Random News Stories

[Ryan Gallagher]

The age gap in nudist culture appears even wider than the age gap in cinema going culture. I'm not sure this is a way forward for cinemas. ;-) lol

[Harold Hallikainen]

Another way to compete with streaming!

[Ed Gordon]

Curtain up – clothes off! Spain makes history by hosting the country’s first nude film screening.

Picture the scene.

Around 50 spectators enter a cinema, put their bags down and take off their coats
.
Nothing out of the ordinary.

Then, they proceed to spread a towel on the cinema seats and take off all their clothes. Naked as the day they were born, they start chatting with their neighbours before the lights go down and the film starts.

Now there’s a trip to the talkies worth remembering.

The nudist event took place in the Lys cinema in Valencia and the Girona cinema in Barcelona for the screening of Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romero’s Christmas thriller Tú no eres yo last Sunday, becoming the first nudist film screening in Spain’s history.

Sadly, the Madrid nudist screening was ultimately cancelled.

Source: https://www.euronews.com/culture/202...nema-screening

[Leo Enticknap]

Continuing on the critter theme - Hamsters v. Airbus

More than 130 escaped hamsters ground plane for five days

Rodents run riot on passenger jet after breaking free from transport boxes during flight from Lisbon to the Azores

James Badcock, in Madrid
18 November 2024, 3.31pm GMT

More than 130 hamsters grounded a plane for five days after they broke free and ran riot inside the cargo hold.

The rodents had been on a flight from Lisbon to Ponta Delgada, on Portugal’s Sao Miguel Island, last Wednesday, along with ferrets and some caged birds that were due to be delivered to a pet store in the Azores archipelago.

However, when airport staff unloaded the hold they found that the hamsters’ transport boxes were empty.

The plane, belonging to Portugal’s TAP national airline, had to be grounded until all 132 hamsters were recaptured over fears that they might gnaw through the aircraft’s electrical cabling.

It took maintenance staff at Ponta Delgada Airport until Sunday to root out the last 16 hamsters on the plane.

Only then was the Airbus A321neo finally declared rodent-free and fit to return to Lisbon on a so-called “ferry flight” with no passengers on board.

The hamsters were due to be delivered to a pet store.

TAP Air Portugal said the plane would now undergo exhaustive checks to ensure that no significant damage had been done by the hamsters’ sharp teeth.

Like all rodent species, hamsters continually gnaw at hard materials to prevent their teeth, which grow throughout their lives, from becoming too long.

Portugal’s specialist aviation news site Aviacao TV reported that passengers and their luggage were also on board the flight.

It added: “Upon landing, the teams responsible for baggage collection noticed that the [hamster] boxes had been damaged and that rodents were loose.”

The boxes containing the hamsters were not accepted on a separate flight out of Lisbon as the containers were not considered to be compliant with hold requirements, according to Correio da Manhã, the Portuguese newspaper.

For some reason, it appears that the boxes were allowed on a subsequent flight to Ponta Delgada.

The Telegraph has contacted TAP for comment.

It comes after a horse forced a Belgium-bound Boeing 747 cargo jet to turn back to New York after it broke free on board last year.

Earlier in 2023, a bear freed itself from its crate on an Iraqi Airways flight from Dubai to Baghdad.

Last year, a giant albino rat shocked passengers on a flight from Bangkok to Taipei after escaping from a passenger’s luggage, along with an otter. The rodents sparked a frenzied search on the VietJet plane before being wrestled into plastic bags. In the tussle, the rat bit a flight attendant.

To add to that list, there was an incident back in the early '00s in which a British Airways 747 became infested with bedbugs. The eventual cost of dealing with them ran into the tens of millions (including both decontaminating the plane and the lost revenue while it was grounded), because the chemicals that are normally used to fumigate a serious bedbug infestation were not approved for use on board aircraft.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Yeah then there is the fact they could have probably just driven them into nearby woods, left the doors open, baited em with peanut butter, and with a little patience, let the real bears do the job. But that would have missed the key ingredient of the security cam footage.

Also i'm curious how one sets up insurance on a stolen vehicle anyway. So many questions.

[Leo Enticknap]

Very likely. The three vehicles involved were a Rolls-Royce and two Mercs. As I mentioned above, it is very rare to see that sort of car up in the San Bernardino Mountains: the narrow, twisty, steep roads that are the only route up and down them, added to the fact that if you live there, you will need to haul most of your groceries and the other necessities of life up from San Bernardino or Redlands, see to it that the majority of vehicles you'll see in communities like Arrowhead, Running Springs, etc. are either pickup trucks or AWD SUVs. Presumably the Roller and the Mercs were driven up there on the assumption that the insurance companies would have a very hard time believing that they were attacked by a bear in downtown San Bernardino.

But to put the icing on the cake, they really should have done this in nearby Big Bear City.

