1,224 Pound Cupcake and Tuxedo Cat Earns High School Diploma: Bizarre News for August 20, 2009

Over the past month, quite a few weird headlines leaped out at me, including feral pigs in the Caribbean, the medicinal properties of blue M&Ms, a woman suing her college for $70,000 over her inability to find a job, and a Florida family who discovered (to their horror) that they are the sole tenants in a 32 story high rise building!

This week, a few peculiar headlines and bizarre stories captured my attention. Here are my thoughts on two of the weirdest recent news stories that have me scratching my head.

The world's largest cupcake has been recorded, weighing in at a shocking 1,224 pounds! That's one heck of a cupcake! This is no ordinary baked good: this massive triple vanilla cupcake with pink frosting is actually more than eight times bigger than the previous record setting cupcake (a monumental achievement indeed).

What would trigger someone to bake a 1,224 pound cupcake? The only answer I can come up with is, because they obviously can. I guess they had the batter, the vanilla, the frosting and the time on their hands, so they went for it. While this is an amusing and bizarre story, the only thing that keeps running through my mind when I read about this cupcake is the struggles of my local food bank.

You see, a while back the local church was asking people if they minded donating their pennies for the local food bank. One kind soul left a container of pennies anonymously on the church steps one night before church, so they were able to raise fifty dollars for the food bank. I know that the food bank will stretch those fifty dollars as far as they can to feed as many hungry people in our community as humanly possible.

When I hear the stories about bailout funds and stimulus dollars and all the extravagant sums of money that get thrown around these days, I can't help but think about how Americans are struggling to survive in small towns and big cities all across our country, and how more and more people are going hungry each day.

The massive pink cupcake just seems like another symbol of wretched excess and wasted resources. It was reported that slices of this cupcake were given out in exchange for donations to a breast cancer organization, but with such a colossal cupcake, there must have been a ton of wasted food. It took eight hundred eggs and hundreds of pounds of flour and sugar to bake the big cupcake. I'd love this story more if the people who baked this cupcake had donated a ton of flour, sugar, milk, eggs and other much needed foods to a food pantry, or baked up some food to deliver to a local shelter, or food bank.

In a completely unrelated news story, Oreo C. Collins, a tuxedo cat, has become the first feline in recorded history to earn a high school diploma. This is no surprise to me, as I've long been convinced that cats have a superior intelligence. Recently, headlines proclaimed that certain breeds of dogs could actually be as smart as a two year old child! I live with a household full of cats, and I'm of the opinion that felines are pretty clever, so it's no surprise that a housecat could pull off the feat of earning a high school diploma.

Oreo is a tuxedo cat, a black cat with white markings that look like a tuxedo. I live with a tuxedo cat myself, and she's pretty sharp. My other black cat definitely exercises her intellectual prowess too, in subtle and surprising ways. For example, when I sit down on the kitchen chairs, I do often slide off a bit. This is because my intellectually gifted cat comes around and unties all the cushions so they'll fall off the seats. She likes to do this repeatedly; as soon as you tie up a cushion to the seat, she'll stealthily untie it.

So she's not exactly a Mensa member, but there is an intelligence operating there. In my time living with cats, I've found felines to be very clever, sensitive, intuitive and resourceful. They're definitely at least as smart as a two year old child! They may even be as smart as a fifth grader! (Except for one of my cat brood, who I confess isn't really the sharpest tool in the shed.)

Oreo C. Collins has pulled off a stunning achievement earning a high school diploma, and displayed some awesome computer skills by earning the diploma online. But what's the real deal behind this story? It turns out that the Better Business Bureau of Central Georgia set out to show that online high school diploma mills are bogus, and proved it by having a "cat" actually earn the high school diploma.

The lesson from this is that fake online "diploma mills" are set up to take money in exchange for providing a high school diploma, and would even award one to a cat! The fact that Oreo could earn a high school diploma online was a funny way of highlighting how these inauthentic schools operate.

If you're interested in studying online, carefully check out the school in question, and verify their accreditation and reputation before you sign up there (to ensure that you'll earn a real degree for your time and money.) The article I read about Oreo also highlighted how fake diploma mills operate, and stated that GEDs are only obtained in person at authorized testing centers, and cannot be earned online.

Meanwhile, Oreo C. Collins is quite pleased with herself and she sits in the sun all day grooming, browsing the Princeton Review, and filling out college applications (I hear rumblings that Oreo is trying to get into the top party college, but that could just be idle gossip...)

More funny headlines from the bizarre news desk: Tots are tutored to give them a competitive edge in kindergarten, and man faces jail time for yawning!

The bizarre headlines just keep coming for steamy late August 2009, it truly makes me wonder what they'll think of next? It will be hard to top the first cat to earn a high school diploma and the world's largest triple vanilla cupcake!

Sources:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32438528/ns/us_news-weird_news/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32420644/ns/tech_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/