter. Filtration system a marvel to behold. It remove 80 percent of human solid waste.”

-compared to the actual lyrics of the anthem-

“From the antiquity
Our heroic glory emerged, They did not give up their pride, My Kazakh people are strong!

Kazakh shooter and gold medalist, Maria Dmitrienko.

Here’s the video of the proceedings:

http://youtu.be/wrFSdeMqwi8

Daily Mail writes:

It seems the nightmare of Borat has come back to haunt Kazakhstan.

The Asian country was outraged by the Sacha Baron Cohen-inspired film of 2006 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and banned it from being shown in their county.

But now, incredible footage from a medal ceremony in Kuwait has shown Borat’s satirical version of the National Anthem played out INSTEAD of the genuine one.

It appears the organisers downloaded the incorrect version of the anthem.

But the Kazakh athlete who was the recipient of the major error, Maria Dmitrienko, refused to be flustered, and continued to the end of the made-up song.

The rest of her shooting team, for who she has just won the gold medal for, were less than impressed however, and demanded the ceremony be re-run as well as a full apology made.

Read more at dailymail.co.uk

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Guest Blogger

GHOST THROWS FRUIT ROLL-UPS OFF SHELF

Ghost obviously not a fan of sweets, throws a box of fruit roll-ups to the floor.

Apparently, one paranormal spectre isn’t a fan of fruity treats. In cctv footage captured at an IGA store in Australia, a box of fruit roll-ups is flung to the floor with the store closed and absolutely no one around.

The Huffington Post writes:

Paranormal investigators may have a startling new piece of information to use in their never-ending quest to make contact with ghosts: They have a thing for Fruit Roll-Ups.

Well, at least an alleged apparition in Brompton, South Australia, does.

A startling new security camera video taken at the IGA store shows a pack of Fruit Roll-Ups being tossed, depending on who you talk to, between and 18 and 36 feet away from its original location — despite no one being visible nearby.

Security cameras have shown how one box mysteriously jumped six meters from its original location on the floor of the IGA store in Adelaide, despite no one being present, according to Metro.co.uk.

UFO CAUGHT ON SEVEN DIFFERENT CAMERAS IN CHILE!!

A lightning fast fly-by from a UFO at an airshow in Chile.

It seems an extra fast ufo got a little curious as to what all the ruckus was about over in Chile and decided to have a little look-see.

Little did it know it would be captured on seven different cameras filming the event from seven different angles while it traveled through the air at over 4,000 mph.

Daily Mail writes:

Video from Chile is stirring up the UFO debate after an unusual object took a fly-by during an air-show.

The footage, from 2010, appears to show a ‘spot’ moving quickly from frame to frame, causing the engineer who spotted the aberration enough alarm that he alerted the Chilean Government.

The UFO made an appearance during an acrobatic air-show at the El Bosque Air Force Base in Santiago, and apparently went un-noticed at the time.

Whether this is because this was due to advanced alien cloaking technology, or because the object is just an artifact on the film depends on your viewpoint.

Investigative journalist and UFO author Leslie Kean told MSN’s Cosmic Log: ‘This is a very, very unusual case, and I’m hoping that this case will help move forward the recognition that there really is something here that’s worthy of further study.

‘It has the possibility of being a breakthrough case.’ However ‘debunker’ Robert Sheaffer told the website: “They are “unexplained cases” only if you ignore the explanation. ‘That’s what’s going to happen in this case.’

Kean said that CEFAA, the government agency which investigates strange air phenomena, found the object on seven separate pieces of video tape, which implies the object – whatever it is – is not an abberation on the video tape.

Ricardo Bermudez, CEFAA’s director, told a UFO conference last month that the spots were caused by an object traveling at speeds in excess of 4,000 mph.

Kean picked out a few elements that make this sighting a little special, in particular that the Government investigated the footage so thoroughly, and found examples of the object on seven pieces of film.

