This thread is about the things in life that make you scratch your head, and go “HUH?”. Things that are out of place, or just plain weird.
I have two. They both happened in the course of the last week.
1. The Sheep
The office I work in is partially surrounded by an artificial, small lake. A moat, if you will. Keeps the other banks from hostile takeovers, I suppose.
In this lake, there are a few tiny, also artifical islands. Some bushes on them, the odd little tree. Nothing major.
Last Wednesday, as I made my way from the railway station to the office in the morning, I noticed it when I crossed the bridge leading to the office entrance.
The sheep. Smack in the middle of one of the artificial islands. And damn, it looked real. It was probably a stuffed one, since it didn’t move, and -upon closer inspection- turned out to have an orange 50 meter piece of rope around its neck. The rope lead all the way up into a window on the 14th floor of one of our offices towers.
Bear in mind: this lake is NOT shallow, and the island is at least 15 meters from the nearest land. Somebody actually got his rubber boat out to place the sheep there. There’s no way in hell it was somehow thrown down there from the 14th floor, because our windows don’t open: the rope was passing through one of the 30*30 cm corner windows they allow us for fresh air (I suppose they’re afraid of jumpers should another Black Thursday hit us). Which begs another question: since one can’t toss 50 meters of rope 35 meters into the air and catch them through a tiny window, somebody must have been lasso’ing for hours to get the noose around the sheeps neck.
All in all, VERY weird. I never did find out the true meaning behind it all, and when I crossed the bridge this morning, the sheep and the rope were gone.
2. Foreign Car
Whilst waiting for my bus home last week, a Mercury Sable stationwagon pulled up in the stations parking strip. As this car is quite rare over here, it caught my eye.
Lo and behold: it sported Texas plates. The plate holder said Houston, if you must know. Sure, some expats take their car overseas, and I’m sure this must have been one of them. But it’s always slightly odd to see a car with plates from a country that isn’t “driveable” to. Well, maybe I’m easily amused.
One other time, I spotted a “GP” (Gauteng Province, RSA) registered Land Cruiser in Amsterdam. Suppose they DID drive it here! Straight across Africa, over to Gibraltar, and up north to the Netherlands!
Am I the only one with weird brain patterns like this?
I had mentioned this once before as seeming like some sort of omen. I was dealt with by my Dopers in a somewhat off-handed fashion. Now I demand to be taken seriously because I keep seeing this everywhere I go.
A pigeon with a club foot.
I think it’s the same pigeon following me, hounding me, mocking me. I tell ya, I’m gonna get me a gun and give that fricking bird what-fer!!
[sub]I don’t know … think I ought to up the dosage?[/sub]
How many times do I have to tell you, it was feta!
Okay, here’s one. I’m driving down the street one day and there is a peacock flapping around and going nuts in the middle of the road. People are swerving and slowing down to miss it, I mean it was beautiful! But it would have made tragic road kill. I would have tried to do something, but peacocks are such mean creatures, I didn’t know how to handle it without getting attacked or hit by a car myself.
Another, although it was Mom that was the witness, not me:
My Mom raised chickens before I was around. A snake had come into the yard and tried to take a chick. My Mom came outside to see my brother, not even in double digits yet, struggling with his fist around part of the chick, trying to get it out of the snakes mouth.
One day I was driving west on I-64 just outside of Williamsburg, VA. Not much there, just your occasional exit, some stores, some condos here and there, interspersed with wooded areas.
There was a lone goat peacefully munching grass in the median. AFAIK, no farms around for miles. How did it get in the median without being killed? It was completely undisturbed by the traffic around it too.
Oh, no, Jack, I see them too. I have a theory that these are the “Peg-Leg Birds”, and that they’re the survivors of the all-out steel cage Ultimate Toughpigeon Contests that happen when we’re asleep. Sometimes I see pigeons missing BOTH feet. They sort of roll around on their little nubs.
And as for MY weird shit, this morning, I was walking through Farragut Square Park here in DC at about 07.00, when I look to my right and see…two mallard ducks sitting on the grass. No water in the park, or for several hundred yards, but ducks. They stared at me until I got out of the park.
Then I had to cross K Street. In the middle, I looked down, and narrowly avoided stepping on…
A USED HELLO KITTY CONDOM!!!
I’d have taken it as proof, but
a)eew
and
b) soiled prophylactics bearing the visage on Sanrio-approved hypercute anthropomophic felines aren’t really high on my must-have list.
Oh, and Coldfire? About the sheep? Maybe someone was playing a baa-d practical joke.
A week and a half ago, an eagle was perched on the balcony railing outside my building’s 11th floor office. He sat there for over an hour, watching us inside (acting like kids at the zoo) and the scene on the street down below.
