Sparrows and turtles

I think I’ve already mentioned how much I miss not being able to download odd/quirky news from www.ananova.com any more. I have been searching for a suitable replace – but the search is slow. Who knew there could be so many sites in cyberspace catering for this type of news?
The saddest story I came across was this (via the NOS news agency) was about an attempt in the Netherlands this Friday on the world record for falling dominoes – currently standing (or would that be not falling) at 3,992,397. A sparrow flew into through an open window and knocked over 23,000 dominoes. The article didn’t mention if the bird had done it one domino at a time – but it did say that it was only a system of 750 built-in gaps of the chain that prevented most or all of the dominoes being downed ahead of time. It had taken employees of television company Endemol weeks to set up the millions of dominoes for Friday’s record attempt and had the bird disrupted more of them, it might have been difficult to meet their schedule. But the record attempt is safe – from this particular interloping sparrow at least – “The bird was shot by an exterminator with an air rifle while cowering in a corner.” Somehow, it just doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.
And still in Europe, at an alpine lake in Bavaria to be precise, police are hunting a snapping turtle. Its crime? Biting a teenage boy. As the report, citing Ananova as its source put it: The boy was bitten through the swimming trunks on his private parts and then bitten again on the hand as he tried to scramble out of the water. The turtle, native to North America, is thought to have been dumped in the lake after becoming too large for its tank. Snapping turtles can reach a weight of six stone and live for 80 years, but police believe that if they fail to catch the latest turtle escapee it will not survive through the winter when the lake freezes over. All attempts to locate it have so far failed – but chances are it’s not the turtle that Iowa woman Marjorie Morris has reportedly found dead in a vacuum-packed brick package of Folgers coffee. P&G, which makes the coffee believes it is an isolated incident. But even so, it’s probably a relief for them to know that Morris says she does not plan to sue.
Others are not so understanding. Take the case of a woman who claimed she found a piece of human finger in a bowl of chili at Wendy’s [International Inc.]. Yes, we’ve all heard horror stories about pieces of things found in food at large burger chains – but this one was true. Not before some major sales damage had been done to Wendy’s, the woman and her husband were arrested and subsequently pleaded guilty to planting the finger to obtain compensation from Wendy’s. I will probably need to do some more research on this one – too many questions are left unanswered in the Reuters report – where did they get the finger? Did someone give them the finger? What were they hoping to get out of it? How much of a finger was it? How did the law find out about the scam? Was the owner of the finger implicated in the case? Hmmm. (Only in America?)