It's Friday, Aug 21, 2026 and here is your weird news update featuring some of the weird news, odd stories, and fun things from the news. This is What a Weird Week.
Show notes page is shownotes.page. Stream and Subscribe HERE.
8 Woman has pretty bad day capped off with parking ticket. Link https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/361021333/woman-dies-comes-back-life-gets-parking-ticket and Link to info on how to do chest compressions https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergencies/hands-only-cpr.html?srsltid=AfmBOoqZhtTzVJdx_CKVXmXVTMkn4ZHuKd2XuCy-0xhtYnpt0y9lDb02
TRANSCRIPT for Season 7, Episode 34, first aired on Aug 21, 2026:
Intro Weird things happened, they always do. Hi everybody, it's Weird! This is like crazy being here. Weeeird! Really weird, damn. Bigfoot eats out of my trash. Well, I got a great show for you today with some wonderful Weeeird stuff! Hi friends, it is Friday, August 21st, at time of recording. My name is Scott, and this is the show we call What a Weird Week.
Number 10: Number 10 is this fellow. What do Las Vegas, a mentalist performer, and a corporate team-building exercise have in common? A Guinness World Records title. The fastest time to fold 12 t-shirts in a relay team of 12. So that is David Record Breaker Rush. We have talked about him before on this program because he sets world records like crazy. He has the world record for having the most world records. More than 200 right now. And so he is in Las Vegas, Nevada for a team-building, corporate team-building thing. What makes this record a little bit unusual is that oftentimes David Record Breaker Rush sets these world records on his own, sometimes in his kitchen, with his family cheering him on. But in this case, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America, planet Earth. And part of the corporate team-building is his colleagues and a mentalist joining forces to break the world record for fastest time to fold 12 t-shirts in a relay. And mission accomplished 2 minutes 19, almost 2 minutes 20 seconds. That's the world record 12 people involved in folding t-shirts in a relay format. We're going to link to the video of the world record being set. But if you don't have a chance to click, I'll describe how it goes. You run to, first person runs to the basket, laundry basket. Take out a t-shirt, fold it, run back, the next person goes. And once you do that 12 times, you stop the time and hope you have a world record, and they did. They did it in world record time, 2 minutes 20. Well done.
Number 9: Okay, number 9 is another inspiring world record. This one, I'm going to put a timer here. And I want you to imagine you're putting together a Mr. Potato Head. Are you familiar? The popular toy, Mr. Potato Head. Okay, so you're putting it together, go. Right, putting this together. Okay, feet, easy, eyes, easy. And what about the nose? Wait, no, that's upside down. Okay, time's up. So that was 8 seconds. Were you able to assemble the Mr. Potato Head in this thought experiment? Because the world record for assembling a Mr. Potato Head is just under 8 seconds. Oh, and I forgot. That's the blindfolded time. A blindfolded man assembled a Mr. Potato Head in 7.92 seconds, and now has a Guinness World Record. A fellow named Connor from Kentucky, United States of America, planet Earth, put on a blindfold, put together a Mr. Potato Head under 8 seconds. Get set, go. Putting the pieces in. Ears, get the ears. It's all about how you have the parts laid out. You're allowed to have everything laid out, but then, you know, you're going blindfolded, right? Make sure you're aware, spatial awareness. And it seems like one of the key tricks is have the feet ready to receive the potato body.
