What a Weird Week gets you caught up on the weird news of the week. https://www.
Hi friends, I'm Scott and this is What a Weird Week, a show about the weird stuff in the news. See below for a transcript of the podcast episode. To subscribe to the podcast or for social media and more links, you can get everything at www.shownotes.page. These are the shownotes for Season 5, Ep 42 first published on Friday Oct 18th 2024. Here are this week's stories...
BIG pumpkin is named Rudy. Is that a good name? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.upi.com/amp/Odd_News/2024/10/16/Safeway-World-Championship-Pumpkin-Weigh-Off/8211729109668/
Very Large Jeans may not be wearable https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2024/10/16/Guinness-World-Records-largest-jeans/5731729100424/
Conktroversy! ... Don't know Conkers? Well trust me, conktroversy is a great pun.
Man climbs Everest for charity. Except it's his stairs at home...
Giant kebab!
https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2024/10/17/cyprus-Guinness-World-Records-sheftalia-kebab/8871729181601/
Weird Door in Antarctica
Hangover Cure?!
Stay Weird, the Doctor says. (Dr Pepper)
Weird lights under plane...
Royalty in a UFO?
Professor's in battle over UFO news
Dolphin Breath has microplastics...
Transcript below...
Transcript ...
00:00
Broadcasting from the Mobile Weird News Gathering Unit, this is What a Weird Week. Hi everybody, it's Weird. This is like crazy new year. Really? Weird. Damn. Well, I got a great show for you today. It was so wonderful. Weird stuff. Hi friends, I'm Scott and we are broadcasting from the Weird News Mobile Gathering Unit this week, bringing you another episode of
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What a weird week. If you're new to the program, we go back, we look at this week's news, we pick out all the weird stuff, and we do a top 10 of the weird news. If you want our show notes, the website is show notes dot page. Show notes dot page. Here we go, season five episode can't remember for Friday, October 18th, 2024. Number 10 this week.
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Farmer Travis. We just talked about Farmer Travis last week because it was a rebroadcast of last year at this time. And Farmer Travis is back with the biggest pumpkin in the world. Farmer Travis from Minnesota has a pumpkin named Rudy at 2,471 pounds. Rudy, Travis and the whole pumpkin transportation team. It is an intricate thing to get a very large pumpkin from California, where Farmer Travis is.
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to Minnesota. I mean, you have to, there's a lot of worrying, I'm sure, that that pumpkin is going to become untethered and perhaps smash somewhere along the route. So that is nerve wracking. Now you guys can all relax. The whole team, you can relax. Nine. Number nine is the largest pair of jeans in the world. This is a record set by a Chinese textile company. A pair of jeans weigh, or...
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You guys were going live off the floor. I don't know. The mobile weird news gathering unit. It's not an ideal situation. Let's try it again. The Chinese textile company that made the world's largest pair of jeans, made jeans 250 feet long. Long legged jeans, baby. 30 garment makers worked on this. 18 days of professional garment making. And now you got yourself a Guinness world record with a big old pair of jeans.
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The photo is quite impressive. We'll link to that in the show notes or click shownotes.page. These jeans are almost 8,000 pounds. It's 8,000 pounds of jeans. You're gonna, they're not gonna stay up on their own. You're gonna need suspenders or a belt or something if you're gonna try to, I mean, isn't that the next step? You do this pair of jeans to get in the Guinness Book of Records, you make the large jeans, but the next step is somebody's gotta wear those jeans around town, right? To be continued.
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Alright, we've got more controversy at the World Conquer Championships. Last week we had a repeat broadcast from last year. There was controversy. If you're unfamiliar with Conquerors and all that, we'll bring you up to speed. That story next!
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This is What A Weird Week. We do weird news of the week. Thank you for listening. Eight. Okay, this is not a repeat. Last week was a repeat, and we mentioned the World Conquers Championships where they raise money. It's like supposed to be a fun thing. It's this game where you have a chestnut, your opponent has a chestnut on a string, and you're trying to smash those chestnuts. The last chestnut standing is the world champion. This is kind of my summation of how the
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conquer championships go. But last year there was some controversy because they have rules about what your chestnut is basically I think supposed to be just like a found chestnut, or a chestnut from the wild, no manipulation. You can't bake that chestnut. And certainly you're not supposed to forge a chestnut out of steel and swap it out when it appears as though you've got serious competition. You swap out your real chestnut for a steel chestnut.
