Weird news you can use

It turns out that a person having a heart attack is usually safer to be in an ambulance headed to a hospital than to already be a patient in a hospital, according to a study by University of North Carolina researchers. It takes longer, on average, for non-ER hospital staff to comply with hospital protocols in ordering and evaluating tests (nearly three hours, according to the study) than it does for ER (and ambulance) staff, who treat every case of cardiac symptoms as life-threatening. Overall, according to a February Wall Street Journal report, the study found the mortality rate for heart-attack victims treated in emergency rooms is 4 percent, compared to 40 percent for patients already admitted for other reasons and then suffering heart attacks.

The continuing crisis

The man hospitalized in fair condition in January after being rammed from behind by a car while on his bicycle happened to be Darryl Isaacs, 50, one of the most ubiquitously advertising personal-injury lawyers in Louisville, Kentucky. Isaacs calls himself the “Heavy Hitter” and the “Kentucky Hammer” for his aggressiveness on behalf of, among other clients, victims of traffic collisions. The (soon-to-be-poorer) driver told police the sun got in his eyes.

Elephants in love

India TV reported in January that a wild male elephant from an adjoining sanctuary had broken into the Nandan Kanan zoo in Odisha, wildly besotted with a female, Heera. The male cast aside two other females trying to protect Heera and mated with her. The male lingered overnight until zookeepers could shoo him away.

The ever-valuable Internet

In January, “Captain Mercedes,” a registered user of the Reddit.com social media site, announced he had compiled a data file cataloguing every bowel movement he had in 2014 and was offering the file to other users to design hypotheses and visual representations of the data in ways that might improve his relationship with his alimentary canal. According to the data-analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com, the “researcher” used the standard “Bristol stool scale” (seven categories of excreta, by shape and consistency) “and produced interesting hypotheses in the ensuing Reddit conversation.”

Suspicions confirmed

A January examination of New York City records through NYC Open Data found that the five most common first names of taxicab drivers licensed by the city are five variations in the spelling of the name “Mohammed.”

Wait, what?

Ms. Meng Wang filed a lawsuit recently in New York City against Gildan Outerwear over her disappointment with Kushyfoot Shaping Tights. In television ads, Wang wrote, a young model sashays down a city street with her eyes dreamily closed and “moans and utters highly sexually charged phrases” “including ‘That’s the spot’ and ‘so good’ … passersby (stop) in their tracks to look at her with mouths agape.” Wang said the ad clearly implies that the tights produce an orgasmic sensation of some sort, wrote Gothamist.com, but that she, herself, has come up empty.

Least competent criminals

Two men remain at large after stealing an ATM from Casino Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, in January. They had smashed through glass front doors, unbolted the machine, put it on a dolly and rolled it to a waiting car (though it briefly toppled over onto one of the culprits). Managers told police the ATM was empty, disabled and scheduled to be moved to another location later that day. A Calgary police officer expressed bemusement at the city’s recent ATM smash-and-grab epidemic, since the machines are hard to unbolt, hard to open and emptied several times a day. “It’s a very ineffective way to make a living.”

Recurring themes

One of the legendary American lawsuit successes is the 1970 award of $50,000 to Gloria Sykes, whose brain injury on a San Francisco cable car left the previously modest Midwestern woman with an unrestrained libido. News of the Weird reported a similar such case, from London, in December 2006. Now, in January 2015, the British Columbia Supreme Court awarded Alissa Afonina $1.5 million for her auto-accident brain injury. She was apparently a demure, high-achieving student, but following the 2008 collision, she had no impulse control, become “isolated,” had “outbursts,” made “inappropriate sexual comments” — and was able to earn a living only as a dominatrix. (Alfonina’s mother, also injured in the accident, was awarded $940,000.) CV

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