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In June, for the fourth year, professor Paul Worsey of the University of Missouri-Rolla conducted his Summer Explosives Camp, with 20 high-school-age kids learning the techniques of blowing things up (e.g., a tree stump, a watermelon, a dead chicken). Said one camper, “Some people like baseball (but) I just like to set off bombs.” Worsey’s […]

Pablo Castro, 26, was sent to the hospital twice in Decatur, Ala., on June 24, once after being stabbed in an argument and, after his release later that day, being stabbed again while arguing with a different person. And Tony Hicks was hospitalized in Knoxville, Tenn., for separate wounds on July 1, 2 and 3; […]

On May 31, veteran big-rig operator Gilberto Cantu drove his 18-wheeler all the way through the Lincoln Tunnel (1.5 miles, from Weehawken, N.J., to New York City) even though the load was 6 inches too high for the tunnel, so that the truck’s roof continuously ripped and peeled off, slowing the truck and making a […]

One of the standard “panic” rumors that throw some African villages into turmoil is the report that a couple (usually unmarried and therefore deserving of bad fortune) has become stuck together during sex and cannot be unstuck without medical attention. A reporter for Kenya’s East African Standard happened to be in the middle of a […]

News of the Weird first mentioned “Breatharians” in a 1999 report, referring to people who claim to subsist on only water, air and sunlight, even though there is scant proof of their self-denial and utterly no scientific evidence that humans can live beyond a few weeks on such a diet. In June, London’s Daily Mail […]

Elderly drivers’ recent lapses of concentration, stepping on the gas instead of the brake: An East Meadow, N.Y., man, 91, crashed into his wife (March). A prominent biochemist from the 1940s, age 88, crashed through a wall of the Civic Center in San Rafael, Calif. (June). An 84-year-old woman, playing golf with another woman, accidentally […]

Twelve hundred troops from Poland were deployed to Afghanistan in June as part of a NATO buildup to patrol the Pakistan border, searching for Taliban forces, but Polish commanders admitted that they would not be combat-ready for several weeks because the keys to all their Humvees had been stolen. One commander said spare keys had […]

The local government in Dalkeith, Scotland, has decided that, notwithstanding global warming and carbon “footprints,” the lights will stay on all night, every night, in the building that formerly was Dalkeith High School (but which has been vacant since 2004) because councilors fear that trespassers would hurt themselves in the darkness and sue them. A […]

In April, Los Angeles gynecologist David Matlock licensed his 2-year-old G-spot-enhancing technology to 35 other doctors around the country to help spread the benefits of collagen injections that swell the so-called Grafenburg Spot (a supposedly pleasure-registering zone which is, at best, tiny and hidden, but according to some doctors, nonexistent). With the patient’s help, the […]

Chief Deputy Terry Thompson was driving around Rayville, La., in June when he saw several cars stopped for an 8-foot snake in the road, with some motorists threatening to run over it or shoot it so that traffic could pass. Thompson stepped in to save it and then realized that he recognized the snake. It […]