Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Tirades ever thrown.

Today’s post actually revolves around a tiny blurb in a sixty year old magazine, so I’ll let you be the judge as to whether it is even close to on topic or not. But here’s the thing: I’m writing this post and your not and the bottom line is that the image said blurb conjured in my mind made me laugh. A lot.

Today we’re taking you back to a simpler time. A time when Santa Claus was just an amorphous figure. A character that was simply an amalgamation of religious stories and folklore, not some cheap marketing whore who’s willing to sell his bearded face to the highest bidder (which often seems to be your local mall…go figure).

But already, in 1951, there were hints that the times…oh, they were a changin’. Case in point, in December of that year LIFE magazine ran a story titled Santa Claus to Santa Stooge, all about the horrors of Santa shilling products and participating in promotional stunts. Apparently this was a new thing for the Greatest Generation to cope with, on account of one of the guys playing Santa in a parade in Ontario, after being mobbed by excited children (who had yet to be warned about unshaved strangers with candy), lost his temper and start kicking at all the greedy little grandparents to be.

Now you tell me, how can you not love the visual of some guy looking to cash in on his overweight gut and graying hair suddenly realizing he has bitten off more than he can chew and kicking wildly at any kid too excited by the idea of seeing the unseeable to stay out of leg’s length?!

Here’s the link to the LIFE article, but honestly, the entire magazine is filled with gold. Give it a look.

Anyone have any better crazy Santa stories?! Let me know!

Andrew, Brian and Justin lay out their brilliant plan for escaping the evil clutches of alien overlords. They then realize how easily a famous psychological experiment could have gone horribly wrong if the three of them had been selected. Brian also shares with the audience his disturbing camouflage technique. Plans for a mission to an Indian massacre are discussed.

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Ohmygod! Complete underwater volcano! All the way! It’s so intense! What does it mean? (begins crying)

[Nat Geo]

A Polish plant biologist is suggesting that plants are capable of thought.

Plants “remember” information about light, and a certain type of cell transmits that information, much like nerves do in animals.

In the study, which has not yet been published, the researchers found that light shone on one leaf of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant caused the whole plant to respond. The response lasted even after the light source was taken away, suggesting the plant remembered the light input.

Different wavelengths of light produce a different response, suggesting the plants use the information to generate protective chemical reactions — like pathogen defense or food production.

Rick Moranis is terrified.

[Pop Sci]

Not only will Austrian stuntman Felix Baumgartner attempt to redefine the official limitations of which height a human can fall from without dying immediately he also hopes to break the sound barrier on the way down.

Starting in the stratosphere at 120,000 feet above the ground, Baumgartner will leap from a capsule suspended by a helium balloon near the boundary of space.

Sponsored by the energy drink company Red Bull, Baumgartner’s mission — called Red Bull Stratos — seeks to extend the “safety zone” of human atmospheric bailout last set in 1960 by diver Joe Kittinger. This limit defines the uppermost altitude a human being can safely jump from.

Awesome. Also, he’s already leapt off the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. Double complete rainbow.

[Space]

Here is one paragraph for you to read:

“Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time.

If that doesn’t make you want to read the rest of this post, you’re a real silly goose.

[Technology Review]

Construction workers at the site where the World Trade Center once stood unearthed a ship from the 18th Century in New York City yesterday.  Crews rushed in to get as much data about the ship recorded before the heat of the sun turn it dust, as well as to ensure that worked continued at the historical site.

So did they build the WTC over a pirate’s hideaway, or did Revolutionary New Yorkers find a creative way to dispose of those darn Redcoats? Let us know your craziest theories in the comments!

[New York Times]

Joan Ginther came from Bishop, Texas. She earned her doctorate in math from Stanford in the 70’s but in more recent times locals saw her exiting a town convenience store carrying $50 reams of scratch off tickets at a time.

Joan Ginter has won the Texas lottery 4 times. She is a millionaire many times over and has declined every attempt by reporters to get her on the record about her winnings.

