And Finally...

One woman’s atypical relationship recently came to an end, and she’s now explained the reason why.

Michele Köbke is a 36-year-old woman based in Berlin, Germany who has previously stated she was in a long-term relationship with a Boeing 737-800 airplane, one that lasted for roughly nine years.

However, despite her previously shared ambition to marry the airplane, Köbke has now revealed that she is no longer in a relationship.

Michele explained her situation to Blide, a German newspaper, in an interview that was later translated by the DailyMail UK: “We are separated, but we're still friends.”

While considered peculiar by many people across the world, Michele is what experts call an objectophile, or someone who is attracted to inanimate objects.

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She once said of her relationship: "My cheeks hurt from smiling, I'm the happiest woman in the world - when I'm with him I have everything I need.

“It's like a normal relationship, we have relaxing evenings together and when we go to bed, we cuddle and fall asleep together.

“When I touch his wings, I get immediately sweaty palms and get excited.”

She also spoke about the time she did get the chance to be up close and personal with her beloved aircraft, saying: “The time in the hangar was the most beautiful moment of my life and when I was with him, we enjoyed our time together, we kissed and I caressed him.”

But like all relationships, they had their difficulties.

Michele previously said: "A relationship with a plane is not easy and at times difficult.

"I can only get close to him when I fly with him or when I can get to him in the hangar, which has only happened once in my life."

The Boeing 737-800, which Michele took to calling Darling, was a major part of her life for nearly a decade, making her decision to disengage in the unique relationship a shocking one.

However, she also has said that the time she did get to spend with Darling were some of the best experiences of her life.

Now, in the wake of her relationship ending, Michele has sold most of her belongings related to the airplane but has not fully disengaged from her atypical relationship type.

"I now love wearing knight’s armor," Köbke explained, now a devoted lover of the Middle Ages.

One of the world’s rarest penguins has been crowned New Zealand’s bird of the year, in an unusually sedate year for the competition, free from the foreign interference and voting scandals of previous events.

The endangered yellow-eyed penguin, or hoiho, is the largest of New Zealand’s mainland penguin species and is distinctive for the pale yellow band of feathers linking the eyes.

The hoiho, meaning “noise shouter” in Māori due to its shrill call, lives along parts of the South Island’s east coast and in the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands. The shy, fishy-smelling species tends to live in native coastal forests, scrub or dense flax.

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Over the years, the contest has become a lightning-rod for scandal, from crowning a bat the winner in 2021, to accusations of Russian interference in 2019, and claims Australians attempted to rig the contest in favour of the shag in 2018.

The two-week competition attracted more than 52,000 verified votes – a significant drop compared with 2023’s event, which leapt to 350,000 votes across 195 countries after British-American comedian and talkshow host John Oliver ran a global campaign for the threatened pūteketeke – a grunting, puking bird with an unusual repertoire of mating rituals.

Oliver’s self-described “alarmingly aggressive” campaign, including buying up billboards in New Zealand, Japan, France, the UK, India and the US state of Wisconsin. A plane with a pūteketeke campaign banner also flew over the beaches of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

His efforts were rewarded when the pūteketeke was crowned the 2023 winner.

Adreanna Shelton and her nine year old daughter Gray were at the Dollar Tree on South Bend Avenue shopping for a gift for Gray's teacher when Gray reached for a candle on the shelf.

"We're smelling candles, and she picked up a candle to smell and tilted it back and it literally, liquid, went down her. At first we were like maybe it's just water, and as we were just walking through the store we get a foul smell and Gray goes, 'mom my shirt really stinks,'" said Shelton.

That smell was urine sitting in the candle on the store shelf.

Appalled by the stain and smell on her daughters shirt, Shelton went to a manager searching for answers.

The store manager offered her a shirt as a replacement.

"They have been telling me this has been happening over a month, and they're not able to catch the person doing it, and there's no cameras down the aisle where he is doing it, so the store employees, the manager, has asked corporate to put in cameras in those areas. And corporate just doesn't want to pay for those,"said Shelton.

Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson had her purse stolen from the hotel where she gave a speech at a conference for senior police officers on Tuesday.

Thieves struck while Dame Diana was giving a speech blaming the Conservatives for an “epidemic of antisocial behaviour, theft and shoplifting,” at the annual Police Superintendents' Association (PSA) conference at a hotel in Kenilworth.

Andi Norton, 32, who also goes by the name Ben Havoc, said in an Instagram post earlier this month that he blew his nose and, “low and behold,” a Lego dot piece came out.

