Bizarre news this week

Wood Sprite and I LOVE strange news stories (as well as Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and Kids Discover books, which feature tons of weird news!), so here are a few we’ve run across this week.

A pickled Japanese turnip may prevent the flu! How cool would that be? I don’t think I’d care for pickled turnips and neither would Sprite, but we’d at least give them a try.

A woman found a four-foot snake in her couch! Oh, this just freaks me out. We found a snake in our basement garage a few summers ago and it still makes my stomach roll. She had the couch, which was bought second-hand, in her BEDROOM for two months before it came out! Reports are saying it might have been a boa constrictor, so it was probably someone’s pet. It was ill and died before she could get it to the vet—maybe from lack of care and no food? This is one of those stories that reminds us to really check anything we buy off of Craigslist for sure.

Scientists have engineered a litter of glow in the dark piglets with jellyfish DNA. I’m telling you, the genetic engineering stories keep getting weirder and weirder. (By the way, does anyone ever wonder if something like the situation in the film The Island is really happening somewhere on Earth?)

New crop circles have popped up in California. Wood Sprite is just amazed by crop circles. I’ve never been interested in the m myself, but now that she is I’m learning more about them and they really are cool. Whoever’s making them—alien or human!—has pretty wicked artistic skills. (Wood Sprite says it’s definitely aliens declaring their peaceful intentions.)

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia