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Today's Paper | December 24, 2024

Published 25 Aug, 2018 07:21am

The weekly weird

Thief steals $100,000 worth of noodles

A thief with a hankering for soup is afoot in Georgia after police in Fayette County discovered someone had stolen nearly $100,000 worth of ramen noodles.

Deputies are looking into the theft of a large trailer holding the massive amounts of soup. The 53-foot trailer was parked at a Chevron store on Georgia Interstate Highway 85 north.

The local sheriff said the trailer had been secured at the time. The owner of the trailer estimated that $98,000 worth of ramen was onboard.

What does one do with that much ramen? We don’t know! However, one pack of Maruchan goes for 29 cents so you can just imagine the sheer volume of noodles that was stolen for it to be equivalent to $98,000.


World’s tallest waterslide to be demolished

The now infamous Verruckt waterslide billed as the tallest in the world, is expected to be demolished shortly, after a Wyandotte County, Kan., judge granted the amusement park company permission to tear it down.

Ten-year-old Caleb Thomas Schwab was decapitated and two women were seriously injured riding the 17-story waterslide at Schlitterbahn Waterpark in Kansas City, Kan., in August 2016 — just 18 months after the amusement park ride debuted. It has remained closed ever since. Court orders blocked the company from dismantling the ride while officials investigated.

Melanie Morgan, who is representing KC Waterpark Management LLC, an affiliated corporate entity of Schlitterbahn, told that dismantling the 168-foot slide is a ‘fairly complicated’ process and is expected to take three weeks. Riders strapped into a multi-person raft careered down the slide at speeds up to 70 mph. The trip down included two plunging drops that descended into a pool at the end.


Muja, the alligator, still snapping in his 80s at Belgrade Zoo

American alligator Muja arrived at Belgrade Zoo on the eve of the Second World War and is believed to be the oldest of his kind in captivity, and still in good health with a hearty appetite for his age, said his handlers.

Generations of Belgraders and tourists have come to watch Muja, and though he rarely moves around much, he is still agile at feeding time — when he munches on rats and quails. This is when his age shows, though, as he sometimes misses the target when he snaps at his food.

So far Muja’s only health issue has been gangrene, which led to him having his front right claw amputated in 2012.

Muja arrived from Germany in August 1937. An old newspaper clipping about his arrival at the zoo said that he was two years old at the time, putting him in his early 80s today. He survived two carpet bombings of the Serbian capital — one by Germany in 1941 and the other by the Allies in 1944 — when all the official documentation about his transfer was lost.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 25th, 2018

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