Wrecking ball

Remember that spate of construction crane accidents in Spring 2008? Despite the lack of news coverage, such accidents continue on a regular basis. Occasionally, when the accidents take a somewhat humorous tone rather than a human toll, they make the weird news. Less often - and sometimes more spectacular - are accidents in which a wrecking ball breaks loose. No one was killed the dramatic incident pictured, which happened in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in July 2007. The 1,500lb. wrecking ball was being used to demolish part of Allegheny College's Pelletier Library when it let loose and rolled 3/4 of a mile downhill. "As it gained momentum, the wrecking ball rumbled from the campus along North Main Street, pinballing back and forth across the street, hitting nine parked cars and damaging curbs with each impact." It hit Alex Habay's Ford Taurus as he sat unawares at a stoplight at 9:45am on his way to work. Habay was showered with glass as the 3'-diamater ball landed in his trunk, crushing it into the backseat and causing the car to collide with the 2 cars ahead of it. He only had minor injuries, as did the crane operator, who tried to throw bricks in front of the loose wrecking ball to prevent the fiasco. In October of this year, a more sinister accident: in the yard of Montreal Tracteur in West Island, Canada, a man who worked for a recycling company was standing in a metal container attaching a cable so it could be hauled away when a 675lb. wrecking ball fell on his head, killing him instantly. The crane operator, who apparently mistakenly released the ball, had to be hospitalized for shock. This incredible video demonstrates the force of the wrecking ball, which can weigh up to 12,000lbs., but is shown to have been staged for the cameras. This footage, too, was meant for the cameras - but to show that wallpaper has been developed to help walls withstand bomb blasts.

Airborne fish

Explained: flying fish (1st image)
Flying fish are from the family Exocoetidae and are found in all oceans, but are more prevalent in tropical and subtropical waters. Their large pectoral fins allow them to leap out of the water to escape predators. They can glide above the surface for 160' at a time, but if they catch an updraft they can extend that "flight" to 1,300'! To do so, they vibrate their tail 50 to 70 times per second to generate speeds of more than 40mph. Their airborne actions have landed them on the decks of ships.

Unexplained: falling fish (2nd image)
The raining of fish is a rare meteorological phenomenon often ascribed to waterspouts picking the animals up from bodies of water and dropping them over land. This explanation, however, has never been observed or scientifically tested - and sometimes occurs in fair weather. Fish falls have been reported for centuries, with the fish sometimes alive, sometimes frozen, and sometimes in pieces. It happened in India in February 1830; Glamorganshire, U.K. in February 1859; Singapore in February 1861; Rhode Island, U.S.A., in May 1900; Powys, U.K., in August 2004; California, U.S.A., in December 2005; and just recently in Japan in July 2009 and India in October 2009. On occasion, a single fish is dropped by a bird, but this does not explain the rain of multiple fish!

Donor siblings

People conceived from donated sperm or ova are seeking out their "donor siblings" to find others to whom they are genetically related. The process is facilitated by the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), founded by mother and son Wendy and Ryan Kramer in 2000. The DSR assists individuals to find - by mutual consent - their (or their children's) half-siblings, their own (or their child's) sperm or egg donor, or their own genetic offspring. The site, which also has a presence on Facebook and has been the subject of stories on NPR and CBS's 60 Minutes, currently has more than 25,000 registrants, and has connected 6,781 people. Ryan Kramer has 6 half-sisters, 2 of whom he and his mother have met. The average number of related donor siblings who've found each other on the registry is 5. But some have found 20, 50 or even, in one case, 120 donor siblings. Six children conceived from sperm donated by "48QAH" have linked up with each other and with their once-anonymous father, a handsome pediatrician who donated some 200 times at $50 a pop to help defray the cost of medical school. The DSR is just one of an International Network of Donor Conception Organizations formed in 2008. The laws - including Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act - are evolving to facilitate the match-ups. "People are curious about where they belong and identifying your siblings is just as much a part of belonging as knowing who your genetic parents are," says Laura Witjens, chairwoman of the U.K.'s National Gamete Donation Trust. Everyone agrees that it's a new kind of family, but some are concerned about the use of one man's sperm to father so many children. Policy guidelines suggest that this should not be the case, but those recommendations are not strictly enforced in the United States.

