Welcome to The Weird Week in Review, where we bring you odd news stories from all over.
1. CALF GETS LASSOED FROM THE HOOD OF A POLICE CAR
When authorities got a call about a calf that was loose on Tennessee’s Highway 79N, David Bevill of Paris, Tennessee, volunteered to help local police capture it. Henry County Sheriff Monte Belew drove down the highway with Bevill on the hood, ready to rope in the calf. According to a Facebook post,
Belew said the calf became loose when a man was driving through town and his cattle trailer door broke. “There were actually two that got loose, but Dr. Lyons at Mineral Wells Animal Clinic and his crew were able to get the other one,” Belew said.
“So everybody is happy—we roped one calf, Dr. Lyons got the other one and the guy who was hauling them through town is happy, too,” Belew said.
It’s always handy to know a cowboy when you’ve got a job to do.
2. CAT STUCK IN SUPPORTS OF DOUBLE-DECKER HIGHWAY FOR NINE DAYS
Erin McCutcheon’s cat Juno escaped a zippered cat carrier and jumped out of a moving car on the upper deck of I-93 in Boston on Christmas Day. McCutcheon couldn’t find her cat, and so distributed posters and put out a call for help on Facebook. On Tuesday, a Local 103 crew of electricians doing maintenance work spotted Juno high above the lower deck, perched on the support girders under the upper deck. Juno had been stuck 80 feet above the highway for nine days! The crew couldn’t catch the frightened feline, but eventually lured her out with cans of cat food. Juno, hungry and thirsty, went home with electrician Jay Frazier, and was later reunited with the McCutcheons.
3. MAN CARRIES SCISSORS IN BODY FOR 18 YEARS
Ma Van Nhat underwent surgery at Bac Kan Hospital in Vietnam in 1998 after suffering injuries in a traffic accident. Recently, he complained of pain in his abdomen, which doctors dismissed as a stomachache. But on December 27, during a routine checkup, a doctor determined there was a foreign object there. Last Saturday, surgeons removed a pair of surgical scissors, which had apparently been inside Nhat for 18 years. The scissors had broken and adhered to Nhat’s abdominal organs. According to The Huffington Post,
The hospital’s director, Trinh Thi Luong, is now taking great pains to find out who may have left the scissors inside Nhat.
“Even if they are already retired, we will still inform them,” Luong said, according to Reuters. “This is a lesson to all doctors.”
4. MAN OPENS DOOR TO BRICK WALL
An unnamed man in Mainhausen, Germany, woke up Monday morning and got ready for work as usual—but when he opened his front door, he couldn’t leave: Someone had built a brick wall over the door opening. The perpetrators had built the wall quickly and quietly during the night. He had to tear out the bricks to leave his house. Police don’t know whether the wall was a prank or an act of revenge.
5. NEW SHERIFF GETS ARRESTED
The citizens of Roane County, West Virginia, elected a new sheriff in November. Bo Williams began his new job last Sunday, but on Tuesday, according to the New York Daily News, he was was arrested on charges of grand larceny for stealing meth from an evidence locker at his previous job with the Spencer, West Virginia, police department. Bags of meth with evidence numbers were found in his desk and in his car. Williams had resigned from that job after admitting to drug addiction in December. The Roane County commission removed Williams from office that same day, and asked a former sheriff to step in to run the department. Williams is out of jail on bond and may face up to 10 years in prison.
Carol Pilon: America’s Last Great Wingwalker. She performs at air shows and teaches younger woman to do aerial stunts.
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Disney executives are scheduling meetings about the fate of Leia Organa. She was to have a big part in Star Wars IX that may or may not be rewritten.
* Hayao Miyazaki’s Path to Studio Ghibli. He was determined to write comic books until he was inspired by a film.
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China’s Decision To Halt The Ivory Trade Is A Game-Changer. With ivory no longer socially acceptable, elephants can keep theirs.
* Car Sensors Are Getting Pretty Darned Advanced. You’re getting a babysitter along with your new vehicle.
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A fed-up fan’s guide to the NFL playoffs. What can they do to get people to watch?
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Delightful Finds From Internet Archive Book Images. Search terms yielded surprising old treasures.
LEGO bricks and minifigs are more than just toys—they’re also an art medium that can be used to illustrate the real world when a photograph isn’t freely available, a fictional world when an artist prefers not to draw one, or just for the fun of it. Here are a few LEGO-centric sites and social media feeds to check out.
1. AN ANONYMOUS GRAD STUDENT // LEGO GRAD STUDENT
Borrowing the department credit card to buy supplies for an event, the grad student fleetingly considers running away and never coming back.
