A man attempts to smuggle a mysterious creature on an airplane, before the the cops uncover his terrifying secret. A Playboy playmate is busted for moving some serious weight south of the border. A Kickstarter involving a favorite Weird Things topic is debated by Brian and Andrew. A murderous beast stalks in a public Los Angeles park. We offend all of the British Empire.

Also, a brand new insurance policy against danger that’s sssssssssssssssssure to please.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings083012.mp3

[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings083012.mp3[/podcast]

Listener Spots:

All spots purchased by Gord McLeod and his site FictionImprobable.com

Love Andrew Mayne’s books? Great! Keep reading them and supporting indie authors! Then, when you’re done that, check out Fiction Improbable at www.fictionimprobable.com

Picks:

Andrew:

Breaking Bad

Brian:

Kill Decision

Justin:

Doctor Who

“How’d your uncle die?”

“He was dressed like a sad, ghetto version of bigfoot, walked into traffic and got nailed by two oncoming cars.”

True story.

44-year-old Randy Lee Tenley of Montana was struck dead when he was hit by two oncoming vehicles as he attempted to cross several lanes of traffic dressed like more like a topiary at a bankrupt garden attraction than Bigfoot in hopes he’d stir up some sightings of the infamously mysterious legend.

Police are continuing their investigation to see if alcohol played a role in the incident.

We’re going to go with, “Yes. There was a LOT of alcohol that a role in the incident.”

What kind of epitaph would you write for that?
[ABCNews.com]

Who knew? Corn’s a valuable commodity among beef producers. Problem is that because of drought there’s just not enough of it to feed all those cows which has caused the price to skyrocket. Beef producers are now looking to alternatives to corn until the prices drop back down to something resembling reasonable. The alternative to corn?

Candy.

Massive amounts of discarded candy from manufacturers.

If you order a burger at your local fast food joint and it tastes like someone spilled a pixie stick on it? You’ll know why.
[WPSD LOCAL6]

Andrew tells us about a man who realizes he is the lone survivor of a violent legacy, or is he? The boys line up to defend poor Thomas Edison from a brigade of internet meanies. An Austrian man was tiny at 21, what happened from there was extraordinary. Would you grow a quarter inch ever month for the rest of your life or shrink? An inventor is found dead… it’s up to Brian and Justin to deduce what killed him.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings082312.mp3

[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings082312.mp3[/podcast]

Listener Spots:

• Rooser-fil-a

• Roll For It podcast

• Let’s build a Tesla museum

Picks:

Andrew:

John Calvert

Brian:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Justin:

True Romance

Okay, “speed” might not be the optimum word. But this hover craft sure cuts a dashing Star Wars-ian figure. California firm Aerofex, may have very well revolutionized hover flight after designing a model that responds to natural balance instead of relying on computer navigation or flight software.

“Think of it as lowering the threshold of flight, down to the domain of ATV’s (all-terrain vehicles),” said Mark De Roche, an aerospace engineer and founder of Aerofex.

Such intuitive controls could allow physicians to fly future versions of the vehicle to visit rural patients in places without roads, or enable border patrol officers to go about their duties without pilot training.

Real. Life. Star. Wars. Speeder. Bike.

[Fox News]

Brian returns from Indonesia with exotic tales of live television performances and flash fame. Also, a very special fan repays Brian’s kindness in a way that leaves him flabbergasted. Andrew reveals that he’s living next door to a snake the size of two Yao Mings put together. Brown recluse spiders finally learn to get out a little more. The boys invent a new theme park entitled Terror World, which is worse than it sounds. They gauge the kill capacity of a chimp.

ALL THAT and the long awaited review of Dark Knight Rises.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings081612.mp3

[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings081612.mp3[/podcast]

Listener Spots:

ENTIRE EPISODE PURCHASED BY PAUL FEELAND

Picks:

Andrew:

The Hunter

Brian:

Silly Little Game

Justin:

Silly Little Game

Paul Clerkin, a shark ecology graduate student at California’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, has been spending the last couple of months on a deep-sea trawling vessel in the Indian Ocean to see if the ship’s nets might pull up anything interesting in the way of sharks.

The trawler’s nets have been dropping to a depth of 6,500 feet off the coast of an island called Mauritius. What’s come up have been hundreds of strange-looking sharks. Several are species known to be very rare while others may be absolutely unseen before now.

“I tell people I have a ton of sharks, and they keep thinking I’m joking,” Clerkin said. “It was an actual ton. I brought back 350 sharks.”

What’s even cooler is that if any of the strange sharks are entirely new species? Clerkin gets to name them. He’s said that he’ll name a few after his mentors and possibly one after his mom and maybe himself.

We can hear his intro now…”I’m Paul Clerkin. You may not know me. A species of shark bears my name.”
Awesome.
[See a photo gallery of these weird sharks via OurAmazingPlanet.Com]
[MSNBC]

Robotics design is continually making all those creepy robot-takeover concepts part of our future reality. Check this thing out. It’s a ‘robot’ that imitates the actions of a worm but has the uncanny creepy factor of a maggot when you continue to watch it move. As soon as someone attaches some kind of weird syringe-probe thing? We’re done.

From MIT:

Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snails and sea cucumbers also use this mechanism, called peristalsis, to get around, and our own gastrointestinal tracts operate by a similar action, squeezing muscles along the esophagus to push food to the stomach.
Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University have engineered a soft autonomous robot that moves via peristalsis, crawling across surfaces by contracting segments of its body, much like an earthworm. The robot, made almost entirely of soft materials, is remarkably resilient: Even when stepped upon or bludgeoned with a hammer, the robot is able to inch away, unscathed.

