museum of the weird – Page 21 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Guest Blogger

THE YOLKS ON THESE EGG-CITING COMPETITORS

Here's one situation where it's not such a bad thing to have 'egg on your face'.

Here’s an event we’re sad to say we missed!

The world famous 7th Annual World Egg Throwing Championships in Swaton, Lincolnshire, England, where competitors ran the gamut of egg influenced games, from egg catching to the finale of Russian Roulette with, you guessed it, eggs!

Here's one competitor smashing what he hoped was a hard-boiled egg into his face, as you can see, he wasn't so lucky.

The Huffington Post writes:

Jerry Cullen may come from a part of Great Britain known as Swineshead, but his own noggin is better suited for eggs — literally.

Cullen just became the world champion in the little known sport of “Egg Russian Roulette.” It’s game where two competitors pick eggs from a box of six. Five of have been hard boiled, and one is left raw, according to ITN.co.uk. The players smash the eggs against their faces and the first shell to crack loses the game.

The “egg-citing” sport is just one of the many “eggs-tra-ordinary” events at the 7th Annual World Egg Throwing Championships which took place this past weekend in Swaton, Lincolnshire, England.

Other events include egg throwing events for two-player and 11-player teams and a tossing event using trebuchets, a Medieval weapon similar to a catapult.

However, organizer Andy Dunlop has a soft spot in his heart for the hard-boiled sport of Egg Russian Roulette and hopes Cullen’s victory scrambles preconceived notions that it is a joke.

“They said there’s no skill involved,” Dunlop told ITN. “We’re here today to prove that there is skill.”

ZOMBIE THEMED RESTAURANT BASED ON RESIDENT EVIL

Zombie themed restaruant? Now, that takes braaains!

Well, if the zombie craze wasn’t taking over as it is, this new restaurant may have just taken things to a whole other level.

Capcom, creators of the most famous zombie game and movies of them all, the Resident Evil series, have decided to open an eatery in Japan based on the post-apocalyptic world they’ve created that’s inhabited by zombies, lots and lots of zombies.

The Huffington Post writes:

Zombies aren’t known for enjoying sit-down meals; most prefer to eat on the run (or shamble).

However, Japanese zombies who want a taste of fine dining will soon get their chance in the form of a zombie-themed restaurant that is opening in Tokyo on July 13.

It’s called the Biohazard Cafe and Grill S.T.A.R.S restaurant, and is based on the Japanese version of “Resident Evil” videogames, known as “Biohazard,”according to ZoKnowsGaming.com.

TheVerge.com reports that Capcom, the company that makes the ‘Resident Evil’ games, plans to sell limited-edition items at the undead diner and entertain customers hungry for zombie-themed entertainment with dance performances by game characters.

Unlike actual zombies, which never really die, the zombie restaurant is scheduled to only last a year, according to Kotaku.com.

THE BALTIC ANOMALY IS NOW KILLING ELECTRONICS

A new update comes from the team that is down in the Baltic Sea just north of Germany and Poland investigating the ‘anomaly’ at the bottom.

They’re now saying the object is shutting off electronic devices while they are directly above the object, but turn right back on as soon as they move out from over it!

RT writes:

A strangely-shaped object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea has been interfering with the electrical devices of the Swedish diving team that is trying to film it. But critics are growing more skeptical about the long-running mystery.

The Swedish Ocean X treasure-hunting team first discovered a mystery object reminiscent of the Star Wars spaceship Millennium Falcon last year.

But they didn’t have the resources to investigate. Now, they have returned with top-of-the-range 3D seabed scanners and a submersible – all funded by a secret sponsor.

They are trying to film it but as soon as they get close, they are foiled.

“Anything electric out there – and the satellite phone as well – stopped working when we were above the object,”Stefan Hogerborn, the expedition’s lead diver, told Swedish channel NDTV.

“And then we got away about 200 meters and it turned on again, and when we got back over the object it didn’t work.”

SNAKE ATTACK AT 175 MPH!

There’s not much of a scarier situation that unexpectedly running into a snake. Well, how about when one comes at you while you’re flying down the road at 175mph?!

A biker in Brazil was out for a ride with some of his buddies on a highway, having a good ol’ time playing around and enjoying the sun, when all of a sudden, SNAKE!

Apparently, just before taking his bike out, a sneaky snake crawled into the chassis of the motorcycle and decided it wasn’t gonna come out until the most absolutely disastrous time for this Brazillian rider.