LEGO Grad Student is a Tumblr—cross-posted to other sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook—that follows a LEGO minifig graduate student through the trials and tribulations of earning a higher degree. The anonymous creator—a sixth-year social sciences grad student—told InsideHigherEd.com that his creations are inspired by his personal experiences but are “exaggerated through my admittedly darker sense of humor.” LEGOs, he says, are “just a nice way to spend an hour or two to decompress and to exercise my creative side … I’ve always felt better during the more stressful moments of graduate school when I knew that I was not alone in feeling a certain way or having a particular experience. I hope that these posts, in their own absurd way, provide that sort of reassurance to others.”
2. SEAN ROMERO // THE SHORT NEWS
The Short News is a real news site that posts real stories from other sources, all illustrated in LEGO scenes. Sean Romero, a tax lawyer in Australia, founded the site in 2014. “I wanted to recreate the news but for legal reasons I can’t use real photos,” he told 7News. “I was having a laugh with my wife and thought if I can’t use someone else’s photos, I’ll make my own using toys.” The news items tend toward the offbeat and entertaining—”I pick a few stories each day that interest me and I think will interest others”—but some news events are off-limits: “While a plane crash is huge news, it would be doing a huge discredit to the story to look like I am making light of a tragic event using toys,” Romero said. The scene above was created to illustrate the story about a GoFundMe account created to protect Betty White through the rest of 2016.
In 2014, LEGO released a new building set called the Research Institute featuring a science lab staffed by women. Donna Yates, an archaeologist who works at the University of Glasgow’s Trafficking Culture Project, immediately bought one and was inspired to create scenes from her own life in academia. She posts pictures of those scenes in her Twitter feed LEGO Academics, which became an instant hit among women in STEM fields. “I got a few extra heads (I wanted some with no makeup), a few extra bodies (I wanted some without the pinched in waist), and some more hair (I wanted some short hair and grey hair),” she told The Washington Post, which added “a bit more variety for the academic women rather than just the long hair/make-up scene.”
4. CRAIG MCCARTNEY AND LINDSEY HAGGERTY // LEGO TRAVELLERS
The LEGO Travellers are Craig McCartney and Lindsey Haggerty, a Scottish couple who are constantly exploring different parts of the world—and share their adventures by setting up their LEGO minifigs everywhere they go. The idea came about after McCartney’s mom found some of his old LEGOs in her home. “I started having a go at building some of the LEGO and I found LEGO figures which kind of looked like us,” he told Gold Coast Bulletin. “We were in Paris for Lindsey’s birthday and took a few pictures of them with the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre in the background for a bit of fun. I joked I would make a Facebook page out of it and Lindsey said it was a bit silly, but the more we did it the more she got into it and it’s become quite popular now.” McCartney and Haggerty spent the holidays in Perth, Australia, and took the above picture at Wave Rock in Hyden. You can follow their footsteps at Facebook and Instagram.
LEGO bricks are great for rendering new versions of existing art in two dimensions, too. The Tumblr blog LEGO Albums is a project by Harry Heaton recreating iconic album covers using LEGO bricks. The finished products resemble low-resolution pixelated versions of album art. Check through the archives to see if your favorite album cover is there.
Bricks of the Dead is a webcomic about a zombie apocalypse that began in 2010. Creator Dave says on the site that he wanted to “create a zombie comic book to entertain and inform the public of exactly what they should do when the zombies show up at their doors.” But with “zero artistic ability,” he was at a loss for how to achieve his goal—until he saw the LEGO comic Adventures of S-Team. “After this epiphany I ran to my parents’ basement (after a lengthy drive to their house) and unearthed my lost bin full of LEGO® and started concocting a story.” Click here to start at the beginning.
Another webcomic illustrated in LEGO, Ballinabricky is set in Ireland in 1936. The action takes place in a fictional town (whose name is a play on the town Ballinabrackey) that, in the comic, is home to many of Ireland’s most famous literary figures, including William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Maud Gonne, and Peig Sayers. The comic was created by Dr. Anthony Valentino, an assistant professor at the County College of Morris in New Jersey. The series starts here, or you can catch up on completed stories here.
There are many brick artists who make stop-motion LEGO videos, but Morgan Spence stands out among them. The Scottish teenager has such a knack for storytelling that he makes commissioned LEGO videos through his company Morgspenny Productions. The teen told Jimmy Kimmel that last summer, Spence made the proposal video above. Check out his other videos here.
