Oddity Central

Stolen Rubber Duck Returned to Family after Mysterious 5-Year-Long Globetrotting Adventure
This Man Is Cycling Across the UK from the Comfort of His Own Home
Trucker Finds Love after Texting Phone Number Scrawled on Public Toilet Wall

Stolen Rubber Duck Returned to Family after Mysterious 5-Year-Long Globetrotting Adventure

Posted: 15 Aug 2016 11:04 AM PDT

Five years after it was stolen from the yard of a home in the Hamptons and taken on an epic journey around the world, a large rubber duck has finally been returned to its rightful owners, although the mystery of who abducted it in the first place remains a mystery.

The large, yellow rubber duck came to the Troiano family about 10 years ago, when their daughter Alicia received as a gift from a neighbor for whom she babysat. She name it Baldie and enjoyed putting it in a makeshift pond that filled up on rainy days, as a lawn decoration. One day, five years ago, Baldie mysteriously disappeared, but the Troioanos didn’t think too much of it. At least not until a few months later when they received a postcard supposedly written by the ducky, postmarked from Kuwait City. In it, the rubber duck told the family of her travels to Amsterdam , Honduras and various other locations around the Middle East, instructing them to follow its travels on a Facebook page called “Gale Ducky”.

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Posted: 15 Aug 2016 09:28 AM PDT

Bored with his daily exercise bike routine, a crafty video game developer from the United Kingdom has come up with a way of spicing up the experience while enjoying the beauty of his country from the comfort of his own home.

Pedaling on an exercise bike may keep you in decent physical shape, but it can get pretty boring after a while. Aaron Puzey had been toiling away on his exercise bike for half an hour a day for years when he decided to look for a way to make it a bit more fun. With virtual reality technology widely available nowadays, all he needed to do was find a way of applying it to his needs. So he set out to build an app for the Samsung Galaxy Gear VR headset which would allow him to hook it up to Google Streetview and make it seem like he’s cycling through different real-life locations. His ultimate goal? To cycle the entire length of the UK – 1,500 kilometers from Land’s End to John o’ Groats – without actually leaving his home.

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Posted: 15 Aug 2016 07:40 AM PDT

It may not be the classic fairy-tale romance, but the story of how a British 51-year-old trucker met the love of his live is definitely one for the books. Believe it or not, he just found her number scrawled on the wall of a public toilet.

They say love happens when you least expect it, and that was certainly the case for Mark Ellis, a trucker from Brighhouse, West Yorkshire. He was on his way to meet his friends for a drink at a pub in Garfoth when he decided to stop at a public restroom. While going about his business, he noticed a raunchy message scrawled on one of the toilet walls – “If you want a good shag call Donna on . . . [phone number]”. Mark apparently founded very intriguing, because he ended up texting the mysterious number with the message “Hi. What are you up to?” “I was curious to know if it was a real human being,” he recently told The Sun newspaper. “We still laugh about it.”

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