Funniest animated blog about dogs EVAH: Hyperbole and a half’s “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving”
Hat tip to my daughter and sister-in-law, both of whom sent me this.
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Speaking of dogs, a woman in England returned her recently-rescued Jack Russell terrier to the animal shelter where she had gotten it. Why?
Because it clashed with her curtains.
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A woman tried to commit suicide by jumping from a 23rd story window in Argentina. She survived. The taxi driver almost didn’t:
Taxi driver Miguel Cajal said he got out of his parked taxi and ran for safety when he saw a policeman looking up at the woman, who was on an upper floor of the Panamericano hotel.“If I hadn’t got out, I’d be dead,” Cajal, 39, told local television, which showed pictures of his mangled vehicle, its windshield and roof crushed by the impact of the woman’s fall.
Another dude in Scotland fell 1,000 feet and survived.
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A 16 year-old in Florida, Nicholas Harrington, got the great idea to place a beat-up old grand piano on a sand bar in Biscayne Bay and then film “a big production, a music video epic”. However, a party at his house resulted in the piano being set on fire. Still, he and his family hauled the burnt piano out to the middle of the bay onto the sand bar where it sat for most of January. However, once officials found out who had put it there, they gave the Harringtons a week to remove it or face a fine.
This week, a guy (on the advice of his 10 year-old son — kids these days) hired a salvaging company and beat them to the punch, retrieving and taking possession of the piano. But not before a photographer took models out to it for a photoshoot and and someone placed a candelabra on it.
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Oh, the humanity.
More Canadian bar owners may soon be giving slightly smaller liquor shots to customers because of a costly discrepancy between Canadian and U.S. systems of measurement.The owners of the Vancouver’s Loose Moose bar performed an audit earlier this year to find out why they were not getting as many shots out of a liquor bottle as they expected.
They discovered that the culprit was the common shot glass.
“The shot glasses [we] were using were made by an American company and they were based on an American ounce,” said Loose Moose co-owner Kyle Tweter. “So they were too big.”
Just another way Canada is used to be better than America.
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Some interesting penny facts:
- There have been 11 different penny designs.
- The first Lincoln penny was struck in 1909.
- Lincoln pennies made from 1909 to 1958 were designed by Victor D. Brenner. His initials V.D.B. were on a limited quantity of the 1909 pennies making it one of the most sought after pennies for collecting. You can still see his initials on Lincoln head pennies (on Lincoln’s sleeve) as shown here:
- The current penny is 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper.
- Pennies minted in 1943 were zinc-coated steel so they were silver-colored.(Copper was in high demand due to World War II.) It’s sometimes called the “steel penny” or “steel cent”. There are only 12 known copper pennies from that year out of the original 40 that were accidentally produced when copper planchets were accidentally left in the minting machinery. They caused problems in vending machines equipped with slug-attracting magnets and were prone to rust so they were never made this way again.
- A penny weighs 2.5 grams.
- Don’t let your dog swallow a penny. Zinc toxicity is commonly fatal in dogs where it causes a severe hemolytic anemia.
- Lincoln faces to the right, while all other portraits on U.S. coins face to the left.
- Approximately 30 million pennies per day (1,040 pennies every second) are produced, more than 13 billion per year.
- “Wheat pennies” (with wheat sheaves on the back) were made from 1909-1959. In 1959, the Lincoln Memorial replaced the wheat sheaves. If you look closely at the Lincoln Memorial on these coins, you can see the image of Lincoln statue in the center of it. In 2009, four new images replaced the Lincoln Memorial, celebrating various stages of Abraham Lincoln’s life. In 2010, the “tails” side of the coin began bearing the Union shield.
- According to Coinstar, makers of coin-counting kiosks in grocery stores, banks, etc., the average American home has $93.75 lying around in some form or another. This means $10.5 billion worth of pennies are out of circulation.
- The Lincoln penny was the first U.S. coin to feature a historic figure.
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A woman in the Ukraine dropped her cell phone at the zoo and one of their crocodiles swallowed it. Zoo employees didn’t believe her until … wait for it … the phone started ringing in the croc’s stomach. It’s actually not that funny of a story since the crocodile has been unable to “pass” the phone. He hasn’t eaten in a month.
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A U.S. company, Canna Cola, will soon begin marketing a line of marijuana-laced soft drinks.
In a related item, Mexican drug smugglers have turned to using a catapult to jettison weed into the U.S..
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Quickie fun news:
- The oldest woman in Canada just had her 112th birthday.
- Residents of Riverside, California were freaked out when they discovered a giant monitor lizard wandering around town.
- In Tarpon Springs, Florida, a 15-foot long python was captured, weighing between 150-200 pounds.
- In Wisconsin, a woman received a gift of a refurbished vacuum cleaner. Inside it was over a quarter million dollars in illegal drugs. Score!
- A dude in Hawaii had to be rescued from a garbage shoot in his apartment building. He was naked.
- The dude who streaked in front of President Obama in Pennsylvania last year trying to win $1 million from Alki David isn’t getting the million bucks. He is, however, getting his rent paid for a year, his sister’s medical bills paid for and some cash.
- A couple in Illinois had twins in 2010. No, wait. 2011. No, wait. Both. It’s true: one twin was born on December 31, 2010 and the other on January 1, 2011.
- A woman in Denver used an iPhone app to keep an eye on her dog while she was at work. She ended up catching a guy trying to rob her instead.
I’m just sayin’…
