Dr. Grumpy's crack team of reporters, bringing you the stories that shape your world.
Dateline: Shanghai, China. A flight from Shanghai to Guangzhou was delayed for 5 hours when an 80 year-old woman threw a handful of coins into one of the plane's engines. She apparently did this to ensure good luck on the flight.
A team of airplane mechanics had to disassemble and inspect the Airbus's engine to make sure none of the turbines were damaged and to remove all coins.
The total value of the coins involved was roughly 20 U.S. pennies.
Dateline: Tulsa, Oklahoma. A dead body was found inside a Walmart bathroom. It had apparently been there for 3 days.
A security camera recorded the 29-year-old woman entering the bathroom on Friday. At some point over the weekend an employee couldn't get the bathroom door open, and hung up an "Out of Order" sign. A repair crew found the body on Monday.
Police captain Todd Enzbrenner commented "It’s not every day you find this sort of thing in a business."
Dateline: Allyn, Washington. A man found a dead roadkill raccoon on the road, and decided to use it as bait to catch crabs. Like most dead things, it smelled awful, so he tied a rope to it to drag it about 15 feet behind him as he walked home.
Two drivers pulled over and confronted him, believing he was dragging a dead dog down the street. One of them shot the raccoon-dragging guy in the leg and drove away. He is expected to recover (the guy, not the raccoon). Police are searching for suspects.
Sheriff's department Lt. Travis Adams told reporters "I've been doing this for 21-plus years, and I've never quite heard the
'raccoon being dragged down the road' story before, so it's a new one
for all of us."
Dateline: Modesto, California. A 45 year man was arrested for starting a fire in a Walgreen's bathroom.
The man told police that he'd had "an accident," and soiled his underwear. He went into the bathroom to take them off and, for unclear reasons, felt the best way to do so was to light them on fire - while still in them.
This got the underwear off, and the man tossed them in the toilet to extinguish the blaze. While no damage was done to the store (or, amazingly, him), this set off the fire alarm and they had to evacuate the building.
When I read the Walmart story online, I thought 3 days how often do they clean those bathrooms? I pick up dead animals for a pet cemetery and crematorium. After one day you can start smelling them. After 3 days they have a stench you can't miss.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't possibly, no matter how hard I might try, come up with a rational explanation for any of those things.
ReplyDeleteHumans. Keeping doctors, nurses, medical personnel, police, fire, EMTs and journalists in business for millennia. Also good for giving the rest of us belly laughs. The Wal-Mart one has me vowing NEVER to buy anything that isn't factory packaged there.
ReplyDeleteI live near Allyn, Washington (well, maybe too near to Allyn) and the local news confirmed that the dragged roadkill was an OPOSSUM.
ReplyDeleteAnd I thought that this was a news source I could trust.
More fake news from DR G.
One would think that people on the west side would know the difference between a raccoon & a possum. Both are common. I certainly knew the difference when I lived there. Here on the east side there don't seem to be any possums, but plenty of raccoons & skunks. No mistaking skunks!
ReplyDeleteThank you for the enlightenments. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm working on the hypothesis that the ability to tell the difference between an raccoon and an opossum is directly related to how far it has been dragged along the side of a road in Washington State.
ReplyDeletePretty sure I'm a lock to get federal money to conduct this research.
LMAO as usual . But re: the roadkill story, I submit that after a certain point in decomposition has been reached, the question of whether it's a possum or a raccoon is strictly academic.
ReplyDeleteI am simply left wondering how many of these people might be patients, former, current or future....of Dr. Grumpy, well except for the poor woman who had died in Wal-Mart, may she RIP. Sad commentary on humanity, all the way around.
ReplyDeleteIt is annoying that now airlines are charging an extra fee for good luck, but she should really have paid for it with her credit card or frequent flier miles.
ReplyDeleteIt's a lot more efficient for Walmart to wait until they have three or four dead bodies on the property and then have them all removed at once. Those cost savings have to come from somewhere, after all.
ReplyDeleteThere are much more pleasant ways to catch crabs.
ReplyDelete9:23 a.m. Anonymous: I work at a vet hospital. We have one client who's been a tad slow about deciding what to do with her dead cat.
ReplyDeleteAs of next month, the cat will have been in our freezer for two years.
We're thinking of throwing her a party. About half of our employees have been with us for less time than this cat.
My current plans are for cat-face cookies with crossed-out eyes, balloons made of rubber gloves and a small, tasteful bouquet placed on her body bag, but I am open to suggestions. Wouldn't want to be tacky.
I didn't think this collection of news stories would've been different this year than last, but is it? (Well, except the details, of course. The poor woman's demise was no less circumspect than it would've been last year or this.) But, this year there seems to be no let-up in the constant barrage of confounding head-scratchers vying for top-billing.
ReplyDeleteSmoking mellow yellow.
ReplyDeleteI can only eat crab if I don't think about what crabs eat. I know we eat lots of actual bottom feeders, but well, ewww.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for the guy who decided to light his underwear on fire, are we sure he wasn't in Florida, or at least from Florida? 'Cuz that's just a Florida kinda thing to do.
So you can catch crabs by messing around with road kill, and get shot too. Good things to know going in.
ReplyDeleteWas away for a week missed this stuff.