1979: Thomas Martin, an assistant manager at a Jack in the Box restaurant, told police he was robbed of $307 while closing up the store. Police asked him to describe the robber. He described himself. He later confessed to taking the money from the store.
I wonder if this sketch is preserved somewhere in the archives of the Oroville, CA police department.
A classic business failure. In the early 1990s, the marketing team at General Mills came up with the idea of a cereal that could be eaten without milk any time of day. Despite spending millions to promote it, hardly anyone bought the stuff.
The cereal pieces were shaped as hexagons and were advertised as food that could be eaten at any time of the day... Consumers were confused by the marketing concept when Fingos were released due to it being advertised as a snack despite being in the cereal section. Fingos were unsuccessful and were discontinued in 1994.
Tom Myslinski, who was an offensive lineman for the Tennessee Volunteers, had an unusual pre-game ritual. He would psych himself up by banging his head against doors, cabinets, walls, towel dispensers, etc. Without a helmet.
One of his teammates explained that he did this "until his eyes get all bloodshot and, then, blood is pouring from his forehead."
Myslinski noted, "It's just my way to pick up the intensity. To tell you the truth, I have no idea why I do it. Afterwards, sometimes, I say to myself that it sure was stupid because my head hurts."
Myslinski went on to play for nine seasons in the NFL and is now a strength and conditioning coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars.
I can only imagine how annoying it would be to have to listen to advertisements between rings whenever you phoned someone. And unfortunately the technology to do this has been developed. Neil Sleevi was granted a patent for it in 1989 (Patent No. 4,811,382), and Bell Atlantic promptly bought the rights to it.
Faced with public outcry, Bell Atlantic subsequently claimed that, even though they did buy the rights to the patent, they never had any intention of inserting ads between telephone rings, dismissing the entire notion as a silly rumor. But I'm pretty sure they would have done it if they had thought they could get away with it.
In 1999, Kevin and George Repper were granted a patent (No. 5,993,336) for a "method of executing a tennis stroke". The method consisted of hitting a tennis ball while kneeling on the right knee — that knee being protected by a kneepad.
This raises two questions. First, how did they possibly obtain a patent for this? And second, why did they bother getting a patent for this? Did they seriously expect other tennis players to license this method from them?
I don't know the answer to the first question, but I have a hypothesis about the second. Some googling reveals that George Repper was a patent attorney while his son, Kevin, was on a high-school tennis team. So my guess is that the patent was some kind of father-son bonding experience, with the father showing his son how to obtain a patent. And it seems like the son is also now a patent attorney.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.