Place name changes

I heard something on the news the other day about Mumbai, India, and became curious about when and why the name of the city changed from Bombay. I knew why the country of Burma's name was officially renamed Myanmar, although many international journalists refuse to acknowledge the change. But when did Peking become Beijing and why did Constantinople become Istanbul? Here are the answers...
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Peking (1st photo) to Beijing (2nd photo)
The name of the Chinese capital of Peking did not change - just the way it was Latinized. After the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, the government adopted a new transliteration method that changed the way the city was spelled in English. The pronunciation never changed in the East, and many Chinese were unaware of the perceived name change. Westerners continued to use both names until China began enforcing the use of the official name "Beijing" on all flights, sea routes, and official documents in the 1980s.
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Constantinople (3rd photo) to Istanbul (4th photo)
The most well-known city in Turkey has had many names. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, "Konstantiniye" was preferred to "Constantinople." The Greek word "Stambulin" ("the City") was often found on roadsides and punningly changed to "Islambol" ("where Islam abounds") by devout Turks. After the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, "Stamboul" was most often used, although it was called "Constantinople" by Westerners well into the 20th c. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), founder of the Republic of Turkey, adopted "Istanbul" as the city's official name, but Europeans showed great resistance, calling it "Konstantineopel" in Germany, "Constantinople" in Britain and France, "Konstantinopoli" in Italy, and "Konstantinopolis" in Greece. "Istanbul" was used in parentheses on Western maps into the 1960s, even though the current name also has early roots. The Byzantines were believed to have called it merely "the city" because of its size, so "eist enpolin" ("is tin polin") referred to going to the city, which may have been the origin of the current name, which was familiar to the Turks in the 11th c.
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Bombay (5th photo) to Mumbai (6th photo)
When the right-wing Hindu nationalist party Shiv Sena won elections in the state of Maharashtra in 1995, they announced that the port city of Bombay was being renamed "Mumbai" after the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi. Federal agencies, local businesses, and newspapers were ordered to adopt the new name. Shiv Sena argued that "Bombay" was a corrupted English version of "Mumbai" and a remnant of British colonial rule, although the national government opposed the name change, fearing that the city would lose its international identity. The change seems to have been successful, although the Shiv Sena's intention to do away with the term "Bollywood" has not.
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Burma (7th photo) to Myanmar (8th comparison photo)
The ruling military junta changed Burma's name to "Myanmar" in 1989. The change was recognized by the United Nations and countries including France and Japan. But the U.S. and the U.K. continue to use both names because they refuse to accept the legitimacy of the unelected military regime, which also changed the name of Rangoon, the country's former capital, to "Yangon." "Burma" and "Myanmar" refer to the same thing and one word derives from the other. "Burma" is the infomal word used in conversation, and "Myanmar" is the literary, ceremonial, and official form. Imposing the formal name is a form of censorship, so the use of it in the international community indicates where sympathies lie.

Follow-ups

Aquaria 11/23/09 Valencia, Spain, boasts not the largest tank, but the largest aquarium in Europe, the Oceanografic.

Stone/house 11/19/09 Reader Angelica Compton brought my attention to this article about an enormous boulder in a house in Margaretville, New York.

Follow-ups 11/16/09 The photograph in this post shows a Chinese man who has had half his body amputated. The operation is called a hemicorporectomy and here is more about why and how often it is performed.

