Mother and children find X-rated message-in-a-bottle
And other stories from the stranger side of life

A mother was shocked when she and her two children found a lurid message-in-a-bottle. The Daily Star reports that Karla Barr was out walking on the Shell Bay beach in Fife with her daughter Jessica, 12, and son Fraser, 10, when the incident occurred. The bottle they found contained a handmade advert for an “escort service” called The North Vikingsea Freelance Escort Babe Agency. Someone had even glued some pubic hair onto the relevant part of the image.
Pedometer-eating pig starts blaze
A pig started a fire in its pen when it swallowed a pedometer. Fire crews were called to a farm near Leeds on Saturday afternoon after copper from the pedometer’s batteries reacted with the pig’s excrement and dry bedding. No animals or people were harmed in the fire. North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said it had gone in to “save the bacon”.
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Bigfoot sceptic says he has now met the beast
A man who says that he never believed in Bigfoot and thought that people who claimed they saw it were “crazy” says he has come face to face with the mythical beast. Billy Humphrey, of Fayette County, told the West Virginia Explorer: “The thing was huge. It had a cone head, and it was tan under the eyes and had a barrel chest.”
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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
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