• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

Naughty_Felid said:
I read that as "urban cows around here are having trouble foraging too"...
Click to expand...
My mum and dad lived down a quiet "country" lane in what was largely an urban area. They would often wake up to find a small herd of cows in the front garden. Quite what drew these cows to their garden was unfathomable, since there wasn't much to munch on.
 
captain_bats said:
I was sitting around ....(etc)....mysterious scratch.....(etc)
Click to expand...

I wonder if you have checked the following;
New pillow? Feather pillows have a tendency to have the feathers 'poke through' and the shafts of the ones that do manage to poke through are quite sharp, like little needles.
Damaged chair or mattress? A part of a damaged spring or protruding staple could cause a small injury.
And the only other thing I could think of - injuries caused while experiencing some sort of seizure that you have been unaware of?

(A mate of mine was epileptic and completely unaware of it until he regained consciousness after 'fitting' one day in a pub garden, with about a dozen people and ambulance staff around him.)
 
Trevp666 said:
And the only other thing I could think of - injuries caused while experiencing some sort of seizure that you have been unaware of?

(A mate of mine was epileptic and completely unaware of it until he regained consciousness after 'fitting' one day in a pub garden, with about a dozen people and ambulance staff around him.)
Click to expand...

Spot-on. I believe a lot of 'unexplained' incidents can be put down to mild or undiagnosed epilepsy.
For various work-related and personal reasons I know a lot about epilepsy. When reading about people's weird experiences I sometimes think 'Aha, I bet I know what really went on there!'

It is much more common than people think; partly, I feel, because it's hard to talk about (in the UK at least) without risking possibly one's job and certainly their driving licence.
We have at least one thread on it.
 
I knew another guy who was (yikes) one of the van drivers at a company I worked for, and he had undiagnosed epilepsy (undiagnosed until several years after this incident)
One day his van had to be recovered from the middle of a large field, next to the M25, after careering off an adjacent approach road, through a hedge and fence, continuing down an embankment and coming to rest in the ploughed ground.
He said he had been forced off the road by a vehicle coming around a bend on the wrong side of the road, but looking back, I suspect more that he had had a seizure.
 
Trevp666 said:
I knew another guy who was (yikes) one of the van drivers at a company I worked for, and he had undiagnosed epilepsy (undiagnosed until several years after this incident)
One day his van had to be recovered from the middle of a large field, next to the M25, after careering off an adjacent approach road, through a hedge and fence, continuing down an embankment and coming to rest in the ploughed ground.
He said he had been forced off the road by a vehicle coming around a bend on the wrong side of the road, but looking back, I suspect more that he had had a seizure.
Click to expand...

Sounds very likely! If so he wouldn't remember the accident and might have been puzzled himself by it, if he didn't know about the epilepsy.

Someone I used to know had a seizure in a supermarket, apparently out of the blue. He'd had fainting incidents before and I was sure this was epilepsy, possibly from a serious childhood head injury.

The A&E doctor told him to inform the DVLA himself but he didn't and it still driving.
I just hope nobody else gets killed if/when he blacks out and meets that brick wall.
 
A woman was found in the woods about a mile from home,
she was unconscious and appeared to have suffered a violent
assault, Her husband was arrested, it wasent till she came round
3 days later it was found that she had a epileptic fit, and poor old
hubby was released.
 
RaM said:
A woman was found in the woods about a mile from home,
she was unconscious and appeared to have suffered a violent
assault, Her husband was arrested, it wasent till she came round
3 days later it was found that she had a epileptic fit, and poor old
hubby was released.
Click to expand...

How awful. I suspect there are many more incidents like this.
 
PeteS said:
My mum and dad lived down a quiet "country" lane in what was largely an urban area. They would often wake up to find a small herd of cows in the front garden. Quite what drew these cows to their garden was unfathomable, since there wasn't much to munch on.
Click to expand...

Their milk shale brought all the cows to the yard???

I'll get my coat...
 
Minor strangeness as I drove back from work...
Torrential rain, punctuated by lightning. I even saw a groundstrike less than a mile ahead.
However... there was no thunder at all. Most of this lightning was near me, but I heard no noise.
I seem to recall somebody else here mentioning something like this recently.