So how did Ginther do it, then?

Good luck pinning her down to ask.

Ginther has never spoken publicly about her lotto winnings and could not be found for comment. She now lives in Las Vegas after moving away from Bishop, and an answering machine message for a telephone number listed at her address says not to leave a message.

She asked the few people who’ve exchanged more than brief pleasantries with her not to grant interviews and sneaked into lottery headquarters in Austin to collect her winnings with the least publicity the state offers jackpot winners.

Is Joan Ginther astronomically lucky and press shy? Or has she achieved what so many have dreamed of, a mathematical flaw in a system designed to rake in money with only a glimmer of a statistical chance for a payout?

[AP]

Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Tirades ever thrown.

There’s an old saying that goes something like, “In the land of the blind the psychotic optometrist is king.”

Never has this oldest of wives’ tales been less true…as you’ll see in the clip.

Although this was clearly a premeditated outburst (and beyond that, just a really douchey move), I can only hope he didn’t order McNuggets for lunch as that would further support my theory that a lack of processed chicken-like meat is at the root of all spontaneous rage.

What makes this really weird is the voice mail he left pre-outburst. Not only did Dr. Douchebag phone in a false apology to ensnare an unsuspecting octogenarian journalist but he over-the-topped-it with a plea of born again Christianity and love of all things news reporter. After that move I was really rooting to see the old guy clock him in the face.

Your thoughts? Do you have something better for the list of Weirdest Tirades? Share it!

Someone print a t-shirt! Thanks to Weird Things reader Katy for sending this in.

[WFAA]

[CNN]

We get pretty cocky here in the 21st Century with our internets and World Wide Web Highway pages, but did you know that the idea for the Internet is four years older than Superman?

In the video above you can check out Belgium inventor Paul Otlet’s idea for a windowed display system that hooked up to other systems “over the telephone.” He also called word processing, a file system, and the multimedia CD-Rom craze all the way back in 1934.

How would the Internet be different today if we had made it then? Let us know your alternative Internet history in the comments!

Check out Paul Otlet’s Wikipedia page

Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Tirades ever thrown.

Ho HO! You say it’s Tuesday night already? You say, where are Brett’s posts?

Well, to you I say, “Wait…what? Seriously? Tuesday? When the hell did that happen?”

Here goes nothing! In honor of “friend of the blog” Mel Gibson’s latest poorly thought out tirade, this week we’ll be looking at some of the weirdest Jekyll and Hyde-esque bouts of rage you’ve ever seen…er, read. (Although you could argue Mel was probably more of a Hyde and Hyder moment.)

First up, Melodi Dushane!

What sent her over the edge? Was it residual anger directed at her parents for spelling her name wrong on her birth certificate, thereby sentencing her to an entire lifetime of leaning over the counter to watch the clerk as he takes down her information, knowing full well she’d have to insist, “No, no. It’s with an ‘I’…”?

Was it an uncontrollable hatred for that guy on the Promenade who told her she looked like a model and for a scant $500 dollars he could get her some “cheap” headshots that would be guaranteed to rocket her heretofore non-existant modeling career into the same eschelon as the likes of Twiggy and Zsa-Zsa Gabor, only to present her with the photo on the right.

Nope. It was Chicken McNuggets.

More specifically, it was a lack of Chicken McNuggets. And as everyone knows, the only appropriate response to a shortage of McNuggets is to hulk out and punch out the drive-thru after smacking the nearest McDonald’s employee in the face.

Yeah. She did that.

The end.

I know this is technically weird rage week…but does anyone out there have any great fast food related stories? When I was researching this one I just kept thinking of when I was that jerk high school kid who always ordered, “a large napkin and diet water…that’ll be all.”

Check out this creepy full-motion x-ray of a human being speaking. The human being in question is Christine Ericsdotter and she recorded herself speaking to study how the different parts of our mouths work together to make words. You can read more about the study here and watch a full video here (Quicktime required).