What was billed as the United Kingdom’s first “Rage Cage” opened in Nottingham, England, in December. Patrons could use crowbars, baseball bats and hammers to smash crockery, electronics and glassware at prices ranging from $15-40.
The Unleash! package lets you demolish four small items, one medium item and a printer.
Rage Cage also offers a ‘couples therapy’ option, which gives partners the chance to vent their anger together for 20 minutes and wreck 11 small and medium items, including two printers.
Customers can also pay to wreck their own household items for 15 minutes.
More Anger Relief
In October, a bookstore in Cairo, Egypt, set aside a small, soundproof room where patrons could go scream at the top of their lungs for 10 minutes about whatever was stressing them out. The storeowner pointed to an academic study demonstrating screaming’s positive effect on the brain. The prototype store is still Donna Alexander’s Anger Room in downtown Dallas, which has been thriving since 2011. It offers a variety of bludgeoning weapons. This season, target mannequins have been gussied up to be Trump and Clinton.
The Passing Parade
— Steve Crow, who lives near San Diego International Airport, told a reporter he had given up since he had gotten no relief from the 20,068 complaints he made during 2016 about airport noise.
— A six-point deer head-butted the owner of a fur company in Willmar, Minn., and broke into the building, where thousands of recently harvested deer hides were being dried. The owner was slightly injured, and the vengeful buck escaped.
— A poll found that Austria’s word of the year for 2016 was a 52-letter word that begins with “bundespraesident” and refers to the postponement of the runoff election for president in 2016.
— Two weeks after a Pakistani International Airlines crash killed all 47 on board, some employees of the company figured they needed to dispel the bad karma, and sacrificed a black goat on the tarmac at Islamabad Airport next to an ATR-42 aircraft (the same model that crashed).
— In a January match in India’s Premier Badminton League, badminton player Mads Pieler Kolding returned a volley at a world’s record for a shuttlecock — 265 mph.
A News Of The Weird Classic
Leaders of the ice-fishing community are aiming for official Olympics recognition as a sport. They’ve asked the World Anti-Doping Agency to randomly test them for performance-enhancing drugs, according to a February, 2013, New York Times report. The chairman of the U.S. Freshwater Fishing Assoc. said, “We do not test for beer” because “everyone would fail.” Ice fishing is a lonely, frigid endeavor, mostly calling for guile and strategy, as competitors who discover advantageous spots must surreptitiously upload their hauls lest competitors rush over to drill their own holes.
The Way The World Works
Former elementary school teacher Maria Caya, who was allowed to resign quietly from her Janesville, Wisc., school after arriving drunk on a student field trip, actually made money on the incident. In November, 2016, the city agreed to pay a $75,000 settlement because the police had revealed Caya’s blood-alcohol level to the press in 2013. This was allegedly private medical information. The lawsuit against the police made no mention of Caya’s having been drunk or passed out; only that she had “become ill.”
The Redneck Chronicles
John Bubar, 50, was arrested in Parsonsfield, Maine, after repeatedly lifting his son’s mobile home with his front-end loader and then dropping it. The father and son had been quarreling over debris in the yard. The father only eased up when he realized his grandson was inside the home.
Questionable Judgments
David Martinez, 25, was shot in the stomach during a brawl in New York City. When he had tried to park in Manhattan’s East Village just after midnight, he moved an orange traffic cone that had obviously been placed to reserve the parking space. He apparently failed to realize that the parking spot was in front of the clubhouse of Hell’s Angels, whose members took notice.
No, I’m The Victim Here
“I’m as tired of hearing the word ‘creep’ as any black person or gay person is of hearing certain words,” wrote Lucas Werner, 37, on his Facebook page in December. He had been banned from a Starbucks in Spokane, Wash., for writing a polite dating request to a teenaged barista. Managers thought Werner was harassing the female. Werner charged that he was the victim of illegal “age discrimination.” He made a “science” claim that “age-gap love” makes healthier babies.
Police Report
Taylor Trupiano paid the $128 fine that was issued by a Roseville, Mich., officer who caught Trupiano’s car warming up unattended in his driveway. Police routinely issue such tickets to send drivers like Trupiano a message that unattended cars are ripe for theft. A police spokesman said the driverless warm-ups are illegal even for locked cars.
Judges Need To Step Correct
In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals finally pulled the plug on Orange County, Calif., social workers who had been arguing in court for 16 years that they were not guilty of lying under oath because they did not understand that lying under oath in court was wrong. The social workers had been sued for improperly removing children from homes. They defended their actions by calling witnesses who submitted made-up testimony. Their lawyers had argued that the social workers’ due process rights were violated in the lawsuit because in no previous case had a judge spelled out that the use of witnesses making fictional statements is not permitted.
Suspicions Confirmed
In January, 2013, the National Hockey League labor dispute ended, and players returned to work. As if on cue, some owners resumed their suspect claims that high player salaries were killing them financially. The Phoenix Business Journal reported that the NHL Phoenix Coyotes’ bookkeeping methodology allowed them to turn a profit for the season only if the lockout continued and wiped out all the games. In other words, based on the team’s bookkeeping, the only way for the Coyotes to make money was never to play.
— Schools’ standardized tests are often criticized as harmfully rigid. In the latest version of the Texas Education Agency’s STAAR test, poet Sara Holbrook flubbed the “correct” answer for questions about two of her poems that were on the test. Writing in Huffington Post in January, a disheartened Holbrook lamented, “Kids’ futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to poorly made-up questions.”
Aww!
— Jasper Fiorenza, 24, was arrested in St. Petersburg, Fla., and charged with breaking into a home in the middle of the night. The female resident said she awoke to see Fiorenza and screamed. But that the man nonetheless delayed his getaway in order to pet the woman’s cat, which was lounging on her bed.
— In December, Durham, Ontario, police officer Beth Richardson was set to get to a disciplinary hearing for “discreditable conduct.” After being called to intervene at a drug user’s home, she noticed the resident’s cat cowering in a corner. She took the cat to a veterinarian, but without asking the owner’s permission.
Least Competent Criminals
— Matthew Bergstedt, 27, was charged with breaking into a house in Raleigh, N.C. He failed to anticipate that the resident was inside, stacking firewood. The owner used a piece of firewood to bloody Bergstedt’s face.
— On Dec. 5 in New York City, an unidentified man made five attempts to rob banks in midtown Manhattan over a three-hour span. All the tellers refused his demands, and he slinked away each time.
People Different From Us
“Every major event in my life has been about insects,” Aaron Rodriques, 26, told The New York Times in December. He was home in New York City during a winter break from his Purdue University doctoral research on the “sweet tergal secretions” of German cockroaches. He was on his way to buy a supply of crickets and hornworms. “Hornworms,” he said, have an “amazing defense … they eat tobacco for the nicotine, which they exhale as a gas to scare away predators.” He added, “When I’m feeling stressed out, I might take one out to calm me down.” He said he met his first girlfriend when she was attracted to his pet giant African millipede, which is as long as a human forearm. But he admits that “for the vast majority” of time in school, “I was alone.”
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