Read more at dailymail.co.uk

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Guest Blogger

MAN HASN’T STOPPED LAUGHING FOR 2 YEARS!

Huug Bosse, the Dutch man who just can't stop laughing.

A Dutch man has been laughing for just about 2 years now, and he doesn’t even seem to mind!

Ever since undergoing hip-surgery and being put under with anesthesia, Huug Bosse just can’t stop laughing, and what’s so funny you ask? He doesn’t know!

Daily Mail writes:

A Dutch man who underwent hip surgery two years ago has appeared in a TV interview claiming he has not been able to stop laughing ever since.

According to Huug Bosse’s wife, her husband now spends his days laughing at everyone and everything and it all started when he had a hip replaced under anaesthesia in 2010.

‘It appears that due to the operation, due to the anaesthesia, he was laughing more,’ Mr Bosse’s wife told the Dutch TV programme Man Bijt Hond as he sat roaring with laughter next to her.

While Mr Bosse did laugh before, his personality had significantly altered since the operation and he now laughed almost all the time, she claimed.

‘Sometimes it starts to get really annoying all that laughing the whole day,’ she said.

Read more at dailymail.co.uk

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Guest Blogger

AUSTIN LOSES AN ICON, LESLIE COCHRAN

Leslie Cochran at Home Slice Pizza, Austin Texas, May 4, 2011 by Steve Hopson

Today is an incredibly sad day for those of us in Austin, Texas and around the world, for we’ve lost an amazingly bright and beautiful spirit that truly embodied the city’s slogan of “Keep Austin Weird”, Leslie Cochran.

Another bright star, deep in the heart of texas, has shined his last warming light upon us and will not soon be forgotten.

Leslie Cochran taking a quick nap during a previous SXSW in front of our very own Museum Of The Weird!

KXAN writes:

Albert Leslie Cochran, the thong-wearing street person who became the living embodiment of the city’s “Keep Austin Weird” slogan, died Thursday morning after more than two years of declining health.

He was 60.

Cochran had been hospitalized since Feb. 16 and inhospice care for the past week. Friends said he had never fully recovered from a head injury from the fall he suffered in October 2009.

“Leslie lived outside the box,” said friend Christine Ann, a South Austin merchant. “He exemplified that, but also spoke … passionately that we not take ourselves too seriously. And Leslie, of course, never did.”

GIRL EATS DIET OF SOAP AND SPONGES

Kerry Trebilcock enjoying a nice mid-afternoon snack, of sponges!

Once you think you’ve tried all the different diets out there in the world, a new one comes along and just changes everything.

This amazing new diet was discovered by Kerry Trebilcock of Mylar, Cornwall and to just put it simply, it cleans your body up!

Kerry has eaten countless numbers of sponges, from little chopped up slices in a ziplock bag with some tomato and bbq sauce (as a snack), to a “sponge-dog”, which is any standard cleaning sponge you’d find around your own sink at home, added with hot relish, ketchup, mustard and honey all folded into a hotdog bun shape! Sometimes, she’ll even spring for a fruit-scented bar of soap to chow down on if no sponges are around ’cause you know, that’s normal.

From what I’ve gathered, it seems that by eating dry sponges for almost every meal, all the normally bad, unhealthy and acidic liquids you’d ingest during an average day would simply be absorbed by the sponges! How neat!

I’d imagine they would start in your belly, absorbing and taking with them all the terrible stomach acid and badness sitting in there into the digestive track. There they would pass through all your bodies filtration systems saying “It’s cool guys, I got this!”, letting those hard working organs rest and relax for once, to the colon where it will be passed out and into the commode to be swept away into the unknown forever by swirling streams of water.

I guess the eating of the soap every so often as Kerry does would also help ‘clean-out’ your system by sudsing up your insides and making them squeaky clean so the sponges can be extra effective the next go ’round?

Sounds about right, right?

Wait, I see here the article says ‘disorder’, not ‘diet’…. oh.

