UPDATE: We are sold out! Thanks to everyone for responding so quickly. We hope you guys like it!

Here at Weird Things we pride ourselves on thinking outside the box. If we can find room in our hearts for yetis, UFOs, self-driving cars and zombies than why not a new model for podcast advertising?

On this week’s podcast we are going to sell three ad slots. Each will cost $20. These spots are for you, our readers and listeners. We will plug your Twitter, Facebook or blog in the form of an original live read hand-constructed by me, Justin Robert Young. It will not be super long but I will attempt to make it funny. Emphasis on attempt.

This is not a donation. We want to give you something for your cash beyond a thank you. We’d hope at least a few of those listening to our Top Ten in iTunes’ Science category podcast might want to follow another likeminded person. Either way, we guarantee you’ll get one new friend or follower, us.

We hope this experiment does well enough that we can repeat it. You can make it happen.

If you are interested, we’ll accept PayPal or all major credit cards.

Email JustinRobertYoung@Gmail.com. The first three to pay will get the inaugural spots on the podcast released this week.

You are not ready for this, the coolest battle between animals in the history of recorded civilization. Due to forest fires, Yetis have unnaturally migrated to a new area of Russia. The problem? Local bears haven’t taken to kindly to their new neighbors and a full scale GD war has broken out!

This year’s expedition to Mountain Shoria is already the third. One of its participants, the director of the International Center for Hominology Igor Burtsev assures that yetis leave traces of their stay in the taiga and fight with local bears.

“They make strange pyramidal constructions of trunks and branches in the wood – sometimes 3 or 4 meters, sometimes only 30 cm high. Sometimes they bend huge trees and twist their trunks like wheels. A human being is just not strong enough for that, and there seems to be no need for bears to do this. At first, we thought that yetis do this to make shelters, but then we came to the conclusion that this is a sort of landmark for them. Or, maybe, this is a way for a yeti to say something to its congeners.”

Hardest part about sussing out the truth in this front line story? Many local farmers have been confusing Yetis for Wood Goblins. This quote is too good not to re-quote. Prepare yourself…

“Folk beliefs say that the wood goblin is the master of the woods. All animals, even bears, submit to him. The wood goblin has a strong hypnotic power, thus he is not afraid of any animal.”

I am so moving to Russia.

[Voice of Russia]

According to his chief astronomer? Yes!

[Guardian]

A York woman discovered the following image in her photos from Nuremberg, Germany.

“I was taking lots of photos to show people where we’d been, but when I got back into the car I noticed there was something on this one,“ said Abbey, who is currently studying at Newcastle University “I just though, ‘What it that? That looks weird’, and couldn’t work out what it was.”

Abbey has shown the picture to friends and family, including a photography student, and nobody has yet come up with a clear explanation.

“I thought it looked like a cherub,” said Bev, Abbey’s mother.

“I also thought it looked a bit like a naked Buzz Lightyear toy, but could be a bee or an insect or something.”

Many have pointed out that the image look very much like West Virginia’s famous Mothman. Has the MM migrated? Or maybe, like the woman who photographed him, he was just on holiday?

[YorkPress.co.uk]

Oh man… let’s get it on. Apparently the Australian chapter of SETI has recorded light flashes from the direction of the newly discovered planet Gliese 581g – the most Earth-like planet ever found.

Have we already ignored first contact?

He said: ‘Whenever there’s a clear night, I go up to the observatory and do a run on some of the celestial objects. Looking at one of these objects, we found this signal.

‘And you know, I got really excited with it. So next I had to analyse it. We have special software to analyse these signals, because when you look at celestial objects through the equipment we have, you also pick up a lot of noise.’

He went on: ‘We found this very sharp signal, sort of a laser lookalike thing which is the sort of thing we’re looking for – a very sharp spike. And that is what we found. So that was the excitement about the whole thing.’

If this was a warning… we are totally screwed.

