BRIGHT IDEA
Cai, a 28-year-old man in Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province, China, had plenty of time to consider traffic patterns as he waited for the lights to change during his daily commute. So much, in fact, that he decided to take matters into his own hands on Sept. 27 and paint new traffic arrows on the roadway. A traffic camera captured the whole project as Cai carefully added a straight arrow to the existing left-turn and U-turn arrows. “I saw the straight lane was always packed with cars, while the turning left lane has a lot of space,” Cai told police. “So I thought changing the signs would make my commute smoother.” The BBC reports that police fined Cai the equivalent of about $151, and crews removed the new straight arrow from the road.
HAIR TRIGGER
Timothy Colton, 28, is cooling off in the Clark County (Nevada) Detention Center after being charged with arson and the attempted murder of his 66-year-old mother, who has limited mobility. The Nov. 27 altercation apparently started over a laundry dispute, but North Las Vegas police said Colton became aggressive and threatened to kill his mother and burn the house down. Fox News reports that Colton set fire to the front door and then ran away to hide under a car in a nearby parking lot, where officers found him. Police said he was “kicking the back seat door and hitting his head on the plastic partition between the front and rear seats” in the patrol car during his arrest. He was being held on $100,000 bail.
ON THE NAUGHTY LIST
A man in Australia couldn’t wait for Santa to deliver his Christmas wish: a 5 1/2-foot-tall “Dorothy model” sex doll. So, according to the Victoria Police Kingston Crime Investigation Unit, he broke into an adult entertainment store in Moorabbin on Dec. 4 by cutting through a fence with bolt cutters and smashing his way through the door. After quickly loading Dorothy into the back of his van, he took off. Security cameras caught the event, but the thief was disguised with stockings and a balaclava pulled over his head.
THE PASSING PARADE
Faye Preston of Hull, Yorkshire, England, loves her neighborhood–even the homeless folks who gently ask for change, or, in Preston’s case, make love in her driveway. She stepped out one night in November to smoke a cigarette and saw a couple under a blanket in her drive, and decided to let them be. But when she went out the next morning, “They were having actual sex on my driveway. The movement going on under the cover was unmistakable,” Preston wrote in the Hull Daily Mail. Still, she was worried about running over them, so she called police, who eventually removed them. “If I was homeless, I’d come here too,” Preston wrote. “Where else can you go for a posh meal, followed by cocktails in a swanky bar and finish the night stepping over some frisky homeless people fornicating on your driveway?”
A MESSAGE FROM GOD?
An 18th-century statue of the crucified Jesus that was removed for restoration from the church of St. Agueda in Burgo de Osma, Spain, held a surprise in a most unusual spot. As historians removed from Jesus’s backside a section of the carving meant to look like a cloth, they discovered two handwritten letters dated 1777 and signed by Joaquin Minguez, then-chaplain of the cathedral. Minguez details life in the community, including harvest reports and diseases, and tells about the sculpture’s artist, Manuel Bal. Historian Efren Arroyo told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo it appears Minguez intended his letters to be a sort of time capsule. The original letters were sent to the Archbishop of Burgos for archiving, but copies were returned to Jesus’s hindquarters to honor Minguez’s intent.
AWESOME!
Chuck E. Cheese restaurants are undergoing an evolution of sorts, and employees at the location in Oak Lawn, Illinois, were only following company protocol when they took sledgehammers to the plastic head of the animatronic mouse on Nov. 28. In a video recorded by a reporter with the Oak Lawn Patch, two female employees half-heartedly strike Chuck’s head for several minutes before it finally breaks apart. Meanwhile, other workers load furniture and games into a moving van. The Oak Lawn location has closed after experiencing a particularly difficult period, as it became the scene of violent brawls and gang activity. But they won’t have Chuck E. to kick around anymore.
INEXPLICABLE
A suburban parking lot in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, has been the scene of repeated crashes, as drivers there can’t seem to avoid the Sage Hill Rock–a large boulder surrounded by yellow cement curbs. At least three photos of cars that have collided with the rock–two hung up on it and the third tipped over on its side–were posted on social media over the weekend of Dec. 2, according to the CBC. “I don’t know how you miss this big rock,” said Brangwyn Jones, who lives in Sage Hill. An employee of a nearby business said the rock was placed in its spot to keep people from driving over the curb. The management company of the retail center had planned to remove it, but an uproar from community members (“It’s far too entertaining!”) may have stalled those plans.
UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT
The Jilin Daily newspaper in eastern China has provided a handy guide for residents about what to do in case of a nuclear attack from North Korea. Cartoons illustrate how to wash radioactive contaminants from shoes with water and use cotton swabs to clean out ears. “If war breaks out,” commented the state-backed Global Times, “it is not possible to rule out the Korean Peninsula producing nuclear contaminants, and countermeasures must be… spoken openly about to let the common folk know. But at the same time, there is absolutely no reason to be alarmed.”
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