Alligator urban legends 11/14/09 Here is a dead alligator photographed last week near Manaquiri, Brazil. And here is a crocodile photographed in Tanzania on top of the backs of some hippos who then attacked and killed it. Two men in Bangladesh were sentenced in absentia to 2 years in jail for beating and blinding a sacred crocodile at a shrine. You may still vote for your favorite entry in the Viewer's Choice Competition of National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009, including #23, a striking close-up of an occupant of Kwena Crocodile Farm in South Africa. Lastly, fossils uncovered in the Sahara Desert reveal "a world full of crocodiles."

Placentas and more 11/12/09 A female photographer with phocomelia gave birth to an average-sized son, now 4 years old.

Forensic pathologists 11/8/09 In this post I featured some famous forensic pathologists. I was recently asked to write an editorial for Anil Aggrawal's Internet Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology and discussed - in an article called "No 'Glass Ceiling'" - the increasing presence of women in the field.

Odd animals 11/4/09 Like Gemina at the Santa Barbara Zoo, a young giraffe named Amali has arrived at the Tulsa Zoo with a crooked neck.

One man band 10/24/09 It dawned on me to look up the history of another street musician - the organ grinder - and find out why they are always depicted with monkeys. They operated organs of various sizes on the street and were often looked down on: banned, accused of petty theft, and considered tone deaf. The monkeys were used to attract attention, performing tricks and collecting coins from patrons. The photo above shows an Afghan boy (obviously not an organ grinder!) with his pet monkey.

Winks and blinks 10/21/09 You have probably heard about Rom Houben, the Belgian man who was unable to communicate for 23 years until doctors recently discovered that he was not in a persistent vegetative state. Because he now types very quickly on a touch-screen keyboard with a finger cradled by a therapist, there are those who doubt the story.

Burqa 10/20/09 Barbie in a burqa is going on sale at a charity auction. While we're on the subject of things Muslim, here are 2 incredible photographs: Afghan children reading the Koran and pilgrims in Mecca before the start of this year's haj.

Dinosaur eggs 10/4/09 A rich accumulation of dinosaur bones has been found at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument site in Utah.

Gossamer 9/27/09 A deadly Australian spider has invaded Japan, possibly in woodchips aboard a container ship.

Pig butchering 9/1/09 Two rats, 2 pigeons, a rooster, a rat, and some 20,000 buffalo have been slaughtered in Nepal in the world's biggest animal sacrifice.

Squid 7/17/09 The strange mating secrets of the squid are revealed in 2 articles, one from 2005 and the other from 2008. Here is an award-winning photo of a squid embryo.

Green eggs and ham 5/11/09 Two firetrucks carrying 15 firefighters responded to the smell of gas in Axedale, Australia, only to find it was due to the flatulence of a 120kg pig. In Ridgetown, Ontario, Canada, a small pig left in the washroom of a Tim Horton's donut shop has been reunited with its owner - a student at the local agriculture school. And here is an article about the intelligence of the pig.

Coal mining and caving 5/4/09 Like Floyd Collins, John Jones has died while exploring a cave despite aggressive attempts at rescue. Here's a piercing photo of some Ukrainian miners.

Dolly the sheep 5/2/09 The world's oldest sheep, 23-year-old Lucky, has died in Lake Bolac, Australia.

Chihuahuas in the weird news 5/2/09 A chihuahua name Shyla in Christchurch, New Zealand, has become a surrogate mother to 7 abandoned kittens.

Mastectomy tattoos 4/27/09 There is research afoot in Australia to enable women to regrow their breasts after mastectomy.

Raiding ancient Egypt 4/20/09 Twenty of the mummies in the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo have undergone CT-scanning that revealed signs of atherosclerosis.

Giants 4/17/09 A female American model over 6' 8" tall is being featured in an Australian men's magazine next to an average-sized model.

Octopus fossils 3/19/09 Here is a lovely photomicrograph of fossilized red sponge coral.

Kangaroo home invasion 3/15/09 A man in Melbourne, Australia, was attacked and the dog he was walking nearly drowned by a kangaroo they startled in the park. Meanwhile, a remote community in Australia's Northern Territory are being terrorized by 6,000 wild camels.