Number 8: Here's the headline I wrote for number 8. Woman has pretty bad day, capped off with a parking ticket. A lady, this is New Zealand, planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy. A lady was parked at a grocery store in the parking lot, or they call it a car park in the article. Same thing, right? I think, same thing. And so, the lady collapsed in the parking lot. And a stranger rescues her, does chest compressions, gets her heart going again. The ambulance is called. And the lady is taken to hospital. Well, I didn't know this because where I live, East Coast, Canada, we don't have this kind of thing. But at this supermarket, you are allowed to park in their parking lot for 90 minutes. And then you get a ticket. Well, this lady was busy, you know, surviving. And so, didn't get her car moved until five hours and something later. So, she was issued a ticket. So, the lady did perish, was revived, and then found out she was issued an $80 ticket for violating the time limit in the parking lot. You can imagine that's not great news after a very bad day. And I don't want to make light of any of this because it was a heavy, heavy day for a number of people, sounds like. When you're busy surviving, being revived, having passed away and now you're being revived and you're, you know, focusing on that. And then you find out you have to pay a parking ticket. That's not fun. Luckily, the company that issues those tickets, once they found out what happened to the lady, they were like, well, you don't have to pay the $80 ticket. You still have to pay $30. They were like, yeah, no, we understand what you're saying. Sure, hospital. Sure, revived. Yeah, we know. We heard you. You still have to pay $30. We'll reduce the ticket. Well, you still have to pay something. Anyway, the grocery store ended up paying the ticket. So, the lady didn't have to pay the ticket. One of the things they say in the article, the stranger who came to the rescue of this lady and started chest compressions, they're still looking for that person to say thank you. I'll link to the article and I'll link to, if you want to learn CPR or whatever it's called where you're at. Maybe it's, is it called CPR everywhere? Anyway, life-saving measures. You never know. I'll put a link where you can learn how to do that. Just in case. Click the show notes. Just as a side note, my neighbor has started mowing their lawn. You probably won't be able to hear the lawnmower unless I get really close to the house, in which case they're mowing some of my lawn at that point. So, that's great. If you're not in a situation where you have a lawn to mow regularly, it's a simple joy in life when you have nice neighbors and you go out to mow the lawn and you discover that they've mowed a little bit, a few strips of your lawn. Just one of the simple happy things in life that can occur from time to time.
Number 7: All right, number seven. The new perfume from Ellis Brooklyn. Ellis Brooklyn Plum Tonic is described as a floral fruity fragrance. I would say fancy too. I went to the website because I don't know anything about this stuff. This is not my world at all. And I went to the Ellis Brooklyn website to research their plum tonic and I was a little surprised by the price. It's a little bit out of my price range. So, the Ellis Brooklyn Plum Tonic is a floral fruity fancy fragrance. I would say as a means of promoting this new fragrance, for a limited time in New York, United States of America, you can get sorbet. So, you can get a frozen treat inspired by the smell, the scent of Ellis Brooklyn Plum Tonic. It's a plum sorbet. And I don't know if they thought this through because as mentioned previously, the perfume is fairly expensive. Couldn't you just buy the sorbet and dab that behind your ears? Hey, that's a life hack. I'm gonna stop there. I think I just hacked it.
Number 6: Number six is more good coffee news, or it would seem to be more research into coffee that points towards something good. Coffee drinkers have less fat, more muscle, according to research out of Finland, which by the way, I always pronounce it Finland. And if you pronounce it a different way, I apologize. I know our show goes out over the Worldwide Information Superhighway. According to the metrics right now, we have almost one listener in Finland. So, if I'm saying it wrong to you, I am sorry and please reach out. The top-line data on this and we link to the article in Science Daily. According to a Finnish study, people who drank more coffee tended to have less abdominal fat and more muscle and what they describe as healthier metabolic markers. My question is how come places that sell coffee? Serious question. If you had a product that you were selling and research came back that seemed to show it was good for you in some way. In this case, more muscle. Wouldn't you brag about that? How come places where you get coffee, you never hear of this? Like I'm not very smart, must be something I'm not getting.
Number 5: Number five is the lady in Dubai who broke a world record for writing 150 words on a small piece of paper. Your standard sticky note, which is three inches by three inches or 76 millimeters squared and the lady in Dubai who practiced a bit, different styles, handwriting and stuff and the rules are it has to be a real word. You can't repeat words and it has to be legible. So, somebody from the Guinness World Records Organization has to be able to read all those words. So, this lady wrote 150 words on that tiny piece of paper. Mostly three-letter words, but that's okay. That counts. And now world domination in writing words on a tiny piece of paper. Congratulations. Here's what I like about this world record. Sometimes we talk about world records and it's, you know, you need access to a helicopter to do it or you have to be incredibly flexible to do it or maybe you need to be on top of Mount Everest with a Rubik's Cube to do it. But this is one we can all get in on this and practice. All you need is a writing utensil, some words in your brain, and a tiny piece of paper. I suppose you don't even need the paper, really. Just go to a friend's house, measure a three-inch square on their wall, and start writing words.
