What a Weird Week Show Friday 16 February 2024: #poptarts and #Eiffeltower #redemption#weirdnews #oddnews

What a Weird Week gets you caught up on the weird stuff from this week's news. For Full Shownotes see https://www.shownotes.page ... search "What a Weird Week" where you get podcasts.

(this is a transcript of the podcast) Hi Friends, I'm Scott. This is What a Weird Week where you can get caught up on the weird news of the week. For a transcript, or shownotes or to subscribe to the podcast see www.shownotes.page! Here's Season 5, Episode 07 first published on Friday Feb. 16, 2024 ... 
 
❿ From NBC 9 News...  Two high school kids in Colorado have received scholarships to play Division One Cornhole for Winthrop University... The athletes are very jacked about it quoted as saying "It's groundbreaking... It's making history!" ... Congratulations to Jaxson and Gavin. At some point professional Cornhole became a thing? and now also opportunities for young athletes to get an education on that Cornhole scholarship... btw Winthrop University is in South Carolina, United States of America. They are the first Division 1 school to offer Cornhole scholarships... Here's another quote... This is from Jaxson talking to media about receiving that Cornhole scholarship... "It's super awesome to make history." I can't argue with that. How fantastic is this? There's a whole new college sport being thrown into the mix... Well, it's not new but new to Division 1 schools... btw, if they don't have Cornhole where you are, it's that lawn game where you throw a beanbag and try to get that bean bag in a hole... The most basic way to describe it. It's a game that at one time I bet people who played horseshoes would make fun of... that part is just speculation.  
Go to your home!

❾ The Plague/ Cat story was picked up by a lot of news orgs... It's a little scary at first. And also weird... a person in Oregon who is infected with bubonic plague got the plague from their cat. That's what the experts are saying. It looks like it was from the cat... I'm not smart about history you guys but I seem to recall "the Black Death" being one of the nicknames of the Bubonic Plague at one time... It wasn't nicknamed The Happy Disease or the Nothing To See Here Plague... It was known as the Black Death... so it seems quite serious... What's good is that the medical experts identified it and treated it quickly, so "Very little risk to the community..." 
Dr. Whiskers? How could you!

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The Top Ten Weird News Stories of the Week: this is What a Weird Week.
 
❽ Every week I like to include at least one story from Ben Hooper... I like to call him Hoops... Hoops works for UPI as the weird news bureau chief and this week Hoops had the story about the very old wombat. It's cool and weird... weird and cool. I mean wombats, right you guys? The Guinness World Records folks have acknowledged this 34 year old wombat at a zoo in Japan, who is the oldest wombat in the world!! 34 years old/ maybe 35 years old! There are some indications that the wombat could be 35. In the wild a wombat lives between five and 15 years and we got a 35 year-old wombat?! His name is Wain btw, Wain the wombat. He's a bit of a miracle. 
Wain (artist rendering)

❼ This past week we had Shrove Tuesday/ Pancake Tuesday and folks in a place named Liberal, Kansas really lean into Pancake Day... they celebrate International Pancake Day with a race that's been going for 75 years and they attempted a couple of different pancake themed World Records... One of them is just a long line of Pancakes... 920 some feet of Pancakes. That's like almost three thousand pancakes lined up! Sweet mama! ... So that would be taller than the Golden Gate Bridge. Or one and a half Space Needles in Seattle... like you could go all the way up the Space Needle with pancakes and come halfway down again with delicious pancakes! It helps me to visualize the pancakes if  I can visualize some landmarks and then have the pancakes there with the landmarks in my mind's eye... here's another one: halfway up the CN tower... or how about this one: enough pancakes to stretch across London's Tower Bridge and still have pancakes left over! That's how many pancakes they made for the World Record attempt! It's a heck of a pancake line. The other record was a pancake flip. This one, there's a knack to it and you got to be a bit athletic and you got to stretch before attempting... they have rules about size of the pancake/ size of the frying pan... and so you got this pancake in the frying pan and you just bend at the knees and it's one two, three heave ho and you whip that pancake into the air... launch it from the frying pan into the air... and they set a record of 32 feet. They the pancake flew into the air 32 feet high! Both these records now have to be confirmed... so unofficial World Records right now, but way to go Liberal, Kansas! 
Pancake goals

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❻ This one was all over the place on the late-night shows and every news network picked up the story of the stingray that is somehow pregnant. The stingray is in a tank with only sharks. No other stingrays.
And so all the news orgs were reporting "What happened? Could it be? Did a shark make a baby with a stingray?" Which is impossible btw. Major news providers kept saying maybe the Stingray Baby Daddy is a shark... it seemed like none of them double-checked if it was possible. It is not. I think the aquarium must know this... I mean, you work at an aquarium, you probably know that, don't you? I don't care who the stingray is involved with romantically, but according to science, if a stingray and a shark enjoy briny love, there will not be some sort of stingray shark or sting shark that results... they would have to adopt their child. If you work in an aquarium, you know that right? But they were playing it up like this is a mystery or whatever... stingrays can reproduce asexually... like by themselves. It's rare, but it can happen. It seems to me that the aquarium (which is in North Carolina, USA) went with a juicy headline and it got lots of attention. 
Briny love