Luckily he kept his wits about him and slowed the 2-wheeled vehicle down to a stop on the shoulder of the road to show the snake to his friends. I, on the other hand, would have most likely freaked out, closed my eyes and let go of the handlebars to fall off and go tumbling down the road at 175mph on a very busy 2 lane highway, which is much more preferable than snake-death.

Watch the video and see for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBnVs6ch4EQ

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the video has been taken down for the time being. We’ll have it up as soon as it’s back!

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Guest Blogger

FAREWELL, LONESOME GEORGE

The last of his kind, 'Lonesome' George the very last Pinta Giant Tortoise, has died.

Sad news comes from the animal kingdom today, ‘Lonesome’ George, the very last Pinta Giant Tortoise from the Galapagos Islands, has passed away at the ripe young age of 100 years old.

In 1972, at the string of Galapagos islands that helped make Charles Darwin famous by giving him beautiful examples of evolution, George was observed by a Hungarian scientist who thought, along with the rest of the scientific world, that his species of tortoise was already extinct. He was quickly added to the Galapagos National Park and their breeding program to preserve the lineage but, was unsuccessful throughout the 40 years he was with them.

BBC News writes:

Staff at the Galapagos National Park in Ecuador say Lonesome George, a giant tortoise believed to be the last of its subspecies, has died.

Scientists estimate he was about 100 years old.

Park officials said they would carry out a post-mortem to determine the cause of his death. With no offspring and no known individuals from his subspecies left, Lonesome George became known as the rarest creature in the world.

For decades, environmentalists unsuccessfully tried to get the Pinta Island tortoise to reproduce with females from a similar subspecies on the Galapagos Islands. Park officials said the tortoise was found dead in his corral by his keeper of 40 years, Fausto Llerena. While his exact age was not known, Lonesome George was estimated to be about 100, which made him a young adult as the subspecies can live up to an age of 200.

3PM CST TODAY: MUSEUM OF THE WEIRD ON “THE JAY THOMAS SHOW”

Just wanted to let everyone know, I’ll be a guest on The Jay Thomas Show today (Wednesday, June 27th) at 3PM Central for a segment called “Holiday Road”.

Well known and respected in the entertainment industry, Jay is is an American actor, comedian and radio talk show host, as well as a two time Emmy Award winner for his role as Jerry Gold on “Murphy Brown” and is equally well known around the world as Eddie Lebec from “Cheers”.

You can catch Jay’s show on Stars Too Sirius/XM Channel 104. Please tune in!

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Guest Blogger

MARS IS, IN FACT, FULL OF WATER!

Turns out the red planet is blue on the inside.

Now, here is some fascinating news!

Scientist have been theorizing that there just might be more to Mars than we think for quite some time now, but lacked the evidence to back themselves up. Well, not anymore.

Smithsonian.com writes:

Despite claims in the 1890s that Mars was filled with canals teeming with water, research over the past several decades has suggested that in fact, Mars has only a tiny amount of water, mostly near its surface.Then, during the 1970s, as part of NASA’s Mariner space orbiter program, dry river beds and canyons on Mars were discovered—the first indications that surface water may have once existed there. The Viking program subsequently found enormous river valleys on the planet, and in 2003 it was announced that the Mars Odyssey spacecraft had actually detected minute quantities of liquid water on and just below the surface, which was later confirmed by the Phoenix lander.

Now, according to an article published yesterday in the journal Geology, there is evidence that Mars is home to vast reservoirs of water in its interior as well. The finding has weighty implications for our understanding of the geology of Mars, for hopes that the planet may have at some point in the past been home to extraterrestrial life, and for the long-term prospects of human colonization there.

“There has been substantial evidence for the presence of liquid water at the Martian surface for some time,” said Erik Hauri, one of the study’s authors. “So it’s been puzzling why previous estimates for the planet’s interior have been so dry. This new research makes sense.”

MEET MUGLY, THE WORLD’S UGLIEST DOG

Meet Mugly, officially, the world's ugliest dog!

Well, if you weren’t sure who had the weirdest looking dog on the block, judges at the ‘World’s Ugliest Dog’ annual competition have put the matter to rest for everyone across the globe because, they have indeed, found the newest ‘winner’ of such a grand title, Mugly.

A few of the other competitors for the title!

The National Post writes:

PETALUMA, Calif. — A Chinese crested’s short snout, beady eyes and white whiskers earned it the title of World’s Ugliest Dog at the annual contest in Northern California on Friday.

