Weekly Weird News

Each week we send our Queen of the Weird, Claire Lumiere, into the wilderness of the Internets to find the weirdest reports from the Underground, CounterCulture and the Paranormal mileau! If you have news that you feel demands the attention of the SittingNow community then drop us an email at wwn@sittingnow.co.uk

Apparently the facts that you mostly vote behind a curtain and are not necessarily at the polls for a very long time does not seem to have sway over Florida nudists who recently have been lobbying for clothing optional polling places. They say it would make it easier for the nudist community to pass their ballots.

Fifty-two cows were struck dead after lightning hit a wire fence they were grazing next to in Uruguay last week recently. In more valiant animal-electrical news,

An octopus menace named Otto at the Sea Star Aquarium in Germany shot out a bright lamp with a precise jet of water and short-circuited the building recently. Spokespeople from the Aquarium say he is the victim of ennui, allegedly having seen him juggle hermit crabs and throwing stones at the tank before.

A French man on a high-speed TGV train in France got his arm stuck in the toilet while trying to fish out his mobile phone. A witness said, “He came out on a stretcher, with his hand still jammed in the toilet bowl, which they had to saw clean off.”

Vampire moths have been discovered! Of this strange population just found in Siberia, entomologists say that they may have evolved from a purely fruit-eating species.

NewScientist reports that homosexual activity can, in some instances, produce offspring. That is, in beetle populations, where less than 7% of females were fertilized indirectly in a study.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare found in a six week observation period that more than 1,400 live, exotic animals were being traded online. The selling of rare live animals has been made easier with the internet, they say, and as is generally the case, regulators of the illegal activity “have been a step behind.”

Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin says the first
astronauts sent to Mars should be prepared to spend the rest of their lives there, in the same way that European pioneers headed to America knowing they would not return home. Because the distance to Mars varies between 55 million and more than 400 million km, a roundtrip would take a year and a half. Buzz proposes, “That’s why you [should] send people there permanently, if we are not willing to do that, then I don’t think we should just go once and have the expense of doing that and then stop.” The point of doing manned missions to Mars, he says, are to “do things that are innovative, new, pioneering”. NASA has tentative plans to send the first astronauts to Mars around 2030 or 2040.

And in case anyone is interested in getting some holiday shopping done and not for those expensive exotic animals which are probably out of most of our price ranges, a sacred seashell in the form of the Virgin Mary was found on the coast of Virginia recently and she’s already up on ebay having started at $24.99!