Weird Wild Stuff

Words by Shelton Hull

So, how’s your summer going? I don’t care how bad you think it is because as long as you’re not dead, in a coma or currently under indictment for 37 federal counts, you’re still doing better than most of the folks in this month’s installment, which begins not far from here: a rare and elusive breakdown, however brief, of the infamous Thin Blue Line, duly breached on June 6 in Orlando. An Orlando Police Department officer got clocked doing 80 in a 45mile zone by a Seminole County deputy who then pulled him over. Rather, he attempted to, before OPD took him on a brief chase before finally stopping and going full Karen on his colleague, all of which was captured on video. Thankfully, neither of them were Black, so no one was killed.

Another recent police chase somehow managed to be even more adorable, while also vastly more dangerous, because the driver in this case was not a fellow cop, but rather a 10-year-old boy. This happened in Buena Vista — not the one in Florida but in Michigan, just outside of Flint. He then led police on a brief chase before they disabled the vehicle remotely, using OnStar, just like every conspiracy theorist has warned you the government would be able to do someday. This is totally illegal, but you can tell the kid probably had a good reason because he stole a 2017 Buick Encore, which adults don’t even drive willingly. And he did: He was trying to go visit his mom in Detroit. Again, illegal, but if the only way to see your mom is to steal a car, then what choice do you really have? It’s unclear whether the young boy will be prosecuted, but we think a spanking will suffice. No dessert, either!

You may or may not recall that Penn State University went through some terrible scandals a few years ago, too awful to even mention, except to say that a chemical engineering professor at the same school has recently found a way to shame his employer that, while not technically worse than what Jerry Sandusky did, is also maybe still worse — you decide. You see, someone was stealing hand sanitizer from Rothrock State Forest (which is sadly not named after iconic bad bitch Cynthia Rothrock), so the park rangers set up surveillance cameras to catch them, and they failed. But they did catch this dude having sex with his German Shepherd on the trail, on video, multiple times. Now, to his credit, the professor immediately grasped the hopelessness of his situation and begged the rangers for death, explaining that he was doing it to relieve stress, like, we couldn’t have guessed that already. And, before you ask: No, they never caught whoever stole the hand sanitizer. Why are you even still thinking about that? Weirdo!

Speaking of weirdos, let’s talk about monks. They get busy, as you know, and it’s reasonable to expect the occasional shenanigan from folks who cut their hair like that on purpose. A Buddhist monk in Thailand was recently arrested for leading a three-man ring of monks that embezzled 180 million Thai baht from Wat Pa Thammakhiri monastery, in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima. It is unclear what he did with the money, but you can be certain that at least a small portion of the pilfered funds were diverted to purchase some kind of fancy beads.

We’ll close out this installment with a reminder that there’s no place like home, and nothing drives that point home like a prison stint, which is exactly what one Minnesota man is facing after he tried to steal the iconic ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.” The theft actually took place way back in August 2005, when he climbed through a window of the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but the shoes weren’t recovered by the FBI until July 2018, while the federal indictment happened mere weeks ago. Well, he can click his heels together all he wants, but he’s not going anywhere, anytime soon.