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That is what is being alleged in the latest controversy with the World Conquerors Championship. I don't know if the investigation continues. The fellow involved says, no, no, the steel chestnut is just like a decoration, a good luck piece, something like that. I'm paraphrasing. And then others are saying, oh, no, you're using that in competition. High scandal in the world of chestnut smashing. We put a link in the show notes if you want to check that out.
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Number seven, we have a wonderful story about someone trying to make the world a better place and they weren't able to climb Mount Everest to actually get to Mount Everest. So they climbed the stairs in their house to the equivalent height of Mount Everest, 29,031 feet, five and a half inches. And this fellow, Sean, in Las Vegas did it. A couple of things. It was under 23 hours. You're climbing the stairs in your house to the equivalent of Mount Everest.
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without touching a banister while you're on the stairs, you can't count on the banister, the railing, whatever, you have to really get in the mindset of climbing Mount Everest. And all this was done to raise money for charity. So I'll link to the video, but also I'll link to the charity if you would like to help out. Sean did this to raise money for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. So a happy story, someone trying to make the world a better place.
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on the stairs. Six. Number six is about a world record in long food. This is at a festival in Cyprus where they took on setting the world record for the longest kebab in the world. Now where I live we would pronounce that kebab, perhaps where you're at you would pronounce it kebab, a 246 footer, a very, very long sausage kebab, kebab. Now I'm saying it both ways. It raised money for charity. It took 30 people to lift the kebab.
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bab, but only one person to eat it. That was the rule. Only one person could eat the entire 246 footer. Just delicious, delicious meat. And that person is still eating you guys. No, I'm just kidding about all that part, but it did take 30 people to lift it. A 246 foot kebab. If you want to see the video of them putting this thing together and the pride in the faces as they measure, we will link to that in the show notes.
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or click show notes dot page. Five. Number five is the mysterious doorway that was discovered in the ice of Antarctica and made headlines this week because the New York Post did a story about it. This was discovered on Google Maps, East Antarctica, and we'll link to the actual coordinates if you wanna look that up on Google Maps sometime. It looks like a door or a rectangle, some sort of depression into the snow, perhaps into the side of a mountain or a rocky terrain with lots of snow.
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Anyway, you could convince yourself that's a door, right? And some people were like, it's a door, yes, but it's just a door from an airplane or something that flew off some sort of aircraft and landed there. Or perhaps it's a door to, you know, the secret alien bases. You know, there's a number of different conspiracy theories, but the New York Post, God bless them, they did go to an expert, an actual professor of glaciology.
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Write that down. That is something I didn't know you could be a professor of. And that is a new squad goal, you guys. Professor of glaciology. It's just a form of ice, of sea ice. And that is the shape it took that according to the expert. If you want to have a look and do a deeper dive into this, perhaps you are conspiracy minded. Let's not go too far down that rabbit hole, you guys. But if you want to have some fun with this weird doorway in the Antarctic ice, we will put a link and some photos.
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and stuff click show notes dot page hang on we have a cure for your hangover perhaps somebody you know maybe it's not you maybe maybe you're hungover right now and I should talk more quietly anyway a cure for hangovers made headlines this week we'll get into that next
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This is the What a Weird Week Show. With all the weird stuff from the news this week, count it down in the top 10 format. Four. Number four this week from our friends at Study Finds. They do good work, they do deep dives, and they get into the science of stuff, and they did a post about the best hangover cure. Embrace yourself. It's not, I know there are many arguments, and there has been research into the bacon sandwich, and a number of different things to cure a hangover.
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According to this article and the research that they get into at study finds, it would appear it's not that great, you guys, for, you know, if you're hungover, it's not, it's not wonderful, but perhaps exercise, just good old fashioned, regular exercise. That's the whole story. Basically, exercise may cure your hangover. Who can, who wants what? I don't know. You're already facing a hangover and then someone's like, Oh, you want to, you really want to feel better.
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Let's go walk three miles and then hit the gym. Let's roll some tires. Let's go. Let's do it. If that person suggests that remember they are trying to make you feel better. Oh, I should say this one here. I mean, you know, if you do these, if you read these studies a lot, there's the whole causation correlation business. And right now this study, it's just a correlation between reduced hangover severity and exercise. So more research is needed.