Octopi at it again! 3/8/09 My Dad and I learned on a documentary the other night that octopi live in every ocean, so I became curious what an Arctic octupus (scroll to the end of the link) and an Antarctic octopus look like. The rare "dumbo" octopus recently turned up in the Census of Marine Life.

Chilblains 2/27/09 The Guiness Book of World Records has recognized a 76-year-old Nepalese man as the oldest person to summit Mount Everest.

Double-muscled dog 1/30/09 This dalmation has no excuse for its size except its owner, who has been banned from owning dogs for 10 years.

Disturbing decapitations 1/23/09 Like the people on the Canadian bus, the riders of New York's D train were trapped on board with a homicidal maniac armed with a knife.

Ancient animals 2/19/09 A first edition of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species is being auctioned after it was found in the guest washroom of a private home in Oxford, England. The gender of a tortoise estimated to be 75-100 years old has been mistaken for 50 years.

More mammoths 1/6/09 Researchers have found a fungus in mammoth poop that is explaining why they died out.

Auroras 12/23/08 To complement this image of the world with an aurora, here is a film of the planet showing the movement of the clouds.

Election Day! 11/4/08 In re: people-watching in the past - here is a mesmerizing film taken in San Francisco in 1905 to compare to 1901 footage from Washington, D.C., linked in this post.

Elephants 10/30/08 There is a link in this post to photos of animal embryos. Here is a photo of a 14-day-old transgenic mouse.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This funny (some say provocative) found-object sculpture dates back to 1936 and was created by Swiss Surrealist artist and photographer Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985). I found it when I was looking for another of her works - to be featured in a future post on taxidermy - and saved it for today. I, for one, am looking forward to the feast! Apologies to the vegans out there, but I am not bothered by the fact that a turkey was slaughtered for this meal. As I mentioned in my Thanksgiving blog last year, I find the annual presidential turkey pardon a bit ridiculous, but here it is again, performed by President Obama. You'll want to revisit last year's photo and story of the incredible 72-lb. bird roasted by a Minnesota man. The link to the equally incredible video of Sarah Palin's interview with turkeys being slaughtered in the background is broken, but here is a new link.

Here are the top 10 not-all-that-strange facts about the Thanksgiving holiday:

1. The "1st Thanksgiving" lasted 3 days!
2. Today, Americans will eat 46 million turkeys in a total of 117 million households.
3. At least 41 million of us will travel more than 50 miles to do so, although this holiday is not the most heavily traveled by airline passengers.
4. The "first Thanksgiving" at the Plymouth Colony in 1621 was just one of many traditional harvest celebrations by people around the world grateful for continued sustenance.
5. Native Americans had domesticated turkeys for centuries before the Europeans arrived.
6. Thanksgiving Day was declared a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and its date was set by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941.
7. Inspired by Americans, Canadians began celebrating a Thanksgiving Day in 1849, with the date formalized in 1957.
8. There are 12 towns in the U.S. named "Turkey."
9. The 1st national Thanksgiving football game was broadcast in 1934 and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (begun in 1924) was 1st televised in 1947.
10. Wild turkeys, of which there are roughly 7 million in the U.S., can run 10-12 miles per hour and fly in short bursts up to 55 miles an hour.

After I watched the turkey pardon, I wondered how long that stay of execution would give it, so I googled "turkey lifespan" and the first item on the list said 72 years - but that was the average lifespan of a person living in Turkey! The accurate answer is that a turkey in captivity lives an average of 2 years for males and 3 years for females, with a maximum recorded lifespan of 12 years. Turkeys bred for consumption live for 1 year. I want the wings!

