A three-year-old girl in North Carolina told her parents that the
monster behind her bedroom wall was keeping her awake at night.
Though her mother, Ashley Class, reassured her that any monsters in
the closet were the product of an imagination fuelled by watching
Monsters, Inc., many more reports about the noisy monster followed,
eventually prompting the family to bring in a thermal-imaging
camera.
Not long after that, beekeeper Curtis Collins began rehoming more
than 50,000 bees from a hive that he described as more than twice the
size of any he'd encountered in a home before. Class added another
figure: wall repairs not covered by her insurance company come to
$20,000.
In ![[IMG: the patient]](images/hedgehog.jpg)
our second item, Cheshire animal-hospital manager Janet Kotze
recounts a visit from a member of the public who arrived first thing
in the morning with a carefully lined box containing the injured baby
hedgehog she'd found cold and motionless on the pavement. The staff
of Lower Moss Wood Nature Reserve & Wildlife Hospital had to inform
the woman that she'd spent the night looking after the fluffy bobble
from the top of a winter hat. The sheepish woman left 'quite quickly'
with the bobble and the food and bedding she'd provided for it.
As emergency crews converged on the scene of an Amtrak train crash that
killed a pedestrian in Wasco, California, they were treated to the
sight of onlooker Resendo Tellez strolling through the streets with
the victim's severed leg. As officers closed in, they saw the
27-year-old Tellez sniff the limb and hold it aloft, then start waving
it around. He continued this until apprehended on charges of
misdemeanour removal of body parts from an area that is not a
cemetery.
Jose Ibarra, a construction worker who had been working nearby,
fleshed out the story with what officers hadn't witnessed: 'He started
chewing on it [...] he was biting it and he was hitting it against the
wall and everything.'
California's Murrieta Police Department received a cease-and-desist letter from Lego for unauthorised use of intellectual property. At issue was the department's pasting of Lego characters' heads onto its social-media images of people arrested for crimes but not yet proven guilty. Since community members had responded well to the 'weekly roundup' posts' form of anonymity-preserving mug shot, the department's Jeremy Durrant has reassured them that 'we are currently exploring other methods of publishing our content in a way that is engaging and interesting to our followers'.
It isn't contagious, is it? Alyssa Todd is a high-school teacher
in Buckeye, Arizona, who has recently been charged with inappropriate
sexual contact with a 15-year-old male student. Diana Pirvu is a
teaching assistant at a middle school in Buckeye, Arizona, who
came to police attention about six months ago for 'inappropriate
contact' with a 13-year-old student. A month before that, Jessica
Kramer, who taught at the same school as Todd, had been arrested for
maintaining an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old male
student.
The most recent of the three 'teacher sex' cases being processed by
the Buckeye police department came to light after the 23-year-old Todd's
husband found a pile of love letters between her and the student, in
which she professed that she would dump her husband in his favour.
Phil has alerted me to the case of Chioma Okoli, a woman in Nigeria
who stands accused of something far worse - making a 'malicious
allegation' that allegedly damaged the business of a tomato-puree
manufacturer. Okoli, 39, faces civil suit for telling her contacts on
Facebook that she'd found Nagiko Tomato Mix too sweet and seeking
their opinion of the product. A week after she characterised it as
'pure sugar', she was jailed for using her social-media account 'with
the intention of instigating people against Erisco Foods'. The company
alleges that Okoli's comments had lost them several suppliers. People
who agreed with her could find themselves classed as
co-conspirators.
To get bailed out of her water-leak-afflicted jail cell, she agreed
to apologise publicly to Erisco. A counter-suit is under preparation.
A week after Carrie Stevens Clark bombarded her Lehi, Utah,
neighbourhood and social-media environs with 'MISSING CAT' flyers,
she received a phone call from a vet informing her that the
microchipped feline, Galena, had hitched a ride to California in a
product-return box. The return of the returned cat was thanks to the
Amazon employee who unboxed the emaciated Galena in Los Angeles and a
night with a co-worker who self-identifies as 'the crazy cat lady'.
Two days after the phone call, Clark followed the box to California,
by plane, and collected Galena from the veterinarian's office.
After hastily exiting a Walgreen's in Albuquerque, allegedly sticky-fingered Mark Chacon tried to give pursuers the slip by zig-zagging his way through nearby cobbled streets. This did prevent any police cars from cornering him. However, the ruckus he'd caused came to the attention of officers who were mounting their horses for a day of pedestrian-safety work. As he heard the hoofs of officer Charles Breeden's posse approach, the 30-year-old Chacon offered merely an assertive 'Wasn't me!'
More than 60 kilos of marijuana, 124 boxes of vapourisers, and 24 boxes of cannabis oil have been returned to distributor Se7enLeaf. More than six months after Costa Mesa, California, police officers seized the products, some of which now are past their use-by date, they accepted lawyers' proof of the legality of the company's operations and that its use of a third-party delivery company had not breached regulations. Owner Michael Moussalli commented later that 'the police were not happy that no charges were filed; the police were not happy that the product was being returned'. The police were not willing to comment to reporters either.
Several zoos in China have faced criticism for portraying one species as another (with one classic example being a golden retriever painted to resemble a tiger) while others are accused of having humans dress up as such animals as gorillas and sun bears. Recently, Taizhou Zoo, in the province of Jiangsu, bit back at critics who complained about their 'panda dogs'. Zoo officials explained that keepers, who didn't have any real pandas to satisfy visitors, had used perfectly safe black and white hair dye to solve the problem. They stressed both that 'people too dye their hair' and that the dogs, which are correctly identified in the exhibit's small print as chow chows, are so popular that people should make sure to queue up to visit them.
The![[IMG: Snoop Fakey Fake]](images/Snoop.jpg)
California Highway Patrol brings us a story with a similar theme.
The general topic is 'If I have a mannequin in the passenger seat,
does that count as a second occupant in the vehicle?', and the answer
is that a Snoop Dogg dummy does not qualify the driver to use the
car-pool lane. After one Officer Kaplan pulled over a motorist for a
traffic violation, state troopers reported that, while 'the appearance
is next level modeling [...] at the end of the day ... plastic is
plastic'.
It is far from unusual for people to experience discomfort while seated on an aeroplane; however, Mexican comedian Yered Licona discovered that the bottom pain she was experiencing aboard a flight to Canada was something rather different. Finding her suddenly aching buttocks 'really hard' to the touch, she knew the fault lay with polymers injected during a cosmetic procedure. Medics in Mexico City confirmed this when removing what she described as her derriere's 'upper part, which was around four fingers width' from both buttocks'. She cannot identify the culprit, though since she has had numerous injections, in various locales.
Ethan Layne is a golf-course greenskeeper who decided to visit two people at the College of the Florida Keys after work. This involved a one-mile tractor drive from Key West Golf Club into a dormitory lobby. He didn't find the two people he had hoped to kill, but he did get to take out his frustration on the building's plumbing with the tractor's bucket and upend an occupied car before the cops showed up. The 22-year-old Layne managed to ram a police cruiser as his parting shot before facing gunshots in return. He has been arrested.
Finally, a 7-Eleven manager in Bradenton, Florida, witnessed an argument break out behind his shop between clerk Danny Waiters and a customer who 'frequently carries a spear'. Stepping in, the manager requested the spear-carrying man to leave the premises, with compliance being delayed only by further remonstration from Waiters. When the man finally turned away, the 34-year-old Waiters produced a pocket knife and stabbed him, inflicting a wound that required surgery. After turning himself in to the police, Waiters claimed that he'd expected a spear attack.