If you were thinking “fly in my soup” or “$10 bill in my glove compartment,” think a little weirder.
IFOUND A…naked “friend of President Obama”
IN MY…shower
HUH? Two children went into their house in Crestview, Florida, in November 2009 and heard someone taking a shower. They thought it was just their father…until a strange, naked man walked out of the bathroom. The naked man said that “President Obama let him in the house” and told them to go away. The kids ran next door and called the police. When officers arrived, Donald Leon May, 48, was still in the house, although by then he’d wrapped a towel around himself. He was arrested on charges of felony burglary and petty theft. (And it turned out that he was not a friend of President Obama.)
I FOUND A…cat
IN MY…new couch
HUH? Vickie Mendenhall of Spokane, Washington, bought a used couch from a thrift store for $27 in March 2009. Then the noises began: For several days, she heard strange sounds in the house, but couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Finally, Mendenhall’s boyfriend was sitting on the couch one day watching television when he felt something underneath him. He lifted the couch up—and found a cat stuck inside it. The cat was in bad shape, so Mendenhall took it to the animal shelter where she worked and began nursing it back to health. She contacted the thrift store, but they had no record of who had donated it. So she put notices in a few local papers—and soon Bob Killion, also of Spokane, contacted her. He’d donated the couch to the store on February 19, he said, and his nine-year-old cat, Callie, had disappeared around the same time. Callie had survived being stuck in the couch for an amazing 18 days. Killion was shocked—and very happy to have his cat back.
In 2009 Italian cops pulled over a car and found 1,700 small animals crammed into the trunk.
I FOUND A…liquored-up mail carrier
ON MY…kitchen floor, eating my noodles
HUH? Marie O’Kelly, 95, of Marion, Iowa, was watching television in her home one day in November 2009 when she heard a noise in the kitchen. She thought her daughter had come to see her, but when nobody came into the living room, she went to check—and found a woman in a mail carrier’s uniform sitting on her kitchen floor. The woman was obviously drunk, and she was eating leftover noodles from O’Kelly’s refrigerator—with her hands. “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and she didn’t answer me,” O’Kelly told a local newspaper. “She just kept eating those noodles.” O’Kelly called police, and 46-year-old Kristine A. Pflughaupt, a 17-year employee of the U.S. Postal Service—who was on the job at the time of the incident—was arrested for public intoxication. Pflughaupt was placed on unpaid leave and an investigation was ordered.
I FOUND A…gecko
IN MY…chicken egg
HUH? One evening in May 2008, Peter Beaumont of Darwin, Australia, was making eggs for dinner. “I was cracking the eggs into a pan when I noticed one of them was all cloudy,” he said. “I looked at the shell and saw a tiny dead gecko.” Beaumont, who is a doctor and the president of the Australian Medical Association, said the egg was intact before he cracked it, so the gecko could not have entered it from outside. How did it get in there? Beaumont has a theory: He thinks the tiny lizard crawled up inside a chicken’s butt, possibly to feed on an embryo. Then it died and ended up being trapped inside a forming egg. Beaumont believes it was the first reported case of a gecko entering a chicken’s butt to look for food. And, even more strange, the discovery might lead to a medical breakthrough: It may explain how salmonella bacteria enter chicken eggs, something that is not well understood. (Beaumont thinks that geckos may carry the germs to eggs via chicken butts.) The theory is now being studied by scientists.
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“Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.”
—Will Rogers
Women get songs stuck in their heads longer than men do, and are more likely to be irritated by them.