Oddacity News
The vacuum cleaner that's watching you, an insulting offer of free beer, the kidnapping that wasn't
Welcome to Oddacity News, your source for the weird, unusual and offbeat news of the world.
Saving a gull friend: A professional soccer game in Turkey was interrupted while a player attempted to give CPR to a seagull that had fallen onto the field after being struck in the air by the ball, reports Turkiye Today. The match stopped for about two minutes while team captain Gani Catan attempted to revive the bird by giving it chest compressions. The seagull survived, though its wing was injured. Catan’s team lost, but he commented: “We missed out on the championship, but helping save a life is a good thing. This was more important than the championship."
Down the drain: There’s a distressing amount of cocaine in the wastewater of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island where many wealthy families have second homes, reports the Nantucket Current. Local officials, who began analyzing sewer water during Covid and now are tracking drug levels, have found cocaine amounts reaching three times the national average. Notably, the tests are finding un-metabolized cocaine, suggesting that people are flushing the drug down the toilet, perhaps because of high profile arrests in the past year.
Unwell: Someone broke into an electronic medical record program in New Zealand and marked some living patients as dead and changed some names to “Charlie Kirk,” report Stuff.co.nz. The intruder who accessed the program used by over 2,000 doctors and 350 pharmacies also seems to have changed the ages of patients and assigned some people to different facitlities. One nurse noted: “We just kept losing more patients from the screen. And so I started panicking because it was nearly tea time and medications were not going to be given.”
Politics on tap: A bar in Washington D.C. gave out free beer during the State of the Union speech Tuesday “until the first insult,” reports The Washington Post. While some expected that President Trump would make that first insult within five or 10 minutes of the start of the speech, it actually took 45 minutes (“Biden and his corrupt partners in Congress”). The next hour of the speech was filled with numerous insults, but with the beer no longer free, not many patrons at Penn Social bar noticed.
This invention sucks: A software engineer accidentally found he could take control of thousands of “smart” vacuums around the world, allowing him look and listen through the remote cameras on the machines, and watch as they constructed a floor plan of each house, reports The Verge. Sammy Azdoufal said he was simply trying to control his own DJI Romo — a $1,900 vacuum cleaner — when he discovered he could access other machines, allowing him to peer into the homes of strangers and even listen in on conversations. “It’s so weird to have a microphone on a freaking vacuum,” says Azdoufal.
Vacation activity: Two British tourists were arrested in Spain after faking the kidnapping of one of them in an attempt to extort a “ransom” of $975 from a relative, the Daily Mail reports. The two men, ages 51 and 37, sent a video to the relative showing one of the men seemingly covered in blood and being threatened with a knife. Police assembled a special rescue unit and were preparing to raid the men’s hotel when they saw them walking out in a “relaxed and amicable way.” The men could face prison time.
These are all classic! Let's move to Nantucket