Homicidal somnambulism

You may have heard the report in the news about the man from Wales who dreamed intruders had broken in and woke to find he had strangled his wife to death. Brian Thomas, 59, and his wife Christine, 57, were on holiday in a camper van last summer when he killed her. He had suffered from sleep disorders for 50 years, but had gone off his medication so the couple could share some intimacy while celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. Thomas went on trial earlier this month and has been acquitted. The judge told the jury that the defendant “was in his sleep suffering a night terror. What he did was wholly out of character,"and said to Thomas, “You are a decent man and a devoted husband. In the eyes of the law, you bear no responsibility.” The prosecution called it a unique case, but a little digging has shown that there have been a number of such "unique" cases - going back as far as the mid-19th c. - and do sometimes result in aquittal. Consider the following:

• In 2003, Jules Lowe beat his 83-year-old father to death and left his body in the driveway, claiming that he was sleeping at the time, and was committed to a mental institution.
• In 2001, Stephen Reitz assaulted and stabbed his girlfriend, but the court rejected his sleepwalking defense, convicted him of first degree murder, and sentenced him to 26 years in prison.
• In 1998, Dean Sokell battered his wife to death with a claw hammer and was imprisoned for life.
• In 1997, Scott Falater's defense that he had killed his wife by stabbing her 44 times and drowning her while he was sleepwalking was unsuccessful, and he was found guilty of first degree murder and imprisoned for life without possibility of parole.
• In 1987, Kenneth Parks was acquitted of fatally bludgeoning his mother-in-law and attempting to strangle his father-in-law after driving 14 miles to their house, all while asleep.
• In 1981, Steven Steinberg stabbed his wife 26 times while sleepwalking; he was found temporarily insane by a jury, who let him walk free.

Be careful if you are on Ambien! Homicidal somnambulism is quite a bit more extreme than sleepwalking or sleep-eating.

More white tigers

I blogged about white tigers 2 months ago and looked in on the status of American entertainer Roy Horn after his 2003 attack. I have since found these gorgeous photographs, so here they are with a weird news round-up. This photo was taken 2 days ago and shows 3-year-old Khane at the Belgrade Zoo eating his meal of chicken. Earlier this month, it was reported that the white tigers at the Chongqing Wild Animal Park in China are chickens, scared of the live fowl given to them as food to encourage them to hunt. The white tigers at the Singapore Zoo fatally mauled a worker who jumped into the moat in their enclosure in an apparent suicide attempt in front of zoo visitors.

This 2007 photo shows 6-year-old Odin, who lives at the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom Zoo in Vallejo, California, and like all tigers loves to swim. At the Liberec Zoo in the Czech Republic earlier this month, 2 lions snuck into the enclosure of a 17-year-old white tiger named Isabella and killed her.

This is one of the 6 white tigers born at the Buenos Aires Zoo in Argentina in 2006. A pair of white tiger cubs born at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Florida, made their public debut in 2008. Two white tiger cubs - Mitra and Shiva - born at The Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (TIGERS) in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 2008 have surrogate parents since being removed from their aggressive mother: the zookeeper and a chimpanzee. A golden retriever adopted and nursed 3 white tiger cubs in 2008 when they were abandoned by their mother at the Safari Zoological Park in Caney, Kansas. A white tiger was born in a litter of 4 this month in the wild - at the Tiger Canyons Sanctuary near Phillipolis, South Africa. Also this month, a white tiger was one of 4 cubs born in the Lucknow Zoo in Uttar Pradesh, India.

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This beautiful white tiger is unidentified and appears to be roaming free, but is probably in a game reserve. A film was made about an individual in Flat Rock, Indiana, who was attempting to breed a white tiger. There are only about 210 white tigers in the world.

Aquaria

I have collected some remarkable stories and wonderful incarnations of fishtanks, otherwise known as aquariums or aquaria, and originally referred to as marine vivariums (or vivaria). The 1st photo shows the world's largest cylindrical aquarium, the 25-meter-tall, 900,000-gallon AquaDom, in the lobby of the Radisson Hotel in Berlin. The 2nd photo shows the 2nd largest aquarium in the world, the 1,981,290-gallon Kuroshio Sea at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan - the window measures 8.2m x 22.5m and the glass is 60cm thick. Not pictured is the Silverfish Aquarium, a customized series of tanks that Octopus Studios will build to order in 6 weeks.