I can't think of a ready explanation.
 
Trevp666 said:
I wonder if you have checked the following;
New pillow? Feather pillows have a tendency to have the feathers 'poke through' and the shafts of the ones that do manage to poke through are quite sharp, like little needles.
Damaged chair or mattress? A part of a damaged spring or protruding staple could cause a small injury.
And the only other thing I could think of - injuries caused while experiencing some sort of seizure that you have been unaware of?

(A mate of mine was epileptic and completely unaware of it until he regained consciousness after 'fitting' one day in a pub garden, with about a dozen people and ambulance staff around him.)
Click to expand...

I've just had a check of my bed/pillows/chair: nothing sharp to report. I have no reason to think I've had a seizure.

I do wonder how long the scratch might have been there before I felt the tingling sensation. If it had been there earlier in the day, it might have happened when I was at, or travelling to, work somehow. I can't even remember if I was at work that day now, though.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Minor strangeness as I drove back from work...
Torrential rain, punctuated by lightning. I even saw a groundstrike less than a mile ahead.
However... there was no thunder at all. Most of this lightning was near me, but I heard no noise.
I seem to recall somebody else here mentioning something like this recently.

I can't think of a ready explanation.
Click to expand...

According to livescience, it's not possible to have lightning without thunder - it's a direct effect of lightning. If you don't hear thunder it means the thunder is too far away.
 
hunck said:
According to livescience, it's not possible to have lightning without thunder - it's a direct effect of lightning. If you don't hear thunder it means the thunder is too far away.
Click to expand...
One night when I was still living in Hebden Bridge, I was lying in bed, trying to get to sleep. I began to notice strange, bluish-hued flashes on the ceiling. We lived in an end-terrace abutting the canal, so had windows on 3 sides. My first thought was that some miscreant had bought some non-organic dairy yoghurt or something, so the police were mounting a stake-out, but no, apparently all was well on that score.

Then I looked out over the canal. There was a solitary cloud floating serenely along, not too far above the ridge on that side of the valley. At frequent intervals - not quite constant, but not far off - it was lit from within by what I can only assume was lightning. There were no ground strikes, nor - and this is the detail that has stuck with me - was there any thunder. In fact, there was a preternatural silence.

So I watched as whatever locus geni or local deity it was inside this spectral palanquin made its stately way down the valley, and nature stilled in respect. And then, suitably awed, I went back to bed.
 
Most often the impression of lightning without thunder results from (a) misjudging the distance between you and a visible apparent strike and / or (b) mistaking a completely airborne (e.g., cloud-to-cloud) flash as a ground strike. However ...

It's possible for atmospheric conditions to attenuate the sound of thunder, even to the point one hears little or nothing in the wake of a visible ground strike. A blast of thunder is basically a coherent shock wave within circa 10m of the strike point, reducing in intensity / coherence to loud sound waves farther out. As with any sound, the received intensity and impact is dependent upon the medium through which the sound travels.

The most radical situation (which I've witnessed myself) occurs when lightning occurs at a well-defined boundary between two air masses of quite different temperatures (e.g., a starkly delineated advancing cold front). The temperature boundary can serve as a sort of filter or barrier across which sound doesn't cleanly pass from one side to the other. I've seen an approaching storm front with lots of lightning no more than
a half-mile distant from which I couldn't hear any thunder until the frontal boundary reached and enveloped my position.

Heavy rain (or snow, in the case of thundersnow) can attenuate thunder to the point all you hear is a low rumble or even less. Sound transmission can also be affected by winds which are flowing the transmitting medium in any direction other than toward you.

Finally, there's the possible influence of ambient sounds. You (Mytho) wrote that you were driving home. The ambient car / road / rain noise probably helped to mask any thunder.
 
A few months ago there were some spectacular thunderstorms in the English Midlands. I sat watching a storm that was about 60 miles away, couldn't hear any thunder, and if I hadn't looked up the storm on a radar weather map I could well have thought it was much closer. We wouldn't normally be able to see a storm that far up the Severn vale but in this instance we had very calm, clear, dry weather where we were and therefore had spectacular visibility allowing us to see the distant storm.
 