Havoc explained that, when he was six years old, he put the Lego dot up his nose.

The toy was “too small for me to reach in my nose and grab it,” he said. So, he said he “had the brilliant idea” of shoving a Lego man up his nose to collect it.

“At this point, I’ve panicked loudly and my mom came in and, in her panic, she’s looking at my nose and seeing there’s a Lego head stuck in my nostril,” he said.

His mom pulled out that second toy with a tweezer – believing it to be the only piece.

For the last 26 years, Havoc said he has suffered from multiple breathing issues including asthma and has recently been diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea.

He said that his doctor had recommended he blow his nose in the shower during the summer months in order to take advantage of the steam and humidity.

After following that advice for the past six months, one day he got a big surprise when the Lego piece fell out of his nose.

The story grabbed headlines worldwide and has now led to a lawsuit against the Venetian Resort Las Vegas.

A California tourist who stayed in the Venetian’s Palazzo Tower over the 2023 Christmas holiday said he was stung by a scorpion — while he was sleeping — and woke up to a searing pain in his groin area.

8 News Now first reported on this incident in March 2024, and since then, Farchi, 62, said the poisonous sting to his testicles has caused him to suffer PTSD and emotional trauma for which he continues to seek treatment. The incident has had ramifications on Farchi’s sex life, the lawsuit stated.

“I can also indicate, as you saw in the complaint, we’re also making a claim for loss of consortium for Mr. Farchi’s wife,” said Brian Virag of “My Bed Bug Lawyer,” one of Farchi’s California attorneys.

“Consortium” means that Farchi’s wife is making legal claims that their sex life hasn’t been the same since the sting.

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Farchi shared with 8 News Now photos of the scorpion hanging on his underwear.

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Farchi shared a medical incident report with 8 News Now that he filed at the Palazzo on December 26. It showed his suite number and what he wrote to hotel staff that night, “bitten by scorpion on my groin/testicles.”

Farchi said the hotel staff didn’t take him seriously.

“(They were) just holding their groin area and laughing about it,” he said. “It was really embarrassing.”

Farchi went to Summerlin Hospital and was diagnosed with “Poisoning: Scorpion Sting,” according to the lawsuit.

Farchi was also treated at UCLA Medical Center, where doctors confirmed he was suffering from physical injuries, including erectile dysfunction, as a result of the scorpion sting, the lawsuit stated.

A police force has said it is not treating the death of a patient found in a hospital catering oven as suspicious.

The man was found dead at Kettering General Hospital in Northamptonshire.

Northamptonshire Police said a report was being prepared for a coroner.

The hospital said staff were working with the police.

Northamptonshire Police said it was called to the "sudden death" of the man at the hospital on Friday.

It added in a statement: "We are not treating this death as suspicious and will be preparing a report for the coroner."

We recently took a look at a trio of calendars from Studio Ghibli. They’re all delightful creations for fans of the acclaimed animation house, but I know there are at least some people whose reaction is “Yeah, they’re nice and all, but I’m not really that big an anime fan. I’m more into cats…and specifically I’m more into cat testicles.”

And hey, no problem, we’ve got you covered, in an uncovered way, on that front too!

Preorders are currently open for the 2025 edition of the Nyantama Calendar. As always, I feel it’s my duty to explain the unusual linguistics involved. In Japanese, nyan is an onomatopoeia for a cat meowing, and by extension can be used to refer to cats themselves. Tama, meanwhile, means “orb” or “orbs” (Japanese doesn’t distinguish between singular and plural nouns), which is also a slang word for “testicles.”

So yes, the Nyantama Calendar is a calendar with pictures prominently presenting cat balls. But how did calendar maker Hagoromo come up with this idea? It all goes back to Nikkan Gendai, a long-running gossip tabloid magazine. Once a year, Nikkan Gendai does a gag issue that’s all about cats and includes a nyantama photo collection. Reader surveys later revealed that the nyantama section was one of their favorite parts, and that positive reaction ispired the creaiton of the calendar.

“Please feel soothed by the powered-up cat testicles,” says Hagoromo in the announcement that promises somehow-improved cat nuts compared to the previous iterations of the calendar, which has been published since at least 2022.

In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses.

After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure.

The team is among 10 recognised in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. They are not to be confused with the more lucrative and career-changing Nobel prizes to be handed out in Scandinavia next month.

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Other work honoured on the night included US research to house pigeons in missiles to help guide them to their targets; UK investigations which found that claims of extreme old age tend to come from areas that have short average lifespans and and a historical lack of birth certificates, and a French study which found that scalp hair tends to whorl in a clockwise direction, though less so in the southern hemisphere.