The Sun writes:

Kerry Trebilcock, 21, has also munched more than 100 bars of SOAP.

She suffers from pica, which causes victims to crave objects that are not food. Kerry, of Mylor, Cornwall, said: “One day I will beat this and be able to have a shower or do the washing-up without feeling hungry.”

Sponge eater Kerry said she likes to spice up her bizarre snacks with hot sauce or mustard. Sometimes, she dips them in tea or hot chocolate like biscuits. She also chomps on chunks of soap — but only organic fruit-flavoured varieties, with lemon and lime her favourite.

Kerry said: “I have been very particular about the type of sponges and soaps I’d eat and how I’d prepare them. If I went out for the day I’d carry a small plastic bag of cut-up pieces of sponge with some tomato and BBQ sauce in Tupperware. I was never without a ‘snack’.”

Other pica sufferers eat metal, coal, sand, chalk — or even lightbulbs and furniture. Petite Kerry, who weighs just 8st, has endured shocking stomach cramps, constipation and diarrhoea.

And although she has cut down on her sponge munching, she has been unable to totally shake the condition. At one point Kerry was eating five a day topped with hot relish, BBQ sauce, ketchup, mustard, jam or honey.

SET PHASERS TO “SHUT UP”, SPEECH-JAMMING GUN CREATED!

A new 'gun' has been invented that stops your conversation cold. Photo courtesy Kazutaka Kurihara

Ever been at the office, library or park enjoying the peace and quiet when, all of a sudden, an incredibly rude person decides to shatter the silence and start talking on their phone annoyingly or, continues to attempt conversation with others over and over again besides being told to ‘shh’ or ‘please, be quiet’ a thousand times?!

Do you want to shut their mouth without ever touching them or getting into an argument? Of course you do!

Well have no fear, for the Japanese Speech-Jamming gun is here!

Wired writes:

What inspired Japanese researchers Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada to create a prototype for a speech-jamming gun? J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick novels? Dystopian art-house cinema? The Muzak Corporation? German avant-garde electronic experiments? The LRAD sound cannon? The answer, it turns out, was the friendly local science museum.

Kurihara, a research scientist at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, broke it down in an e-mail exchange with Wired. “One day I just came by a science museum and enjoyed a demonstration about Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) at [the] cognitive science corner,” says Kurihara. “When I spoke to a microphone, my voice came back to me after a few hundred millisecond delay. Then, I could not continue to speak any more. That’s fun!”

Kurihara soon realized his adventures in the science museum could be applicable to other fields. He was already interested in developing a system that “controls appropriate turn-taking at discussions.” The science museum visit was his “a-ha!” moment. “Then I came up with the gun-type SpeechJammer idea utilizing DAF,” says Kurihara. “That’s the destiny.”

VIOLIN STRINGS MADE OF SPIDER SILK!

Dr Osaki with his one of kind, spider-silk strung violin.

More cool news coming from the spider-science world!

Adding to the list of incredible and awesome uses for spider-silk, a scientist of Japan’s Nara Medical University, Shigeyoshi Osaki, has developed a set of violin strings woven from the ‘dragline’ silk spiders use to hang themselves from.

It’s apparently stronger and resonates brighter than the usual, aluminum coated, string traditionally used on violins and other stringed instruments! Researchers have been studying the pros and cons of using spider-silk for quite some time now and have been making breakthrough after breakthrough. Hopefully we’ll see some more incredible stuff very soon!

BBC News writes:

A Japanese researcher has used thousands of strands of spider silk to spin a set of violin strings.

The strings are said to have a “soft and profound timbre” relative to traditional gut or steel strings.

That may arise from the way the strings are twisted, resulting in a “packing structure” that leaves practically no space between any of the strands.

The strings will be described in a forthcoming edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

95 YEAR OLD WOMAN CLIMBS OUT OF COFFIN…FOR BREAKFAST!

This is why you should, at the very least, double-check to see if the person you just laid to rest in a coffin, is actually dead.

