News Of The Weird
Bits And Pieces Of Wheely Weird Newsy Stuff Collected From Around The Net So You Don’t Have To …Yer Welcome
Dog Struck By Car Rides Inside Bumper For Miles
A dog hit by a car in upstate New York rode for 45 minutes wedged between the broken bumper and the grille before the driver realized she was carrying an injured passenger.
Coco the shiba inu was being treated for a fractured elbow after being struck in Albany.
Rotterdam Police Lt. Jeffrey Collins says the driver knew she hit something and noticed the car’s damage but didn’t see the dog at first. She drove about 15 miles to Rotterdam before hearing noises and stopping to recheck her car’s front end. She called 911 after she saw the dog gazing from below the license plate.
“Saw something coming into the road, thought it was a ball, possibly an animal, struck it,” said Collins. “Stopped, checked, realized there was some damage to her vehicle, but didn’t realize that the dog had been embedded almost into the front grille or front scoop of the car.”
A Schenectady veterinary clinic worker told WNYT-TV that 16-pound Coco “fit perfectly” in the space behind the bumper and was lucky to be alive. “I couldn’t believe she survived, to be honest,” said Noella LaFreniere of Hernas Veterinary Clinic, where Coco is being treated.
“It was like the perfect fit. She fit perfectly in that bumper and came out alive, and it’s shocking to us. Working with the animals all these years, it’s shocking. She’s very lucky,” she said. Police located Coco’s owner. “She’s a trooper, she really is,” said LaFreniere, as she held Coco. “She’s just so mellow and so good, and we can’t wait to do the surgery to get her better and get her home.
Scientists Taught Rats To Drive Tiny Rodent-sized Cars
Rats have mastered the art of driving — taking tiny rodent-sized cars for joyrides in a lab experiment at the University of Richmond.
The rats were trained to drive the minuscule automobiles with pieces of Froot Loops cereal — gripping a pair of handle bars with their paws and steering the plastic car left or right, according to a New Scientist report published Tuesday.
In stunning videos of the experiment, the rats can be seen not only driving in a straight line, but reversing and doing Uturns in order to secure the sweet treat — suggesting rats are more intelligent than previously believed, scientists said.
The 17 male and female rodents were taught to advance their driving skills, with scientists placing the rewards at increas- ingly further away points around the box.
“They learned to navigate the car in unique ways and engaged in steering patterns they had never used to eventually arrive at the reward,” researcher Kelly Lambert told New Scientist.
The study also found the rats became less stressed as the experiment progressed — suggesting that, like humans, they get the same satisfaction we do when we perfect a new skill.
“I do believe that rats are smarter than most people perceive them to be, and that most animals are smarter in unique ways than we think,” Lambert said.
How Much Are You Willing To Pay For An Office Parking Space?
Many say that urban development comes with a price, and most likely it’s the price tag of location’s or country’s real estate that gets literally increasing with progress. Hong Kong, a continuously growing economy in Asia, is a stark example of a progressive country with increasing real estate prices, and this story concretizes the hypothesis.
According to a report by South China Morning Post, a parking spot at The Center, a 73-story office tower in Central Hong Kong, was sold for a whopping HK$7.6 million or around $969,000 at the current exchange rates.
With that said, the said spot is now the most expensive space to park, according to South China Morning Post.
To give you an idea of how expensive his property is, let’s break it down to the nitty-gritty. At the price it was sold, the 134.5-square-feet (12.5-square-meter) parking spot costs around HK$56,505 per sq-ft or around $7,200 per sq ft. The average price of a Manhattan real estate is at $1,770 per sq ft, making the Hong Kong parking spot four times the price of a luxury apartment in New York.
South China Morning Post also mentioned that his price is more than three times the median home price of Hong Kong – a price that has topped global ranking for nine consecutive years.
The owner of the parking spot, Johnny Cheung Shun-yee, declined to mention who the buyer is in his interview with South China Morning Post. He only mentioned that he sold the last of his four parking slots in The Center to someone who has an office in the building.
South Carolina Ford Dealer Offers ‘god, Guns And America’ Promotion
Fall is hunting season, and in the rural South, it’s apparently also a slow time of year to sell cars and trucks. And so, with one eye on past precedent and another squarely trained on its core customer demographic, a Ford dealer in Honea Path, South Carolina, has turned to a new promotion it calls “God, Guns and America!” The deal? Buy a new or used car and get a Bible, a shotgun and an American flag in return.
Carolina Ford says it launched the promotion Oct. 1 and plans to run it through November as a way to gin up sales.
“October is a weird month in the car business,” general manager Derrick Hughes told the Detroit Free Press. “It’s like the calm-before-the-storm type month. You’ve got to have something going. October is the slowest and November is the second slowest.”
The dealership, located about 20 miles south of Greenville, has said it’s not trying to make a political statement but is simply appealing to local residents’ religious leanings, patriotism and love of hunting. Upon purchase, customers are given a voucher and background check paperwork to take to a local sporting goods store. If they fail the background check or want to buy something other than a gun, the voucher can be used to buy other items.
If the giveaway sounds familiar, that’s because it’s happened before. This past summer, a Ford dealer in Alabama kicked off a Fourth of July-themed “God, Guns, and Freedom” promotion in which it, too, gave away a Bible, American flag and certificate redeemable for a shotgun to customers who bought a vehicle. The dealership in that case said Ford asked it to stop running its Facebook video advertising the deal after a shooting at a Ford dealership near San Jose, California, left three people dead. But Ford made no public comment about that promotion, and it told the Freep that its dealers are independent businesses and that the current promotion in South Carolina is not being driven by the company.
On Carolina Ford’s Facebook page, commenters seemed split between wholehearted support — “You guys got some guts, and I love it.
God Bless you and the USA!” one commenter wrote — and disdain. One woman scolded the decision, adding, “Welcome to the origin of our next mass shooting.” It’s the inescapable culture war, playing out on its Facebook page. Perhaps not surprisingly, Carolina Ford did not respond to a request for comment from Autoblog, but the dealer confirmed the promotion was still valid.
