‘Mystery pooper’ exposed
On a daily basis, a New Jersey man eluded police detection and managed to relieve himself (i.e. poop) on school grounds at a New Jersey high school. Police finally caught up with the “mystery pooper,” as they called him, after setting up a sting operation that every officer on the force was probably clambering not to be a part of. It turns out it was the school’s superintendent! He was charged with lewdness, littering, and defecating in public. While he faces these charges, the school district has placed him on paid leave. Hopefully he is given a chance for a bathroom break at his trial.
Be reverent before the holy chicken
Like something out of a fever dream, there’s a giant chicken-shaped church on the Indonesian island of Java known as Gereja Ayam. The man behind the chicken church told Atlas Obscura that in 1988 he received a vision of a dove with snow-white wings perched at the top of a hill. A disembodied voice asked him to build a church for all people. When he awoke, he initially dismissed the vision as just a dream. When one of his employees failed to show up for work after Ramadan, he went to go track down the man in his hometown of Magelang, and was invited to see the sunrise with employee. It was there that he recognized the hill from his dream. He then went to work designing the chicken-shaped church himself with construction starting in 1992 with a crew of 30 people. Due to a lack of funds, the project was halted in 2000, but viral Internet fame allowed the house of worship to be completed in 2015.
What’s that smell?
I’ll just come out and say it. Durians are weird. They’re a huge fruit native to Southeast Asia. In addition to being large, they’re covered in spikes and have a distinct, and not pleasant, smell. That smell caused some trouble at an Australian college campus recently when nearly 500 people were evacuated for a suspected gas leak that turned out to be just a rotting durian in a campus library. Emergency responders who showed up to investigate the smell of gas found a rotting durian fruit in a cupboard and alerted students that the coast was clear. No more fresh fruit in the library folks!
Cowabunga!
A Brazilian surfer has been making waves in the international surfing community. In November of 2017, Rodrigo Koxa surfed an 80-foot wave in Portugal that has just been recognized as the largest wave ever surfed by the Guinness Book of World Records. The video of Koxa surfing the wave looks like something out of The Perfect Storm, but Koxa said that receiving the award for breaking the record was the best day of his life.
This race will not qualify you for the Boston Marathon
On May 5, the town of Boerne, Texas, will host the “Boerne 0.5K run.” Yep, that’s about one-third of a mile for us yanks. The race starts at a local brewery and ends at — you guessed it — another brewery. It’s at least close enough “that we can lie and say that it is exactly one-third of a mile,” says one organizer. Boerne runners will get a free beer to start the race and if it’s too much to get to that finish line brewery, they can pay extra to get transported across the finish line — by a 1963 VW bus. And if you get a little hungry on the way, there’s a doughnut and coffee station about 490 feet into the marathon. Oh yeah, if you need a smoke, there’s a smoking station en route.
Nutty politics
A squirrel named “Furry Boi,” represented by a human proxy who wore a squirrel costume to campaign as Furry Boi, has won a seat in the University of California Berkeley Student Senate. The editorial board of the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian, however, is not laughing. They let Furry Boi’s backers have it. “You voted for a squirrel; we’re disappointed. Instead of electing qualified students who had real, tangible ideas … many of you thought it might be … funny … to have a man dressed up in a squirrel costume with no real platforms represent you.” But Furry Boi did have a platform, including more access to acorns, encouraging “safe spaces” for students and squirrels, and launching the Amicable Student Society, or ASS, to “bridge the culture gap between humans and squirrels.” Regardless, this could be a sign of the end for human candidates.
Centuries of meatball lies
Sweden has just ruined the reputation of one its greatest and tastiest exports. Turns out the Swedish meatball is actually “based on a recipe King Charles XII brought home from Turkey in the early 18th century.” Whaaaat? Yes, Sweden’s official Twitter account announced this travesty. But because Sweden’s official Twitter master or mistress knew the world would fall to its knees in grief, they supplied a delightful Swedish meatball recipe to ease the pain. The intro reads, “this classic recipe for Swedish meatballs guarantees the perfect taste — if you add lingonberries! From Sweden, with meatball love.”
I’m a doctor, not an arborist
An 800-year-old banyan tree in India, one of the oldest living trees in the sub-continent, was hanging onto dear life after termites infested the tree. Practical logic likely wouldn’t leave you with the impression that inserting an intravenous solution into it’s branches would be the answer, but you’d be wrong. The tree, known as Pillalamarri, measures 405 feet from east to west and 408 feet from north to south, according to the Mahabubnagar, India District Forest Office. The tree is spread across nearly four acres and underneath the tree stands a small shrine that allegedly dates back to 1200. More than 12,000 tourists visit the tree each year, awed by its vast size.
Pushing his luck
Would you rather win the lottery or survive a helicopter crash? A North Carolina man just experienced both. He claimed he was married to Lady Luck when his wife scratched a ticket that came up a $100,000 winner. He then bought a single-seat Mosquito Aviation XE helicopter (bad karma not to have a seat for your wife, guy), which he proceeded to fly and, through inexperience, crash. It caught fire, but the man was able to escape with only bruises and scratches.
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