Then, I went to the kitchen to get a Coke and by the time I returned, he had left. All this on a Friday afternoon in downtown Washington, DC.
Shortly after I moved to the south, this happened.
Driving north on Interstate 75, just south of Atlanta. I’m moving along at about 75 or 80 MPH and I see in my rear view mirror that a vehicle is closing in on me, and fast. I was in the left lane, so I moved over to let him pass. It was a Sanford and Son style pickup truck (1940s or 1950s looking), and it was very large. It must have passed me going 100 or 110MPH. Behind the wheel is your stereotypical old hillbilly. He’s 55 or 65 years old, overalls, no shirt, gray hair and a big bushy gray beard – Upon reflection, not at all unlike Uncle Jesse. In the bed of his pickup truck he has two full phone booths. Yup. Before I could even digest what I saw, two state troopers came blowing by me at about the same speed.
Sometimes I like to imagine what circumstances could have lead up to what I witnessed.
Well, here’s one that I actually did that I’m sure freaked more than one person out. I got a blow up sex doll, and filled it with helium. Then I went out to the Baltimore beltway, and tied about 50’ of the thinest fishline I could find to the doll, Climed into a tree in an overgrown area next to the highway, and tied the other end of the line up in the tree. I did this at about 4AM. The commuters in next morning’s rush hour were treated to the sight of a blow up sex doll, floating lazily 50’ or so over the beltway, with no visible means of anchorage. Hehehe!
Ummmm…
Didn’t “Don and Mike” do that a few years back? They inflated a love-doll with helium and, IIRC, it took several more large helium-filled balloons attached to it to get it airborne.
I was driving up the NJ Turnpike last year, and the traffic was getting congested (no big surprise) and cop cars were flying down the road, some on the shoulder. NJ State Troopers never drive fast on the shoulder, and it struck me as odd. Several miles up the road, I found the reason. Cows on the road. Live cute cows, wandering around contentedly.
One day, on the way back from lunch, my cow-orker and I noticed that 15,000 barrels of jet fuel were on fire at work. I have never seen so many news copters in one place!
I live in a community in San Diego that’s described as “Country Living” (ha, the houses are all earthtones - oh, wait, that describes every other SoCal subdivision).
Well, apparently in the country, wild peacocks roam freely. I was headed to the garage to go to work about a week ago. As I was getting into the garage, I spotted a peacock walking down the asphalt driveway that runs through my complex. Stopped me dead on. Now that’s something you don’t see everyday. It just toodled on down the road, like it owned the damn place.
(came to find out later that there’s a ranch nearby that breeds the darn things. I guess one escaped!) Too weird. Nobody really wanted to believe me at first, they all insisted I was either hung over or still asleep.
You DO NOT talk about the Ultimate Toughpigeon Contest!!
Second rule… you can see where this is going.
My weird shit (boy, did that come out wrong[that, too]):
This relates to the freaky birds (ducks sitting in the middle of nowhere, insane peacocks, Tyler Durden wannabe pigeons):
Driving down a side street one day near my office complex (near Portland Oregon), and a Canadian goose landed right in front of me. I was going slow, so I had time to stop, but I leaned on my horn, and the goose just stood there for, like, twenty seconds. Then I swear it gave me a comtemptuous look (it was probably from Quebec), and flew off.
Other weird stuff:
Used to work in a thrift store as a clerk, but sometimes I’d have to sort clothes to go out on the racks. One day I came across a thong (as in g-string, not flip-flop), that looked like it was barely big enough for a toddler. Very disturbing.
Years ago, my grandpa hit a kitchen sink in the middle of Highway 99 in northern CA (not as odd as it seems, since that stretch is kind of in hicksville, but damn, how do you explain that to your insurance agent?).
I don’t know. But if they did it anytime after '86, it was my joke, the bastards. And I used a very very cheep doll. Damn thing only cost $10. Frankly, It looked to me like it would pop if anyone actually tried to screw it. I KNEW that a good doll might be too heavy, and didn’t feel like spending $100 on a joke, anyway.
About a year ago, my husband and I, along with two friends visiting from out of state, were sitting at an extremely busy intersection at rush hour. This intersection is situated right beside Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, and the highway we were on (Dale Mabry) is four lanes wide both ways. We were first in a long line at the redlight, waiting for it to change.
So we’re just kind of chatting until I spotted a rat (now mind you I had never seen a rat IRL before this - only in movies or in a pet store) that leapt from the curb at the corner of the block with the stadium, and made a mad dash for the opposite corner. The traffic was super heavy and this rat had a LONG way to go. But he just hop-hop-hopped through the speeding cars while we watched in awe with pointing fingers.
It was weird because none of us had ever seen a rat, first of all, and then super weird because the first rat any of us had seen apparently had super powers. Or was maybe bionic.
