Pat Robertson Can Leg Press 2000 Pounds —
Status: Must be False (by reason of being physically impossible)
Pat Robertson claims to be able to
leg press 2000 pounds. If this is true, it would be a world record. Even more improbably, his trainer claims to be able to leg press 2700 pounds.
I don't know when Robertson first posted this bizarre claim on his Christian Broadcasting Network website (it's included in
a sales pitch for his "age-defying protein shake"), but it came to the attention of the blogosphere on May 22 when
Clay Travis wrote about it on CBS Sportsline. Putting Robertson's claim in context, Travis noted that the leg press record is held by Dan Kendra of Florida State University who pressed 1,335 pounds, causing the capillaries in his eyes to burst. Robertson, who's 76 years old, has apparently managed to beat Kendra's record by 665 pounds (without doing any damage to his eyes).
Robertson has posted a video of himself leg pressing 1000 pounds, which seems pretty remarkable (kind of unbelievable, actually), but we have to take his word for it (and the word of his trainer) that he lifted the 2000 pounds. Here's the description of how it supposedly happened:
Pat Robertson worked out at the gym on an incline leg press machine with weights up to 570 pounds. Working with his physician, who was an amazing strength trainer, he worked up to 800 pounds, then 1,000 pounds. Then one day he was able to leg press 1,500 pounds one time. Then over the succeeding months, he trained with multiple reps of 1,200 pounds, 1,300 pounds, and 1,400 pounds. One Saturday morning, his physician said, “I’ll get you bragging rights. Let’s go to 2,000 pounds.” Then he worked up multiple reps of 1,400 pounds, 1,500 pounds, 1,600 pounds, 1,700, pounds, 1,800 pounds and 1,900 pounds. When 2,000 pounds was put on the machine two men got on either side and helped push the load up, and then let it down on Mr. Robertson, who pushed it up one rep and let it go back down again.
I'm simply not willing to believe that a man his age set a leg press world record. In fact, I find it hard to believe that he even lifted 1000 pounds (he's either lifting magic weights, or using a
lifewave patch). As Big Gary wrote to me in an email, if this isn't a hoax, I'll drink his age-defying protein shake.
Hans Mobius, the 72-year-old president of the Erie County Farm Bureau, claims that last week he saw Bigfoot wandering around on his horse farm in western New York. And he has the pictures to prove it. Here's how the sighting happened: 
The U.S. Patent Office recently awarded patent number 7037243 to Lester Clancy, inventor of the cordless jump rope. It's a jump rope without the rope. I guess you could call it an 'air rope'. However, it does have handles. Here's the description from the patent: 
For the past month villagers in West Bengal have been terrorized by a ghost that took the form of a floating skull with fiery red eyes. A number of people have suffered scratch marks when attacked by this ghost. Now police have taken a suspect into custody, "A pigeon with a miniature plastic skull dangling around its neck and with glowing red bulbs in the eye sockets." The police don't know who outfitted the pigeon in this way, but suspect that their sole motive was to create a panic. In other words, it was a random prankster. However, the cause of the scratch marks remains undetermined. Also, demonstrating how unreliable eyewitnesses can be, police noted that "people had described the ghost variously as a man and a monkey." Which recalls the Winsted Wild Man panic in Connecticut over 100 years ago, in which witnesses swore they had seen a (nonexistent) wild man sporting tusks and as large as a gorilla.
It seems like it's been a while since there's been anything really unusual or novel offered on eBay, which is why this auction for an alien head inside a duck is a bit of a relief. At last, something new. (To be a bit more specific, what you get if you win the auction is an x-ray of an alien head inside a duck, not an actual alien head, nor a duck.) From the description of the item:
This image of a billboard for Miele vacuums has been circulating around. It's a cool concept for an ad... an enormous vacuum sucking a hot air balloon out of the sky. However, this billboard can't actually be seen anywhere in real life. It's an ad concept dreamed up by Jon Kubik, a student at the Miami Ad School. (via Adrants)
Here's a hoax that I missed while away in Scotland. Geoff (who withheld his last name) claimed to be a twenty-five-year-old virgin. He launched a website (avirginsplea.com) on May 1, declaring that if his site received five million hits by the end of the month, a girl he knew had promised to sleep with him. Soon blogs were linking to his site to help him out, and the media (unable, as always, to resist an unusual story about sex) deluged him with requests for interviews. Predictably, it all turned out to be a hoax. Geoff, although a real person, was not a virgin, as reporters found out who tracked down a former girlfriend of his. In addition, Geoff hadn't created the site. He was merely the front man for it. The creator of the site was web designer Matthew Gamble who had intended it, so he later claimed, to be an experiment in viral marketing. 
A rare heart-shaped potato has been found by Linda Greene of Moon Township, Pa. She found it in a sack of potatoes back in February and emailed the Idaho Potato Commission about it in March. For some reason it's only making headlines now. What makes the discovery of the potato strange is that irregularly shaped potatoes are supposed to be removed during the sorting process and used for french fries. The potato commission president said: "I would guarantee someone saw it and thought, 'This is cool, we'll let this go through.'... Typically, unique shapes will go into processing _ dehydrated or cut up into french fries." To those who suggest the love spud is a plant (pun intended), being used by the commission to drum up publicity, the commission president says, "We didn't plant it. We'll have to start sorting for heart-shaped potatoes." (Thanks to Big Gary for the story)
Speaking of fake Irish bars, now it's possible to have an instant fake British pub, anywhere you like. It's advertised as "the Worlds first fully functioning Mobile Inflatable Pub." This comes from the same people who brought us the world's first inflatable church. Ideally it should come with a bartender who fakes a British accent.
