Ric Flair, wrestling’s golden boy in the ‘80s, says he’s slept with around 10,000 women during his 68 years on Earth. Woooo! Known for his flamboyant wrestling persona on WWE, Flair made this confession for an upcoming ESPN 30 for 30 documentary. The Nature Boy says now that he wished he hadn’t revealed the number because he doesn’t want to embarass his grandkids, he told People magazine. Flair isn’t up to his casual shtick anymore. Since he met his fiancee, Wendy Barlow, Flair is a “one-woman man.”
90 Degrees of Uncool
The New England Patriots had to issue an apology to fans after charging people at Gillette Stadium $4.50-$5 per cup of tap water during the game on Sept. 24, in which the temperature reached up to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Organizers are lucky the place didn’t go all Woodstock ‘99 when music fans rioted, in part, because of the lack of water and exorbitant water bottle prices. Gillette got itself into this dry situation when vendors for the $3.7 billion franchise were unable to maintain a steady supply of for-sale water bottles.
The Other Thing Paul Revere Rode
Listen up! This shit is important. Workers digging at the site of Paul Revere’s home in Boston’s North End believe they may have discovered the Revere family outhouse. Revere was an American silversmith who played a well-known role in the American Revolutionary War: his midnight ride alerting fellow colonials that the British were coming. The find is particularly fabulous, city archaeologist Joe Bagley says, because people in the Colonial Era didn’t just go numbers one and two in the outhouse, they also threw their trash in there. “We’re hoping to find the individuals’ waste themselves, from which we can get seeds from what they were eating, we can find parasites, find out what their health was, but then everything else that they threw out from their house,” Bagley told CBS Boston. Researchers aren’t ready to officially declare that the hole they’re digging in was Paul Revere’s shitter. To confirm their suspicion, they need to dig down for the “nightsoil, that kind of smelly, dark soil which is now composted and not that bad, but might have a stench still,” Bagley says.
Sorry About Your Car, Man
A Denver woman leaving work at the end of the day had reason to be pissed: She found a scratch on her car’s back bumper with no note in sight. But that was before she also noticed her left side mirror was slightly askew, and that tucked inside was an envelop containing not only an apology note, but two $20 bills and half a joint — all of which were rolled up in a baggie. “Hey I am very sorry truly (sic). I am such a dumbass. Please forgive me. Sorry 4 the scratch man,” the note read. The $40 will be put to use buffing out the scratch, but the woman won’t be smoking the j… at least that’s what she told the local NBC affiliate. “I’m not a smoker; I’m a runner.”
Yes, I Did Inhale
A British man recently got the medical news you never want to hear: a lung cancer diagnosis. A persistent, year-long cough led him to seek an X-ray, during which doctors discovered what they believed to be a tumor. But while operating on the man to remove the tumor, the doctors instead retrieved a Playmobil miniature traffic cone. The man, who was 47 at the time of the operation, explained he had gotten the play set, including the toy cone, on his 7th birthday. In a report on the procedure in the British Medical Journal, he told researchers he regularly inhaled the toy pieces from the set. This one sat there undisturbed for 40 years until leading to his cough, diagnosis, and later — one imagines — sheepish relief following the operation.
Taking the ‘Fun’ Out of Funeral Directing
Being a funeral director is probably a hard job. It can’t be fun hanging around corpses for so much of the day. One coping mechanism for a Pennsylvania funeral director was — according to an abusing corpses charge — allegedly taking cellphone pictures of organ harvests and decomposing corpses to “gross out” her friends and family. Police confiscated her phone on the charge, and in addition to the photos, found texts about (gasp!) marijuana. She is now facing a marijuana charge, as well. A few thoughts: 1.) Texting gross photos to your friends and family can sometimes be a crime. 2.) Once police have access to your phone, apparently, they will probe every single text and conversation inside. 3.) Would I be able to resist the urge to text gross photos of corpses to friends and family if I was a funeral director? The jury is still out.
It Came from Edgewater Pond!
At Edgewater Pond in Alberta, Canada, city staffers in hazmat suits sprayed chemicals into their stormwater pond on Sept. 26, hoping to vanquish a dreaded scourge: monster goldfish. The problem began four years prior, when someone released store-bought goldfish into the pond. The invasive species can grow up to a foot long and have now taken over the pond. The fish normally grow to accommodate the size of a small fish tank, but without any boundaries the orange aquatic menaces have grown not only in size, but in number. During the past three years, thousands of goldfish have spawned from the pond and the city’s plans to eradicate them have been to no avail. This year the stakes are higher as the fish have been spotted migrating to a nearby pond. For those concerned about the rest of the animal kingdom, the city’s environmental director said the chemicals sprayed in the pond only work on animals with gills and the goldfish are the only species in the pond that have them.
Robotic, Pollution-Sniffing Eels from Switzerland
A team of researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have developed a robot modeled off lamprey eels. “Envirobot,” a long, sensor-equipped robot, is capable of swimming along the surface of the water and collecting samples and data for analysis. The robot was made possible due to advances in 3D printing and allows researchers to deliver scientific data in real time. The creators of the Envirobot hope the project’s robotic descendants will be able to operate autonomously, even underwater.
A High Speed Window Wash
A viral video of a man clinging to a windshield wiper of a high-speed train has gained a lot of traction on the internet. The daredevil train surfed for about four minutes on Sept. 24 in Perth, Australia. An employee of the railroad company called the Public Transit Authority during the stunt and agency officers were there to greet the 23-year-old thrill seeker at the train’s next stop, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The report continued that the unidentified man was taken to a hospital for a mental evaluation.
Keep it weird Pioneer Valley — and tell us about it. Send weird news tips to deisen@valleyadvocate.com.
