Odd News... March 09

[VulcanRider]

He slept for two days? Most men would be dead...

[Bungleau]

Dead... either before, during, or shortly thereafter...

I understand the sleeping for two days bit...

[VulcanRider]

It's not just an urban legend!!!

Angry wife sells $45,000 car for $1.00

A controversial radio DJ's wife sold his $45,000 sports car on eBay for less than a dollar after he flirted with model Jodie Marsh on air. Kerrang 105.2's Tim Shaw told the sexy babe he was prepared to leave his wife and their two children for her. The DJ's wife was listening and immediately started an auction on eBay to sell his Lotus Esprit Turbo with a 'Buy It Now' option of $1.00. The item description read: "I need to get rid of this car in the next two to three hours before my husband gets home to find it gone and all his belongings in the street." The car was sold in under five minutes. It wasn't the first time this DJ upset his 27-year-old wife. When she was pregnant he rang up her sister live on air and said he thought about her while having sex with his wife. Mrs Shaw said: "When he said he would leave me and the kids for Jodie Marsh, that was it for me. I am sick of him disrespecting this family for the sake of his act. "The car is his pride and joy but the idiot put my name on the log book so I just sold it. I didn't care about the money, I just wanted to get him back." She added: "There is no hope for a reconciliation." A Kerrang 105.2 spokesperson said the DJ was 'absolutely gutted.'

Pictures at the link

[Firestormalpha]

Wow, so it's true, "Hell hath no fury..."

[Arvon]

Reproduction is no fun if you're a squid," said a biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, referring especially to the deep-sea squid. Finding a mate a mile down in pitch-darkness is hard enough, but the combination of males that are smaller and fearful of being overpowered and females whose reception of sperm involves being stabbed makes the insemination process especially traumatic. Sperm deposits can be extensive and burdensome to the female and are delivered by the reckless slashing of the skin by the male. In fact, according to a December report in Germany's Der Spiegel, in the darkness the male sometimes misses the female altogether and inseminates himself. [Spiegel Online, 12-23-08]

[Bungleau]

"Vampire" unearthed in Venice plague grave

Daniel Flynn Rome (reuters) - Italian Researchers Believe They Have Found The Remains Of A Female "vampire" In Venice, Buried With A Brick Jammed Between Her Jaws To Prevent Her Feeding On Victims Of A Plague Which Swept The City In The 16th Century.

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

"This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire," Borrini told Reuters by telephone. "This helps ... authenticate how the myth of vampires was born."

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 -- in which the artist Titian died -- on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three km (2 miles) northeast of Venice and was used as a sanitorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse's teeth, and vampires became known as "shroud-eaters."

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the "undead" were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

"To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there," said Borrini. "It's possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized."

While legends about blood-drinking ghouls date back thousands of years, the modern figure of the vampire was encapsulated in the Irish author Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula," based on 18th century eastern European folktales.

(Editing by Phakamisa Ndzamela)
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Interesting... interesting...

[Bungleau]

Math whiz, dead for 450 years, gets TV bill

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German mathematician who died 450 years ago has been sent a letter demanding that he pay long-overdue television license fees, residents at his former address said on Wednesday.

Germany's GEZ broadcast fee collection office sent the bill to the last home address of Adam Ries, an algebra expert who bought the house in 1525. A club in his honor was set up at the property four centuries later.

"We received a letter saying 'To Mr Adam Ries' on it, with the request to pay his television and radio fees," said Annegret Muench, who now heads the club.

Muench returned the letter to the GEZ with a note explaining the request had come too late because Ries had died in 1559, centuries before the invention of television and radio. She nonetheless received a reminder a few weeks later.

This was not the first time the GEZ had sent a bill to those in the afterlife. Last year, a school named after poet Friedrich Schiller received a reminder asking him to declare all radios and televisions in his home and pay the corresponding fees.

(Reporting by Franziska Scheven; Editing by Katie Nguyen)
============================

"If you don't dispute the bill within ten days..."

Reminds me of the guy who got repeated messages threatening to cut off his service if he didn't pay his bill of $0... Sending a check for $0 didn't fix it

[Bungleau]

Wash. man caught in HOV lane with unbuckled dummy

BELLEVUE, Wash. – You forgot to buckle up, dummy! A commuter who put a homemade dummy in the passenger seat to sneak into the car pool lane was caught Wednesday near Seattle. But it wasn't because a cop realized the passenger was fake. Instead, the State Patrol trooper noticed the dangling belt buckle on the passenger side and suspected a seat belt violation.

Patrol spokeswoman Christina Martin told The Herald of Everett that the driver acknowledged trying to beat traffic by using the HOV lane.

He created his passenger by draping a rain jacket over plastic piping, topping it off with a Halloween mask of Gandalf, the "Lord of the Rings" wizard, a beard and a baseball cap.

The trooper issued a $124 ticket and confiscated the dummy.
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Smart and dumb at the same time...

[VulcanRider]

A member of the Singapore Parliament, Loo Choon Yong, attracted worldwide attention in February when he proposed that his already legendarily hard-working countrymen add Saturdays as a workday, to improve productivity to cover for a declining birthrate. "We should accept that, as a people, our procreation talent is not our forte," he said, and move from a five-day workweek to six. [Agence France-Presse, 2-5-09]

I think I understand why they're not procreating...

[Bungleau]

It all works until everyone keels over dead...