In a year dominated by serious headlines ranging from war to wildfires, it’s easy to get caught up in negative news.
But the world can be a wild and even downright weird place, and every once in a while a story comes along that makes us pause and go, “Wait, what?”
Sometimes these little nuggets can brighten an otherwise grey day. Other times, they’re a potent reminder that the world is bigger and filled with more of the unexpected than we give it credit for.
We’ve collected a few of our favourite offbeat stories here as we reflect on 2023 and look ahead to 2024.
B.C. home bombarded with unsolicited food deliveries
Who doesn’t love a free meal, especially local takeout?
It sounds good in theory, but for one New Westminster neighbourhood the free food fiesta became a delivery downer in March.
Residents told Global News her neighbourhood was bombarded with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of unsolicited Uber Eats deliveries.
The orders ranged from bottles of water to full McDonald’s meals to a single portion of gravy.
“It’s like this insane barrage of deliveries,” resident Jennifer Hughes said. “Every 30 minutes, the bags would just show up.”
Every order was fully paid for. And even more unusual — none of the orders had names on them or specific units or addresses. Instead, the deliveries were ordered to a generic address applying to multiple townhouse complexes.
“There was a lineup down the street in front of our house of delivery drivers,” neighbour Geoff McLennan told Global News.
“They were all laughing to each other and one driver said there were ‘thousands of orders that spiked’ over the recent weeks to the neighbourhood. They didn’t know what was going on either.”
Uber Eats said it was taking action over the deliveries, including banning the multiple accounts placing the orders.
‘Like a miracle’: Mystery cash baffles, delights Victoria apartment residents
Christmas came early for residents of a Nanaimo housing complex, who came home this year to find cash gifts from a mysterious benefactor.
Residents of 18 individual units in the subsidized housing complex on Esquimalt Road each found $50 cash on their doorsteps in October, with no explanation about the source.
“I thought, I don’t think anybody owed me money that they’re paying back, this is kind of crazy,” resident Joanne Parks told Global News. “I couldn’t figure it out.”
No one in the building appeared to have any explanation for the cash splash, which amounted to $900 in total.
Theories among residents ranged from someone winning the lottery to the donor finding the cash and deciding to share it around.
Resident Veda Mata said most people in the building were living on seniors’ pensions, meaning $50 was a “big deal.”
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“This is pretty amazing, we were all confounded, and of course I was delighted,” she said. “I thought this is really weird — when does this ever happen? It’s like a miracle.”
The Greater Victoria Housing Society, which manages the building, told Global News it has no idea where the money came from, but spokesperson Vanessa Schneider said: “It seems like a wonderful surprise.”
‘Really nice kid’ breaks into Vancouver cupcake bakery, snatches goodies, cleans store, apologizes
This one might take the cake for oddball stories of the year.
It happened in May, at Vancouver’s Sweet Somethings bakery, when a burglar was captured on camera smashing the glass door to gain entry.
But he didn’t go for cash. Instead, the young man can be seen spending the better part of an hour hanging out, mopping up the floor and taking selfies on the bakery’s work phone.
In the end, all he stole was a box of cupcakes.
After the story went viral, bakery owner Emma Irvine said the bizarre burglar came forward to fess up.
“He’s a really nice kid,” she said, explaining that the sticky-fingered treat thief had phoned in to apologize and offer to pay for the damage.
“It was a really sincere, heartfelt apology. You know, I have a soft spot in my heart for this guy. So we’ve definitely asked the police not to press charges,” she said.
As for the sweet swindler’s motive?
“He didn’t really say much about it. I didn’t ask too much about it,” Irvine said. “I think he was heading home. That’s all I know,” Irvine said.
The bakery also made the most of the bizarre situation and the publicity that came with it, rolling out a line of cupcakes decorated with the orange sunglasses the thief made famous with his selfies.
Pigeons wearing meth-filled ‘backpacks’ busted at B.C. prisons
Drug smuggling at Canadian prisons is an ongoing and serious problem.
But it appears some would-be B.C. traffickers were unusually creative this year, pioneering a new — or should we say ancient — technique to ferry their product.
In January, correctional officers at B.C.’s Pacific Institution in Abbotsford said they busted a tiny, feathered drug mule.
The culprit was a pigeon, who was wearing a tiny “backpack” packed with crystal meth.
John Randle, president of the Pacific Region for Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, said he’d seen a lot of creative smuggling attempts in his 13 years, but never heard of birds recruited into the job.
“It’s almost like the inmates and the criminals are going back in time and using older technology,” he said.
Just a few months later, another backpack-equipped pigeon was busted, this time at the Matsqui Institution, also in Abbotsford.
This time the bird’s cargo pouch, constructed from denim and bed sheets, was empty.
“The best guess, or educated guess I could make right now is that it looks like they were training this one to eventually bring in a package,” Randle said.
Since then, it appears the region’s prison drug smugglers have switched back to modern technology.
Correctional officers told Global News this month they’re dealing with a tsunami of contraband delivered by drones.
Meteorite? Mud? Mysterious rock crash lands in B.C. man’s pool
A B.C. man thinks a little piece of the cosmos may have splashed down in his pool this year, but experts aren’t so sure.
It happened in Delta in June when Justin Broad said he saw something hit the water.
“It didn’t cloud up and dissipate. It just dropped to the shallow end right at the bottom in a ball,” Broad said.
“I assumed it was a meteor, (a) little meteor sample,” Broad said.
Broad had the pool drained and scooped out the mystery material, which he described as having little crystals in the sediment.
Alan Hildebrand, associate professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary and a planetary scientist, told Global News that based on the pictures, he does not think what hit Broad’s pool was a meteorite.
“The dry picture particularly I mean, I agree it looks like dried mud, but the dried mud is brown,” he said. “So if it was an unusual type of meteorite, what we call a carbonaceous chondrite, we’d be expecting it to be black or dark grey. So. So it looks indeed like mud from this planet.”
Broad said he would just be happy to know where the object came from.
“I would really be curious to know, at least we have closure where it came from, I mean, and scientifically to explain how it turned from a solid into a sediment just like that,” he said.
‘People-sized’: Huge, thick ice chunks flow down Fraser River and wash up near Agassiz
Do you remember how cold it was last winter?
Those bone-chilling temperatures burst plenty of pipes in the Lower Mainland — and they also produced some more unusual phenomena.
In January, Fraser Valley residents were treated to a sight not often in the area, a miniature version of the iceberg parades that appear on the East Coast.
“People-sized” chunks of ice washed up on the Fraser River near Agassiz and Chilliwack, drawing big crowds.
Brent Ward, a professor in the Earth Sciences Department at Simon Fraser University, said ice chunks in the river aren’t uncommon, but pieces of this size were rare.
“It really reflects that strong cold snap we had in December and now some of that ice has now broken up and moved downstream,” he said.
In December, a winter storm blasted many parts of B.C. with some Vancouver reaching -13 C and the Williams Lake area reaching -36 C.
The ice likely formed during that deep freeze, then broke free as temperatures lifted around the new year.
“This is very common in most of the rest of Canada because it gets really cold in the winter and then you get thick ice and that breaks up in the spring,” he added.