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Honorable Mention. I wanted to Honorable Mention the folks at Dr. Pepper for the reason that they are encouraging weird. I saw this in Adweek but it's been making headlines around the marketing department is out there trying to raise awareness for Dr. Pepper. They are encouraging people. I think it is actually a nice effort to encourage people from doom scrolling, you know, going down rabbit holes online and that sort of thing. Instead of that, just get weird.
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Try more weird. That's the message from Dr. Pepper. So they have some of their own memes they've generated. A spoonful of weird makes the Monday go down, you know, that kind of thing. If it's something that can help people from doom scrolling and more and more research is showing, the longer you go down those rabbit holes online, the more likely you are to not feel great about yourself. If you can get away from that through weird, I think I want to I'm going to say Dr. Pepper.
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Thanks for spreading the weird as a weird news show. Fang, I wanna say thank you. I don't really understand much else about it, you guys. It's just like, try weird. Hey, don't doom scroll. Get weird, baby. All right, do we break here? We're taking a quick musical interlude and we're right back with more weird.
11:16
This is what a weird week we do weird news. Three. All right, this one is a weird one. It's from the Unilad or Unilad website and it's about somebody who looks out their airplane window and they see these weird lights under the clouds. So obviously aliens, right? Therefore aliens. And then the article gets into what it might have been. We link to the photos and the theories. So somebody.
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Eventually it was aliens, aliens, aliens, and then somebody was like, no, no, it's a cruise ship having fireworks. And then a few other theories like that. And then they talked to a meteorologist and there were weird lights captured before in a similar situation. And that time, you know what it was? LED lights from fishing boats. So we may have a mystery. The investigation continues. Many people are satisfied with that. Mystery solved, perhaps.
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More if you click show notes dot page. This too. This one's weird you guys, I think. I would say this qualifies as weird. From Metro UK, the headline is King Charles flew a prototype UFO over Canada in 1975. The East Coast of Canada, Nova Scotia, Canada, North America, planet Earth, in 1975 had the opportunity.
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to know this is all alleged and it is a UFO researcher or a documentarian who is according to the article the documentarian is exploring the British royal family's ties with aliens and so from that the Metro UK folks wrote up a story that this director of this film alleges that King Charles once did fly a UFO. Charles was nearby in Nova Scotia serving as a helicopter pilot and got
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Project Serpico. Now, it wasn't believed this was an alien craft, just an unexplained flying object, a weird fly. It was a WFO maybe. The machine was perhaps made by human beings, but was weird. I will also link to another story the Mirror has about a huge alien announcement that is imminent. And they quote a professor. Apparently there is, according to this article, there is
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some sort of competition about who can publish the information and get it to the public quicker. Let's all try not to panic, but it is an interesting read. Okay, we're going live off the floor. Where are we here? Musical interlude? All right, musical interlude and then more weird.
13:58
This is what a weird week. Weird news for your ears and brains. The weird news goes into your ears and gets into your brain. Okay, this one, not a happy story, but I guess important and weird. It is weird for sure. So that quali, you know, if we're doing weird news, that one qualifies. The headline is microplastics detected in dolphin breath. So dolphins, delightful dolphins of the sea, according to the study.
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It is believed that microplastics are being inhaled by dolphins and can be detected in dolphin breath. So let's try to make the world a better place with less microplastics. You know, that's that I don't want to get too preachy there, but it's now affecting our delightful dolphins. They seem so happy, so stoic, right? Once it gets into dolphin breath, I would say I'm not a scientist, you guys, but I would say that's a sign that
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We need to back off on the microplastics. The science indicates that microplastics are not good. Perhaps if we do our part, and the governments of the world as well, and the business sector, if we all do our part and try to reduce microplastics, that's one thing. What if we outfit all of the dolphins with some sort of blowhole mask or blowhole filter of some sort? Now that could be, Elon, hey? That could be something, that could be next, Elon. Anyway, there's a couple.
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Couple of ideas I'm just riffing now, but well, let's, let's be done there. This has been what a weird week off the floor live, the mobile weird news gathering unit this week, not in the studio. Thank you for listening. If you want our show notes, if you want to see the photos links to everything, if you go to show notes, that page, you can find all our stuff or how to subscribe to the podcast and also information about fun house radio.
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We have a button there if you'd like to listen to fun house radio or just search fun house radio every weekend. We're part of the programming over there. So we'll catch you next Friday for 10 more weird news items on what a weird week.