95 year old, Li Xiufeng, was presumed dead by neighbors when she was found lifeless and non-responsive in her home. They laid Li in a coffin for a few days while they made funeral preparations, and so friends and relatives could come visit and pay respects.

The day before the funeral was set to happen, Mr. Qingwang, the man making the plans, came to check and prepare the coffin, only to find it empty!

Apparently, being dead for a few days works up quite the appetite, because they found Li Xiufeng doing just fine in her kitchen and making herself some breakfast. She’s quoted as saying “I slept for a long time. After waking up, I felt so hungry, and wanted to cook something to eat.”

Again, just double-check.

Daily Mail writes:

A 95-year-old Chinese woman thought to have passed away stunned her neighbours – after waking up six days after she had been placed in a coffin. Li Xiufeng was found motionless and not breathing in bed by a neighbour two weeks after tripping and suffering a head injury at her home in Beiliu, Guangxi Province.

When the neighbor who found her could not wake the pensioner up, they feared the worst and thought the elderly woman had passed away. She was placed in a coffin which was kept in her house unsealed under Chinese tradition for friends and relatives to pay respects.

But the day before the funeral, neighbours found an empty coffin, and later discovered the 95-year-old, who had since woken up, in her kitchen cooking. Neighbor Chen Qingwang, 60, who originally found Mrs Xiufeng, said: ‘She didn’t get up, so I came up to wake her up.

‘No matter how hard I pushed her and called her name, she had no reactions. ‘I felt something was wrong, so I tried her breath, and she has gone, but her body is still not cold.’

As Mrs Xiufeng lived alone, Mr Qingwang and his son made preparations for her funeral, and the ‘dead’ woman was left in her coffin two days after she was discovered. The day before she was due to be permanently laid to rest, however, Mr Qingwang arrived at his neighbour’s property and found her ‘corpse’ had disappeared.

Read more at dailymail.co.uk

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Guest Blogger

GIANT ‘TREE LOBSTER’ ONCE THOUGHT EXTINCT, FOUND ALIVE!

Nick Carlile, seen here with the Lord Howe Island stick insect, discovered the thought-to-be extinct phasmid in 2001 on Ball's Pyramid. -Daily Mail

Here’s a cool little story about a not-so-little bug that was once widely accepted as extinct, only to be discovered 80 years later, hidden from the world on a huge, lonely rock out in the middle of the ocean.

The giant stick bug or ‘tree lobster’ that was once found on Lord Howe Island near Australia, was believed to have gone extinct over 80 years ago when a grounded ship allowed black rats to escape from it’s cargo and subsequently find their new favorite meal, huge phasmid insects called, easily enough, stick bugs. Just a few years later, the bugs were nowhere to be found… and the rats had gotten fat.

A couple of researchers thought they may have some luck finding these guys still alive after some info came down the pipe-line about a possible sighting on another island just a few miles away called Ball’s Pyramid.

Ball's Pyramid, the giant rock jutting out of the ocean all by itself, where the giant stick-bug was found.

Sure enough, they were there, clinging to the one plant that survived on the lifeless island. The researchers quickly made a plea to the Australian government to take some specimens and attempt to build a population large enough to re-introduce back to the island it once inhabited, after the black rats are taken care of, of course.

The Daily Mail writes:

A narrow and forbidding rock that stands higher than the Empire State Building, it does not look like the most welcoming place to set up home.

But that did not stop an insect which was thought to be extinct for 80 years from building its last known colony on the 1,844ft high Ball’s Pyramid.

Scientists have discovered 24 of the creatures living 500ft above the South Pacific Ocean around the single plant that had survived on the rock.

The ‘tree lobster’ insect, which is as large as a human hand, had somehow made its camp despite the lack of food and the harsh conditions.

Nobody could say how they got there in the first place – but four have now been taken off and have bred thousands more to ensure their species survives.