…glorious and weird! O Canada, we stand on weird for thee…
Police in Langley, British Columbia, issued a warning to men in the city in October 2009: be on the lookout for a “serial testicle kicker.” Police said a woman in her late teens or early twenties had walked up to several men in the city and, without warning, kicked them in the groin. One man, 22-year-old Anthony Clark, had even lost a testicle to the woman. “I just want to know what her problem is,” Clark said.
A man whose car ran into a ditch while being chased by police in southwest Ontario in February 2010 ran across a shallow river to hide his tracks—and then jumped into the snow and covered himself up to hide. Officers couldn’t find him until they brought in a canine unit. The man was arrested…and taken to a hospital to be treated for hypothermia…hours later.
Robert Medwid, 39, and Sabrina Lonsberry, 32, of Red Deer, Alberta, won the Canadian national lottery in January 2007, taking the $13.8 million jackpot. Medwid chosen the winning numbers based on the weather in Scarborough, Ontario, where the numbers are drawn. “I decided to research the climate, humidity, and snowfall on draw nights in Scarborough,” Medwid said, “and I chose my numbers based on that information.” Winning numbers: 5, 9, 14, 31, 37, and 46. (Brrr!)
Bela Kosoian, 38, of Montreal, Quebec, was arrested in 2009. Her crime: not holding a handrail on an escalator in a subway station. (She was busy digging in her bag for change when ordered to hold the rail, and refused.) She was handcuffed, taken to a holding cell, and finally released with a $100 ticket for the handrail offense and a $320 fine for obstructing justice. Said Kosoian, who left the Soviet Union years ago to live in Canada, “Stalin may be dead, but Stalinism lives on.”
In August 2009, three men from Cudworth, Saskatchewan, took a video of themselves illegally shooting ducks on a pond—from their car—and put the video on YouTube. They were arrested within days, fined $5,000 each, and banned from hunting for three years. One of the men, David Fraser, 30, tried to explain the incident by saying they’d only recently moved to Saskatchewan from Toronto…where the only birds they’d ever seen were seagulls and pigeons.
Q: Why did the moose cross the road? A: To get to his hoose.
David Dauphinee, 52, and his brother Daniel Dauphinee, 51, both retired officers with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, were arrested in 2001 after throwing dozens of onions, apples, and oranges at police officers from a 19th-floor hotel room window in Winnipeg. When police got to the room, the two men—who were drunk—jumped into bed together and pretended to be asleep. When asked for their names, police said the older brother “barked, like a large dog.” The two were convicted of assault with a weapon (the fruit and vegetables) and sentenced to two months in prison.
In 2008 Catherine McCoubrey, 25, of Winnipeg, Manitoba, stabbed her boyfriend in the heart…accidentally…while attempting to carve a heart shape into his skin with a large knife, which he had asked her to do while they were having “rough sex.” She pleaded guilty to assault and was given three years of probation. The boyfriend nearly died, doctors said, but made a full recovery.
A Toronoto gym owner named Rick Evans applied for the vanity license plate “KICK-BUTT” in 2009. However, the review board rejected because it “condoned violence and contained sexual subject matter.” Ironically, Evans’s first license plate choice was “BUTT-KICK”…which wasn’t available because someone else had successfully applied for, and received, the plate.
Juanita Stead, 36, of eastern Newfoundland, went to a hospital on New Year’s Eve 2008 with abdominal pain. She and her husband Terry both thought she was passing a kidney stone. Doctors took X-rays, but could see no evidence of a kidney stone…they could, however, see a baby in her belly. “I told him he had the wrong X-ray file,” Stead said. Six minutes later, she gave birth to a 7-pound, 12-ounce boy. Stead, who’d had another child two years earlier, had no idea she was pregnant—she hadn’t experienced any morning sickness, and her menstrual cycle continued normally. “Honest to God,” her husband said, “I just don’t have words to explain it.” (Little Nicholas is doing just fine.)
Japanese embassies have a 24-hour hotline for Japanese tourists suffering from severe culture shock.