Loud Fish Sex; Granny’s Ashes At Disney: Best Of Weird News & Oddities

ACROSS AMERICA — Things happen every day in America that simply cannot be made up. Here are a few of them from Patch’s Weird News & Oddities column, starting with things that went bump, bump, bump in the night.

People in South Tampa, Florida, were confounded last winter by the low-frequency drumming sound that interrupted their sleep, scared some of their children and caused tremors in their houses.

Multiple theories were floated. Some blamed a loud party boat on Tampa Bay. More skeptical people thought the sounds might be coming from an underwater military installation. Or, some asked, could it be aliens?

Nope, it’s likely just loud fish sex — although James Locascio, a fisheries program manager for the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Sarasota, put it more scientifically. His previous research suggests the low-frequency sounds — similar to bass on a stereo and peculiar to the anatomy of the species — were coming from black drum fish, which were in the middle of their winter mating season. The fish are most active at night.

• Read the full story: Frisky Fish Keep Tampa Awake

Raining Grandma’s Ashes At Disney

A trip last spring to Disneyland wasn’t exactly a trip to the “Happiest Place on Earth” for some visitors, who found a popular ride smeared with bone chips and ashes — the cremains of someone who apparently loved the place a lot.

Dusting the Anaheim, California, theme park with the cremains of loved ones seems to have become a thing, and Mickey and Minnie would like for everyone to just stop it. For the record, no one at Disney has ever said this is OK. California state law doesn’t, either.

The creepy discovery at the “Rise of the Resistance” was the latest in a string of cremains scatterings that include dustings on the “It’s a Small World,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and — this one gives us pause — “Haunted Mansion” attractions.

Ashes “won’t stay where you drop them” a park worker commenting on the creepy practice on a Reddit thread called “Ashes on Attractions.” Grandma — or whomever — will likely be “swept up and dumped,” the person said.

• Read the full story: The Horror! People Are Scattering Human Remains At Disneyland

It Was So Hot ...

It was so hot in Death Valley National Park in July that a 42-year-old tourist from Belgium melted the skin off his feet after losing his flip-flops in sand dunes, park officials said.

The air temperature was 123 degrees Fahrenheit on July 20, but in heat that extreme, the sand can be much hotter, anywhere from 170 to 180 degrees and into the 200-degree range.

Unable to walk out of the dunes on his own due to extreme pain, the man and his family were assisted by other park visitors, who helped carry him to a parking lot, where park officials assessed his injuries. The punishing temperatures made the air too thin for a medical helicopter to safely land, so he was taken by ground ambulance to a higher elevation, where it was only 109 degrees. From there, he was flown to a hospital in Las Vegas for treatment.

• Read the full story: Tourist’s Skin Melts Walking In Hot Sand

Woman Lived In Sign For A Year

Nicknamed “the rooftop ninja,” a Michigan woman who lived in a sign for a year gets points for her ingenuity.

Think of all the people who looked up at the roof peak displaying the Family Fare grocery sign in Midland and never once thought, “Hmm, a person could set up housekeeping in that sign.”

The unidentified 34-year-old did just that, getting up and into the squatty “A-frame” and then out again without being noticed for about a year before she was discovered. She’d made the sign a cozy home with flooring, a small desk, a pantry for food and even a houseplant. She reportedly had a car and a job.

Contractors working at the store discovered the rooftop ninja and called police. They let her go without charges.

• Read the full story: MI Woman Lives Inside Sign For A Year

He Ate How Many Big Macs?

A guy in Wisconsin sunk his teeth into McDonald’s signature Big Mac sandwich more than 50 years ago and hasn’t eaten anything since — well, much of anything.

Don Gorske, now 70, promised his mother during the first seven years of his gastronomical romance with the sandwich that he’d eat one meal a day that didn’t have a Big Mac, and even she acquiesced, eventually telling him “If they haven’t killed you by now, go ahead.”

A Guinness World Record holder for eating more than 34,000 Big Macs during his lifetime, Gorske now limits his sandwiches to two a day and sometimes has a light snack at night. There have been times in the past that he’s eaten as many as nine a day.

Gorske walks about six miles a day, gets regular checkups, and his body hasn’t betrayed him. He’s not worried his record will be challenged and laughs at himself a bit. “Even if someone started now, I’ll be dead before they could match it,” Gorske once told Patch. “And they’re going to have to be obsessive-compulsive if they’re not going to eat anything else. ….”

• Read the full story: He’s Eaten 34,000 Big Macs Since 197s — And Little Else

Space Junk Likely Hit Home

A fellow in Naples, Florida, is pretty sure a piece of trash that was part of a 2.6 metric ton pallet jettisoned from the International Space Station hit his house in early March, narrowly missing his son. NASA engineers said they would analyze the 2-pound object to determine if that’s what damaged Alejandro Otero’s home.

