10 Offbeat Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

With another week in the history books, it’s time to sit back and review some of the peculiar stories that made the news over the last few days. If you’d rather know about recent good news in the world, you can click here.

There are tales of gators on ketamine and the world’s most expensive pigeon. There are two stories regarding discoveries from shipwrecks, and staying on the subject of history, we pay a quick visit to the town of Bedrock for a yabba-dabba-doo time. Jack the Ripper claimed a few headlines this week, as did an uninvited guest from space.

10Saucy Jack Is Back

It has been 130 years since Jack the Ripper’s killing spree, but he is still garnering plenty of attention. A new study published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences claims that DNA from a shawl alleged to have belonged to one of the victims has finally revealed the identity of Jack the Ripper.The authors are Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University and David Miller of the University of Leeds. They say that Jack was a Polish barber named Aaron Kosminski. The reveal itself isn’t too shocking. Kosminski has always been considered one of the more likely Ripper suspects. The scientists claim that mitochondrial DNA found on a shawl which is said to have belonged to Catherine Eddowes matches that of Kosminski’s modern descendants. This proclamation has not been well-received by the scientific community, who have deemed it “unpublishable” and “terrible science and terrible history.”[1] For starters, geneticist Adam Rutherford pointed out that the testing had been done in 2014 and had already been heavily criticized but, for some reason, has now made its way into a scientific journal. Other geneticists such as Turi King from the University of Leicester voiced concerns over contamination. Even if the shawl belonged to Catherine Eddowes (which is definitely not a certainty), it has been handled with carelessness by many people throughout the decades. It seems probable that Jack the Ripper’s identity still eludes us.

9A Pigeon Worth His Weight In Gold

Photo credit: Pipa

A pigeon called Armando set a new record after being sold at auction for €1.25 million ($1.42 million).The previous record was €376,000 ($426,000). Auction house Pipa, which specializes in selling racing pigeons, knew that Armando would fetch a great price. He had been touted as the “Lewis Hamilton of pigeons.”[2] However, they expected the bids to top off around half a million euros, maybe €600,000 max. Never in their wildest dreams did they think Armando would be sold for over double that amount. The giant price tag was the result of a bidding war between two Chinese buyers.So what’s so special about Armando? He is regarded as one of the greatest racing pigeons of all time. His competing days are behind him, though. Armando will turn five this year, and he has retired from racing. However, he is still capable of producing many offspring to carry on his legacy.

8Shipwreck Ale

Photo credit: Currier & Ives/Library of Congress

Beer aficionados have a new drink to try. It is called Deep Ascent ale, and it is made with yeast from a century-old shipwreck.The SS Oregon was once the fastest liner traveling the Atlantic. Alas, it sank in 1886 after colliding with a schooner a few miles from New York in an area known today as “Wreck Valley.” As the name implies, quite a few vessels went down in that region, which has become a popular spot for scuba divers. One of them is Jamie Adams, a former Wall Street trader who now operates the Saint James Brewery in Long Island. He got the idea that if he could find a few intact bottles, he could recreate the beers from over 130 years ago.Adams first tried his luck in 2015 without success. It wasn’t until 2017 that he got his hands on some pristine beer bottles after shifting sands opened access to the ship’s dining room. It took him another two years and the help of a microbiologist to extract the yeast and then use it in a modern ale.[3] The finished product is a beer that Adams describes as having a “slightly fruity taste and hoppy finish.”

7Last Blockbuster On Earth

Photo credit: AP/Gillian Flaccus

The city of Bend, Oregon, will soon have a strange claim to fame: It will be the home of the last Blockbuster on the planet.At the moment, there are two of these video rental shops remaining. One is in Bend, and the other is in Morley, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia. However, the latter will close its doors permanently at the end of March, thus leaving the store in Oregon as the last Blockbuster standing.The American shop was once part of a five-store franchise owned by the same family, but all the other Blockbusters were closed down. General Manager Sandi Harding believes this one survived through “pure stubbornness,” but it also required running on a very tight budget. The computer system uses floppy disks to reboot, while business transactions are stored on reel-to-reel tape. Employees write out membership cards by hand because the dot-matrix printer they once had broke.[4]These measures might have been implemented to keep costs down, but now they are actually working in the store’s favor. More and more customers are stopping by looking for a hefty dose of nostalgia. At its height, Blockbuster had over 9,000 locations across the world. It also had a chance to buy Netflix for a “paltry” $50 million, but it passed on the opportunity. It went bankrupt in 2010, but some stores had been franchised and stayed open.

6Herodotus Was Right

Photo credit: Christoph Gerigk/Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation

Almost 2,500 years ago, Herodotus wrote The Histories, one of the most influential works of literature of the ancient world. Included in the texts was an account of his visit to Egypt. One passage puzzled scholars. It described, in detail, a ship called a baris with “long, internal ribs.” Herodotus witnessed it being built, but archaeologists never found any evidence that such a vessel ever existed. But now they’ve actually...



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