10. JEFF FRIESEN // 50 STATES OF LEGO
Canadian photographer Jeff Friesen and his daughter did a series that depicted each state in America in a scene made of construction paper and LEGO minifigs. They’re more comedic than accurate, but they do give us an idea of what outsiders think when they hear a state’s name. (If you couldn’t guess, the state pictured here is New Mexico.) See all the 50 States Of LEGO at Bitrebels, and check out more of Friesen’s whimsical LEGO works at the Instagram gallery Stories for Toys.
The Ice-Skating Dandies of 18th-Century Paris. They took a mode of transportation and made it into an art form.
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Yale student turns 5-day mumps quarantine into the best Snapchat story ever. Boredom can do strange things to a person.
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In the video Smile, a woman fantasizes about her possible reactions to a catcaller. Contains NSFW language.
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France Has Her Own Lady Liberty, and Her Name is Marianne. She changes with the nation’s political climate.
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The synchronization of 100 metronomes. Watch and try to identify the last holdout.
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A Cromulent Exercise in Language. An awful lot of our new words come from pop culture.
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Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic? Another of the many way the prequels defied common sense.
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When Arthur Conan Doyle Judged A Bodybuilding Contest. It was elementary, my dear.
House with a Heart Senior Pet Sanctuary via Facebook
Shelters have a hard time finding adoptive families for elderly pets, animals with disabilities or chronic medical conditions, large animals that need special facilities, and working animals who have outlived their usefulness. Some people have stepped up to provide permanent care for these animals, so that they can live out their lives in comfort and security.
1. OLD FRIENDS FARM
Many thoroughbreds are born each year, but only a few can be champion racehorses. Of the rest, some become pets and a few will be used for breeding stock, but even they become old eventually. In 2002, the public was shocked to hear that 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand was sent to a slaughterhouse. The Boston Globe film critic Michael Blowen was already trying to raise money to start a thoroughbred retirement farm, and the response to Ferdinand’s fate brought in enough donations to open Old Friends in Georgetown, Kentucky. That’s where former champion racehorses live out their retirement years alongside thoroughbreds that never raced—160 horses in all. The farm in Georgetown and its other locations in Franklin, Kentucky, and Greenfield Center, New York, are open to the public daily. Pictured above is 1997 Kentucky Derby winner Silver Charm, who is now a resident of Old Friends.
2. CHIMP HAVEN
For decades, the U.S. produced medical breakthroughs with the help of experimental lab animals, including hundreds of chimpanzees. When animal testing began declining, research centers found themselves with a surplus of elderly chimps. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) founded chimpanzee retirement farms, funded through the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection (CHIMP) Act.
Chimp Haven in Keithville, Louisiana, is the National Chimpanzee Sanctuary, home to more than 200 retired research chimpanzees on 200 acres of forest land. The chimps are free to roam, build their own nests, and associate with each other as they please. The staff at Chimp Haven interacts with the chimps to ensure they have veterinary care, complete nutrition, and enrichment.
Elderly people worry about what will happen to their cats if something happens to them. In Tucson, Arizona, they know that their pets can be taken in by Hearts that Purr Feline Guardians. The cats that come into their care live in a family environment, but the demand is more than the home can provide. Founder Jeanmarie Schiller-McGinnis began a foster care program to help alleviate overcrowding by placing cats with other elderly people who could use a companion pet. The foster cats remain under the guardianship of Hearts That Purr in case something happens. Some of the cats are available for permanent adoption.
4. HOUSE WITH A HEART
Dogs of advanced age and dogs with disabilities have a hard time finding homes because they present unique challenges and potential expenses not usually associated with the many younger dogs available for adoption. In 2006, Joe and Sher Polvinale turned their Gaithersburg, Maryland, home into a pet sanctuary for such hard-to-place canines. Joe has since passed away, but Sher continues to run House with a Heart Senior Pet Sanctuary, a retirement home for elderly and special needs dogs. With the help of a team of volunteers, the dogs get proper care and lots of affection.
Sheba’s Haven Rescue in Inverary, Ontario, Canada, is both a retirement home and a hospice for dogs. It takes in shelter dogs with incurable illnesses, disabilities, or limited lifespans and offers a loving family environment and palliative care. The resident dogs have three acres to explore, and orthotics, such as wheels, for those who need them. Dogs that are able can visit a local nursing home to spend time with human residents on Wednesdays. Dogs that were considered unadoptable have a permanent home at Sheba’s Haven.