Prince Philip was meant to meet an alien called ‘Janus’ at a flat in Chelsea, a new documentary has rather casually claimed.

The King of UFOs, which will be streaming on Amazon and Tubi on September 20, described how the late Duke of Edinburgh’s engineering background made him passionate about all things extraterrestrial.

So meeting an alien was an offer that the husband of Queen Elizabeth struggled to refuse, apparently.

The film’s director, Mark Christopher Lee, told Metro.co.uk that the meeting was arranged by the Prince’s top aide at the time, Sir Peter Horsley.

‘Horsley actually met this Janus entity in a flat in Chelsea in 1954 – he claimed that it had an ethereal otherworldly quality and it could read his mind and extract information about flying saucers,’ Lee said.

The pair were pencilled in to meet at a flat along Smith Street, a small residential road about a 10-minute walk away from what is now Sloane Square Tube station, on a ‘winter’s evening’.

‘Horsley wanted Phillip to meet with this Janus as Janus had a message to give him that the world needed saving as Philip was a man of great vision,’ Lee added.

‘Philip didn’t go to the meeting – and it’s most likely that Janus could have been a Russian spy – but Horsley stuck to his belief that Janus was not of this world.’

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Horsley did mention this possible close encounter in his memoir, Sounds From Another Room, in which he described a serious ‘Mr Janus’ with an intimate knowledge of aliens that UFO experts have widely interpreted as being extraterrial.

Previously:

• Documentary claims 'paranormal library in Palace' as Charles seeks 'UFO truth'
• Wild claims King Charles 'flew UFO to save lives' in secret military mission

A 38-year-old man sought help from urologists after suffering redness, swelling and scabbing on his penis, which had persisted for the best part of a week.

Further investigations revealed that the troubling symptoms had begun soon after he'd suffered a bout of severe diarrhea and vomiting.

The doctors, at the American University of Beirut Medical Center in Lebanon, where he was treated, took a swab of the man's penis to test for infection.

They found evidence of the bacteria bacillus cereus, which is usually found in rice that's been left out at room temperature for too long and can cause sickness and stomach upsets if eaten.

The doctors concluded that the man's unusual genital infection had been caused by an episode of diarrhea and vomiting that occured almost immediately after 'vigorous sex' with his wife.

The intimate act can increase the risk of bacteria permeating the skin due to the change in blood vessels.

The bacteria was said to have made direct contact with the patient's groin.

The doctors remarked that it was 'unusual' to see bacillus cereus in the skin, let alone the genitals.

This was the 'first case in literature' of the food poisoning in the penis.

Archive

Reference:

Nasrallah, Oussama G. MDa; Mahdi, Jana H.d; Araj, George F. PhDb; El Sayegh, Noura MDb; El Zakhem, Aline MDc; Bachir, Bassel G. MDa (2024) "Bacillus cereus infection of the penis: an unusual infection". Annals of Medicine & Surgery 86 (9), 5600-5603. Full text (warning, contains photos)

Pen-chan, a female Cape penguin born and raised in captivity, who had never swum in the open sea before or fended for herself, absconded from an event in the central Aichi region on 25 August.

Her keeper, Ryosuke Imai, said a team began scouring the area immediately but a powerful typhoon that brought record rains across Japan hampered the search.

Given Pen-chan’s lack of preparation for life in the wild, the team thought she would not get very far or survive for longer than a week.

But on 8 September, Imai received information that the bird had been spotted happily bobbing in the water at a beach 30 miles (45km) away.

“I thought she would look exhausted, but she was swimming as usual,” Imai said after the animal was recaptured. “It was beyond my surprise … It’s a miracle.”

Plain water is the only thing visitors are allowed to consume inside the huge cavern at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. Cheetos are a no-go, and the recent park visitor who dropped a bag full of them created a “huge impact” on the cave’s ecosystem, the park said Friday in a Facebook post.

“At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing,” the park said in its post about the garbage found off-trail in the Big Room.

“The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi. Cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues.”

The park said rangers spent 20 minutes carefully removing molds and foreign debris from surfaces inside the cave, noting that while some members of the ecosystem that rose from the snacks were cave-dwellers “many of the microbial life and molds are not.”