Watch it again….it’s creepy little self gets stepped on and hit with a hammer! And it KEEPS GOING!

[GeekNews.net]

Please watch video of this beast before we post the new episode of Weird Things on Wednesday.

We’ve seen a LOT of weird things before in the medical field. But THIS? This is a whole new level.

Back in 2009 a woman by the name of Shanyna Isom had an asthma attack. No biggie, right? Wrong. Isom experienced an allergic reaction to the steriods used to treat the asthma attack.

The result? A reaction like a d-lister from the Xavier Institute…she’s growing fingernails where she would normally grow hair.

No…really…fingernails are sprouting from her body.

Johns Hopkins University doctors are baffled at the condition. There’s no precedent for what’s happening to Isom. She began growing skin cells at 12 times the rate of a normal person and each follicle began producing a fingernail!

Doctors seem to have the bizarre disorder under control and are working to figure out how to fix whatever strange effect the steroid treatment created which caused this entire mess to start in the first place.
[I09]

It’s late. It’s dark. You’re out in a cemetery with a buddy looking to snag some swag off a couple corpses and hoist it on the local pawn shop in the morning.

You and your buddy unearth a casket, begin to pry it open and BLAM! You realize that something from inside the coffin has just shot you in the face!

Sounds like the opening scene of a Sam Raimi film. It’s not. It’s an absolutely real thing called a ‘grave gun’ or more commonly a ‘set gun’.

Originally the guns were used to protect a particular area around a campsite to prevent any kind of intruders from entering the camp. The gun’s business end was typically very wide and one to three trip-wires were then strung from the trigger of the gun and anchored at the other end to trees. When someone entering the area hit any of the trip-wires, the gun would fire effectively disabling hte intruder.

Around 1700, the original set-gun design went through a little redesign and began turning up inside the coffins of the more important individuals who’d died.

Once word spread about the ‘grave guns’ being inside random caskets? Grave robbing saw a drastic decline.

One of the last, and quite possibly, the most in your face version of the grave gun was created in the late 1880s. Called a ‘Coffin Torpedo’, the next-gen grave gun was basically a sawed-off shotgun attached to the underside of the coffin’s lid. Once you opened the casket to peer inside? SUPER-BLAM! as a sideways rain of 36-caliber lead balls raced to kiss your face.
[GUNS.COM]

Police officers in northern Penang, Malaysia raided a house after getting a distressed phone call from someone.

What they found was a pile of eight, chanting adults covered with a blanket lying on the floor of a bedroom.

Underneath this bizarre dog-pile was a 3 year-old girl who’d been suffocated by the adults on top of her. The adults that took part in this eerie and disturbing scene were the girl’s parents, grandmother, uncle, aunt, two cousins and the family’s maid in a ritual to remove the evil spirits that apparently inhabited the child.

All eight adults are currently being detained.
[ABC NEWS]

A lot of couples like to get those fun, old-timey pictures taken together. Others like to get romantic looking, holding-hands-in-front-of-a-landscape picture.

Then there are the pictures that Haruhiko Kawaguchi are taking of couples which are about as far from cute and ‘awww’-inspiring as you can imagine.

Using a plastic bag and a vacuum, Kawaguchi shoves the loving couple into the large, clear plastic bag, seals it shut and then uses the vacuum to suck all the air from the bag effectively shrink-wrapping the couple like a bag of meat. For about 20 seconds, the couple have to endure the pressure, their ears popping and a lack of oxygen. Kawaguchi steps up on a box, snaps a couple pictures and then opens the bag to let air back into the lungs of his subjects.

Haruhiko (who prefers to be called ‘Hal’) has snapped over 80 couples for this, his latest project called ‘Flesh Love’. The process hasn’t been without incident. Men tend to panic more than women. One guy peed himself. ‘Hal’ now uses a lubricant to cover his subject’s skin since the tightening bag causes friction when the plastic bag begins to press against the skin.

Think we’ll just stick to old-timey photos or really bad self-made, mirror-shot profile pictures.

[FeatureShoot]

Travel conspires to keep the boys apart for one more week. HOWEVER, we did scramble together this minisode featuring Brian, Justin and “OMG” Chad Johnson, who loyal listeners might remember from our Halloween Haunted Hotel episode a few years back. We discuss the recently landed Mars Curiosity Rover, Chad gamely tries on the big shoes of Mayne and attempts a creepy scenario and everything devolves into a shouting match when the idea of a one-way trip to Mars is remembered.

We are back with the OG line-up next week!

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings080812.mp3

[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings080812.mp3[/podcast]

Got an event coming up real soon? Maybe a wedding? Maybe a birthday?

Well in case you are and you’re wondering where to find memorable entertainment for your party? Look no further than Ebay.

Right now, because of a ‘changed business model’, you can now have an entirely Hillbilly band play at your event!

A petting zoo/amusement park in Massachusetts has decided to bid farewell to this frightening group of robotic performers designed and built by an ex-Disney Imagineer (we kinda get why he’s an ex-Imagineer).

Originally this band cost the company $15,000. They’re letting go of the whole group, including the porch if you dismantle it yourself, for a steal at $5,000! Total deal.

You only have a couple of days left to snag the entire group so you’ll have that special ‘something’ that leaves an impression on your event’s guests that they’ll never forget..

Like when they all suddenly stop playing, turn their heads to look at you with their unblinking stares and then quickly return to playing one of their beloved jigs.

[Ebay]