The Shannon Foundation is a farm in St. Clair, Missouri, where all kinds of retired pets and farm animals can live out their lives. Current residents of the 100-acre farm include dogs, cats, horses, llamas, pigs, goats, chickens and other poultry, deer, a Fennec fox, and exotic pet birds. Some are special needs pets from shelters, others came when their owners died, and some were rescued from abusive situations. A few of the younger animals—including sugar gliders, emus, and horses, as well as cats and dogs—are available for adoption.
7. THE CENTER FOR ELEPHANT CONSERVATION
In May of 2016, Ringling Bros. Circus officially retired their last 11 circus elephants to a sanctuary in Florida. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Center for Elephant Conservation sits on 200 acres of land between Tampa and Orlando. The facility holds 40 Asian elephants who have either retired from the circus since 1995, or are offspring of retirees.
8. THE ELEPHANT SANCTUARY IN TENNESSEE
Ringling’s Florida facility is not the first elephant retirement village in the U.S., nor the largest. The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee has 13 elephants who retired from zoos and circuses and live on more than 2700 acres in Hohenwald, Tennessee.
9. ELEPHANT NATURE PARK
Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand is a retirement home for elephants that have spent their lives working in transportation and heavy lifting, or were rescued from abusive owners. Elephant Nature Park is supported by tourism, and runs various elephant care projects in Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar.
10. BIG CAT RESCUE
People are enamored with the idea of an exotic pet, like a wildcat, but then find that a full-grown wild animal is too much: too expensive to feed, too strong to live with, and in need of too much time and space. Exotic wildcats raised in captivity can’t go to a normal shelter and can never be returned to their native habitats.
Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida, provides a permanent shelter for big cats and exotic wildcats that began their lives in captivity. In addition to abandoned pets, they take in cats rescued from roadside zoos, circuses, and other stressful situations. The current population includes lions, tigers, leopards, lynxes, cougars, bobcats, servals, ocelots, and more. Their mission is to give big cats as wonderful a home as possible, but Big Cat Rescue also lobbies against the exotic pet trade and works to educate the public about wildlife issues. They also have a great YouTube channel.
How the Fermi Paradox Works. There are plenty of reasons aliens haven’t invaded the earth yet.
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Don’t Miss These 10 TV Shows Premiering in January. Comedy, drama, remakes, history, there’s something for everyone.
* Star Wars: Darth Vader’s Best Moments from the Marvel Comic. The series told the Sith Lord’s story between episodes IV and V.
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Scientists Say These Are The First Snow Leopard Quadruplets Seen In The Wild. The footage from Mongolia was captured in September.
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These Are The Best Wedding Photos Of 2016 And They’re Stunning. It’s enough to make you want to take the plunge yourself.
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This American Indian artist is reviving Native culture in a big way. Steven Grounds wants to turn an old boarding school from a place of shame into a gallery of art and history.
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The scientific reason you should be watching Planet Earth. It will awaken your sense of awe for the natural world.
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The Era of the Body Snatchers. Grave robbing was once a profitable career.
The Tragic Romance of China’sRomeo and Juliet. The heartbreakingly romantic story The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd still inspires lovers.
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Cold War Secret: Project Horizon. The 1959 proposal to put a nuclear military base on the moon.
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An Alternate History of DNA. If any one scientist hadn’t make a breakthrough, everything after would have been different.
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Finland just launched an experiment giving 2,000 people free money until 2019. The basic income program will show how $590 a month can help the unemployed get back to work.
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Watch South Korea’s giant Titanfall robot come to life. It’s Optimus Prime with a man in his chest.
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The History of Islam’s Golden Age, part one, part two, and part three. For a time, they were the leaders in science, technology, and medicine.
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The pirated Chinese translation of Revenge of the Sith now has spoken dialogue to match the English subtitles. Enjoy the video version of classic Backstroke of the West. Contains NSFW language.
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How 12 Famous Rappers Picked Their Names. One came from an internet name generator!
21 Little Ways To Be Happier In 2017. Everyone could use a little mental health maintenance.
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The Last Dog At The Shelter Receives The Sweetest Farewell Party. For the first time ever, the Hawaiian Humane Shelter adopted out all of its animals just before the new year.
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Inspiring Lessons from Movies for the New Year. A little wisdom to start 2017 with.
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The Most Anticipated Movies of 2017. Mark up your new calendar with the release dates.
* Work Days in America vs. Sweden. Some employers there want to reduce employee burnout.
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What Are the Odds You’ve Met a Psychopath? Higher than you realize, but you shouldn’t worry.
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Everything you need to know to get a jump on your 2016 taxes. The sooner you deal with them, the sooner it will be over.
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11 Beautiful Black Chickens. They can’t help it, they were bred to be attractive.