They are going to have a helluva time trying to empanel a jury for this case; specifically, finding 12 citizens in the locality who are utterly devoid of anything close to a sense of humor, to be able to sit through this trial with a straight face. The first time I was called for jury duty (less than a month after my naturalization ceremony!), a friend told me about the occasion in which she took part in the selection process for a trial in which some parents were suing a daycare, because, while supposedly being supervised by the daycare's staff, their kid inserted a Lego piece where the sun don't shine, and it got stuck so badly that surgery was required to remove it. The judge briefly explained the facts of the case, whereupon most of the potential jurors started giggling, such that they were kicked out immediately.

[Ryan Gallagher]

I must be missing something because I don't see where the gain is.

Just choosing random values, I have a car worth $50,000 with a $5000 insurance deductible.

I hire someone to wreck it for me and pay that guy something (because he probably won't do that for free).

I call the insurance company. "The bear ate my car."

The insurance guy looks at it. He says, "We'll fix that. Pay your $5000 deductible."

Or he says, "This is a write off. Here's $45,000, which is the value of your car less your deductible."

I don't see a scenario where the scammer comes out ahead here.

You assume the scammer got the car a legal way and had money into it already. Maybe if they can get the insurance to write it off it is a form of laundering a stolen car for a legit one?

[Randy Stankey]

IMO, a scam is a scam, regardless of how much or how little the scammer profits.

The insurance commission doesn't care whether somebody profits. They only care about whether the payout was legitimate or not. Motives and outcomes are secondary.

The bottom line is that this is just another "dumb crook" story, albeit an unusual one.

[Frank Cox]

I must be missing something because I don't see where the gain is.

Just choosing random values, I have a car worth $50,000 with a $5000 insurance deductible.

I hire someone to wreck it for me and pay that guy something (because he probably won't do that for free).

I call the insurance company. "The bear ate my car."

The insurance guy looks at it. He says, "We'll fix that. Pay your $5000 deductible."

Or he says, "This is a write off. Here's $45,000, which is the value of your car less your deductible."

I don't see a scenario where the scammer comes out ahead here.

[Randy Stankey]

Take one look at the scratches on the upholstery and interior doors and it's very obvious that they weren't made by bear claws. They even say so in the TV news clip.

If they really were bear claws, they wouldn't be straight and clean looking. They'd be crooked and ragged and not so evenly spaced. Instead, they probably would have gone all the way through the fabric and into the padding below.

As one of the news people said, bears only have five claws and the fake scratches show six claw marks. Hmm... Maybe it was a new species of bear?

[Leo Enticknap]

The first red flag to the insurance detectives should have been to wonder what the F anyone was doing with a Roller up in Lake Arrowhead. The only way to get there is on 30 miles of so of narrow, single lane road, full of steep gradients, hairpin bends, rock slides, and other hazards. Buying such a wide and heavy vehicle, noted more for its ability to take royals to ceremonial occasions than driving up mountains, would be like wearing a Versace gown to climb Everest.

[Ryan Gallagher]

DELETED. LOL, replied to something on page 1 by accident.

[Randy Stankey]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqSrRDCeBGA

[Frank Cox]

Who's been eating my porridge? Who's been sleeping in my bed?

Who's been tearing up my car!!

It wasn't me, says the bear.

[Leo Enticknap]

The local radio station I was listening to en route to a service call this morning had a lot of fun with this one: now, a newspaper on the other side of the world has picked it up!

Man dresses as bear and trashes Rolls-Royce in ‘insurance scam’

Four people arrested in California for insurance fraud after making claims worth £112,272 for bear damage to their cars

James Crisp
14 November 2024 12:23pm GMT

A suspected fraudster dressed up in a bear costume before damaging cars in an insurance scam in the US.

Four people in Southern California were arrested for insurance fraud after making claims worth £112,272 for bear damage on their cars, which included a Rolls-Royce.

After viewing videos of the so-called bear trashing several cars, California insurance department officials decided the guilty animal was a human being and not an ursine invader.

The Insurance Department said: “Upon further scrutiny of the video, the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume.”

Investigators also showed the videos to a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who “opined it was clearly a human in a bear suit”.

Video footage of the inside of the car showed grooves in the seats and interior that suggested claw marks.

Insurance companies had paid out the claim after being told the bear entered and damaged a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost on Jan 8 before the investigation began.

The car was parked at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains about 60 miles north-east of Los Angeles.

The suspected fraudsters also submitted claims for damage to a 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG and a 2022 Mercedes E350, with videos of the so-called rampaging bear.

All three claims gave a matching location and the same “date of loss”. The accompanying footage suggests the allegedly staged bear attacks occurred outside the same property, on the same night, but at different times.

There are wild black bears, which – contrary to their name – can be brown in the San Bernardino Mountains, but grizzlies were hunted to extinction in the state of California in the 1920s.

Ruben Tamrazian, 26, Ararat Chirkinian, 39, and Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, all of Glendale, and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, of Valley Village, were arrested on charges of insurance fraud and conspiracy, NBC News reported.

A San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson said on Wednesday that charges were submitted against the four people and were under review.

Insurance Department detectives were assisted by the Glendale Police Department and the California Highway Patrol.

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