I had to work yesterday – woe is me-- after work I stopped by a favorite bar for a beer. I looked across the street to see three people leaving a building and they proceeded to walk across the street toward my location… in slow motion… They were all dressed in black skirts, black shirts, and well black everything except for white face makeup. This was one guy and two girls. For anyone familiar with Seattle, this was in Belltown and I’ve given up being surprised of what I see in Belltown, but this was weird. Three people in all black except white makeup walking in slow motion. Did I miss “Act Like a Zombie Day?”
When I was in India over the summer, I saw…okay, a lot of weird and baffling shit. (Like the time I saw a guy spend twenty minutes wrangling three goats into an autorickshaw. What could possibly be a better means for transporting goats?) But the number one was probably when I was woken up by a lot of jingling going past my door every fifteen minutes or so. When I finally got up to see what it was, I was startled, to say the least, to see that the jingling was coming from bells tied to a camel. Which was being ridden up and down my street by a girl.
She proceeded to do this for the next several hours. I don’t know.
This reminds me of something amusing I saw YEARS ago, and not recently at all, but you can’t stop me from sharing: a bus I was riding in Jerusalem pulled up to a guy on a camel, dressed in “Arabian nights” regalia*. Chatting on a cell phone. I wish I’d had a camera on me.
*Camels do not live natively in Israel. The only ones there are for tourists to sit upon and pose.
Well, I live in middle-of-nowhere WV (seriously, last census, the town I live in had a population of 806), so “Weird Shit” is pretty much the day-to-day life of this particular raised-in-a-suburb-of-Baltimore girl!
A couple of weeks ago, my hubby and I went out to lunch at the local diner. While we were waiting for our food, we perused the local newspaper. In the classified section (I swear to God I’m not making this up) there was an ad for a gun shop advertising a “Buy Three, Get One Free” sale. Buy three guns (specifics outlined in the ad), get one free!
Not recently but there was a photo that ran in the paper years ago (it’s still pinned to the wall in my sister’s old room at our parents house) where the photog just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
At an intersection two vehicles are going past each other.
One of them is a truck towing a big prop plane with the wings removed (think C-47).
Heading in the other direction is very fat man wearing a tuba (as in “Sousaphone”), riding a small motorcycle.
Driving home late at night, in the winter, in a small suburb north of Austin, I saw a girl rollerblading in a full kimono. She was using her fan to block the wind from her face.
My wife and I looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Did you just see that?”
This wasn’t weird but I was driving with my mom and saw an escaped grocery item by the side of the road – “Was that a HAM?!” “That’s what I thought!” Struck us as funny. And sad as we imagined the disappointment of the owner. And ed as we wondered how a ham could escape.
Several years ago, when I lived in NYC, I was walking through midtown Manhattan one morning, and all of a sudden there were elephants walking down the street, in single file, each trunk holding the tail in front of it. I guess the circus was in town.
And on another occasion I saw hundreds of men with tubas.
When I was 16 years old a friend and I were hitchhiking back into Saratoga, NY. We were picked up by a one-armed man driving a stick shift. No kidding.
OK, OK… he did have a complete right (shift) arm, but his left arm ended below the shoulder (he didn’t have a left elbow).
Early one morning I was going to work in Rockefeller Center. It was snowing hard, but I’d just started a new job and wanted to make a good impression by assuming the office was open instead of staying home and assuming it was closed. Turns out that it (and most other businesses) never opened that morning.
So it’s early morning, 8:00am-ish, heavy snow, West 50th Street, and I see camels and sheep and other assorted barnyard animals being led around. They were (apparently) for the manger scene in the Christmas show at Radio City being taken out for a walk.
Two very odd things on the same drive in central Wisconsin. I was a passenger in my sister’s car.
I glance over to the right and see what appears to be a full-sized statue of an elephant, completely alone in a very large field, and think, “that’s odd”. But it got odder a moment later when it shook its head and started walking. Yes, it was a grown elephant completely unattended. If it was chained up I was too far away to see it. Then I looked at the next field and saw a small carnival had been put up, so I suppose the elephant was associated with it. But, well, that’s it…
Later, I glance over and look at a billboard, and its message is so bizarre I convince myself that I’ve misread it. I even ask my sister to turn around and go back so I can see what it really say, 'cause I can’t even imagine anything remotely like it that would make any more sense. Anyway, I talk to some people at work the next day and find that I got the message right the first time, “Let’s get ice cream after you paralyse us”. It’s an anti-drunk-driving billboard.
The story of the girl in the kimono reminded me of one we saw once. We’d traveled down to south eastern Germany to see the famous Neuschwanstein castle. On the way home, we took sort of a scenic route, driving around on some back roads and looking through some small towns. In one small village, we rounded a corner to find a guy on a chariot in full Roman garb. He had two horses pulling his chariot.
Another time I went to Amsterdam with a friend who was visiting from the USA. We didn’t really have any plans, just check out the town. There were a bunch of people standing along the canals and we heard music so we went to see what the fuss was all about. Turns out there was a boat going by with a bunch of attractive young girls, all topless with white wraps sort of like loinclothes and also around their shoulders (but not breasts) and heads. We had stumbled onto the Gay Pride Parade, Amsterdam style, and got there just in time to witness one of the Lesbian floats. There were other, erm, interesting floats that also went by.
More recently we were looking at houses in an area near Tampa. We were in an upscale subdivision with a golf course and checking to see if the houses were in our price range (they weren’t). On the way back out, at the golf cart crossing, there was a six foot gator sauntering across the road. He was in no hurry, so we just stopped and watched him cross.
We were waiting at a stoplight recently, and crossing in front of us was a Very Serious-looking man in a business suit, carrying a briefcase. He was a particularly large man and was riding a shiny pale pink Vespa.
Somehow it just looked so incongruous, giant scowly guy in a suit overwhelming this pearly pink scooter.
A legless man riding a motorcycle in Istanbul. What astonished Agent Foxtrot and I wasn’t so much that he was able to get onto and crank the motorcycle – but how the hell did he stop the motorcycle and get off? Did he just aim for the nearest crowd and launch himself off the handlebars, screaming “CAAAAAAATCH ME!”?
Sighted in King’s Point, NY a couple of months ago: a wrinkly bald old man wearing very short shorts and rollerblades, skating along holding a hockey stick.
ed as we wondered how a ham could escape.