“First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.” – Steve Martin

I must apologize for my absence yesterday, but quite frankly, I had better things to do.  Haha.  Seriously though, the penance for my blogless day involved driving the cell-phone signal no-man’s land that is highway 41 in the dark.  Furry creatures with marble eyes scurried to and fro in front of us.  Porcupines threatened to puncture our radiator with their menacing quills.  And, of course, it was so very boring.  And long.  And did I tell you it was boring?

Well, we did make it home.  Finally.  And I now must present you with the daily blog fix that you have been waiting for–

1)  Japanese researchers have found a solution to a problem that I didn’t even know I had.  Apparently, I have experienced a great deal of frustration surrounding the storage of my round fruits.  It seems that I have also had great difficulty slicing said objects.  Thank God they pointed this out because now I really want to buy the product they are pushing…square watermelons.

Yup.  You heard me right.  Forget curing cancer or solving the word’s hunger problem.  We have bigger fish to fry…melons are rolling around willy-nilly in the bottom of fridge’s all over the globe!  What if one of these giant orbs accidentally squishes the Wonderbread?

Using tempered glass boxes, scientists have managed to alter the shape of the watermelon without compromising its quality.  The only problem is that when these babies first rolled (oh ya, they can’t do that anymore) into Japanese supermarkets in 2001, they cost the equivalent of $83 US.  I think at that price you could afford to replace the squashed Wonderbread.

2)  Okay, this is the strangest piece of information that I have come across yet.  It made me laugh and cringe at the same time.  And, according to Snopes, it’s true.

In 1997, a huge tug-of-war was held in a Taipei park to celebrate Retrocession Day.  1600 people pulled with all their might on a 5 cm thick, nylon rope.  They should have known a disaster was likely to happen.  The rope snapped with tremendous force, taking with it a pair of arms.  No really.  Two men each had an arm torn off just below the shoulder.

Thankfully, both arms were returned to their owners during 7 hours of surgery.

3)  I don’t know if this is new or if up until now, I have been the world’s least observant person, but there is a stretch of the 401 between Belleville and Kingston that is a manufacturer’s road paint test strip.  On our way back from Newmarket yesterday, we kept seeing signs forewarning us of “test paint strips.”  My husband and I obviously aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box because we both looked at each other with dumb, blank looks on our faces and said in unison, “what the hell does that mean?”  Well, we received our answer a few metres later–in techno-colour.

While this picture shows drivers off to one side, forbidden from driving on the psychedelic markings, we had the privilege of running right over them.  Plus, not all of these strips are tidy, horizontal lines as shown here.  That would be too boring to mention (although maybe this is still too boring to mention).  There were dots and slashes and vertical lines too.  I, of course, have to wonder what effect these would have on an illiterate (thus unable to read the explanatory signs) person at night.  Would they think they had fallen asleep at the wheel and had somehow wound up driving onto a banquet hall’s carpeting?  (I’m sorry, but those places really do seem to have the ugliest prints on the floor).