Weird Week: Swearing vicar, naked unicyclist and monkey licker

By Scott McCartney
Published on 25/05/2012 15:15

Some of the stranger stories making the headlines this week

• When you hear about a holy man using the F-word and bragging about how much fun sin is, Jack Hackett from legendary comedy Father Ted springs to mind.

But alas, these statements came from a real-life man of God who has been forced to apologise for his odd posts on Facebook.

It was reported this week that Canon Paul Shackerley, Vicar of Doncaster, has been caught using unChristian language online.

As well as complaining about having to go to church every weekend, he recently posted: “I think I will put my feet up. I’ve done f**k all today other than jazz lesson and visit a friend. I hear the fizz of tonic in my gin beckoning.”

The incident has caused so much fuss that the Bishop of Doncaster has waded in and apologised to the congregation.

• Some say that it’s a miracle that the human race has evolved against all the odds since crawling out of a swamp all those millenia ago. But what if some members of society never made it out of that swamp?

A man in New York was nursing a bullet wound after begging his friend over and over to shoot him - just because he wanted to see what a gunshot felt like.

Shawn Mossow finally got sick of hearing his friend whinge on about how he wanted to be shot, and put a .22 caliber bullet in his right leg like he asked. Now that’s a true friend right there!

The “victim” is expected to make a full recovery, but Mossow was charged with reckless endangerment.

• How far would you go to save a friend’s life? What would you be willing to do? Anything? How about if your friend was a monkey at the zoo? Still anything?

How about if your monkey pal was facing death by constipation? Well according to Chinese zookeeper Zhang Bangsheng, the only way to save that monkey’s life was to lick its bum. For an hour.

The dedicated animal enthusiast tongued the rear end of a tiny francois langur monkey who was in danger of dying after eating a peanut it could not pass.

Well done sir. For saving that animal’s life, Zhang Bangsheng should be given a medal. And maybe a breath-freshening mint.

• Right, so you’ve just robbed an internet cafe. Before doing a runner you need to be sure you’ve thought of everything. Gun? Check! Cash? In the bag. Mask? Still on. Now, it looks like you’re going to make it out without being identified. One last thing: did you log out of Facebook? uhh . . . .

After two masked idiots in Colombia decided to knock off an internet cafe in Calima at gunpoint, police simply walked in afterwards, looked at the Facebook page on the computer one robber had been using before the heist, went round to his house and arrested him.

• A man was arrested in Texas for riding a unicycle naked. That’s not even the weird bit.

The strangest part was that Glynn Farley was sober when police arrested him for distracting drivers and creating a hazard.

Police said Farley was falling off the unicycle and into traffic, but his response was simply that he liked the feel of riding naked.

Farley was fined $1,500, and I really hope they burned that unicycle seat.

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