[Daily Mail via Conspiracy Journal]

At long last, the original footage from the moon landing has been released. Until now, the best we have had is a recording sourced from a television camera pointed at a monitor on that fateful day. This restored footage is so clear you can even see the astronaut’s faces through their reflective helmets.

In a blog post today, Google owned up to running self-driving cars through all manner of conditions: highway, city, long-distance and on challenging terrain like the steep streets of San Francisco. The experiments were conducted wither no or very limited human interaction and the biggest accident came when a vehicle was rear ended while fully stopped.

The man who made it happen, Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is understandably bubbly about the breakthrough when quoted by the New York Times:

“Can we text twice as much while driving, without the guilt?” Dr. Thrun said in a recent talk. “Yes, we can, if only cars will drive themselves.”

Obviously, this is about as blinding awesome as weird can get. That is, until the robots rebel against us, lock the doors and drive us all off a cliff.

[Google Blog]

[New York Times]

Watch this great interview with Dr. Michio Kaku (author of Hyperspace) as he explains how alternate realities may actually exist. If they do, maybe there’s an alternate Dr. Kaku who is trying to convince his world they don’t.

Ladies and gentlemen… please make your introductions to a new species of fruit bat found near Papua New Guinea. He also looks like Yoda.

On a clerical note, this was sent to me within an hour by both of my Weird Things podcast co-hosts Andrew Mayne and Brian Brushwood. For the record, Andrew was first.

[Daily Mail]

If alien life is in our atmosphere, we are going to find it. With a balloon. We are launching from Sweden.

[AOL]

The last time we saw census results this weird, Betty White was talking about swapping out calculator batteries to power a crotch massager.

Marine scientists have announced the 80% completion of a comprehensive ocean census and the results are predictably freaking bizarre. Check out a full slideshow at Discover Magazine’s 80beats blog.

[80beats]

When Humphrey Simmons went fishing recently he didn’t expect to catch a shark, and he definitely didn’t expect the the shark to burp up the remains of a human being. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened.

When Simmons caught the shark a friend who was with him shot the shark several times. What happened next was shocking:

“We tied the rope around his tail fin, and pulled him towards the boat. We were going to cut the hook out of his mouth and let him go when he regurgitated a human foot — intact from the knee down.”

The body has been identified as a missing sailor. Play the slideshow below for several pictures of the grizzly sight (WARNING: Not for the squeamish!):

[The Tribune]

The kids love vampires, the kids love pet fish. Is it any wonder that the World Wildlife Foundation has found a Dracula Fish along with 144 other insanely weird animals surrounding Southeast Asia’ Mekong River in 2009.

Here are a few of the others:

Cuter by far is the lipstick gecko, barely big enough to perch on a finger, with a dark barred pattern across its lips suggestive of cosmetics.

Other featured creatures include a fangless snake, a frog that chirps like a cricket, and a pitcher plant that traps insects and grows to a height of over seven meters.

“This rate of discovery is simply staggering in modern times,” said Stuart Chapman, Conservation Director of WWF Greater Mekong, in a statement.

By random happenstance, we have some more Weird Animals coming your way today. Hold on to your butts.

[Reuters]

Is this a picture of a zombie? Notice the open casket on the bottom right.

Physical deformity? Extremely well-made student horror film? Has hell indeed become too full forcing the dead to walk the Earth?

You can see it now but make no mistake, the Hartley 2 is coming. Not unlike the Hulk, it’s green, it’s unstoppable and it will come very close to destroying the Earth before moving along peacefully.

Comet Hartley 2 will swoop within 11 million miles of Earth on October 20, one of the closest approaches of any comet in the last few centuries.

Hartley 2 is already visible as a pale green streak in the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia. NASA astronomer Bill Cooke caught the comet on September 28 in a 4-minute exposure taken from a remotely-controlled telescope in Mayhill, New Mexico (Cooke himself was in his home in Huntsville, Alabama, according to NASA’s Watch the Skies blog).

Who’s having a Hartley 2 party?

[Wired]