When delays prevented a controlled journey back to Earth, NASA tossed the pallet of spent batteries from the space station in 2021 and it has been careening around Earth since. NASA had expected the contents of the pallet to burn up harmlessly, but its counterpart European Space Agency had said some pieces of it could reach the ground, though the chances of it hitting a person were “very low.”

Harvard and Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell questioned NASA’s decision to jettison such an enormous piece of trash and send it back in an uncontrolled reentry.

“NASA was rolling the dice … and they made an unlucky throw,” McDowell told Gizmodo. “So you had this 2-ton thing that reentered the atmosphere and this is some small fragment of it that survived and went through this poor guy’s house.”

• Read the full story: Space Station Trash May Have Crashed Into FL Home

Down And Dirty On Diaper Spa

It took a clarification that adults who enjoy wearing diapers won’t have access to a playground for the adult Diaper Spa to overcome objections spelled out in an online petition that called on Atkinson, New Hampshire, town leaders to reject the business.

“It has come to our attention that this business is advertised to individuals whose sexual fetish involves childlike behaviors,” the petition states. “This business, per their website, has advertised our town playground to their potential clientele. Thus, their sexual fetish will involve the town park where our children play.”

The physician-run diaper salon caters to “all diaper-wearing individuals who seek acceptance, respite and care.” Dr. Colleen Ann Murphy, who runs it, says she has addressed the concerns in the petition and has changed the language on the website to state that “I have never taken a client off property, nor do have I ever offered to do so.”

“It is important that my services do not include field trips,” she said

• Read the full story: Diaper Spa Saga Cleaned Up

(Dirty) Diaper Delivery Service

Imagine opening the package you ordered online and finding a swim diaper “encrusted with feces” and “covered with poop stains.”

Erin Elizabeth Herbert, of Redlands, California, doesn’t have to wonder what that’s like, according to a searing review she left about her Amazon experience. She had pictures to prove it, too. The whole experience, she said, left her “extremely grossed out.”

The stinky mess has left sellers Paul and Rachelle Baron $600,000 in debt for something they say wasn’t their fault.

Their diaper was once a bestseller on Amazon, but customers left in droves after Herbert’s negative review, left in 2020. Amazon, not individual sellers, are responsible for inspecting returns before they’re resold, the Barons said.

• Read the full story: A Woman In CA Said She Got A Dirty Diaper In Her Amazon Delivery

Take Down Your Pants, ‘Strike’ It Lucky

Some people like to take off their clothes and do ordinary, mundane things, like ride a bike naked, work in the garden naked, or go to work naked or just be naked.

Catering to their preferences was a bowling in the buff event called — and we didn’t name it, the Pittsburgh Area Naturists did — Balls Out Bowling. It’s also “toes in bowling,” and rental shoes, worn no one knows how many times, or by whom, are included in the price. Women can wear bottoms if they choose.

But enthusiasts of this activity aren’t trying to “strike it lucky,” if you know what we mean. Regardless of what you may be thinking, it was not a bawdy bowling event.

• Read the full story: Naked Bowling In Pittsburgh

Whale Boat Tipping

Whales are going to do what whales are going to do, and in an incident earlier this year, one rammed and capsized a 23-foot boat, tossing its two occupants into the ocean off the coast of New Hampshire, in July. Both were rescued without injury by two young brothers, who were boating nearby.

“He went under, he disappeared for a few minutes, and then the next thing we know, he just popped right up on our transom,” one of them said.

Officials think the boat-tipping was likely unintended on the whale’s part and not bored play, as some scientists believe after studying hundreds of cases in which whales have rammed expensive yachts, fishing boats and motorboats in the water off the coasts of Spain, Portugal, France and Morocco.

Instead, the whale was probably just hungry and unaware of the boat, the New Hampshire Shoals Marine Laboratory’s Sara Morris told a local TV news station.

“If you look at the video really carefully, you can see that the whale has its mouth open,” Morris said. “It looks like it’s lunge-feeding and actually trying to catch fish.”

• Read the full story: Why A Whale Likely Capsized This Boat

Cicadas Are Champion Pee Squirters

In case you missed all the cicada weirdness — this year’s dual emergence of periodical cicadas brought billions of the red-eyed bugs out of the ground for a weekslong sex party in the trees — here’s something a bit more out of the ordinary.

Periodical cicada enthusiasts walking under trees to see the bugs were advised to take along an umbrella as protection against powerful jets of cicada pee.

Cicadas are world-champion-level pee squirters. In a contest of distance and velocity, cicadas could line up with other animals their size and out-pee them every time. These insects that only live a few weeks above ground can squirt pee up to 3 meters per second, the fastest urine stream among animals recently studied by scientists.

And here’s another thing: Getting hit with a long stream of cicada urine isn’t necessarily an unlucky accident. They use their locker room brag-worthy urine streams as a defense against predators like squirrels and, yes, humans.

Cicadas are always ready to defend themselves, too, replenishing their arsenal by sucking in 300 times their weight in plant sap every day.

• Read the full story: Yes, Cicadas Intentionally Squirt Pee At People