News of the Weird
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
The chosen professional interest of biologist David Scholnick of Pacific University (Forest Grove, Ore.) is in how shrimp act when they get an infection, which he gauged by building a tiny treadmill in order to run crustaceans through their paces to measure blood lactate levels. “As far as I know,” Scholnick told LiveScience.com in October, “this is the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill.” To increase the shrimps’ stress, Scholnick designed tiny backpacks out of duct tape but still found that healthy shrimp could go for about an hour without fatigue.
Simon Pope’s “Gallery Space Recall” exhibit at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Wales, in October is a startlingly empty room, with patrons called upon to supply the art by imagining another art show they have seen so that, wrote Pope, the two exhibits “exist at two locations simultaneously, both here and there.” (Pope wrote that the exhibit suggested the brain-injury disorder “reduplicative paramnesia,” in which a person has a delusional belief that something exists at two places at once.)
The Havering town council in Romford, England, prepared a 300-page report in October, which was the result of a 12-month investigation, to find out who had heckled a speaker at a zoning meeting by making “baaa” noises. The authors said they had narrowed the list of suspects.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD