Holly LaFavers of Lexington, Ky,, tried to cancel an Amazon order placed by her second-grader son, Liam, but it was too late. When the pair arrived home on May 5, WKYT reported, Liam yelled, “My suckers are here!” LaFavers was greeted by 22 cases of Dum-Dums lollipops — each containing 2,340 lollipops. Liam, who placed the order while entertaining himself with his mother’s phone, actually had ordered 30 cases — for a total cost of more than $4,000 — but eight of the cases wouldn’t scan and were returned. “He told me that he wanted to have a carnival,” LaFavers said, “and he was ordering the Dum-Dums as prizes.” Amazon refunded the order, and LaFavers vowed to change the access settings on her phone.
Seen it all
During a traffic stop on May 5, police in Akron, Ohio, caught bodycam video of a suspect behind the wheel with a meth pipe in his mouth. But the perpetrator did not face arrest, because it was a pet raccoon. WLWT 5 reported that when the driver, Victoria Vidal, 55, was detained for driving with a suspended license, officers returned to her vehicle to find the animal, named Chewy, in the driver’s seat with the drug paraphernalia. “While our officers are trained to expect the unexpected, finding a raccoon holding a meth pipe is a first,” the Springfield Township Police Department said in a Facebook post.
You again?
Rescues are not uncommon on Mount Fuji, but one climber may have used up all the good will of the Shizouka prefectural police, who were called to save the man near the mountain’s peak twice in a span of four days. The adventurer, a 27-year-old Chinese student living in Japan, began suffering from altitude sickness and was airlifted to safety after calling authorities on April 22. The Associated Press reported that he returned to the mountain on April 26 “to look for his cellphone and other belongings left behind.” When another climber found him suffering altitude sickness and unable to move, authorities were called in to rescue him once again. There is no charge associated with being rescued — even twice in the same week.
Oh. bother!
Anyone familiar with A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories knows bears love honey and will go to great lengths for the sweet stuff. So it’s not exactly surprising that Jeff Bonner of Bazetta, Ohio, caught a bear on the motion-activated cameras he had set up to protect his apiary. What was surprising, Bonner told WFMJ-TV, was what little remained in the aftermath of the bear’s late-night snack attack. “He ate the frame, the wax that was there, and the bees,” Bonner said. “He literally ate a whole hive of bees.” The Ohio Department of Natural Resources recommended that he increase the apiary’s security with an electric fence.
Trouble brewing
ChatGPT can perform many impressive tasks — sometimes with amusing results — but no one was laughing after it dabbled in tea leaf reading. Greek City Times reported on April 26 that a Greek woman filed for divorce after the OpenAI chatbot asserted that her husband was having an affair, a conclusion the bot came to upon “reading” the coffee grounds in the couple’s mugs in a photo the woman uploaded to the app. “I laughed it off as nonsense,” the husband said, “but she took it seriously. She asked me to leave, told our kids we were getting divorced, and then I got a call from a lawyer. That’s when I realized this wasn’t just a phase.” The husband’s lawyer maintains that ChatGPT’s claims have no legal standing.
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