Posts Tagged ‘Oddball News’

Dishing Dirt (Limerick)

Monday, January 28th, 2013

I enjoy unearthing oddball news items and celebrating their weirdness in verse. For instance, energy bars made from crickets. But a restaurant whose recipe ingredient-list touts dirt? That’s a bit too much to digest.

So, I won’t be going to Tokyo’s French restaurant Ne Quittez Pas any time soon, even if their dirt is “special black soil from Kanuma, Tochigi Prefecture.”

Dishing Dirt (Limerick)
By Madeleine Begun Kane

Dear restaurant, please don’t feel hurt
If I spurn you, including dessert.
I have very good grounds:
Word is making the rounds
That your food features soil — that’s the dirt.

Weird News Snark (New Regular Feature)

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

I’m introducing a new regular feature today — Weird News Snark.  How regular?  That totally depends on news craziness … and Mad Kane laziness. 

So let’s get started:

And you think you’ve got mother-in-law problems?

Private’s platoon sergeant is his mother-in-law, too.

At long last, a good reason to attend your reunion. 

ORONO, Maine —  Fifty years after taking school sprit to new heights with a paint brush, a University of Maine graduate has received a pardon from the school administration.

Where’s the beef?

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) – Guessing about the contents of a cow’s stomach is a thing of the past for University of Arkansas researchers – all they have to do is reach in and take a sample. The university’s Animal Science Department has surgically implanted 4-inch-wide tubes, called cannulas, in the sides of 12 cows.

Yeah, but what were they smoking?

KANSAS CITY, Kansas (AP) – More than 1,680 guitar players turned out, tuned up and took part in what organizers say was a world record rendition of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” – a song that was the first many of them ever learned.

“Creative” U.S. Lawyers Have Nothing On The Germans.

BAUTZEN, Germany (AP) – Three German teenagers have been spared paying hefty damages after a court ruled it could not prove an ostrich farmer’s claim that their festive firecrackers made one of his birds impotent.

This never happened when Jimmy Carter was president. 

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – A woman was held up during a fill-up. The woman was pumping gasoline Sunday morning when a man stuck something in her back, told her it was a gun and ordered her to start filling up his sport utility vehicle instead of her own car…

Freedom’s for the birds.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Four highly endangered red ibises have been taken back into captivity in China, after two days of free living made [the birds] lose their appetite…

Perhaps those birds could use this fellow’s dietary aid.

A man in southeast China says 40 years of swallowing tree frogs and rats live has helped him avoid tummy ache.