And now for the weird news:

• November 2009 - A Florida woman with 2 children in her truck struck and destroyed a 1,500-gallon aquarium at the Tampa International Airport (see before and after photos) - the tank was worth more than $50,000 and contained 50 fish and a dozen hermit crabs, of which only a few (including a clownfish, a butterfly fish, and a blue tang) have survived.
• December 2008 - A shark in the aquarium pool at a resort in the Bahamas jumped its barrier and went down the slide into the swimming pool. No guests were hurt, but the shark later died from the chlorine.
• August 2005 - A 61-year-old Australian woman sued the Sydney Aquarium after the glass in a giant exhibition tank shattered, leaving her standing in chest-high water, bleeding from a gash in her ankle, and surrounded by sharks.
• January 2001 - A shrimp hidden in a shipment of display rocks was terrorizing the occupants of a 5,000-liter tank at the San Francisco children's aquarium.

I, too, would have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder if a shark-filled tank collapsed around me, but also if a shark slid into the pool. I would have felt terrible killing almost all the fish in the airport aquarium, but I can't say I would have had much sympathy as I heard the barnacles at the children's aquarium pop...

Oasis and Airbus

My Dad and Sarah are visiting from Arizona for the holiday while my Mom and Del spend Thanksgiving with a friend in Texas. Since Dad and Sarah like to go on cruises, I will ask them if they intend to sail on the heavily promoted Oasis of the Seas. This Royal Caribbean ship is so enormous that its home port had to be enlarged and many ports are too small to accommodate it. It weighs 225,282 tons, has a length of 1,181 feet, has a height of 154 feet above the waterline, has 16 passenger decks and 6 engines, cost $1.4 billion to build, and carries a crew of 1,165. The 6,296 passengers it holds may enjoy the following amenities: a park with 56 live trees, a carousel, a casino, a tattoo parlor, a 750-seat amphitheater, 4 swimming pools, a jazz club, a comedy club, an entertainment venue, boutiques, restaurants, 5 movie theaters, a spa, a fitness center, a zip-line, a mini-golf course, a volleyball court, a basketball court, 2 surf simulators, 2 rock-climbing walls, and a youth zone that offers a science lab and computer gaming. To build and launch such a thing seems to me to be hubris and to sail on it seems to be conspicuous consumption. We know what happened when the Titanic was billed as the largest and safest ship ever built - and Oasis of the Seas is 5 times the size of the Titanic...

And then there's the Airbus A380, the largest passenger airliner in the world. Since its debut in 2007, a total of 38 have been built at a cost of more than $300 million apiece, with orders for dozens more. It has 4 engines, weighs 610,000 pounds, carries almost 82,000 gallons of fuel, and can carry 100 tons (the freight version can transport 150 tons). It is 240 feet long, 79 feet tall, and has a wingspan of 261 feet. The cabins in the A380 are customized, so the various planes offer bars, lounges, casinos, duty-free shops, beauty salons, and private suites with beds, desks, and shower access. The A380 has 2 decks and - with a flight crew of only 2 - can carry up to 853 passengers. I'd be afraid to be one of them for fear of tempting fate.

Eye news

Today I offer for your consideration a long list of weird news about eyes. When I first filled out an organ donor card, I excluded my eyes because it gives me the willies to think of them being removed, but I feel so strongly about restoring sight, if possible, that I no longer make that exception. What follows are stories about curing blindness and causing blindness, the weird things people do with and to their eyes, and eyes in archaeology and on the cutting edge. I have prefaced each headline with an adjective to help you decide if you want to go to the link to read/see more.

Promising: Scientists in the U.S. were developing a microchip that could be surgically implanted in the eye to stimulate the cells around the retina and restore sight.

