Shel Silverstein once had a poem about a snail that lived in your nose and would bite your finger off.

Maybe he was inspired by something that’s been going on in Africa that nobody’s ever paid much attention to…until now…

A US pathobiological science professor returned home from an excursion to Africa. Three days later he discovered he’d picked up a small hitchhiker. That small hitchhiker was a tick. It had hitched a ride inside his nose!

After removing the tick using forceps, a mirror and a small torch, the tick was hustled off to Georgia where its DNA was sequenced revealing that this little world traveler might possibly be an entirely new species.

Tony Goldberg, the professor harboring this tiny nightmare in his nose, is now rethinking his theories about how chimps and humans exchange pathogens. Upon further research, reports and high resolution photos turned up these same ticks hiding in chimps’ noses as well.

In a statement we can all relate to, Goldberg says, “”When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off.”

We couldn’t agree more…and we don’t even have ticks in our noses.

[Web Pro News]

It wasn’t too long ago that North America’s Hellmouth of a state was calling for people to go out into the wild and bag/kill as many giant pythons as they possibly could.
Now that that’s yesterday’s Nature versus Humankind battle is over, everyone’s favorite birthing place of weird EVERYTHING is taking us back to the good old days of that era of 1970s horror films when piranha, worms, snakes, rats, bears and even tadpoles decided they were tired of sharing the planet with us.

Just what the hell is this new scourge that’s coming to wreak havoc upon us now?

Brace yourselves, people…

Snails.

SNAILS!

And they’re exactly the kind of snails some of you are imagining right now…
Giant African Snails that can grow to 8 inches long, devour 500 different species of plants and (you’re going to slap your face like Maculay Culkin in Home Alone right about now) they are tearing through stucco and peoples’ homes! Not only that but the snails’ shells are big enough to puncture car tires because they’re Frogger-like skills are nonexistent!

Good luck, Florida.

[Huffington Post]

Like some kind of massive, uber-budgeted, city-wide set of a Ridley Scott film that takes place after the fall of mankind, several cities built by China are almost completely devoid of life.

What’s even stranger is that these massive cities continue to be built even though hardly a single living thing is taking up residence in them.

Recently an entire Chinese-built city in Africa popped up on everyone’s radar because of its sheer size. Named Nova Cidade de Kilamba, this massive city covers 12,335 acres, contains 750 eight-story apartment buildings, 12 schools, more than 100 retail units, is designed to hold an estimated 500,000 people and was built in less than three years for a hefty 3.5 billion dollars.

At the current build rate as many as 20 of these ‘ghost cities’ are being constructed every year with currently as many as 64 million vacant homes left empty.

These cities aren’t being built in people-friendly locations either…one of them is actually built in the middle of a Mongolian desert.

[WND]

There are a lot of bad ways an affair with your friend’s wife can end. Some, like death or violent maiming, could be a little more permanent. But few are weirder than what went down in Kenya last week.

A man cheating with his friends wife found himself stuck inside his adulterous lover by way of an alleged black magic spell. The husband, who suspected shenanigans, visited a witch doctor who placed the spell.

The next time the scandalous pair got together for some down low dirty time, they didn’t come apart.

Authorities were called in and things only ended after the lover paid a ransom of $240 to the cuckold husband and a priest was called in to remove the hex.

[UK Zambians] via Tony Ley

Red Hartebeest: 1 – Biker: 0.

That looked pretty deliberate on the Hartebeest’s part. Also looks very painful.

[Deadspin]

If you think American schools have problems, take a look at Botswana:

Schools in Botswana are infested with devil worshippers … Operating more like drug-dealers, they get instructions from up the rungs of the ladder of Satanism. And travelling to meet their leaders is not an issue as they can simply summon a slice of bread, a needle, a blanket or mealie meal bag and instruct it to take them to the depths of the ocean where they hold meetings with their leaders and receive instructions. The girls even have the power to resurrect dead bodies after they exhume them and then take them along to the meetings in the ocean. … The devil worshippers said they often find willing recruits among youngsters because they are fond of alcohol and always engaged in brawls after bingeing. At school, devil worshippers are encouraged and even participate in fights in which blood ends up being shed. Then, when nobody sees them, they lap up the blood of the protagonists.

An underwater conspiracy of portkey-wielding schoolgirls who are obsessed with the dark arts are terrorizing the impoverished African nation. Neither The Boy Who Lived nor You Know Who could be reached for comment.

[The Monitor]

On the left, the mysterious “bearded” antelope photographed in Kenya. On the right, Editor of this site Justin Robert Young.

Weird Things officially has no comment.

[MSNBC]

After thorough forensic analysis of the remains of the lions featured in the film Ghosts in the Darkness (based in part on the book The Man-eaters of Tsavo – which I kid you not, was bedtime reading in my household growing up), researchers from University of California, Santa Cruz have concluded that the murderous pair of lions only ate 35 people and not the 135 some had reported.

By looking at isotopes in the teeth of the lions (currently on display at the Chicago Field Museum) scientists were able to put together a very detailed picture of the lions eating habits:

The results suggest that during the final months of what John Patterson described as the lions’ “reign of terror,” fully half of one lion’s diet consisted of humans, with the balance made up of mid-sized grazing animals such as gazelles and impala. Strikingly, the other lion ate very few humans, subsisting instead on herbivores. That dietary disparity leads Dominy and Yeakel to infer that the Tsavo lions worked together to scatter everyone, both humans and wild game, setting the stage for one to gorge on humans and the other to feed on herbivores.

While some may say that 35 or 135 is really just detail, especially since the research only shows how many humans the lions *ate* and not just murdered, it’s a fascinating example of how modern science can be used to look at historical accounts.

Reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

UCSU: Legendary “man-eating” lions of Tsavo likely ate about 35 people–not 135, say scientists

Tsavo maneaters – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Somhlolo National Stadium, Swaziland

Muti is the Zulu word for lucky charms used in traditional tribal rituals. Swaziland soccer players often use them to curry the favor of the gods and increase their team’s chances of winning. At Somhlolo National Stadium, the football players have gone too far with their muti making ways, even stuffing muti underneath the artificial turf.

Things have gotten so bad that Swaziland’s sports minister is now filing criminal complaints and considering banning any team that defiles the $600,000 turf. Most of the holes, burned or cut into the turf are, unsurprisingly, close to the goals or towards the center of the pitch. Police are tepid with their pursuit, claiming that since most muti stuffing incidents happen at night, there is little they can do about it.

Now that we’ve learned that the police force of Swaziland doesn’t operate after hours, we anticipate the muti stuffing problem will continue to grow unrestrained. Also we are strongly considering throwing a Weirdthings party on the turf sometime in the not so distant future.