Karl's Weird News

 Heaven’s Gate revisited:

Ten years ago next week, one of the strangest events in county history exploded into the public’s consciousness. For several days, it was the biggest news story in the world.

It began unfolding the afternoon of Wednesday, March 26, 1997, during a period when the Hale-Bopp comet could be seen in the night sky.

 Inside a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult lay dead. Convinced that a spaceship was traveling behind the comet and that they would be transported to the vessel to begin a new life “beyond human,” they had poisoned themselves. Twenty-one women and 18 men died by eating pudding and applesauce laced with phenobarbital and other drugs – the largest mass suicide on U.S. soil.

Dog’s dinners prove popular in Nigeria:

“Welcome to animal kingdom where man pikin dey show dog pepper,” says Chibuzo Eze in Pidgin English, meaning: Welcome to place where the son of man is giving dogs a hard time.

Mr Eze then hungrily gets back to tugging his chunk of dog meat.
…
Mr Eze says he eats dog meat because “e dey protect person from all those nyama-nyama disease them” – it gives you immunity from different diseases.

“Seven words you can never say on television”… but which are said on the Internet. A lot.:

The Net’s not always a kid-friendly place; there is plenty of foul language out there. And of course, the blogosphere is no different.

But how different are the Rightosphere and Leftosphere when it comes to “dirty” language? Which side produces the most profanity-laced diatribes? Via Instapundit, I happened upon this interesting challenge from InstaPunk:

I propose an exercise to be performed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months’ worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin’s infamous ‘7 Dirty Words.’

…
So how much more does the Left use Carlin’s “seven words” versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

Read the whole thing – the total for the left is 384,788. The right comes in at 21,319
UPDATE: including more heavily trafficked blogs on both sides makes it even worse! 1537788-to-37285. 41-to-1.

Mexico’s ‘Migrant Mountain’:

Millions of migrants have crossed illegally from Mexico into the United States. Their experience could hardly be more real. But now at a controversial theme park in Mexico, tourists can pretend to be an illegal migrant.
…
They come to the Eco Alberto Park to be shot at, chased and to wade through fast-flowing rivers. I myself developed a certain connection with one such river, but more on that later. For the equivalent of $19.50 (£10), you can spend a night living like the millions of Mexicans who actually risked their lives crossing into the United States.

Melon-butting record smashed

A man has broken the world record for smashing watermelons with his head at the biennial Chinchilla Watermelon Festival in Queensland.

29-year-old John Allwood, a local melon picker, head-butted 40 watermelons in less than a minute to claim the title of world champion.

Mexican Businessmen Break Kebab Record

A group of businessmen in the northern Mexican City of Chihuahua broke a tasty record Friday, making a hunk of meat on a skewer big enough to serve 24,000 tacos.

In the Friday event dubbed as the “Tacoton,” the meat for a pastor taco, a variety of the Mexican dish that consists of pork squashed onto a stake, weighed 3.9 tons and was 13 feet high, Mexican government news agency Notimex reported.

Officials from the Guinness Book of World Records recognized the hunk of meat as the world’s “largest skewer of kebab meat,” Notimex reported.

Unleash the gods of war: cargo cult awaits its messiah

THEIR MUSCULAR backs daubed with the letters U-S-A in bright red paint, a platoon of 50 young men march and wheel beneath a relentless tropical sun.

Shouldering bamboo poles like rifles, theyexecuteimmaculatedrills, stamping to attention, about-turning and deploying their imitation weapons beneath a giant stars and stripes flag fluttering from a pole.

This tiny, imitation army belongs to one of the world’s last surviving cargo cults, an anthropological phenomenon thought to have begun in the late 19th century and which mushroomed in the Pacific after the second world war.

When soldiers and airmen from the US and other allied countries arrived in the islands with huge war cargoes, it was believed by islanders that these were gifts from the gods – so those who followed the beliefs of a cargo cult would be rewarded for their faith. When goods fail to appear, as in the post-war period, it is because they have not yet performed the correct rituals – this has led to islanders re-creating airstrips, lookout towers and “radio equipment” made from wood or coconut shells and imitating the troops drills.

China to measure the Great Wall:

Researchers are to carry out the first detailed survey of the Great Wall of China to establish just how long the ancient barricade is, Xinhua reports. Along with checking its dimensions the four-year study, which starts in May, will map the wall’s exact route.

Islands where marriage is an offer that no man can refuse:

UNDER threat from increasing contact with the outside world, the world’s only surviving culture in which men have no say in who they marry is proving surprisingly resilient. In the Bijagos archipelago of 50 islands off the coast of Guinea-Bissau in west Africa, it is women, not men, who pick their partner. They make their proposal public by offering their groom-to-be a dish of fish, marinated in red palm oil.

Modern Pagans Honor Zeus in Athens

A clutch of modern pagans honored Zeus at a 1,800-year-old temple in the heart of Athens on Sunday the first known ceremony of its kind held there since the ancient Greek religion was outlawed by the Roman empire in the late 4th century. Watched by curious onlookers, some 20 worshippers gathered next to the ruins of the temple for a celebration organized by Ellinais, a year-old Athens-based group that is campaigning to revive old religious practices from the era when Greece was a fount of education and philosophy.

Ganges flushed for Hindu bathers:

India’s Ganges river at the city of Allahabad has been flushed with fresh water from upstream to improve bathing for millions at a key Hindu festival.Some holy men, or sadhus, had threatened to boycott bathing in waters they considered too polluted.

Five million devotees have already gathered on the banks of the river for the 45-day Ardh Kumbh festival.

What’s in a name? In Venezuela, just about anything

As university students clashed with the police in Venezuela last May, attention focused not just on their demands to hold elections without government meddling but also on the names of the two leaders organizing the protests: Nixon Moreno and Stalin Gonzalez.

 Many Venezuelans had a good laugh at the names and went on with their business. What’s so odd, after all, about the occasional Nixon or Stalin in a nation where bestowing bizarre names on newborns has become a whimsically colorful tradition?

Icy time for Dook swimmers:

Around 400 revellers donned fancy dress to brave the icy waters of the Firth of Forth in this year’s Loony Dook swim.

 People dressed as everything from Santas to Vikings entered the waters of the Forth in Edinburgh for the charity swim, reports the BBC.

Christmas is just poo in Spain

What’s the most prized figure in an average nativity scene – a wise man, a donkey, perhaps a shepherd? Well in certain parts of Spain the one character no self-respecting manger would be without is “El Caganer” or “The Crapper”. Every year homes across the Spanish region of Catalonia proudly boast a statuette of a smartly dressed peasant squatting behind a rock with his trousers around his knees and his butt sticking out.