You can find a lot of weird stuff on YouTube, such as this video of a water-skiing elephant. Watching it, I feel kind of sorry for the poor elephant made to do this.



The story behind the video is that it was a publicity stunt from 1959 dreamed up by New York PR man Max Rosey in order to promote an amusement park. Rosey was also the man who came up with the idea for an annual hot dog eating contest in Coney Island to promote Nathan's hot dogs.

I found this video (and the explanation about it) on a blog called Liquid Soap, which is about publicity stunts of yesteryear. The blog is written by Mark Borkowski, who's also the head of the UK's Borkowski PR agency.

If I saw mechanics busy sacrificing some goats as I boarded my plane, it wouldn't exactly set me at ease. Still, mechanics in Nepal seem to think it did the trick. From Reuters:

The Feejee Mermaid is apparently currently on display as part of the American Museum of Natural History's exhibit on Mythic Creatures. A Flickr user, despite being told that photography was forbidden in the exhibit, managed to surreptitiously snap a picture of it anyway.

The one time I saw the Feejee Mermaid was back in 1998 when it was housed at Harvard's Peabody Museum. It wasn't on display, so I had to ask for special permission to see it back in the archives. I managed to snap a few pictures of it, despite also being told that photography was not allowed. I always wondered what the big deal was about taking pictures of it.

Anyway, I have a pretty thorough description of the Feejee Mermaid and its history in the Hoaxipedia. The irony is that the creature currently on display as the original Feejee Mermaid almost certainly isn't. The original probably was destroyed when Moses Kimball's Boston Museum burned down in the 1880s.

Meet Angie from Chernobyl. She's the biggest cat in the world. She belongs to Dr. Maricek, who's a radiation scientist. Angie's missing a gene that controls her growth. As a result, she just keeps growing and growing (and growing!). She currently weighs about 800 lbs and eats 60 lbs of food a day. Despite her size, Angie behaves like a normal cat, though she is extremely shy with people.

Angie's very cute (and looks a bit like my cat Boo), but if she ever curled up on someone's lap, I think the result would be a very flat human.

Thanks to Sarah of messybeast.com for the link. Sarah says, "With some dodgy photo-editing. I can't work out how this hasn't yet ended up in a chain email. Eat your heart out Snowball!"

First there was Oscar, the death-predicting cat. Now there's Scamp, the death-predicting schnauzer. Metro.co.uk reports: It sounds like these death-predicting animals are a fairly common phenomenon, though I suspect it all must be some kind of Clever Hans Effect. Now we need some death-predicting rabbits, gerbils, and parakeets to round out the menagerie.

Cats are disappearing from the town of Stourbridge in the West Midlands. Up to 40 lost cats have been reported so far, all from the same small neighborhood. Metro.co.uk reports: It reminds me of that bridge in Scotland I posted about two years ago, which dogs keep leaping off of, apparently to commit suicide. Perhaps the cats of Stourbridge have gotten tired of life in the town and are wandering off to find new homes. Unlikely. Or perhaps there's a cat-napper in the area. Or perhaps it's just a statistical fluke.

Kevin Keeble stirred up a lot of excitement when he sent pictures to the Newquay Guardian showing a great white shark that he claimed to have spotted about a mile off the coast of Cornwall. At the time he said, "We were out about one mile off Towan Head and I saw this fin in the distance. We were reeling in the mackerel but I picked up my camera and caught a picture with my telephoto lens. The shark was about 100ft away. It was only there for a few seconds before it disappeared."

A shark mania ensued. Others sharks were spotted, but they turned out to be harmless basking sharks.

Now Keeble has changed his tune, confessing that it was all a hoax. He's told a rival paper that he actually took the photo of the shark, "whilst I was on a fishing trip in Cape Town and just sent it in as a joke. I didn't expect anyone to be daft enough to take it seriously."

So it's once again safe to go swimming in Cornwall.

FlexPetz is a San Diego-based company that allows people to rent out dogs by the day. So if you want to be able to take a dog to the beach on the weekend, but you don't have time to care for it during the week, this is the service for you. Marlena Cervantes, the founder of the company, doesn't like the term "rent-a-pet," according to this AP article. Instead, she likes to think of what she's offering as "shared pet ownership." The service is quite pricey, but it's doubtless cheaper than caring for a dog yourself for its entire life.

As soon as I read about this company, I thought about the many "rent-a-something" type hoaxes that have been reported here over the years, such as: Rent my Son, Rent a Wife, Rent a Negro, Rent a Midget, Rent a German, and Rent a Dildo.

However, I'm pretty sure FlexPetz is not a hoax. Though many might think that it's such a bad idea they would prefer it was a hoax.

My first reaction was to be appalled. Pets, to my way of thinking, are part of the family. They're not something to be rented on the weekend. But the more I've thought about it, the more I've started to grudgingly accept the idea of this company, because if you want a pet but you're not sure if you can take care of it for its entire life, renting one would be better than buying one and later trying to get rid of it. (via Art of the Prank)

The Coleman Frog, explains a recent article on Canada.com, is an enormous stuffed frog -- it weighs 19 kilograms, or about 42 lbs -- on display in the York-Sunbury Museum in Fredericton, Canada. According to legend, the frog originally belonged to Fred Coleman, who owned a lodge near Fredericton back in the 1880s. He used to feed it whiskey and whey, causing it to grow to its enormous size. After it died, he had it stuffed. It sat in the saloon of a hotel for a while before coming into the possession of the York-Sunbury Museum.

There are skeptics who say that the Coleman Frog is a fake. They suggest that the frog was actually originally a display item used to advertise a cough medicine guaranteed to relieve "the frog in your throat" (See Canada's Mysterious Maritimes), but the York-Sunbury Museum dismisses such skepticism. Tim Andrew, a local expert on the frog who defends its reality, says, "I don't suppose we'll ever put the controversy to rest. It was suggested doing DNA testing on it, but I think we're reluctant to disturb the peace of a stuffed beast that's been around quite happily for 123 years now." (Thanks, Joe)

Big Gary forwarded me a link to this Yahoo News Photo of Eclyse, a zebra-horse hybrid housed at the Stukenbrock Safaripark in Germany. Big Gary had some doubts about whether this was a true hybrid, or a fake one (such as Tijuana Zebras -- donkeys that Tijuana street vendors paint to look like zebras so that tourists can pose with them). Eclyse's color coating does look so strange that it would be natural to assume it was fake, but it turns out to be real. Spiegel has more pictures of Eclyse.

Eclyse's coloring is highly unusual, even for a zebra-horse hybrid. The Wikipedia entry on Zebroids speculates that she got her patchy coat because her mother was "piebald or skewbald (known in the USA as a Pinto horse)."

The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (Volume 357, Number 4) contains a short article about Oscar, a cat that seems to possess the ability to predict when people are about to die. Oscar's home is the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, so he has many chances to be around dying people. When patients are about to die, he curls up next to them and happily sleeps there, until they're dead. Then he quietly exits the room. Most of the time the dying patients are so sick they don't even know he's there. The article in the NEJM states: Oscar is a cute cat, but my first thought was whether Oscar could somehow be causing or hastening the deaths of the patients, though I can't imagine how this could be. An Associated Press article raises some other possibilities: Normally I'm happy if a cat curls up with me, but in Oscar's case, I would be a little concerned. (Thanks, Big Gary)

An anonymous correspondent emailed me a link to Arr, the Kraken, where I found this picture of a very curious creature. Arr, the Kraken speculates that it might be a kangahippopossumouse. Perhaps, though it could also be a Tasmanian Dwarf Hippo. Anyone out there able to positively identify this thing?