Krepostnoi said:
One night when I was still living in Hebden Bridge, I was lying in bed, trying to get to sleep. I began to notice strange, bluish-hued flashes on the ceiling. We lived in an end-terrace abutting the canal, so had windows on 3 sides. My first thought was that some miscreant had bought some non-organic dairy yoghurt or something, so the police were mounting a stake-out, but no, apparently all was well on that score.

Then I looked out over the canal. There was a solitary cloud floating serenely along, not too far above the ridge on that side of the valley. At frequent intervals - not quite constant, but not far off - it was lit from within by what I can only assume was lightning. There were no ground strikes, nor - and this is the detail that has stuck with me - was there any thunder. In fact, there was a preternatural silence.

So I watched as whatever locus geni or local deity it was inside this spectral palanquin made its stately way down the valley, and nature stilled in respect. And then, suitably awed, I went back to bed.
Click to expand...
Light playing on the walls and ceilings of a bedroom can be particularly spooky. A strange perfectly circular orb of light about three inches in diameter appears on the far wall of our bedroom at dawn. It disappears then reappears and travels across the wall. Took a while to work out what it was. The low sun shines through the large circular curtain ferrules, and even though these are not parallel to the window even when the curtains are closed, the angle makes a perfect circle on the far wall when sunlight shines through. Either that or we've got a pretty slow witted poltergeist.
 
RaM said:
A woman was found in the woods about a mile from home,
she was unconscious and appeared to have suffered a violent
assault, Her husband was arrested, it wasent till she came round
3 days later it was found that she had a epileptic fit, and poor old
hubby was released.
Click to expand...
I wonder though how though the injuries from suffering a fit in woodland could be identified as the result of a violent assault. Not much CSI going on there I suspect, and I wonder on what grounds hubby was arrested. A strange one indeed, RaM.
 
It's a few years ago, and I can't remember any other details, I think it came via the local paper but not sure,
it did seem strange at the time, firstly not a lot of violence happens round here and at the time we didn't
get a lot of people from out of the area knocking about, the woods are very quiet so it was unusual.
When it came out that the injuries were the result of a fit I did wonder how such a mistake could be made
but they can be very violent so maybe not.
 
PeteS said:
I wonder though how though the injuries from suffering a fit in woodland could be identified as the result of a violent assault. Not much CSI going on there I suspect, and I wonder on what grounds hubby was arrested. A strange one indeed, RaM.
Click to expand...

If she'd had a seizure when walking through the wood, on a shortcut home perhaps, she might have fallen hard headfirst onto the path or against a tree. Accidental facial injuries can look brutal and her husband would be the obvious suspect.
 
escargot said:
If she'd had a seizure when walking through the wood, on a shortcut home perhaps, she might have fallen hard headfirst onto the path or against a tree. Accidental facial injuries can look brutal and her husband would be the obvious suspect.
Click to expand...
But surely there must be some evidence of husband's involvement for an arrest. Probably a bit more to the story eh?
 
captain_bats said:
I was sitting around the other night when I felt a strange, tingling, slightly scratchy, 'sensitive' (best word I can think to describe it) sensation on my upper back. I thought it was the tag in my t-shirt scratching me, but when I reached back there I discovered that there was no tag in my t-shirt. I shrugged my shoulders and went to bed.

The sensation lingered the next day, so I checked it out in the mirror to discover an approximately 4" long, perfectly horizontal scratch between my shoulder blades....
Click to expand...
I, too, have experienced this on and off over the years, and have recently found a few such scratches on my back. While I won't totally dismiss the possibility of scratching myself with my nails in my sleep - my wife's theory - I don't think they're sharp enough. One recent scratch seems to be in an area that gets a few folds in the skin when I sleep in a certain position, so I wonder if trapped sweat, possibly combined with detergent or shampoo residue, may be irritating my skin in a linear way.
 
PeteS said:
But surely there must be some evidence of husband's involvement for an arrest. Probably a bit more to the story eh?
Click to expand...