Ironic: The U.K.'s National Health Service sent a letter inviting a woman from north Wales to have the ophthalmic surgery she needed - 18 years after she had died.

Painful: An 81-year-old monk on Thailand mistook a tube of superglue for eyedrops, but was fine after doctors unglued one eye.

Diabolical: A man from Dundee, Scotland, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for gouging out his ex-girlfriend's eye and attempting to throw her off an 8th-floor balcony.

Surprising: American woman Jalisa Thompson's claim to fame is her eye-popping ability.

Disturbing: A 70-year-old Swedish woman undergoing cataract surgery was mistaken for another patient and had an unneeded operation on her eyelid last month.

Miraculous: A 60-year-old American woman from Mississippi has regained her sight after doctors implanted a tooth in her eye to anchor a tiny prosthetic lens.

Unforgivable: Under the influence of PCP, a Bakersfield, California, man mutilated both eyes of his 4-year-old son, blinding him.

Strange: The eyes of a young woman in Melbourne, Australia, clamp shut for 3 days at a time, blinding her, then open for the next 3 days, then clamp shut again - a baffling affliction she has lived with for 4 years.

Remarkable: A 5,000-year-old artificial discovered at a site near Zabol, Iran, is believed to be the oldest prosthetic in the world.

Horrifying: Doctors in Kragujevac, Serbia, removed an 11cm parasitic worm from a 37-year-old woman's eye socket.

Questionable: Photos and a firsthand account of one of the first eyeball tattoos.

Insane: A 25-year-old death row inmate in Texas, who has a history of mental problems, pulled out his remaining eye and ingested it, having mutilated the other eye 3 years earlier while on trial.

Unfortunate: A drunken blind man stumbled into the wrong house in Houston, Texas, and was injured by birdshot fired by the homeowner when the man refused to leave.

Defensible: A blind man in Inkster, Michigan, shot at 2 men trying to rob him, hitting one of them in the chest.

Undetermined: Snopes has no information on the authenticity of this photograph showing a man pulling his eyeballs down to cheek level.

Unbelievable: The Texas Commission for the blind violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by discriminating against 2 employees who have impaired vision.

Daring: A legally blind man climbed both Mt. Hood in Oregon and Mt. Whitney in California, setting world records each time.

Creepy: This unnamed man has quite a range of motion when rolling his eyes around in his head.

Pishtaco

A horrifying story in the weird news today raises the specter of the pishtaco, a vampire-like demon in Andean folklore. Peruvian police have arrested 3 (or by another acount, 4) members of a gang of at least 9 people accused of killing peasants and selling their body fat for use in cosmetics. The suspects have confessed to 5 such murders, but are believed to have killed dozens of people over several decades. At a press conference, police displayed 2 bottles of what was confirmed to be liquified human fat, carried by the suspects when they were arrested in a Lima bus station. Said to be worth $16,000 or more per gallon for use in anti-wrinkle cream, the fat had been extracted from the thorax and thighs by dismembering the body and suspending it above a candle to allow the fat to drip into a vat below.

Pishtacos were characterized as white foreigners who found their Indian victims on dark lonely roads, killed them with machetes, and extracted their fat to make soaps, lubricants, healing salves, and beauty creams. A review of Mario Vargas Llosa's 1996 book Death in the Andes explains the myth and quotes from the book: Pishtacos, half-gringo ghouls who are said to live in caves, lurk along the highways, and suck the fat out of anyone foolish enough to travel the Andean roads at night. Pishtacos "needed human fat to make church bells sing more sweetly and tractors run more smoothly....They not only slit their victims' throats but butchered them like cattle, or sheep, or hogs, and ate them. Bled them drop by drop and got drunk on the blood."

