Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- Scientists studying greater sac-winged bats in Costa Rica have found that bat pups babble in much the same way as human babies, repeating key "building-block syllables" that are the foundation of
communication. ● A video that went viral this week showed a bear stealing an Amazon delivery of toilet paper from a woman's porch in Bristol, Connecticut, before, we presume, taking it into the woods...
● On Thursday last week a two-year-old African Grey parrot called Grey went missing from his home in Tadworth, Surrey. Two days later he was found at London Waterloo Station 20 miles (32km) away and
returned to his family after they spotted him on a British Transport Police tweet, since when he keeps squawking tannoy announcements, making the "bing-bong" noise familiar to users of British train
stations, tells the family to "keep left" and impersonates the sound of a train on the tracks. ● Bittern chicks have been seen fledging their nest at Lunt Meadows Wetland Nature Reserve in
Sefton, Merseyside, for the first time in 200 years. ● Researchers using virtual reality have found that rattlesnakes increase the frequency of their rattling as animals - or humans - get nearer to make
themselves seem closer, given them a "distance safety margin" to act if needed.
- Ferrero, the company that makes Tic Tac mints, has taken advantage of US military videos of a pilot describing an unidentified aerial phenomenon as a "tictac" by sending a large tic tac-shaped
container filled with limited edition packs of their mints into space attached to a high-altitude balloon earlier this month.
- Two men have been charged with conspiracy to convert criminal property and possessing criminal property after police found a hoard of Viking-era coins and silver ingots in their houses in County Durham
and Lancashire in 2019. The hoard was described by Dr Gareth Williams, curator of early medieval coins and Viking collections at the British Museum, as a "nationally important hoard" and worth around
£1m ($1.37m) at the time of its recovery. It includes coins depicting Alfred the Great of Wessex and Ceolwulf II of Mercia. Under British law such a find automatically belongs to the Crown and must be
reported to a coroner within 14 days, after which a legal process involving the coroner, the Secretary of State and the British Museum then decides on the find's status and any applicable remuneration to the
finder.
- Two Australian meth addicts have been arrested after dressing up as policemen and 'raiding' another addict's house, beating another man there with a hammer and demanding that they hand over their drugs. ●
A man who had recently been released from prison on license panicked when he saw a police car and sped off with the police in pursuit, in late July. He reached speeds of 90mph (144.8km/h) on residential roads,
sped over give way markings and drove round a roundabout in the wrong direction, all with a child in the car. Defending Zak Palmer, 25, in court on Friday, Anthony Bell told the judge that "the irony is
he had passed his [driving] test a few weeks shortly before the incident. [..] He panicked when he saw the police and reverted in that moment to the man who shouldn't have been driving and had no license."
Taking into account Palmer's attempts to turn his life around the judge sentenced him to 12 months suspended for 21 months, a 2-year driving ban, 20 days' rehabilitation activity and a four-month 10pm-6am curfew.
● A Spanish family was wrongly accused of uploading child sexual abuse images to Facebook after Spanish investigators interpreted a date used in a report by the American National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children as being in the European format, rather than the American. Europe uses a DD/MM/YYYY format while the US uses MM/DD/YYYY, and the report stated that the perpetrator had used a certain public IP
address on "10/11/2016", or 11th October 2016. The Spanish interpreted the date as the 10th November 2016. The international standard date format - also used in an abbreviated
form here at The Irregular office, is YYY-MM-DD. ● A teenaged driver in Stockport has been criticised for parking in a disabled-only space, leaving a crudely-drawn badge sketched on the back of a
MacDonald's paper bag. ● Emergency services called to reports of a body floating face down under weeds in a canal in Briennon, central France, discovered that it was actually an inflatable sex doll. ●
When police in Warrington stopped a driver for not wearing a seat belt he admitted to also having some cannabis on him. A search of the car then found £20,000 ($27,400) in cash and several mobile phones.
Ensuing searches of houses linked to the man turned up a further £20,000 ($27,400) cash, cannabis worth up to £195,000 ($267,000) and drug paraphernalia. ● Two men are been sought by Cheshire
police after stealing a red phone box from a garden in broad daylight; during the the theft they even asked a passer-by to guard exposed electrical cabling.
- Climate modellers have shown that were it not for the ban of CFCs in aerosols, refridgeration and air conditions in the 1980s the world would be facing an additional 2.5oC (3.6oF)
temperature rise by the end of the century and a collapse of the ozone layer by the mid 2040s, leading to a "scorched Earth" with much greater risk of skin cancers and less absorption of carbon by
plants. ● Researchers have found that the flooding in Europe in July which killed at least 220 people was made more likely by human induced climate change, with rainfall in the region 3-19% more intense.
● Rainfall has been observed on the summit of Gunnbjørn Mountain, at 12,139' (3,700m) the highest point in Greenland, for the first time on record.
- A hundred and twenty members of the Carnethy Hill Running Club in Edinburgh have, between them, bagged all the Munros - the 282 Scottish mountains over 3,000' (4,828m) - in a single day. Some runners
completed the ascents of 12 summits, running up to 40 miles (64.3km) in the process, while others completed solo attempts after nightfall, on routes that were boggy or without paths, all in bad weather. The final
summmit was reached at 11:48pm, hitting the target with just 12 minutes to spare. ● Katie McCabe, 14, from Topsham in Devon has completed sailing around Great Britain solo, in a 26' (8m) wooden boat.
If confirmed by Guinness World Records, the anticlockwise journey around the country, which raised thousands of pounds for charity, will make her officially the youngest person to have done so. For insurance
reasons her father sailed the route five miles behind her.
