Weird News

I generally like to check out News of the Weird by Chuck Shepard every Monday.  Here are some weird news I thought I’d pass on:

• British entrepreneur Colin Dowse recently introduced Sprayonmud (about US$14 a quart), dirty water chemically treated for greater stickiness, mainly for urban SUV owners to pass themselves off as all-terrain adventurers. [Wired.com, 6-10-05]
• In the last few years, Taiwan entrepreneurs have opened restaurants with motifs such as prisons,
  zombies and Mao Zedong, but the latest is Eric Wang’s “Marton,” in Kaohsiung, whose theme is the toilet. All seats are what you would think, with food served on a glass tabletop resting on a bathtub, and some of the delicacies are presented in miniature toilet bowls (among them, curry hot pot, and disturbingly, chocolate ice cream). [Agence France-Presse, 5-23-05]
• Recent scholarly findings (reduced to their essence in a May Wall Street Journal column): It’s much easier to identify someone if he is physically near you than if he is up to 450 feet away (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, February). People who choose their careers carefully, rather than on a whim, experience greater job satisfaction (Journal of Economic Psychology, vol. 26,
  no.3). College students tend to drink more alcoholic beverages than they realize (Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, April). If patients voluntarily tell a doctor about a bad side effect of a medicine, they are more likely to be switched to a safer one than if they don’t (Archives of Internal Medicine, January). [Wall Street Journal, 5-27-05]

Here’s a few, I hope they give you a good laugh.