The Penguathelon and Other Oddities in the Universe.

 

Today has been a day of reading strange events; Some of which are funny, some of which are not funny, some of which are downright  scary. 

We’ll start with the funny, and I can shorten this entire paragraph to two words: New Zealand.  There are many reasons why I want to visit New Zealand. It’s been described as the most beautiful place on Earth, though in the immortal words of Lewis Black, after you spend 23hrs on an airplane, any land mass is beautiful.  And I think the people of the country would be interesting too as most of them strike me as insane.  Proving this fact is that this month is the first annual Penguathelon.  Essentially its described as a penguin olympics including frisbee, surfing, and waddle races, in addition to people being invited to participate in these events while wearing penguin feet themselves.  It’s described as a interesting way for the public to get up close with them while understanding more about penguin welfare.  I am, however, at a loss to under how watching a penguin throw a frisbee accomplishes this.

On the not funny side, you may have seen that McDonald’s restaurant recently began offering free wi-fi in their restaurants in an attempt to increase their business.  This has worked a little too well, it has increased the amount of traffic inside their restuarants, but now they’ve found that people are hanging around too damned long afterwards. The average person is there for 30min where it used to be only 10.  This has begun a small war against the internet squatters and they’ve begun corralling them in certain areas, to limiting the amount of time they sit there, to playing god-awful music over the loudspeaker, which is like killing a mouse with a rifle….which my dad once did when I was a child….but thats another story for another day.

And onto the downright scary side.  There’s a cemetery in Imperial County, California (anyone ever notice that all these strange things seem to come from california? It’s not just the cheese outta the state) that is currently in foreclosure.  This is scary to me on many levels.  For one, how the hell does a cemetery go into foreclosure!?  I thought they had a financial base for these places to prevent this kind of thing from happening.  And for second….If they get foreclosed on and someone else purchases them, do they kick out the ‘residents?’

What do you all think about these things?