Not Quite In The News

Hey Josh, how about another round-up of bizarre and amusing current events?

I thought you'd never ask.

In fact, I'm still supremely confident that you'll never ask, but here we go anyway.

First, my newly discovered favorite 4th of July tradition, the World Pillow Fighting Championships.

This might be the most frivolous lawsuit yet. And yet I'm somewhat hopeful that it will finally force a court to rule conclusively that astrology is a giant load of heifer feces, paving the way for hundreds of frivolous lawsuits against horoscope columnists.

File under 'deliciously appropriate if somewhat misguided.' A Chinese clinic uses electric shock therapy to cure internet addiction.

Tolerance and understanding is great and all, but some cultural differences will always be irreconcilable. How dare those Muslims ask the Belgian Speaker of Parliament not to serve alcohol with lunch?

This one may not impress you, but he's my newest hero. Over the weekend a Japanese man nearly doubled the current record for reciting pi from memory. Taking almost 24 hours, he recited pi to 83,431 decimal places.

To give you an idea of how astoundingly pointless this knowledge is, consider that knowing pi to 31 places would allow you to accurately calculate the circumference of the universe to within the width of one proton. Assuming, obviously, that you have the means to measure the radius of the universe with similar accuracy. For that you just need a ridiculouly enormous telescope, a damn good spectrometer and a really nice calculator. Or maybe one of those super-long tape measures like on TV.