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Health & Fitness

Don't Believe Me? Just Check It Out For Yourself!

In the search for truth that is stranger than fiction, I uncover facts like: Our country is exporting a record amount gasoline. We exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported .

I get a lot of information emailed to me all the time.

Facts, stories, news releases, crime reports, snippets of all kinds are sent my way. Many of these are bizarre enough that I will research and verify it with sites like Snopes, Urban Legend, Man-Myth-Legend, Tech Republic, SPIN, CNN, FBI, etc.

Recently I got a story about a British company, appropriately called Captive Media, apparently they have come up with an electronic game for men who get bored staring at the wall while using stand-up urinals in restaurants, bars and pubs. It’s a “hands free’’ video game with monitors mounted over the ceramic bowls. Guys aim at specific points, and an infrared device records where the pee-pee strikes. The games offered include various sports challenges and a multiple-choice general intelligence quiz. But it’s 100 percent true.

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Then there is the fact that the U.S. Postal Service, whose origins date back to the mid 1600s, is on the verge of bankruptcy. To avert that they are going to slow the arrival of mail even further, closely resembling the delivery of the Pony Express. They are closing 250 of the 500 mail processing centers nationwide by March. They will be consolidating their efforts, but will not be letting go of employees. This is the current solution to that of reducing mail delivery to only fives days a week, which they claim will not ever need to happen if this works.   

Now the last time I heard something so ridiculous, the news agencies were vehemently telling me that the Y2K Bug was going to crash all computers and electronics with timers and send us into a cataclysmic disaster of darkness and failures of unparalleled worldwide proportions when the year turned 2000. You know what happened? Nothing! But there was an almost Earth-wide panic leading up to the event that proved to be a hoax of immense proportions or grandiose miscalculation.

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However, there are a few things that I have recently heard about and I am in the process of checking out their validity. So here is a list of Wild Bill’s Believe It or Nots for the month of December.

  • They now give the new Citizenship & Naturalization Test for the United States of America...in Spanish.
  • The New York Mets are currently paying Bobby Bonilla, 1 million dollars a year for the next 24 years, to stay home and NOT play baseball.
  • Sonic restaurants actually have a designated “Happy Hour” with daily drink discounts...but they only serve non-alcoholic beverages.
  • After a substitute teacher overheard 9-year-old Boston student tell another student that the teacher was “cute” repeatedly, so school officials put him on two-day suspension for sexual harassment.
  • Mele-Ka-Liki-Maka is Hawaiian for “Merry Christmas” and  Mele-Ka-Liki-Maki is a pickled leek fish sushi.
  • A Zimbabwean man fainted when the prostitute he ordered up, turned out to be his own 20-year-old daughter.
  • Residents of a tiny town in Maine, dependent on the fishing industry and near the Canadian border, line up and pucker up for an eight-foot sardine sculpture that drops at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.
  • A Portland teen survived in the wilderness using tips he saw on the TV show Man vs. Wild. He spent 10 hours outside in below-freezing temperatures, by building a snow bank to say warm till help arrived.
  • Two teen boys who hugged each other hello were suspended from Palm Bay Southwest Middle School for violating a policy against public displays of affection.
  • Neil Diamond wrote the song “Solitary Man” after painstakingly observing the entire audience full of women at his first concert at Radio City Music Hall in 1965.
  • Quviasukvik is the Inuit Indian word for the Christmas celebration, while the word “Eskimo” is a horrible racial slur towards Inuit Indians and is actually on the scale of The ‘N’ Word

There are some you blog reader/responders that seem to be professional naysayers and certified disbelievers on every subject known to man. Some of you appear to think you know best and that you could beat Ken Jennings and Watson at Jeopardy with half your brain cells tied behind your back. (And I’m sure I’ll hear from you)

But for those other readers, if you have any weirder than weird, but true facts, stories, news releases, snippets of all kind...please feel free to share.

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