This Here Woman Is Quite The Bowler

I'm an inexperienced bowler, but I like doing it every now and again.

I'm not that great at accuracy, so I try to throw the ball really hard in the hopes that the wind from the ball rushing past will knock over the pins I miss. Cool theory, but I haven't seen it work much yet.

It could be worse. There's a viral video of a woman bowling in Brazil where things really go off the rails. Maybe a bit high and destructive with the throw? You be the judge:

The Most Vermont Style Highway Mishap EVER!

Vermont State Police had to close down part of Interstate 91 in the northeastern part of the state for the most Vermont of reasons:  

There was a maple syrup spill on the highway. 

The area around Exit 27 northbound shut down late Monday afternoon when a 42-gallon drum of maple syrup broke loose from a pickup truck and toppled onto the roadway, police said.

Nobody got hurt, but there was a LOT of anguish over the spill. Vermonters never cry over spilled milk, but they DO cry over spilled maple syrup.

"It's too bad to see someone lose so much perfectly good syrup.....It's depressing," said Newport, Vermont Fire Chief Jamie LeClair.

Unlike some spills you hear of on highways. the Great Vermont Maple Spill of '17 wasn't all that big a deal. After all, maple syrup isn't the most hazardous of substances out there.

Road crews had the whole thing cleaned up within 20 minutes and traffic, such as it is in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, was soon back to normal.

"A couple dozen pancakes could have absorbed it," said LeClair, the fire chief. (I am not making up these quotes.)

Besides, most of the snow poured onto snowbanks on the side of the road. Us Vermonters love sugar on snow. We pour maple syrup on fresh clean snow, or if none is available, crushed ice, and go to town.

Alas, the snow on the side of the road was dirty with road salt, dust and God knows what else, so there was no sugar on snow party at the scene of the crash.

Let's just hope the sugaring season this year, which starts soon, will yield a bumper crop to help make up for the tragedy in Newport.

Woman Somehow Manages To Get Snake Stuck In Her Earlobe

Ashley Glawe got her pet python Bart stuck in her
gauged ear. Both are fine now, though. 

I'm prone to pratfalls.

I'm always tripping, dropping things, losing things, losing my marbles.

My sister Lynn says I'm fun to watch.  

Maybe.

But I was delighted today when I learned I've never got myself in trouble in this weird a fashion: A woman in Oregon managed to get a snake stuck in her earlobe. 

I bet that will never happen to me.

The woman in question, Ashley Glawe, has a rather unique fashion sense. Part of that is her gauged earlobe. That means it's stretched to a large, weird shape, I guess so you can put big earrings in or sonething.

So she has a big hole in her earlobe.

Glawe said her pet python, Bart, decided to slither into that big hole in her earlobe and got stuck. Which meant she had to go to the emergency room to fix the problem.

I'm sure the medical personnel at the hospital had never seen anything quite like that.

Thankfully, everything ended well. Doctors numbed Glawe's ear so they can stretch it more without inflicting a lot of pain so that Bart could slither out.

And, bonus! Bart was not injured during his ordeal. Glawe is fine, too.

Well, as fine as a woman can be with big holes in her ear and a pet python named Bart

See, Church Can Be Fun!

The title of the YouTube video in this post is "Joyful Noise While Praying"

It starts off with a solemn moment with the preacher, until his assistant gets in the act.

Lots of fun!

Giant Moon Rolls Through Chinese City, But All Is Fine

It was cloudy and gusty in the city of Fuzhou, China the other day because of a typhoon lurking offshore.

An inflatable moon that broke loose takes a
trip down a freeway in a Chinese city. 

But then, what's this? A giant inflatable moon comes rolling through town, crashing through intersections, bouncing over cars on the freeway and skittering off cargo ships docked at the port.

The city is having a mid-autumn festival that features the moon. Since clouds from the typhoon were blocking the view of the real full moon overhead, people set up these inflatable ones.

The gusty winds from outer fringers of Typhoon Meranti broke one of these moons loose, resulting in this funny video you see below. Nobody got hurt and there was no real damage:

Carnival Vista Cruise Ship Creates Mini-Tsunami, No Carnival For Sicilian Boat Owners

Sunken, damaged boats in Sicily after a Carnival Cruise
ship got to close to a jetty

Somebody's in trouble over at Carnival Cruise Lines.

In  late August, the humongous Carnival Vista cruise ship departed port in Messina, Sicily. Whoever was piloting the thing came to close to a jetty and a marina where numerous small boats were docked.

As you can see in the dramatic surveillance video at the bottom of this post, the results were not pretty.

According to Cruise Law News, several passengerfs aboard the Carnival Vista thought their ship hit the piers, but that was not the case. It just came much, much too close.

Several small boats sank, others were crushed. The pier was destroyed. Luckily, there are no reports of injuries.

