Friday Snippets and Soundbites

Happy Friday! While the ec team is out of the office today taking part in Student Ministry Fun Day (a big gathering of all the people who work in any area of student ministry at LifeWay) and having a great time, we hope your Friday is off to a good start, too.

We want to help you celebrate the end of the school week with all the random news you can handle, so we've been scouring the Web for interesting news stories to confuse and befuddle you. We hope this week's edition of "Snippets and Soundbites" does just that.

And remember: if today's post doesn't contain enough news of the weird for you, check out page 38 in the September issue (and every other issue) of ec!

Ready? Let's get on with the show!

Nebraska's "toilet-paper" bandit pleads guilty.
No, we didn't make up that headline. It's the title of an actual news story we found this week. At first glance, we thought maybe it referred to a thief who only stole rolls of toilet paper. Then we read a little further. Apparently, the toilet-paper bandit is 29-year-old Joshua Nelson of Lincoln, Neb. He pleaded guilty to attempted robbery this week after prosecutors in Lincoln County District Court agreed to lower the charge and dismiss a weapons count. Nelson robbed a convenience store in Lincoln on April 24. He was armed with a knife and had concealed his face by wrapping it mummy-style in toilet paper. No one was hurt in the robbery, but Nelson faces up to 20 years in prison for the robbery. He will be sentenced on October 28. To learn more about this strange story, go here. 

Zucchini: the little known weapon.
Ever had zucchini? It's that green vegetable that looks kind of like a cucumber but tastes more like squash. And it's probably the vegetable you'd vote least likely to be used as a weapon, yet apparently a Montana woman recently used a veggie to fend off a bear. Yep. She used a zucchini to shoo away a charging bear. Here's what happened: the woman was awakened early Thursday morning by some noises in her backyard. She got up to investigate and found a 200-pound black bear attacking one of her pet collies. Trying to save her pet, the woman stood at her back door and screamed. This effectively took the bear's attention off the dog, but then the bear charged her. The bear swiped at the woman with its paw, ripping her jeans and tried to come inside the open door, so the woman grabbed whatever was closest to her on the kitchen corner. It happened to be a 12-inch-long zucchini she'd picked from her garden earlier in the day. She threw the veggie at the bear, striking it on the head. The bear then fled. The woman only sustained minor scratches that did not require medical attention, though she will be getting a tetanus shot just in case. Her dog didn't appear to have any bite wounds, but the woman plans to take him to the vet anyway. Learn more here.

What does that even say? 

Archaeologists say they've rediscovered a language no one has spoken since the 16th or 17th century at a Lima archaeological dig. The dig in northern Peru is near the city of Trujillo. The site is at the location of a collapsed church complex that had been inhabited by Dominican friars for two centuries. During the dig, archaeologists discovered a letter with a string of numbers and words in a strange language on the back. A recently released photo of the letter shows a column of numbers written in Spanish and translated into a language that scholars say is now extinct, but appears to be somehow related to Quechua, an ancient language still spoken throughout the Andes. The letter was discovered in 2008, but archaeologists kept it a secret until research showing evidence of the lost language was published in a journal this week. To learn more, go here.