The Peruvian police have not charged their suspects with cannibalism - that's another (recent) story altogether: Police in Perm, Russia, have arrested 3 homeless men for attacking a 25-year-old with knives and a hammer, eating part of his body, and selling parts to a kebab and pie kiosk...reminiscent in this case not of myth, but of Sweeney Todd.

Follow-ups

Cloaca 11/17/09 Today is World Toilet Day! I used the opportunity to contact Virginia Gardiner, inventor of the LooWatt, to give her my regards. In this article from Tuesday, the founder of the World Toilet Organization wants everyone to see past the toilet's lack of charisma to solve the world's sanitation problem.

Follow-ups 11/16/09 In my last set of follow-ups, I linked to the illustrations of radiation-damaged insects by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger. I soon heard from follower Kent Schnake, who was sent "reeling back to the 1950's. I was born in 1950," he writes, "so one staple of my childhood was movies about various dangerous mutations due to radiation. I immediately thought of a movie I saw about giant ants. As I was looking about for examples, I stumbled on this article that gives an excellent explanation of why scaling creatures up in size would create big problems regarding their viability. It seems that the 50 ft. Woman would have had serious health problems!" The article is a fantastic find and a great read.

Circus animals on the lam 11/13/09 A family was recently driving through a safari park in Johannesburg, South African, when a lion managed to open the back door of the car. Meanwhile, 8 British tourists are suing a safari park north of Cape Town, South Africa, because of the irresponsible actions of a park employee who overturned the vehicle they were riding in, causing them to be surrounded, threatened, and traumatized by a pride of lions.

Birds in fable and fact 10/22/09 In Fairbanks, Alaska, hundreds of ravens gathered right after 2 of the birds were accidentally electrocuted.

Mona Lisa(s) 8/12/09 Here is an attempt to create the largest reproduction of the painting - 50X its original size - in Wrexham, Wales, U.K.

Autotomy 5/10/09 In a follow-up to this post, I linked to a video of a Chinese speed-cooking competition. Here is a similar video of a deep-fried carp cooked, served in a Taiwanese restaurant, and eaten - all while it is still alive.

Chihuahuas in the weird news 5/2/09 Above (1st photo) is the best costume I have seen on a dog (not a chihuahua) this Halloween! And the chihuahua depicted (2nd photo) deserved, in my opinion, Best Costume of all the dogs featured in a post this summer.

Animal accidents 1/16/09 There have been a flurry of mentions that British photographer Kevin Beresford has published a surprisingly popular Roadkill Calendar for 2010, but nowhere can I find a link with order information, which seems a bit suspect.

Traumatic skull injuries 11/25/08 Though it involved the heart and not the skull, this traumatic injury immediately reminded me of Phineas Gage.

Stone/House

I love houses made of stone and always have, so I look for strange ones in slideshows of unusual architecture and am drawn to stories in the weird news about stones and houses. Bingo on both fronts. The house in the 1st photo appears in many lists and was compared to the Flintstones' homestead in a news article. It is located in the mountains of Fafe, Portugal, and incorporates 2 enormous boulders in the design. There is much speculation on the web that the house is photoshopped. I can't speak for that, but can say that the 2nd image shown here is fictional - the work of Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin. Another house that doesn't exist - at least not anymore - was the 19th c. stone house belonging to Irish filmmaker Neville Presho, who returned from New Zealand to find that his 6-bedroom home on Tory Island had been razed without his permission to make way for a hotel parking lot. The court found in his favor this summer, but he has only been awarded $69,000 in compensation. And then there's the family in Wyberba, Queensland, Australia, whose house (with them in it) narrowly escaped destruction when a huge boulder (3rd photo) broke free from a large overhanging rock face. It rolled 150M and came within 50M of the house. A geologist from the Queensland University of Technology said the boulder was a time bomb: "The fracture along which the boulder broke must have originally started some time ago and has slowly spread from the top left to the bottom right until finally breaking completely....It was simply a matter of time." He said the Days would be well advised to get a geotechnical engineer to inspect the rest of the rock face...