This week in odd news: Women rescued from unicorn raft, restaurant busted for tarantula tacos

Minnesota deputies rescue women stranded on unicorn raft

STARK, Minn. (AP) — It was not a fairy tale, but a rescue on a Minnesota lake did involve a rainbow unicorn.

A sheriff's deputy and a reserve deputy from the Chisago County Sheriff's Office spotted a group of five women on a large, inflatable rainbow unicorn floating on Fish Lake on Saturday.

KMSP-TV reports the deputies pulled their squad car over and asked the women for a photo, but noticed the raft was stuck in weeds.

Driving by a local lake we observed a bunch of women in a 🌈🦄 stuck in the weeds...Yes a rainbow unicorn... With a handful of laughs and some mad rescue roping skills they were pulled back to the dock! #wherestheglitter pic.twitter.com/qCyhfJqAa9

— Chisago Co Sheriff (@ChisagoCountySO) August 11, 2018

One deputy threw a rope to the women while the other recorded a video . The sheriff's office tweeted: "With a handful of laughs and some mad rescue roping skills, they were pulled back to the dock!"

Deputy Scotty Finnegan threw the rope. He says the women would have had trouble getting out of the mucky lake unassisted.

Ogden man designs bikes that are a little sketchy, scary

OGDEN, Utah (AP) — It's easy to find someone with a love for bicycles in Utah, but Mark Johnson looks at cycling a little different than most.

"I want to ride a bike that's kind of dangerous, that's a little sketchy, that's a little scary," said Johnson.

This hunt for a treacherous bike is what led to Johnson riding around Central Ogden on a summer afternoon atop a giant steel and scrap-metal tricycle known as "The Mastodon." The contraption is just the latest homemade set of wheels that he has built for UpCycle: Bikes and Boards. Johnson hopes to start a business taking old bikes and scraps and rebuilding them into rideable pieces of art.

On Tuesday, Aug. 8, the Mastodon was circling outside of the Ogden Bicycle Collective, a non-profit bike shop. Johnson came by the shop to use the shared tools and community work benches. After a recent crash on the bike, he was looking to straighten the 4 foot long front forks and find new handlebars.

Johnson is built like a jiu-jitsu instructor — which he is — with sleeve tattoos, a greying beard and a tight knot of dreadlocks. While focused on the technical aspects of repairing the Mastodon, he also has an infectious laugh as he and the shop mechanics try to figure out ways to repair a bike that is unlike any other.

"You never know what he's going to come in with," said J.P. Orquiz, the head mechanic at the collective. On this day, some repairs could be done with a single wrench, while others involved Orquiz and Johnson standing on the bike and using scraps they found around the shop to try and bend the frame.

"Every time I come in here, I borrow some tool that they have to dust off," said Johnson.

When he first came up with the idea for UpCycle, Johnson says he quickly had another realization: "I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

After a little digging, he found out about the Thursday night bicycle mechanic classes held at the collective. Along with the experience he gained at the classes, the shop also became a source for recycled bike parts and frames. That knowledge and raw materials are now being combined into not only the Mastodon, but other UpCycle machines like "the dog bike," ''the surf bike" and "the murder bike."

"They're unique," said Johnson. "Not everyone has a bike like that. Actually, not everyone wants a bike like that."

Johnson's moving sculptures are built for adults, but he describes the designs as ideas that would scare his mother mixed with childlike creativity. The Mastodon, for example, comes from a melding of his own ideas and inspiration from his 9-year-old son's drawings of prehistoric animals.

"When you're a kid, you have all of these ideas that we kind of mash down because we're trying to be adults. The ideas are still there. They're just buried. I try to dig up the old stuff," said Johnson.

Officially, Johnson wants UpCycle to be a formal business, but he doesn't have much concern about the actual business side of it. His current goal is to have 20 rigs ready to sell next year at Ogden's farmers market. If he sells those bikes, he'll start looking at plans to expand.

"If they don't sell," said Johnson, "then I'll have 20 bikes and that's awesome. Either way, it's win-win."

— By BENJAMIN ZACK, Standard-Examiner

Information from: Standard-Examiner, http://www.standard.net

Mexico City restaurant busted over protected tarantula tacos

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Fancy a tarantula taco for a cool $27? Not so fast, Mexican authorities say.

A Mexico City market restaurant recently put the arachnids on its menu and posted a video on Facebook showing a chef torching one until blackened.

The only problem: The Mexican red rump tarantula is a protected species.

The federal environmental protection agency said Tuesday it was alerted to the situation via social media and seized four tarantula corpses that were ready to be served up on tortillas.

The tarantula tacos were apparently on offer for 500 pesos, or 50 times the price of a basic street taco.

