— Werner Purkhart has been running a “silent disco” in Salzburg, Austria, for four years. He was denied renewal of his business permit in July because his parties were too loud. At a silent disco, each dancer wears headphones to hear radio-transmitted music; to those without headphones, the roomful of swaying, swinging dancers is eerily quiet. Salzburg Mayor Heinz Schaden said it was still too loud. “The noise … is keeping (the neighbors) up.”
Weird Food Prep
Leaked photographs taken by an undercover health and safety officer at China’s Tongcheng Rice Noodle Factory in Dongguan City show workers in street clothes casually walking back and forth on piles of vermicelli noodles about to be packaged for shipment to stores. Some workers were even seen lounging or sleeping on the mountains of noodles. In 1992, News of the Weird noted that health officials in South Dennis, Mass., had closed the Wing Wah Chinese restaurant for various violations, including the restaurant’s habit of draining water from cabbage by putting it in cloth laundry bags, placing the bags between pieces of plywood in the parking lot and driving over them with a van.
Odd Naps
— “The Chinese fondness for napping in odd places is a well-documented phenomenon: one that’s spawned a popular website and even a book,” wrote The Wall Street Journal in a July dispatch. In a recent photo essay, a Getty Images photographer captured a series of shots of customers catching 40 winks in various furniture departments of IKEA stores, which does “not see it as a problem,” according to a spokesman. Maybe, he said “we can sell an extra mattress or two.”
Signs And Wonders
— Five siblings in a rural Turkish family near the Syrian border were discovered by researchers in 2005 to be quadruped walkers (hands and feet to the ground, rear ends up). This was thought at the time to mark the first known “turnaround” in human evolution. However, the siblings were later re-characterized by the PLOS One journal research as people who were accommodating a musculo-skeletal imbalance in the brain. Other members of the family have normal gaits. The journal noted that the five quadrupeds have a variety of developmental issues.
— Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News reported in May that a 62-year-old man on an Istanbul TV dating show said he was just “an honest person looking for a new wife.” He also mentioned he had served two prison terms, one for murdering a wife and the other for murdering a girlfriend. “Bad luck always found me,” he said. “This time I’ll leave it to God.”
Police Report
— Alonzo Liverman, 29, was arrested in June in a Daytona Beach, Fla., police sting on prostitutes’ johns. “I’m hungry,” was the female officer’s come-on. Responded Liverman, “I got a salad.” Even though no salad was found on Liverman, police determined the banter constituted a sufficient offer for paid sex.
— The robber of a Chase Bank in Tucson, Ariz., is still on the loose even though surveillance video has been widely distributed. The video showed a man pulled the holdup while carrying a small dog in a basket.
Donkeys Rising
— In Turkey, some shepherds have outfitted their sheep-monitoring donkeys with solar panels and battery packs to illuminate isolated fields in the night. Thus, pregnant animals can be aided during births and will not need to return to the farms for assistance.
— In an interview with Vice.com, the Swiss founder of Eurolactis touts donkey milk as the preferred substitute for cow milk on the grounds that donkeys have only one stomach, as human beings do. Cows, goats and sheep have multiple stomachs that break down their complex milk. But that milk gives human beings digestion problems.
The Justice Angle
— In the midst of the city of Detroit’s crackdown on residents who were delinquent on their water bills, the Council of Canadians came to the rescue. First, the council pressed the United Nations to label Detroit’s program a “human rights” violation. Said the council chair, “I’ve only seen this oppression in the poorest countries in the world.” Second, the council sent a convoy of “good Canadian, public, clean water” into Detroit in July to help the 79,000 homes in peril. The amount of water was a only a small percentage of what was needed.
— Ajanaffy Njewadda and her husband recently filed a lawsuit against New York City’s transit authority (MTA) after she fell down some stairs at a subway station, broke an ankle and got a concussion. The MTA had placed a large ad for the serial-killer TV series “Dexter” on station stairs. Njewadda said she was terrified by the ad and lost her balance.
— A man who was called only “D.B.” filed a lawsuit in April against medical clinics and physicians who performed his colonoscopy in Fairfax, Va., in 2013. The suit was based on what the patient learned from audio his smartphone recorded while he was unconscious. Though he originally intended to record only doctors’ instructions, he was dismayed to learn that they began “mocking” him the second he went under, making disparaging and false statements about his health; feigning disgust at his body (“Oh! Oscar Mike Goss!” — slang for “OMG” or “oh, my God”); threatening to “fire a gun up his rectum”; “diagnosing” him with syphilis or “tuberculosis in the penis”; and threatening to note hemorrhoids on his record. The tape showed that all of this was done amidst gales of laughter.
Recurring Themes
The most recent murder suspect to whine about his oppressive jail conditions is Adam Landerman, 21, awaiting trial for the grisly murders of two people. In July, his patience exhausted, he filed court papers in Joliet, Ill., complaining that the jail’s towels are too small, the jail offers no barber or beautician services or shaving cream, and the food is “monotonous and undiversified.”
Weird News Classic
Fred Armfield was arrested for patronizing a prostitute in Greenwood, S.C., in January, 2010. Armfield allegedly confessed he had bargained Melinda “Truck Stop” Robinson down from $10 to $5 for oral sex. Several days later, however, Armfield disputed the arrest, calling himself a “descendant of the original Moro-Pithecus Disoch, Kenyapithecus and Afro Pithecus,” — “living flesh-and-blood being” who, based on his high character and community standing, should not be prosecuted. Also, he said, any payment to “Truck Stop” with Federal Reserve Notes didn’t constitute a “purchase” since, he said, such notes aren’t “lawful money.”
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