Friday Snippets and Soundbites

Hey, guys! It's Friday, which means—wait for it!—it's time for the blog edition of "Snippets and Soundbites." Ready for some random news stories from the past week? We've been hard at work, combing news sites and press releases to share some of the more, er, strange stuff that's been going on. Ready? Let's get the show on the road!

Graffiti? There's an app for that.

These days with all the smart phones and iPhone craziness, it seems like there's an app for everything. Counting calories. Getting to where you're going without getting lost. For finding recipes. And now, it seems, fighting back against graffiti. Yep, that's right. An L.A.-based company has created an iPhone app that allows cities to catalog graffiti, dispatch cleanup crews, and provide key evidence to police. Here's how it works: the app allows an iPhone user, whether a citizen or government official, to take a picture of the graffiti and send that photo to the company's database. The location is tagged using the phone's GPS capabilities, a worker is notified, and he or she goes out to paint over the graffiti. The images of graffiti are catalogued and mapped to help police track down suspects and build stronger cases. The app is already in use in Tuscon, Ariz., where police officials say it's a great tool in their fight to keep their city graffiti-free. To way more about the app than you ever wanted to know, go here.

Bringing business to life

You expect a certain kind of behavior from a funeral home, right? Quiet, respectable, efficient, caring. Funeral homes just aren't the place to go for a rollicking good time, right? Well, one mortuary in Massachusetts is ready to challenge our concept of what a good funeral home should be. Devanny-Condron Funeral Home in Pittsfield, Mass., is planning a series of events that Terry Probst, the new managing partner, says are designed to bring life to the business and remind people that the funeral home is a center for community life. (Huh?) On the calendar: a chili cook-off, a murder-mystery show, and free limo rides for couples on their 50th wedding anniversary. We're not sure what to think about all that. If you'd like to read more about the mortuary's plans and other events in the works, go here.

Steer the course!
A lot of things can happen when you're driving. It's why your parents and the government have so many rules about what you can and can't do while driving (listen the radio, text, etc.). But for an Arlington, Wash., man what went wrong when he was driving was completely unexpected. That's because his steering wheel just popped off. Yep. Popped off. Think about that. The man was driving his 1978 Buick on Thursday afternoon when his steering wheel came off. His car left the road, went down an embankment, up the other side, and crashed into a barn. He narrowly missed hitting a power pole and several small barns at a local dairy farm. He suffered only minor neck pain, a miracle indeed. The damage at the farm isn't quite so minor: the car destroyed the farm's refrigeration and milking area and happened right as 140 cows were about to be milked. To learn more, go here.

As always, if this wasn't enough randomness and weird news for you, check out page 38 in this month's (and every month's) issue of ec.