Friday Snippets and Soundbites

It's the last weekend of January, and we can't wait to round-up this week's news of the weird. We've got everything from a stray lizard to a car encased in ice in this week's news stories.

Ready to get this weekend started off right? Let's go!

The mystery of the grand piano: SOLVED!

Earlier this week, news sites all over the Internet were abuzz with the mystery of a grand piano that mysteriously appeared on a sandbar in Miami's Biscayne Bay. The piano was placed on the highest point of the sandbar so that it wouldn't be submerged when the tide came up. Theories abounded about how the piano got there and many people tried to take credit, but the mystery came to a close yesterday: 16-year-old Nicholas Harrington put the piano there and he has the whole thing on video. Harrington, his older brother, and two neighbors took the piano out to the sandbar on January 2 on the family's boat and left it there. Harrington doesn't like to call the escapade a prank, since his intent was to create an experience for boaters. It was also something he thought made help me get into a prestigious art school. The piano was an old movie prop (Harrington's dad is a production designer) that had been burned during a neighborhood New Year's Eve party. Harrington says he would have preferred to leave the whole thing as a mystery and had intended to remain anonymous (except for including the photos in his college application). But then the story went viral and others began taking responsibility. The piano has now been removed. To read more about this mystery, go here.

Out for a stroll

Residents in a Riverside, Calif., condo complex were in for a surprise earlier this week when they noticed a stray (nope, not a dog) monitor lizard ambling down the sidewalk of the complex. The lizard was so big that it even scared the animal services officer called in to do something about the 5-foot-long lizard. "She said she saw it and almost jumped back in her truck," said John Welsh, spokesman for Riverside County Animal Services. "The residents were freaking out because here's the Godzilla-like creature walking down the sidewalk." The officer used a catch pole (a long pole with a loop on the end) to catch the animal, which seemed calm at first, then started hissing. Black-throated Monitor lizards are carnivorous, legal to own in California and native to the African grasslands and parts of Asia. Young lizards generally cost about $100 in pet stores. Because this lizard is so big, the animal control officers think it was probably someone's pet and might have escaped its cage or gotten loose while the owner was gone. They're holding the animal at a local animal shelter with the hopes the owner will claim it soon. To learn more, go here.

It's an iceberg! No, it's a car!

And we'll just leave you today with this video of a New York man's car:


If today's online edition of the news of the weird just isn't enough for you, please check out page 38 in this month's (and every month's) issue of ec!