This Week in WTF, August 21, 2015

– No points for good intentions: You have to admire the man’s sense of responsibility, although its belated nature does make it hard to be too sympathetic with his plight. I am referring, of course, to the man in Abbotsford, British Columbia who jumped into the back of what he thought was a taxi after concluding that he was too drunk to drive himself home (h/t Sean Robichaud).

There were two problems with this plan: (1) he came to the realization that he was too drunk to drive while he was driving; and (2) it was a police cruiser, not a cab.

Oops.

– To be fair, plush-animal technology has made huge advances in recent years: A 911 caller reported a live tiger on the loose, which turned out to be an extremely lifelike stuffed tiger. Not “stuffed” in a taxidermy sense, but “stuffed” in a normally-snuggly/cuddly sense.

By Monika Wahi (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

“Oh, sorry, is this your couch? I just needed to rest for a—hey, is that a stuffed antelope? Yum!”

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“Long Live the Riders of Roosevelt!”

This is why teddy bears are awesome:

Big GIF = slow loading

(h/t pokoshoko on Imgur)

I couldn’t find the video this comes from, but I found an animated short about a teddy bear who fights monsters, and a short about a boy with a monster under his bed (based on perhaps the scariest two-sentence short story ever.) (Videos are embedded below.) Continue reading

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Plush Terror from the Deep

I freely admit to having an above-average fondness for stuffed animals, at least among 39 year-old men, and I even have some rather unconventional examples. That said, I do have some limits.

To give you one example, a few weeks ago, my friend Paul posted a link to Facebook about the axolotl, an endangered salamander native to the lakes surrounding Mexico City. Partly inspired by this, I bought a mini squishable axolotl from Squishable.com, because while the axolotl is a strange and off-putting beast, it is also rather cute in its own proud way. See if you can spot which is which:

By th1098 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

axolotl

I also have a squishable Cthulhu. Don’t try to understand why—it would only drive you mad.

 

 

 

 

(I’m adding some polite space here because the next picture might be jarring otherwise.)

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of strange and off-putting beasts, this is a giant isopod, basically an oversized doodlebug that lives at the bottom of the ocean: Continue reading

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