Italian authorities said they're investigating. The incident caused about 250,000 Euros in damage, which is the equivalent of about $280,000, says Cruise Law News.

No word yet from Carnival on what caused this, or what they might do to make amends.

Did someone say lawsuit?

Here's the video:

 

Bad Day On The Ship: Watch This Russian Cargo Go Overboard

Sometimes getting goods across the ocean is tough.

Storms arise, seas get rough, things go wrong.

For instance, watch what happens when the straps holding some giant pipes on a Russian ship snap in a storm. Explain this to your boss when you get to your destination! 

At least they're not in as big a mess as Anthony Weiner seems to be.

Here's the vid

Always Bad When Pace Vehicle Stalls At A Bicycle Race

Here's what happened this weekend when a pace motorcycle stalled at a big bicycle race, the Red Hook Criterium in Brooklyn, New York.

Lots of unhappy racers, I'm sure:


Here's another view

O Canada! Hockey, National Anthem And Skating Hazards Don't Mix

Not the best moment in the history of people
singing "O Canada."  

You have to expect this to happen all the time in Canada: A hockey game and a rendition of "O, Canada," the national anthem at the start of a hockey game.  

Some moron decided that it would be cool to have the guy who sings "O Canada" skate around the arena before the hockey game as he sings.

Bad idea, but it wasn't totally the singer's fault. Some moron, there were a lot of morons in this incident, apparently, put out a ceremonial carpet. The singer, Mark Donnelly, didn't see the carpet and fell flat on his face as he was singing.

Decent recovery though.

Watch the disaster in this video:

Happy Ending For Deer Stuck In Picket Fence

Ah... The American dream. A nice house. A nice yard surrounded by a nice perfect picket fence.

This deer got stuck while
trying to leap over a picket
fence in Attleboro, Mass.
Luckily the homeowner freed
the deer, which did not appear
to be seriously hurt.  

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for an unfortunate deer in woodsy suburban Attleboro, Massachusetts, plenty.

Apparently, our deer was running through the neighborhood and tried to take a graceful leap over the Kelley family's picket fence.

Not so graceful.

The deer's hind legs got caught at the top of the fence, and the animal did a nice faceplant on the lawn. And he was stuck.

Yes, we're continuing with our theme of the day, clumsy animals. Earlier, you might have seen my post about penguins having trouble getting past a rope.

Anyway and luckily, 7 year old Grant Kelley noticed the problem with the deer in his backyard.  He told his mother, Kate Kelley who told her husband, Brian Kelley

Even more luckily, each board in the fence is removable. Dad Brian Kelley went out there and removed a couple of boards, which freed the deer.

The only problem is, since Kate Kelley was filming, the whole world gets to see the deer's humiliation.

Otherwise, though, the deer is fine. Watch the funny report from television station WCVB in Boston, which used the Kelley video to tell the story, which has a happy ending:

New Reasons To Dislike Winter Ice

They tell us we might get some sleet and freezing rain mixed with the snow in Vermont tomorrow.

Ice storm damage in Hugo, Oklahoma, via
@OKD2Houchen on Twitter.  

That's part of a bad weather pattern that has spread frigid temperatures, snow and lots of ice across the country.

Apparently, it's bad in Russia, too. Watch what happens when workers try to remove huge icicles from a Russian building that were hanging like daggers over the pedestrians below.

Nobody gets hurt, but it doesn't end well.

Dramatic Chinese Bridge Collapse Offers Lesson: When They Say Stay Off, Stay Off

A couple hundred people plunged into the water at a tourist site in China this week when the pedestrian bridge they were on collapsed beneath them.

Down she goes. Bridge collapses in China
when too many people got on it.   

The people responsible for the bridge said the span had the capacity for only 40 people at a time and tried to control the crowd.

Uh, uh. They all wanted to get across at once. Now if not sooner.  Big mistake. With more than 200 people on the bridge, it didn't work. So the crowd that was in such a hurry didn't make it across at all.

Luckily there were only a couple dozen minor injuries, so it could have been a lot worse.

Here's the wild video:

The World's Most Sea Sick Cars and Trucks

Ever bought a used vehicle and found out it didn't work as well as you'd hoped? That maybe it turned out to be a lemon?

A still from the video of an ill-fated
overseas trip from Japan that didn't go well
for some auctioned cars.  

Maybe it was shipped overseas aboard a Russian freighter. If the video in this post is any indication, it's better to buy a local car.

This Russian freighter, bound from Japan and loaded with used cars for resale, hit a big huge storm in the North Pacific.

Some of the cars are now deep down at the bottom of the ocean. The ones that didn't sink didn't exactly make it intact, having taken some  unique and bumpy rides across the deck of the ship.

Somebody didn't tie things down well, did they? It's always fun to watch someone else's disaster, right?

Watch the video before you buy your next car. You'll be happy you did.