Freaky and Fantastic News to Lighten Your Friday

Friday is a good time to taper down from the week, and this week is a good one to taper down from. With that in mind, here are a few lighter - and weirder - items from the news. Enjoy!

First up: There was an earthquake on Friday, that shook the New York City area and the surrounding countryside, including Horsham, Pennsylvania, where Justin Allen was undergoing a vasectomy.

“The doctor was like, ‘I think this is an earthquake.’ I figured he was messing with me, but he had to stop because everything was shaking,” Justin Allen of Horsham told the Guardian.
“[He] put the tools down for a moment.”
Allen got the shaft timing-wise when the 4.8-magnitude quake began shaking the hospital room right as he was going under the knife — fully lucid with local anesthesia — at around 10:25 a.m., he said.
“I thought maybe a train was passing by,” he said. “We talked about how we’d never forget where we were at that moment.”

That's downright unsettling. Having been through this experience myself, I can attest that it's disconcerting enough to have sharp, pointy things in close proximity to a portion of your anatomy where you really don't want sharp, pointy things. We applaud Mr. Allen's fortitude and the aplomb with which he seems to have taken this experience.

Next; I'm not sure what's up with New Zealanders, but one man from that Shire-like nation was placed under arrest in Sydney, Australia, reportedly for mistaking an airliner for the urologist's office and attempting to give a sample.

A passenger has been fined for urinating in a cup during a delay in deplaning after landing at Sydney Airport.
The incident, after a 3-hour Air New Zealand flight from Auckland, occurred last December and a Sydney court fined the 53-year-old man 600 Australian dollars ($395) for offensive behavior in February, officials said Friday.
The incident only came to public attention on Friday, when New Zealand news website Stuff reported that a passenger in the same row, identified only as Hollv, said she had reported the behavior to the air crew.

Well, now, let's be charitable. As a man of a certain age myself (and well past 53), I can attest that when you gotta go, you gotta go. I won't presume to judge this unnamed New Zealander's emergency micturition, but one would think he may have just rang for the flight attendant and explained the nature of his emergency instead of resorting to the cup.

Finally, we head to the Great White North, where a man was bitten (no, not there) when he tried to remove a rat that suddenly appeared in his toilet bowl.

The individual, 76, suffered bites on two of his fingers as he tried to remove the rodent - and was rushed to hospital for treatment.
His wounds were dressed and he was discharged — but returned 18 days later complaining of fever, headaches and abdominal pain and was admitted to the ICU.
It was then that doctors ran tests which revealed he had been infected with leptospirosis, a bacteria found in rat urine — and also found he had warning signs of multi-organ failure and sepsis.
He was quickly administered with antibiotics, and after a few days had recovered enough to return home.

We're all glad he's going to be OK; but really, this is Canada, a region where the locals are known to attempt shenanigans involving rodents.

Happy Friday, everyone. It's been a hectic week; the world seems an unusually unsettled place just now. But it's important, now and then, to forget our troubles and laugh a little.

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So relax! Have a nice dinner and a few drinks, if that's your pleasure. The world's problems will still be here on Monday. And all of us here at RedState will still be here to inform you of everything that's happening. For even more great on-the-spot with the news that's hot, consider upgrading to a VIP account. VIP status will open a plethora of stories and podcasts here at RedState. And remember that a Gold-level account gets you access to all of our sister sites in Townhall Media: PJ Media, Twitchy, Hot Air, Bearing Arms, and Townhall.com. Use promo code SAVEAMERICA for a 50% discount.