Now there's something you don't see every day...

I’ve always wanted to participate in one of these “strangest thing you ever seen/did/found” type threads, but never had anything to contribute. Until today.

I was at the grocery store, and saw an elderly couple outside, dressed in the typical casual clothes you’d expect any elderly couple to be wearing, as if they were riding a golf cart around a retirement community in Florida. Except they weren’t getting into a golf cart, or motor home, or any sort of car you’d associate with old people.

They were getting into a super-stretch limousine. The FRONT seat, mind you. (I tried looking in the back seat, but the tinted windows made it hard to see anything. I think it was full of luggage.)

Hmm, I guess this doesn’t seem so strange now, after the fact. But it was pretty darn surreal. Anyone care to add their stories?

Well, the strangest things I’ve ever seen were

  1. A meteorite crash. Big blue flash when it hit.

  2. Buster Keaton wearing a Sari. (Not in person, thankfully.)

And apparently a couple of years ago, when the 30th anniversery of the movie “Night of the Living Dead” came around, my Dad saw a group of people dressed as Zombies lurching about the University campus in celebration. (Though it was sometimes easy to confuse them with the usual group of moaning rag-tag people lurching about the campus. But the Zombies were carrying fewer paper bags from liquor stores.)

That’s all I can think of at the moment.

Ranchoth

My wife just got a Miata and last week we were driving on a freeway in Memphis. As I pulled up next to a limo I noticed a young kid leaning out the window. He yelled “Nice car” as we passed. Again it may not seem strange now, but at the time it was really a weird experience.

Just this morning.

Smelled something strange as I walked up the stairs out of the train station. When I got to the top I went around the corner to see…

Two guys in their mid-50’s, standing in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk. One of them was naked from the waist down, the other appeared to be wiping the first one’s ass and legs. I didn’t care to get a more detailed view of what was going on.

Like the other 500 people on the sidewalk this morning, I kept walking, bought my morning coffee, and continued on to my office.

I feel guilty for laughing so hard at this, but it was so funny at the time:

I’m sitting in a car stopped for a light at an intersection. On the sidewalk, two guys approach each other at right angles. One is blind, using a white cane. The other is in a powered wheelchair moving at a pretty good clip. There is a tall hedge between them. I was at an angle where I could see them both; they were unaware of each other.

It was just so inevitable, and seemed straight out of a Monty Python skit. They smashed into each other and went tumbling into the hedge. They were getting up and sorting themselves out when the light changed and I left.

The car repair business at the end of my street exploded once.

I was at home waiting to hear back from a job interview when I noticed flames licking the back of the building a few doors down. Apparently one of the mechanics had accidentally started a fire; when the fuel tanks for the welding gear started going up the fire brigade abandoned the street and we had to move out for a few hours.

I’ve also watched a 1950s-era military fire engine deliberately crashed onto a roundabout down at the other end of my street (for the filming of a drama series), and while at the Farnborough Air Show some years back I was in the crowd when one of the engines on a Russian An-124 cargo plane exploded.