Competing for fame, $1,000 and a year’s worth of dog cookies, Mugly won the honour by beating out 28 other ugly dogs from around the world.

The 8-year-old rescue dog from the United Kingdom will also be invited for a photo shoot and will receive a VIP stay at the local Sheraton.

“I couldn’t speak when they announced Mugly’s name,” said Bev Nicholson, the dog’s owner. “I didn’t know which way to look. I was shaking as much as the dog.”

It’s not the first time Mugly has been recognized for his unattractiveness. Nicholson said he was named Britain’s ugliest dog in 2005.

The contest at the Marin-Sonoma Fairgrounds gets worldwide attention, with reporters and camera crews from around the world travelling to Petaluma, about 40 miles north of San Francisco.

Organizers say the competing dogs are judged for what they term their “natural ugliness in both pedigree and mutt classes.”

WOMAN CAN SEE MORE THAN THE AVERAGE HUMAN WITH HER ‘SUPERHUMAN’ SIGHT

More colors of the color spectrum are visible to an English woman than most other humans on earth.

Neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan, and her colleagues from Newcastle University in England, knew that there was someone out there with a little something extra… 2 cones in the eye that allow them to see thousands of more shades of color than most of us ‘normal’ folk, to be exact.

Most people don’t know that this is actually possible, I sure didn’t, and these researchers weren’t even sure they’d ever find somebody with this incredibly rare ability to see beyond what was thought possible, until they did.

Discover Magazine writes:

An average human, utterly unremarkable in every way, can  perceive a million different colors. Vermilion, puce, cerulean, periwinkle, chartreuse—we have thousands of words for them, but mere language can never capture our extraordinary range of hues. Our powers of color vision derive from cells in our eyes called cones, three types in all, each triggered by different wavelengths of light. Every moment our eyes are open, those three flavors of cone fire off messages to the brain. The brain then combines the signals to produce the sensation we call color.

Vision is complex, but the calculus of color is strangely simple: Each cone confers the ability to distinguish around a hundred shades, so the total number of combinations is at least 100³, or a million. Take one cone away—go from being what scientists call a trichromat to a dichromat—and the number of possible combinations drops a factor of 100, to 10,000. Almost all other mammals, including dogs and New World monkeys, are dichromats. The richness of the world we see is rivaled only by that of birds and some insects, which also perceive the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

Researchers suspect, though, that some people see even more. Living among us are people with four cones, who might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no names, no paint swatches. And because perceiving color is a personal experience, they would have no way of knowing they see far beyond what we consider the limits of human vision.

Over the course of two decades, Newcastle University neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan and her colleagues have been searching for people endowed with this super-vision. Two years ago, Jordan finally found one. A doctor living in northern England, referred to only as cDa29 in the literature, is the first tetrachromat known to science. She is almost surely not the last.

GIANT WOMBAT FOSSILS FOUND FROM OVER 100,000 YEARS AGO

Giant Wombats once roamed what is now Australia.

Paleontologists in Queensland, Australia have unearthed fossils of what just might be the biggest, cutest thing ever… well, almost cutest. I mean, did you see those mini-mammoths we talked about a few weeks ago?!

BBC News writes:

The find, in Queensland, Australia, of about 50Diprotodons – the largest marsupial that ever lived – has been called a “palaeontologists’ goldmine”.

The plant-eating giants, the size of a rhinoceros, had backward-facing pouches big enough to carry an adult human.

The fossils are believed to be between 100,000 and 200,000 years old.

Lead scientist Scott Hocknull, from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, said: “When we did the initial survey I was just completely blown away by the concentrations of these fragments.

“It’s a palaeontologist’s goldmine where we can really see what these megafauna were doing, how they actually behaved, what their ecology was.

“With so many fossils it gives us a unique opportunity to see these animals in their environment, basically, so we can reconstruct it.”

The “mega-wombats” appeared to have been trapped in boggy conditions while taking refuge from dry conditions, Mr Hocknull added.

The pigeon-toed animals were widespread across Australia about 50,000 years ago, when the first indigenous people are believed to have lived, but they first appeared about 1.6 million years ago.

It is unclear how or why they became extinct, but it could have been due to hunting by humans or, more likely, a changing climate.

The remote desert site contains one huge specimen, nicknamed Kenny, which is one of the best preserved and biggest examples ever discovered. Its jawbone alone is 70cm (28in) long.