Weird Week: Welcome to Barcelona and also please leave

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  • Real mature: Anti-tourism protesters in Barcelona are squirting tourists with water guns to deter more from coming. A demonstration of ~2.8k protesters, organized by 100+ local groups, filled streets over the weekend to protest mass tourism’s impact on living costs and quality of life in the region. Barcelona, which saw ~26m visitors in 2023, isn’t the only fed-up locale: Venice, Amsterdam, Bali, and Kyoto have all taken steps to curb overtourism.  
  • A police bust took down a criminal enterprise, seizing many bricks. No, not bricks of cocaine — these were Legos, obviously. Thieves lifted thousands of new, unopened Lego sets from stores near Eugene, Oregon, then sold them to a local hobby shop. Here’s the rub: the store’s owner allegedly knew the sets were stolen. The whole crime ring came crashing down with a police raid, during which ~4.2k Lego sets worth $200k+ were recovered.
  • Sometimes all it takes for a person to spill their guts is a sneeze — literally. A 63-year-old man was eating at a Florida diner when a forceful sneeze sent “several loops of pink bowel” gushing out of his recent surgical wound, a rare medical complication known as bowel evisceration, per the American Journal of Medical Case Reports. The man, who’d had staples removed from the seemingly healed wound that morning, was celebrating with his wife over breakfast when it happened. And while it cut their meal short, we can’t imagine they were the only people whose breakfast was ruined. (The man survived, BTW.)
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Topics: Weird Week

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