❺ So there's a piece of music that, from beginning to end, will take 639 years to complete. The song or piece of music is set to be over in the year 2640.  But it's in the news this week because there is an organ playing this song and it's been playing the song for 23 years so far... and this week they had a chord change in the song. It's been two years since there was a chord change. I can't wait 'til they get to the bridge!! It's the John Cage Organ Foundation who is behind the performance... the music began in 2001 and, again, will conclude in 2640. I don't understand art. And so I don't want to weigh in... I don't know too much about the composer but I was reading about another one of John Cage's compositions/ artwork, whatever you call it. That one is titled Four Three Three and it's just four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
It's a very interesting article from NPR about how they got this going... the John Cage Organ Foundation wanted to honor the late artist's legacy and they decided to play this very very very long song... this is in Germany... sandbags are involved... seriously, there are sandbags being used to keep the music going (after some debate it was decided that the organ doesn't have to be played by human fingers for all 639 years)... shoutout to the organ maintenance crew... they have the job of keeping this pipe organ going for six hundred and something more years.

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You're listening to the What a Weird Week Program. It's weird news! 
 
❹ A wonderful tale of redemption this week... a followup to story that we talked about last week. The fellow who made the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks... the fellow in France named Richard ... 700,000 matchsticks!! It took years to make this thing. And it got to a world record height of 23 and a half feet (ish)... then the Guinness World Records folks said it's disqualified because the match sticks were bought wholesale instead of off a store shelf (paraphrase). That was against the rules. Here's the tale of redemption... the Guinness World Records folks have changed that. They've reversed their decision and Richard in France does have the world record for the tallest Eiffel Tower made of matchsticks. I love that story. You just gotta follow your dreams.
 
❸ Another follow-up... in an episode a lil while ago we mentioned about Sir Winston Churchill's false teeth... that they were going on auction... icymi, he carried them around. He threw them on occasion when he was frustrated. They were his speech-giving teeth. That's me paraphrasing. But that's kind of the gist. Anyway, they sold for 18,000 Pounds at auction. So that's our follow-up. Actually, the headline says they were snapped up. So well done Sky News on that headline.
try them on for size

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We're almost to the number one weird story of the week... this is the What a Weird Week Show.
 
❷ A new study is in the news about emojis and how men cannot understand emojis as well as women... the researchers have a theory on this... pretty big survey... 500 men and women were surveyed... men and women from the UK and from China... they would be shown emojis and quizzed on what emotion is being conveyed by this emoji... side note, one of the things they found out is British people have a harder time recognizing the disgusted face...  more research needed on that but one working theory is that you friends in Britain are so used to keeping your emotions in check that you've lost the ability to register disgust when you see it on an emoji... back to why women are better at figuring out emojis ... increased sensitivity is what researchers think... women are oftentimes the primary caregiver in the early stages of a baby's life and learning to figure out what emotion your baby's going through is important...  that might be why women have an emoji superpower... 
Here's what I learned... I don't know what I'm sending. When I send you an emoji it could be completely wrong. So I'm sorry. 

🍅 Sort of a bittersweet Honorable Mention... this week we lost someone who brought joy to so many... Bill Post who played a key role in introducing us to Pop Tarts passed away at age 96.
Pop Tarts made their debut in 1964... at that time you had strawberry (still going strong), blueberry, brown sugar and cinnamon, and and apple currant!? In the article, Bill sounds like a humble fellow... the family does mention that Bill is often credited with inventing the Pop-Tart but whenever someone would ask Bill, he would say he "assembled an amazing team that developed a concept from Kelloggs."
We Salute you Bill.

Hang on for number one!!
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Catch up on the weird news of the week with What a Weird Week.

❶ Meat rice is in the news. It is exactly what it sounds like. It is meat grown inside rice. Essentially. It's a hybrid food invented by scientists that is rice with meat inside... it is apparently very nutritious or rich in nutrition or however you say that (I make no claims)... and it's one of these foods that could save us all... It's pink in the pictures and mostly rice-lake... icymi, science believes that if they can grow meat/ if we can get the nutrition of meat without using a lot of land as farmland, that'll help fix climate change and it'll ensure that all us humans get enough food. But how does it taste? None of the articles I saw really get into how it tastes? It behaves mostly like rice... sticky rice... so if you're about that kinda texture and you put enough bacon fat on there (or other go-to topping) maybe it'll be fantastic. To be continued. You can't buy it at the store yet... but what if you could go to the store and buy a big old box of Minute Rice/ Minute Meat one day!?
... that's this week's What a Weird Week program. For Shownotes and more go to ShowNotes Dot Page or search "What a Weird Week" wherever you get podcasts. BTW, Every weekend we are one of the things you can hear on Fun House Radio. Ask your smart speaker to play Fun House Radio or see the link on our Shownotes Page.  See you next week for another countdown of weird news.

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