Friday Snippets and Soundbites

We've had a long winter's nap here at "Snippets and Soundbites," but we're all rested it up and ready to kick off the first full weekend of 2011 with all the strange news we could find in this week's news coverage.

Ready to get a quirky start to your Friday with the news of the weird, including a phone that saves lives, raining birds, and a poor, poor snowman?

Let's go!

A phone that does EVERYTHING.
We all know that cell phones do everything under the sun this day. We're long past just making calls or texting with today's iPhones and Droids. And a nightclub employee in Atlanta now knows that his phone does something else: saves lives. Well, at least it saves one life, his. On Thursday night, the man was working as a parking attendant at a nightclub in Atlanta and things were going as usual. Two men had been ejected from the club, though, and when they came out onto the parking lot, shots were fired. The parking attendant was hit, but he had his cell phone in his jacket pocket. The bullet hit the phone before ricocheting off the man's chest, leaving him with only minor injuries. So the man was safe and the two men were arrested a short time later. To learn more, go here.

It's raining. . .birds.
You've probably heard this week that New Year's Eve in Beebe, Arkansas, didn't go quite as most residents had planned. That's because thousands of dead red-wing blackbirds fell from the sky and as of yet, no reason for the strange event has been discovered. An ornithologist (someone who studies birds) said that maybe fireworks or some other loud noise frightened a flock that roosts in the town and they flew into confusion, slamming into buildings and other obstacles. Others have wondered if weather, chemicals, or diseases could have played a role. The fireworks/loud noise theory appears to have some credence, though, as residents did report hearing loud booming sounds on New Years Eve, though no one quite knows what caused the booming noises. An initial examination of the birds led scientists to believe they all died from hemorrhages caused from flying into something very hard. In other seemingly unrelated events, there was a large fish kill in the Arkansas River and more birds fell out of the sky in Kentucky, Louisiana, and even Sweden this week. To learn more, go here.

What does he have against snowmen?
A bus driver in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, apparently just doesn't like snowmen. We say that because a video was posted on YouTube a few weeks ago of the driver running over a snowman built in the middle of the street. And it's not like the driver didn't have room to maneveur around the snowman. The video shows only the bus and one other car on the street on the University of Illinois campus. The car carefully drives around the snowman and minutes later, the bus slams into the snow creation. No one knows who built the snowman or shot the video, but transit authorities saw it on YouTube. And the driver? Well, he resigned from his job after the transit authorities saw the video. Learn more here. To see the video, go here.