There only needs to be suspicion for an arrest.
If, say, the wife were found injured on the footpath some time after she'd be expected back from work, but the husband hadn't reported her missing because, he says, he'd assumed she'd gone shopping or visited her sister on way home, that might look unusual to a cynical policeman.

A little communication breakdown can cause all sorts of trouble.
I once chatted at work with a policeman who'd had to deliver the death notification to the wife of a man who'd died in an accident on his way to work. The wife flatly refused to believe him as, she said, Hubby was still asleep in bed. She went upstairs to wake him up so he could tell this silly policeman he'd got it wrong.

A couple of minutes later she came back down in a state of shock. No sign of Hubby or his work clothes.
He'd been offered some overtime and had sneaked out very early without disturbing her. She had no idea, and now he was dead.
 
hunck said:
According to livescience, it's not possible to have lightning without thunder - it's a direct effect of lightning. If you don't hear thunder it means the thunder is too far away.
Click to expand...
Except that I saw a groundstrike that appeared to be nearby.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Except that I saw a groundstrike that appeared to be nearby.
Click to expand...

Well either you've witnessed something weird or the storm from which the lightning originated was too far away to produce a sound you could hear.

As Enola says above, there are various reasons why sound travel may be affected. And you were driving - that would produce ambient sound which could be louder than the distant thunder.
 
I heard birdsong coming out of the air vent in my Office today - not too surprising, I've been under a lot of stress recently. As I walked down the corridor to the Gents, the song got louder (rich and polyphonic) but each time I stopped to locate the source, the noise stopped. Ipso facto I must have been the source. Sure enough a screw hook had punctured the sole of my trainer when walking to Work, water had got in and I started to squelch. When the shoe had dried out a bit, the squelch transformed itself into the voice of nightingales.
 
Bad Bungle said:
I heard birdsong coming out of the air vent in my Office today - not too surprising, I've been under a lot of stress recently. As I walked down the corridor to the Gents, the song got louder (rich and polyphonic) but each time I stopped to locate the source, the noise stopped. Ipso facto I must have been the source. Sure enough a screw hook had punctured the sole of my trainer when walking to Work, water had got in and I started to squelch. When the shoe had dried out a bit, the squelch transformed itself into the voice of nightingales.
Click to expand...

This morning on my bike ride a car went past me making a whooping/whistling noise. Thinking someone was leaning out of it to take the piss I quickly prepared a torrent of invective, but it disappeared up the hill with no further mockery.

When I was waiting to turn right it came back again, making the same sound. It was the turbo heat exchange. Must admit I was disappointed.
 
This is at third hand, but the sources are impeccable (via my wife, from her mother):

The MIL has an allotment in Ayrshire, which she is giving up. Within the last few days she took home from the allotment a large-ish pot full of chives, which she wanted to keep and pot on.

On digging into the pot, she found it to be pot-bound, i.e. a tightly-woven mass of roots. ln the centre of said mass, she found an egg, which she describes as “like a hen’s egg”, which l take to mean in appearance and dimensions. She threw the egg into a bin, where it cracked, revealing exactly what one would imagine you’d find in a hen’s egg apparently, i.e. yolk & white, all liquid and fresh-looking.

My wife’s (and my) first thought: grass snake, but a quick Google reveals that the laying/hatching season ended months ago.

maximus otter
 
Last edited:
It could be a wood pigeon. They're sometimes laid on the ground and I've found one or two when I've been lifting potatoes in the garden. Some predators will bury them. Pigeon eggs are smooth and white. They're smaller than hen's eggs and don't have a pointy end.
 
I was on my way into work this morning; parked up, got out of the car and opened the top pocket of my rucksack to remove my card and lanyard - they've been there since I left work on Thursday. Only - there are three points at which my card holder can attach to the lanyard, a long one in the top middle and two small ones either side of it. Somehow the lanyard was attached to the left-hand small hole, which made it hang askew - but I would NEVER wear it like that, it would offend me. The clasp linking the two was properly shut, so it was unlikely to have just slipped from one hole into the other, and who would have been fiddling with it anyway when it had spent all weekend tucked away? That gave me something to contemplate on my walk across to the building.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top