- The New York Times has reported that the Walt Disney Company is developing free-roaming realistic robots of its popular characters to populate its theme park grounds. Disney executives were reported as
seeings the robots as a way to intrigue children and "stay relevant"; the Twitterati instead immediately drew comparisons with Westworld, the HBO science fiction series based on a 1973 film of
the same name in which humanoid robots in a theme park go rogue and start killing people. ● The world's fastest rollercoaster, the Do-DoDonpa at the Fuji-Q Highlands amusement park in Japan, which has been
accelerating riders to 106.9mph (172km/h) in 1.8 seconds since December 2001 has been suspended after four riders suffered fractures, including a broken neck and a broken back.
- A 2012 academic study into nudging people to be more honest has found itself in the news for a very ironic reason. It was based on three experiments, two laboratory-set and the third based on data from
a car insurance company. The results of the two lab tests have proved difficult to replicate since the study's publication, but the third is proving the most controversial, with a recent analysis of the data,
which involved drivers self-reporting their mileage driven (on which insurance charges were based) either with a signed statement of affirmation or without. Analysis of the mileages quoted showed that, rather
than following the expected bell-curve (more mileages in the middle ranges than at either extreme) the distribution was flat, and it appeared that a random number generator had been used to add between zero and
50,000 to the submitted mileages. The data also included an even spread of all digits as the final digit of the mileage, whereas most people tend to round up or down to the nearest ten. When confronted with the
evidence the five contributors to the original report admitted that the data was fabricated, but claimed that they had been given - and placed too much trust in - false data rather than faking it themselves.
In other words, an academic study on dishonesty has been found to be based on dishonest data...
- The US National Ignition Facility has claimed to be on the edge of achieving "ignition" in nuclear fusion, the point at which the energy produced exceeds that put in. In their latest experiment
they fired 192 of the world's strongest laser beams towards a peppercorn-sized capsule of deuterium and tritium, compressing it to 100 times the density of lead and heating it to 100,000,000oC
(180,000,000oF), hotter than the core of the Sun. The experiment yielded 1.35 megajoules of energy, about 70% of that delivered by the lasers, eight times that of experiments earlier this year and
25 times that of 2018 experiments. If ignition can be achieved, fusion promises to be a far cleaner source of nuclear power than the currently-used fission. ● Earlier this year the US Navy filed for a
patent on a sonic weapon to disorient its target by using a long-range microphone to record their voice then play it back to them twice, both simultaneously and with a slight delay. The effects of the weapon
are reported as being similar to the symptons reported by US diplomats in Cuba and Vietnam, dubbed "Havana Syndrome", and initially blamed on targetted microwave weapons.
- Viewers of an Australian news report on police dogs found the segment briefly interrupted by a 2-second clip of an apparent satanic ritual including an altar, inverted cross and the hooded celebrant saying
"Hail, Satan". At the end of the segment Australian Broadcasting Corporation newsreader Yvonne Yong made no reference to the interruption and moved on to the next item. It is still unexplained how the
clip came to be broadcast during the segment.
IN BRIEF: Domino's new watermelon pizza is being met with near-universal disgust. ● Conspiracy theories claiming that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was a "false flag" operation
to start WWIII/create one-world government led by the Antichrist/etc/etc/etc are already springing up despite widespread independent journalistic reporting, mostly based on the coincidental tail registration of
a USAF C-17 cargo plane - 1109, claimed by conspiracists as referencing 9/11. ● American-born entertainer and WWII French resistance heroine Josephine Baker is to be reinterred in the Pantheon in Paris,
becoming the first black woman to be buried in the monument. ● Greenwich council employee Jo Kibble travelled from London to Morecambe in Lancashire, 260 miles away, in a single day using only scheduled
public bus services. ● If you want to stop a pan of water boiling over, just put a wooden spoon across the top, according to viral video (It breaks up the bubbles' cohesion, apparently). ● The garage
door from the Trotters' lock-up in Only Fools and Horses has been bought by a collector for a "significant sum". ● A video of lightning from Storm Henri striking the top of One World Trade
Center in New York City has gone viral online. ● The owner of a petrol station, believed to be in Belgrade, has been praised online for reacting to a driver refusing to put out his cigarette by spraying
him with a CO2 foam fire extinguisher. (As at least one person commented, the incident was on the forecourt, in the open air, so the danger of the man suffocating was lessened).
CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: Facebook is being criticised for sitting on a report that the most-shared post in the second quarter of 2021 was COVID-19 vaccine disinformation. ● Disgraced but somehow
rehabilitated televangelist Jim Bakker has whined "Do you think God can hear your prayers through a mask?", rather missing the claimed omniscience of the fictional deity... ● The twice-indicted
former president finally told his supporters at a rally that COVID vaccinations were a good thing - and got booed... ● The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine
official approval, having previously only approved its use in emergency (i.e. pandemic) situations. ● The Benton County jail in Washington State is offering its 350 inmates packets of ramen instant
noodles in exchange for their getting COVID-19 vaccinations. ● The FDA has issued a plea to people to stop taking livestock de-worming medicine to treat or prevent COVID-19 as poisoning cases from ingesting
one such drug, ivermectin, spiked. Their ad reads "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it."
UPDATES: The Ever Given container ship, which blocked the Suez Canal for several days in March, has safely passed through the canal on its way back to Asia. ● The day after Taliban
fighters were photographed riding dodgems and a carousel the Kabul fairground where the attractions were based was burned down by (presumably other, possibly jealous) Taliban fighters.
In Sunday school the vicar was testing the children on their knowledge of the Book of Genesis. "Little Mary," he said, "who was the first man?"
Little Mary thought for a moment. "Adam, sir!"
"Quite right. Now, Little Jennifer, who was the first woman?"
Little Jennifer looked puzzled and said nothing. "I'll give you a clue," the vicar said, "it's something to do with an apple."
Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "Granny Smith!"