Number 4: I'll do a trigger warning here. I don't know how you feel about taxidermy. If that weirds you out, then trigger warning. Number four is about the taxidermied fox head. It's called a badly stuffed fox head if you don't have a chance to click the picture. I will describe it. I do not see a fox head. I see it looks like a small bear or something. But what really gets your attention is the eyes. It looks like it has googly eyes. Whoever taxidermied this, I don't know what was going on. I don't understand taxidermy, but to me, it's googly eyes looking back at me. This all occurred in Bristol, United Kingdom. The taxidermied fox head was purchased at an antiques fair for around 50 pounds, and then it goes on auction. The opening bid, 28 pounds. But somebody realized what it was. It wasn't a fox head. The bidding started going up and up. Remember, it started at 28 pounds, ended at 60,000 pounds because it was a Tasmanian tiger, which those things are extinct. So extremely rare, a taxidermied Tasmanian tiger. What I love is the person who put it on auction had no idea, right? And they get the call, yeah, so we started the bidding at 28 pounds, and you're probably like, oh, great. Didn't sell. No, no, it sold. All right, what, 30 pounds? No, 62,000. The article paints a picture of the person who listed this not knowing what it was and not expecting that much money. Nice surprise for them. If you would like to see the googly eyed thing, you can click the show notes or go to shownotes.page.
Number 3: Number three is the Jellyfish Museum. They believe it's the first of its kind in Florida, United States of America, planet Earth. The first ever United States jellyfish, solely dedicated to jellyfish museum. They have 20 tanks, something like that. There's a nice write up from Associated Press. You can imagine it would be fascinating to learn about jellyfish and think of all the school trip possibilities for this museum. One other thing, it seems like a wonderful place to take your enemies and get them, you know, stung, stung real good.
Number 2: Number two, the Belgium Basement Bullion is our next story. This happened last week. The crew was working in the basement of an old brewery, 19th century brewery. They're doing some sewer work in the basement and they found what they thought was a bucket of coins. Well, it was, but they were thinking modern day coins. It turns out they were old gold coins and then they also found gold nuggets and they also found around 50 gold bars. So the old gold stash was valued at around $10 million American. That's where we are right now. I love it when people find treasure. I love it when we have stories like that, but they don't know where this came from. There is some speculation. Maybe it was the former, like the family who owned the 19th century brewery way back in history had this gold stash down there, but that's speculation right now. Where we go from here is authorities hang on to that gold stash for five years and then if nobody makes a rightful claim to it, it gets split between who found it and the property owners where it was found. If I were on that construction crew, like I don't own one of those fancy calendars that goes five years into the future, but I think I'd buy one. I'd invest in one of those and start X-ing off days. Either that or just try to put it out of my mind for five years. That'd be hard.
Number 1: Number one this week is... I'm going to play the video first. Alright, what's happening in that video is a robot is running down an indoor track. This is a training run before the World Humanoid Robot Games, or many people refer to them as the Robot Olympics. I'll link to the video. You can check it out for yourself if you have a chance to see our show notes. So this is a person-shaped robot training for the Robot Olympics, which officially kick off tomorrow, Saturday, August 22nd, 2026. At time of recording, it's Friday the 21st. So tomorrow in Beijing, Robot Olympics. So this training run, the robot is running down the track very fast. It's impressive. And then you'll notice the wall at the end. I think they put extra padding. I want to say I read one article that said extra padding because robots tended to pass the finish line and keep going and smash into the wall. And that's kind of what happens here. The robot keeps going into the wall, stumbles back, falls back, and then sparks start flying out. To my untrained eye, it almost, you could almost convince yourself the robot snapped in two. I wanted to include this story because if you have heard our program before, many times I have talked about the robot uprising and how it's imminent. And the robots are planning to take over and we need to be vigilant. And then I see a robot run into a wall and snap in two. And you might think, maybe I'm not as nervous about the robot uprising anymore. Maybe the robots aren't that organized. I'd like to take this moment to say, no, don't let your guard down. It might be a distraction. This robot might have been a distraction while the other robot, the robot vacuums, are getting together in their secret meetings, planning to take over our living rooms and terrorize our pets. Just one theory. I'll link to the video and the whole story about the Robot Olympics if you click the show notes or again, our show notes page is shownotes.page.
Outro And that's our show this week. Thanks for checking out the program. It's called What a Weird Week, in case you forgot. And we do weird news, odd news, and fun stories from the news. Thanks for liking and subscribing and smashing the buttons that indicate good things. We're back next Friday with more weird stuff on What a Weird Week.