Oddacity News
Thrift store treasure, peanut butter art, flight instructor leaves the room
Welcome to Oddacity News, your source for the weird, unusual and offbeat news of the world.
Good find: A teenager in Oregon found a team jacket worn by NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain in the used clothes bin at a Goodwill store, paying $3 for an item experts say may be worth as much as $250,000, reports Oregon Public Broadcasting. Quinn Brown, 19, grabbed the jacket from the bin after another shopper tossed it back in. “I realized pretty quickly that I probably have Wilt Chamberlain’s jacket here,” Brown said. He was right. The jacket is now up for auction at Sotheby’s.
Hold the jelly: A museum in the Netherlands spread 800 pounds of peanut butter across its floor in tribute to a recently deceased artist, reports AP. Two employees of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen worked for several days spreading 40 buckets of peanut butter across a 270-square-foot hexagon. It was all to honor the late Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers who first created the Pindakaasvloer, or peanut butter floor, in 1969.
Gonna Fly Now: A team of Italian aerospace engineering students built the largest paper airplane ever, a craft 65 feet wide and 23 feet long, setting a Guinness World Record. "It all started with a few paper airplanes between classes, almost as a joke.” said the students. After months of testing prototypes, they launched the plane, made only of paper and glue, inside an airplane hanger, flying it 193.5 feet.
Second life: An investigation in Arizona involving an 18-month-old boy who was declared dead but then found alive in a morgue five hours later indicates that a doctor dismissed questions about his inital ruling of death, reports NBC News. When a police officer told the doctor that a nurse had found a pulse and the boy appeared to be breathing, the doctor reportedly said: “Do your thing and let me do my thing. I went to medical school for a reason.” The boy, who had been feared drowned, ultimately survived.
Red-handed: Police in Maryland say that a man’s truck was stolen while he was burglarizing a Verizon store, reports WMAR2 News. “That’s some karma right there,” said a police officer as he arrested Jalen Godard. Godard had called police to the scene to report his stolen truck at the same time officers were investigating a break-in at the neighboring Verizon store. Officers noticed similarities between Godard and security camera pictures of the burglar, and saw that there was blood both on the store’s broken window and on Godard’s hands and glasses.
Final exam: A 22-year-old student pilot in Argentina found herself suddenly alone at the control of a plane when her instructor abruptly jumped out of the aircraft to his death, reports CNN. The instructor, Leandro Andrés Bertazzo, 42, told the student, “You know what you have to do, carry on,” before taking off his headset and seatbelt, opening the door and jumping out of the plane. The student managed to land the plane safely despite being in “complete shock,” the head of the flying school said.
Nice work, Scott.