Quirky World...Irony lost on the Twitterati as they resolve to break free from social media... on Twitter
Pledging to “unplug” from electronic devices and social media is one of the most popular new year’s resolutions, according to Twitter.
The irony of using social media to promise to switch off was not lost on Twitter users, one of whom wrote: “Saying your resolution is to #unplug on Twitter is like saying you’re going to try to control your drinking problem while at a bar.”
Cold shoulders
A snowmobiler who survived two nights in a remote northern Utah canyon built a snow cave and used pieces of his snowmobile to protect him from the cold. But he had little to drink after his bottles of Gatorade froze.
Lawrence Orduno’s snowmobile got stuck after he and a friend were separated while riding in the Franklin Basin area near Logan. The 48-year-old tried to dig the machine out for about 30 minutes. “It was just too deep in the snow, standing straight up and down,” Orduno said.
His truck was about 12km away, but walking through the chest-deep snow drifts with dark quickly approaching was out of the question. He decided to hunker down for the night.
Orduno accidently left his food behind in the truck that day, and thought he’d lost his cigarette lighter. But as he shook out his pants to remove caked snow just before dark, the lighter appeared, caught in the bottom of his pant leg.
He shaped the snow around him into a cave-like shelter and used the side covers from his snowmobile to help protect him from the wind, then collected wood and built a small fire. He crushed his two frozen bottles of Gatorade to free some ice and stay hydrated.
Play-Doh!
It was an embarrassing Christmas for Nivea Cabrera after she was accused by her fiance’s mother of letting her five-year-old granddaughter play with a sex toy.
A mortified Carbrera asked the child where she got the penis-shaped plastic cylinder. “It’s from my Play-Doh,” the girl replied.
Toy company Hasbro is now doing damage control over the extruder tool in its Play-Doh Cake Mountain toy.
The two-piece syringe-like tool, which includes a tube with corkscrew-type ridges around the outside and a dome-shaped top with a hole at the tip, can be used to squeeze Play-Doh to look like decorative cake frosting.
Toilet trouble
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is launching a nationwide online programme to check whether people are using toilets as part of his cleanliness drive.
From next month, officials will head out with mobile phones, tablets, and iPads to report on whether toilets are being used in rural India, with results uploaded onto a website in real time.
India’s shortage of toilets costs the country the equivalent of about €41bn a year, mostly through premature deaths and hygiene-related diseases, according to a World Bank study.
About 626m Indians defecate in the open compared with 14m in China, the World Health Organisation said 2012. Since taking office in May, Modi has repeatedly lamented the poor state of sanitation and public cleanliness in India, vowing to solve the problems within the next five years. The government has doubled spending on a toilet building programme and requested financial donations from some of the country’s largest companies to help.
Phone rescue
A man who fell 20ft into an open Chicago storm sewer was saved by his mobile phone. Recordings of the man’s 911 calls show he remained calm even though he was trapped underground for almost two hours and broke his leg.
He was walking on a grassy strip along a hard shoulder when he fell. The dispatcher asked him to tell her when he heard the siren on a squad car.
Rescuers took about 70 minutes to get him out once they found the hole. Officials said he may not have been rescued if not for the call.
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