The restaurant's menu also features other creepy-crawlies such as grasshoppers, worms and ant eggs, which have a long tradition in Mexican cuisine, and scorpions, which are less common.

Heat wave put flamingos in the mood for 1st time in 15 years

LONDON (AP) — A British conservation charity says record-breaking temperatures have encouraged a rare flock of Andean flamingos to lay eggs for the first time since 2003.

The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust says six of the exotic birds laid nine eggs, all of which were infertile. The charity's reserve in Gloucestershire in southwest England then gave the Andean flamingos eggs from near-relatives, Chilean flamingos, to look after.

Mark Roberts, the aviculture manager at the Slimbridge reserve, says "with the Andeans in full parenting mode, we gave them Chilean chicks to bring up as their own. It's great motivation and enriching for the birds."

The Andeans are some of the oldest animals at the trust's Slimbridge reserve. Some arrived in the 1960s as adults. The birds are long-lived and can breed into old age.

Mooning case against Virginia softball coach's wife wanes

FLOYD, Va. (AP) — The moon over Virginia was half-visible that May evening, as was the one on the softball field, authorities say.

The Roanoke Times reports 57-year-old Debbie L. McCulley is accused of mooning the stands, but a judge Thursday said the indecent exposure charge could be dropped.

McCulley's husband coaches Glenvar High School junior varsity softball. A Floyd County sheriff's deputy's report says McCulley took the field after a loss to Floyd County High School and exposed her right butt cheek. McCulley said she thought the other coach was going to attack her husband, so she refocused attention.

Prosecutor Eric Branscom says McCulley has written an apology and will perform community service. Branscom says McCulley will likely have the charge dismissed or receive a suspended sentence at a February administrative hearing.

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Information from: The Roanoke Times, http://www.roanoke.com

University honors students who found love in elevator in '72

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Philadelphia's Temple University is honoring a 45-year relationship sparked in a campus elevator.

Sharyn Rubin and Eric Schlesinger briefly met on move-in day on Sept. 6, 1972, while she was moving in and he was operating a dorm building elevator. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports Rubin formally introduced herself a few days later at a college mixer, walking up to Schlesinger and saying, "Hi, Mr. Elevator Man."

The quote is now affixed to the elevator, which will be named for Shari Rubin Schlesinger on Friday.

She died last year from colon cancer. She and her Elevator Man had been married for more than 42 years.

Eric Schlesinger says meeting his future wife in the elevator was "the most important thing" that happened to him at Temple.

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Information from: The Philadelphia Inquirer, http://www.inquirer.com

Plane narrowly misses van crossing runway for barbecue

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — A jetliner taking off narrowly missed hitting an airport van that crossed a runway to go to an employee barbecue.

The Envoy Air jet, with 50 passengers and 3 crew members aboard, was taking off on June 27 from Missouri's Springfield-Branson National Airport. Video shows the van cleared the jet's path with seconds to spare.

A report obtained by the Springfield News-Leader shows the van's driver said he decided to cross the runway to make the barbeque in time. He said a ground controller had cleared him to cross Runway 14, but halfway across he saw the plane coming down the runway.

The airport on Wednesday issued a statement that an internal review is underway and the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.

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Information from: Springfield News-Leader, http://www.news-leader.com

Baby boom at Arizona hospital with 16 pregnant nurses

MESA, Ariz. (AP) — A baby boom is brewing at a suburban Arizona hospital where 16 intensive care nurses recently discovered they are all pregnant.

The nurses at Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa outside Phoenix joked Friday they thought there was something in the water when it became clear they were all expecting babies between October and January.

Nurse Rochelle Sherman, nearly eight months along, said: "I don't think we realized just how many of us were pregnant until we started a Facebook group."

Nurse Jolene Garrow joked, "We all formulated this plan to have the holidays off!"

Garrow said that as their pregnancies have progressed, the patients have begun noticing that most of the nurses around them are expecting. One patient insisted on touching her belly the night before, she said.

Garrow added that their non-pregnant colleagues have been great at helping with patients they should not be exposed to because of conditions or treatments that are potentially dangerous for expectant women, such as tuberculosis or shingles or chemotherapy because of the radiation.

But Ashley Adkins worried that the other nurses are getting tired of their pregnancy-focused conversations.

"They just roll their eyes!" she laughed. "More baby talk!"

Hospital officials noted that the Banner medical center chain has a pool of floating nurses that should ensure shifts are covered when their ICU nursing specialists begin taking their 12-week maternity leaves starting in the fall.

The nurses said their colleagues are throwing a group baby shower next week.

The hospital on Friday gave the women one-piece rompers reading, "Relax! My mom is a Banner nurse!"

— By ANITA SNOW, Associated Press