At the start of the school year, when meeting with the Record editors, I proposed an idea that didn’t take off but I still think is an idea with considerable merit. Why not have a round up of the strangest new stories of the past month in each issue of the school newspaper?
Our regular diet of important news is at times so dispiriting and so overwhelming – and yet there are many uplifting and delightfully odd stories out there, if you know where to look. (In the interest of giving credit where credit is due, this idea for a series is reviving and adapting a tradition pioneered by former students Anthony Dixon and Martin Miller).
I have several websites bookmarked on my browser that meet that specific emotional need of “I ought to read the news but cannot cope with the actual news.” Recently I went through the archives of these websites to dig up the items that are, in my humble opinion, the best quirky news stories of each month of the school year so far.
AUGUST: A few years back it seemed all but inevitable that driverless cars would be the way of the future. But the logistics of making this a reality are proving confoundingly tricky. While some American cities do allow driverless cars on an experimental basis, the residents of one downtown neighborhood in San Francisco were less than thrilled by the cars’ early morning presence in a parking lot back in August. The parking lot belongs to Waymo, a division of Google that is developing its own model of automated car.
For several nights in a row, clusters of driverless cars, which should in theory be able to park themselves with ease, began circling and honking at each other. Sophia Tung, a resident who began a YouTube livestream to document the phenomena, said she enjoyed watching the driverless cars’ nightly dance but would have preferred it without the honking.
SEPTEMBER: Ernesto Reinares Varea hit the headlines in Spain this September for offering a unique service. For 500 euros (about $550), Varea will interrupt a wedding if the bride is ambivalent about going ahead with the wedding but hasn’t yet had courage to call it off. Varea’s favored method is to show up unexpectedly and to “claim to be the love of your life” and then leave hand in hand with the bride. What began as a joke is now a real business venture. Varea describes his line of work as being a “wedding destroyer.”
OCTOBER: An Oregon man has found local fame with a strangely affecting trick: placing plastic googly eyes on existing public art installations, creating new works of art in the process.
NOVEMBER: Perhaps my favorite story of all. In November a group of men in California were caught dressing up in bear suits and attacking their own cars in order to fraudulent make insurance claims. The group was successful enough for three different insurance companies to pay out a little more than $140,000 in total before the ruse was discovered.
In each case a scam artist, dressed in a realistic-looking bear suit, broke into a car owned by someone else in the group, and savagely tore the car up and the others sent the video footage into the insurance company. All the “attacks” took place in the same area near the San Bernardino mountains, east of Los Angeles, which is known for having a large active black bear population. The costumes were later found at the suspects’ homes and included metal tools shaped to look like bear claws.
DECEMBER: What to do with excess Christmas trees? The Berlin Zoo has an answer. Each year, fresh unsold Christmas trees are donated to the zoo animals as playthings. Apparently, elephants like to throw them up in the air and to rub the bodies against the roughly textured trees, while giraffes like to nibble on the trees when they are hung down at an appropriate height.
JANUARY: OK, this story is more heartwarming than funny. A “golden spike” is a railroad spike used symbolically when two sides of railroad meet in the middle during construction. In January the city museum in Anchorage, Alaska (pop. 285,000), and the tiny city of Nenana (pop. 350), on the opposite side of the state, joined forces to win an auction bidding for the Alaska Railroad’s golden spike. The two cities jointly paid $201,600 for the golden spike, which will be displayed for an equal amount of time in each community. Alaska’s cross-state railroad construction project began in 1914 and it took nine years and 470 miles of track to join the two sides of the state together. The replica spike had been in private hands for the last 100 years.
FEBRUARY: George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees between 1972 and 2010, was known as a man of many strong and eccentric opinions. One of them was his strong aversion to facial hair, likely rooted in his days in the military, resulting in a strict ban on beards for Yankees players. Now, Steinbrenner’s son, Hal, the current owner of the Yankees, has repealed his father’s ban, which has been in place since the ‘70s. The old policy was not total (sporting a mustache was considered acceptable). The new policy was announced in advance of spring training.