According to Daily Mail, the lewd act with a cucumber took place around 5:30pm in the Truxton Circle neighborhood north of D.C. It was actually close to a high school so that might bring even more problems his way if he’s eventually caught. In the video posted to Reddit, the unidentified man is seen going into the driveway of the home before he then positions a cucumber in the front grill of a parked SUV. Then, he checks his surroundings to make sure nobody is looking (he didn’t spot the camera) and makes the cucumber into an adult toy seemingly putting it inside of himself.

The footage was shared to Reddit by the homeowner with the doorbell cam in hopes of identifying the culprit. Catherine Baker told DCNewsNow, “I was so disgusted, and freaked out. I want people, I want my neighbors to know and keep an eye out for this person. I want parents to be mindful. There’s a lot of kids, there are high school students, they walk themselves to and from school but we all have to be vigilant about this kind of thing.”

In the video, you can see him finally notice the security camera and that’s when he puts the cucumber back in his lunchbox and calmly walks away from the scene. Was he saving it for later? Why did he put it back in the lunchbox? Daily Mail reports that the man could face a fine up to $300 and faces 90 days behind bars if caught and convicted.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/41815012

It was the talk of the town. After the authorities sought to break a long-running heatwave in Chongqing by using cloud-seeding missiles to artificially bring rain, the Chinese megacity was blasted by an unusual weather event – an underwear storm.

Termed “the 9/2 Chongqing underwear crisis”, an unexpected windstorm on Monday brought gusts of up to 76mph (122km/h), scattering people’s laundry from balconies on the city’s high-rises. Douyin, China’s sister app to TikTok, was filled with videos of pants and bras flying through the skies, landing in the street and snagging on trees.

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One man bereft of his underwear said he was “laughing like crazy” but the rain storm in Chongqing had now turned him into a “lifelong introvert”.

Family members of Krishna Kumar said they took him to Ganpati Hospital in Saran after he vomited several times. "We admitted him and the vomiting stopped soon after. But the doctor Ajit Kumar Puri said he needs to be operated upon. He conducted the operation by watching videos on YouTube. My son died later," Chandan Shaw.

The family members said they do not know if the 'doctor' had proper qualifications. "We think he was self-styled and fake," they said.

The teenager's grandfather said the boy was feeling better after the vomiting stopped. "But the doctor sent the father away on an errand and started operating on the boy without the family's consent. The boy was in pain. When we asked the doctor why he was in pain, he snapped at us and asked if we were doctors. Later in the evening, the boy stopped breathing. He was revived (with CPR) and then rushed to Patna. He died on the way. They left the boy's body on the stairs of the hospital and fled," said Krishna Kumar's grandfather Prahlad Prasad Shaw.

In March, health technology startup HeHealth debuted Calmara AI, an app proclaiming to be “your intimacy bestie for safer sex.” The app was heavily marketed to women, who were told they could upload a picture of their partner’s penis for Calmara to scan for evidence of a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Users would get an emoji-laden “Clear!” or “Hold!!!” verdict — with a disclaimer saying the penis in question wasn’t necessarily free of all STIs.

The reaction Ella Dawson, sex and culture critic, had when she first saw Calmara AI’s claim to provide “AI-powered scans [that] give you clear, science-backed answers about your partner’s sexual health status” can be easily summed up: “big yikes.” She raised the alarm on social media, voicing her concerns about privacy and accuracy. The attention prompted a deluge of negative press and a Los Angeles Times investigation.

The Federal Trade Commission was also concerned. The agency notified HeHealth, the parent company of Calmara AI, that it was opening an investigation into possibly fraudulent advertising claims and privacy concerns. Within days, HeHealth pulled its apps off the market.

HeHealth CEO Yudara Kularathne emphasized that the FTC found no wrongdoing and said that no penalties were imposed. “The HeHealth consumer app was incurring significant losses, so we decided to close it to focus on profitability as a startup,” he wrote over email, saying that the company is now focused on business-to-business projects with governments and NGOs mostly outside the United States.

More and more AI-powered sexual health apps have been cropping up, and there’s no sign of stopping. Some of the new consumer-focused apps are targeted toward women and queer people, who often have difficulties getting culturally sensitive and gender-informed care. Venture capitalists and funders see opportunities in underserved populations — but can prioritize growth over privacy and security.

Medical clowns are known to have a positive therapeutic impact on kids in hospitals for a range of health issues, and now it’s been shown they can reduce the length of stay and antibiotic use for children with pneumonia.

A study, done on 51 children, found that those visited by medical clowns on average left hospital more than a day earlier than those who weren’t.

“Medical clowns undergo specific training to work in hospitals,” says Dr Karin Yaacoby-Bianu, a researcher at the Carmel Medical Centre and Israel Institute of Technology, Israel.

