— Designer Van Tran of Brooklyn, N.Y., won the 12th annual wearable Toilet Paper Wedding Dress design contest in New York City in June, with a $10,000 prize from sponsors Charmin and Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Least Competent Criminals
In May, a 16-year-old boy in Lakewood, Wash., not only used Facebook to set up a marijuana-dealer robbery, but during the robbery itself, accidentally shot himself in the groin and femoral artery, requiring a life-saving seven-hour surgery.
Cognitive Failure
In a May journal article, biologists from the University of Florida and Oklahoma State University found that more than 80 percent of survey respondents want package labels on all foods that have DNA content, even though all meat and vegetables have DNA. The Oklahoma researcher found earlier that about the same number want such labels to be mandatory. Law professor Ilya Somin suggests playfully raising the fright level of those respondents by adding this alarm to the label they demand: “Warning: Pregnant women are at very high risk of passing on DNA to their children.”
World’s Greatest Lawyers
Attorney Lee Pearlman finally earned an acquittal in June, after two hung-jury trials, for his client Danielle Goeller — one of a seemingly increasing number of drivers who hit pedestrians but claim they were unaware of anybody being hit. Goeller, 28, a trauma-room nurse with no intoxicants in her system, had struck a 60-year-old man on a busy, heavily lighted Tampa street at 11:45 pm, cracking her windshield — but drove on without stopping. “What does she think she hit?” asked the prosecutor. “A deer? A bear?” Responded Pearlman, “She’s a scared girl in the middle of the night who doesn’t have the life experience other people do.”
Bright Ideas
— Picturesque Torrelodones, Spain, has a population of 22,000 humans and 6,000 pet dogs. The town apparently has few conscientious dog owners, which town leaders say accounts for the nearly half-ton of litter that accumulates daily. The town’s latest bright idea is installing a seven-foot-high, 10-by-10-foot brown, inflated plastic swirly in the center of town as a reminder to residents to pick up after their dogs.
— British student Joshua Browder, 19, created an easy-to-use computer app to help drivers fight parking tickets they believe unjust and now reports that users have won 160,000 cases out of 250,000. All the cases were in London and New York City and won by following his question-and-answer chat interface at DoNotPay.co.uk. Browder said he was motivated to develop the app after getting about 30 tickets he says he did not deserve.
The Passing Parade
— A bicycle thief was stopped on June 10 when the bike’s owner and several other people chased him from the Wal-Mart parking lot in Eagle Point, Ore., drawing the attention of a passing rider on horseback, who joined the chase and moments later lassoed the man and restrained him until police arrived.
— A kite surfer on a Sussex beach south of London got into trouble on June 26 and was unable to float back to land, until two good Samaritans in kayaks rescued him. The saviors happened to be dressed as Batman and Robin for participating in the Shoreham Beach Superhero Paddle.
Weird Japan
Client Partners is only one of several Japanese agencies that supply rental friends to the lonely, for hours or days of companionship tailored to the needs of the socially challenged client, with two rules: no romance and no lending money. A writer for AFAR travel magazine interviewed several friends in June, one of whom explained: “Japan is all about face. We don’t know how to talk from the gut. We can’t ask for help.” Said the female friend, “There are many people who haven’t been touched for years … who start to cry when we shake hands with them.”
But It’s Our “Policy”
Good Samaritan Derrick Deanda is facing a $143 bill from paramedics in Elk Grove, Calif., after he jumped to pull out a man and his three children, including a 2-year-old, who were trapped in car wreckage. A short time later, the paramedics arrived and, noticing that Deanda had a cut on his arm from breaking the car’s window to free the family, bandaged him. Elk Grove has a policy charging all patients at a first-responder site $143 for the rescue, and Deanda received his bill in June.
News Of The Weird Classic
Delivering gourmet meals to customers’ doors is a fast-growing business model, but so far, only London’s brand-new (as of 2012) Housebites goes the extra step. According to its press release, cited by Huffington Post, Housebites not only home-delivers restaurant quality cuisine at the equivalent of about $20 per entree, but offers an optional dirty-pans service, about $8 extra, lending out the containers in which the food was prepared, thus allowing clients to trick their dinner guests into believing the client actually prepared the meal.
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