Of Course We’re Starting With Florida
A woman in Florida crashed her SAAB into the Adrian Fernandez Insurance office in Tampa. It’s the third time in ten years a car has crashed into that insurance building, so clearly it was asking for it, tarted up like some kind of fruit stand. Fortunately no one suffered any major injuries. Also fortunately, the woman didn’t have to work very hard to contact her car insurer about the accident: she had just crashed into their office.
And now we leave Tampa, Florida for the faraway land of, um, Jacksonville, Florida. Beth and Tony Johnson from Ohio brought their 15-foot-wide, 7300 lb possibly-working yo-yo to Jacksonville Crane and Machinery to make a world record attempt for the largest working yo-yo. The record is currently held by an 11.5 foot, 1600 lb yo-yo. You’ll note we don’t mention the name of the current record holder; that’s because we don’t want to encourage them. They still hold the record, however, as the Johnsons’ yo-yo was estimated to be too heavy for the release cable and the attempt was postponed. But look on the bright side: they’ve inspired a groanworthy number of yo-yo puns this week.
Don’t Worry, Germany. We Didn’t Forget You.
Here’s a perfectly normal sentence: a drunk German man summoned the fire department to a train station to rescue his beer. A 44-year-old man stepped off a train at the Kaiserslautern station to smoke a cigarette with a 28-year-old friend. The train departed with their bag of beers still on board. The older man, reacting with the wisdom only years of drinking and riding the rails can provide, punched a glass fire alarm, injuring his hand. When firefighters arrived, he requested they save the beers. Authorities determined his BAL was 0.195, just a hair shy of “stupor”. At least he still had the presence of mind to focus on saving those beers at all cost. Unfortunately, the German media didn’t see fit to report the fate of the bag of beers. Our thoughts and prayers are with the bag of beers in this difficult time.
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- Florida woman crashes her car into her car insurance company (AOLNews)
- World record yo-yo attempt spins out of control. Wacka wacka wacka. (Jacksonville, with video)
- Drunk German summons fire department to train station to rescue his beer. (TheLocal)
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- Taiwan wants to alleviate pollution, smell, and overuse of water at pig farms. Hey, that’s great. How are they going to accomplish that? By training pigs to use a toilet, of course. (Reuters)
- Helicopter pilot Steve Irwin spotted thousands of sharks swimming just 100 meters away from the shores of Palm Beach. In other news, I’ve never been happier to not be living in Florida. (WPTV, video here)
- A 12-year-old girl found a naughty surprise in a bag of Valentine’s conversation hearts. One of the hearts was printed with the message, “Nice T*ts!” And she’s mad? What I would have given to get a sweet compliment like that at age 12. (KCRA)
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- Blocking the internet for five days cost the Egyptian economy $90 million, estimates the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. I’m not sure how to convert Keyboard Cat videos into dollar value equivalent, but it’s a lot of replays. (PCWorld)
- 28% of Egypt’s population is 15 to 29 years old and rank their financial satisfaction as 5.4 on a scale of 1-10. 27% of young adults there are also unemployed according to this interactive widget about several countries made by the New York Times.
- Here’s a chart plotting rises in the food price index in Egypt over the past five years, which is now as high as it was during the food riots in 2008. It would be a bad time for Mubarak to say anything about eating cake. (GOOD)
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