Oddity Central

Oddity Central

Australian Town Completely Covered in Cobwebs after Millions of Spiders Rain from the Sky

Posted: 20 May 2015 01:14 AM PDT

Earlier this month, the residents of Goulburn – a small town in Australia's Southern Tablelands – were spooked to discover their properties blanketed by millions of tiny spiders and mounds of their silky threads. The spiders had apparently rained down from the sky, silken thread and all, a phenomenon known as “Angel Rain”.

"Anyone else experiencing this Angel Hair or maybe aka millions of spiders falling from the sky right now?" wrote resident Ian Watson on the Goulburn Community Forum Facebook page. "I’m 10 minutes out of town, and you can clearly see hundreds of little spiders floating along with their webs and my home is covered in them. Someone call a scientist!"

That sounds positively frightful, but experts say that arachnid rains are actually a natural phenomenon, and not as uncommon as you'd think. It is referred to as 'spider rain' or 'angel hair' in scientific circles, and is actually a form of spider transportation called 'ballooning'.

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The Shorter the Skirt the Cheaper the Meal at This Chinese Restaurant

Posted: 20 May 2015 12:21 AM PDT

In a bid to improve sales, a Chinese restaurant recently ran a special promotion – they offered discounts to female customers based on the length of their skirts. The shorter the skirt, the heavier the discount! The amount of skin-show upwards of the knee was measured upon arrival, and the discount percentage was determined accordingly.

The promotion, which ran all of last week at Yang Jia Hot Pot restaurant in Jinan, was a huge success. Hordes of women lined up outside the establishment, waiting to have their skirts measured. The highest hemline recorded was 13 inches above the knee, attracting a huge 90-percent discount. The lowest was at three inches, earning a 20 percent saving.

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Canadian Scientist Uses Small Iron Fish to Save Lives in Cambodia

Posted: 19 May 2015 11:39 PM PDT

When Canadian scientist Christopher Charles discovered six years ago how badly Cambodians were suffering from anemia, he decided to try and solve the problem. Unfortunately, tried-and-tested methods such as iron supplements and iron-rich diets didn't work because they weren't affordable. So he came up with the novel idea of using a small iron fish as a cooking ingredient!

The people Charles was working with were the poorest of the poor, and couldn't afford red meat or expensive iron pills. The women couldn't even switch to iron pots because they were too heavy and costly. "Some nights I wondered what I had got myself into; here I was in a village with no running water, no electricity and no way to use my computer — it was like a (research) baptism by fire," Charles recalled.

But inspiration struck eventually, and he decided that the best way cure anemia was to literally add iron to the food. "We knew some random piece of ugly metal wouldn't work . . . so we had to come up with an attractive idea," Charles said. Along with his research team, he came up with small, circular chunk of iron, but the women were hesitant to add it to their pots. They changed the prototype to a lotus shape, but the women didn't like that either. So Charles dug deeper into Cambodian history and culture, and decided upon a piece of iron shaped like a fish – a symbol of good luck in Cambodia. And it worked! Women were more than happy to add it to their cooking pots and follow Charles' instructions.

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