Weird Wild Stuff

April Fools’ Day is right around the corner, but foolishness of all kinds is already well underway, and here are just a few recent examples.
We’ll start in Florida, where fights get started over food on a daily basis. These fights are usually stupid and unnecessary but not in this case. A man in Fort Myers attacked his roommate after he ate an entire Key lime pie that the man had specifically bought for his mother’s birthday, as he should. The roommate responded by dumping cold water on his head for which he was booked for battery on a person 65 or older. The fact that both combatants are elderly makes one assume that this was building for a while and also that alcohol was somehow involved.
The rapid growth of electric vehicles has been notable, as has the proportional growth in weird stories related to them. Check it: A popular BBC Radio 2 DJ missed his flight to Amsterdam after his car battery died on his way to the airport. Scott Mills, who had forgotten to charge his secondary battery, and his fiance were subsequently stuck on the roadside, locked in the car for five hours before rescue workers could free them. Thankfully, they were both unharmed and, even more remarkably, are still engaged.
Jokes about the slow pace of mail delivery have been a staple of comedy for about as long as mail delivery has existed. Whether it’s carrier pigeons, Pony Express or Amazon drones, that will always be a thing. Well, here’s one for the record books: A letter delivered in London last month aroused suspicion because the stamp had a king on it, instead of a queen. Since Charles has not had official stamps issued yet (same for currency), the recipient looked closer, having already determined that it was not addressed to him. On closer inspection, that king was not Charles III, but rather George V, great-grandfather of the current king, who was born in 1948. This letter was mailed in 1916 and was somehow lost until last month, 107 years later. The punchline is that the letter was addressed to a man who was, back then, a “stamp magnate” in London. That guy would have surely advised them not to open the letter, as that damages the resale value, but you really have no choice in that situation.
Everyone loves robots, and most people love religion, so it was maybe inevitable that both would collide at some point. The Daily Beast reported about the Kodaiji Temple, an old worship spot for Zen Buddhists in Kyoto, Japan and their current religious leader, an “android priest” named Mindar who recites the Heart Sutra when his motion sensor is tripped. The article mentions similar experiments in Germany and the United States, where the artist currently developing a “Robo Rabbi” is also a fashion model in her spare time.
Let’s wrap up with a great example of citizens leveraging their privilege in the right ways. A team of MMA fighters in Wheeling, West Virginia stepped up to offer their services to a local restaurant that was forced to cancel a drag brunch after receiving threats from the usual suspects (literally). We’d all love to see a lot more stuff like this happening all over America, especially here in Florida, where the clientele overlaps so widely.