“They have been shown to reduce pain and alleviate stress and anxiety in children and their families during medical treatment, and have been gradually integrated into many aspects of hospital care

“But their impact on children being treated for pneumonia has not been investigated.”

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Children visited by clowns needed an average of 2 days of IV antibiotic treatment, while the control group required 3. Other medical markers, like heart rate and inflammation, were lower in the clown group.

“While the practice of medical clowning is not a standardised interaction, we believe that it helps to alleviate stress and anxiety, improves psychological adjustment to the hospital environment and allows patients to better participate in treatment plans like adherence to oral antibiotics and fluids,” explains Yaacoby-Bianu.

A man who carried out 12 shoplifting offences in Cork City was jailed for seven months as the sentencing judge said shopkeepers were challenged by such thefts as they strive to pay their staff, rates and other business expenses.

Judge Mary Dorgan initially imposed a sentence of five months on 48-year-old Paul McCarthy and directed him to come under the direction of the probation service for a period following his release from prison.

However, Paul McCarthy said he refused to have anything to do with the probation service as he was not happy with previous dealings he had with that service.

Previous to the 12 new theft offences, the defendant had 205 convictions, including 37 for theft, 31 for being threatening and abusive and 50 for being drunk and a danger.

A photo from 1941 has left some people questioning whether time travel could be real. The historic snap, taken by Edward Rosskam on Chicago's South Side, shows a lineup of smartly-dressed children and teenagers standing outside a cinema.

But one boy towards the edge of the photograph has left people scratching their heads. Some social media users are now convinced the young man is holding an Apple iPad.

Taking to Reddit's timetravelerscaught forum, one person captioned the snap: "iPad carrying movie goer, all the way to the right." But not everyone's on board with the time-travel theory – and some people think it could be something much more mundane.

Elaborating on historical cinema etiquette, another chimed in: "Back in the day of early film, ushers scanned the audience for pens and notepads as to prevent bootleg recreations of the film."

Another user added: "If I can time travel, have an iPad and I'm black why in God's name would I go to the South Side of Chicago in 1941 to watch a matinee of 'The Aldrich Family'?!"

Here is the relevant bit of the photo:

Electrocuted, flaming bird carcasses are falling off of power lines and causing wildfires across the U.S. This surprisingly common phenomenon has been responsible for at least three Colorado wildfires so far this summer.

These events are not isolated. A 2022 study found that electrocuted birds caused 44 wildfires in the contiguous United States between 2014 and 2018. That study was led by Taylor Barnes, a biologist who now works for electric utility company EDM International. In the paper, Barnes wrote that “avian-caused ignitions” happen when a bird sits on an overhead power line. For reasons that can vary from case to case, sometimes the bird receives a powerful electrical shock, setting its feathers on fire. The dead or dying bird then falls, and, on occasion, lands in some brush or other flammable material.

“Sometimes they burst into flames,” Barnes told 9News, an NBC affiliate in Colorado. “Sometimes they just fall dead. Not every bird that is electrocuted will fall to the ground and start a fire.”

Odds are, you’ve seen birds perched on electrical wires countless times without witnessing spontaneous sparrow combustion. Barnes said birds just going for a sit pose no threat. Because the birds are not touching the ground, the electricity in the power line has no way to the ground and is not dangerous to them. It’s only when the birds get into a part of the power infrastructure where a circuit can be completed that they end up crispy.

Law enforcement descended on a Monmouth County recycling facility after employees reported seeing a dead body on a conveyor belt Wednesday afternoon.

State Police Sgt. Charles Marchan said workers at the Republic Services recycling facility were sorting materials on a conveyor belt around 2:40 p.m. when they saw the body.

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The body of a man was found by troopers but has not yet been identified.

Bolton Wanderers striker Victor Adeboyejo missed their EFL Trophy victory at Barrow on Tuesday having injured himself after a "hefty sneeze".

The 26-year-old suffered a back injury on Monday which was set off by the sneeze, manager Ian Evatt said.

Bolton won the fixture 3-2 to get their EFL Trophy campaign off to the perfect start despite Adeboyejo's absence.

"He had a pretty hefty sneeze – now Victor is a powerful boy and even his sneezes are powerful," Evatt told the Bolton News.

“He felt a bit of a crack in between his ribs and we are hopeful it is just a cartilage or muscular issue, but until we had a good look at the scan we won’t know.”

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“I have to start having a long look at myself when players start getting injured sneezing,” Evatt added.