Invasive apple snails, like the snail pictured above, and mystery snails in Georgia have tested positive for rat lungworm and could make people sick if they eat them, according to state officials. (Shutterstock),
Americans have had to get their heads around a lot so far in 2025, the least of which is not rat lungworm that could be lurking in escargot.
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Georgia officials say the spread of two invasive snail species testing positive for rat lungworm parasites isn’t anything to get freaked out about. People who eat the snails have almost no chance of dying or getting sick. Or — we’re presuming here — they’re not going to get any sicker than they may already be after learning that the reason snails get this particular parasite in the first place is they nibble on rat feces.
“While this newest discovery is alarming, the Centers for Disease Control website notes that the parasite does not replicate in humans, and human-to-human transmission does not occur,” the Georgia Department of Natural Resources said in a news release.
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These two species of snails — the apple and mystery snails — are trouble for other reasons as well. They’re rough on boat hulls.
- Read the full story: Rat Lungworm May Be Lurking In Your Escargot
‘What Happens In Balloon Stays In Balloon’
Temecula, California, has a new “mile high club.” Lovers can go up, up and away for a romantic adventure in their personal a boudoir in a basket.
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If making love in a hot air balloon with a professional pilot in the basket seems exhibitionist, the owner of the hot air balloon company offering the flights assures you it is not. Once the balloon reaches the 1-mile altitude, the pilot discreetly pulls up the privacy screen, puts on noise-cancelling headphones and chills out.
“What happens in the balloon stays in the balloon,” Magical Adventure Balloon Rides owner Denni Barrett told Patch.
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“I’ve had people book the mile-high flight from all over the U.S., Europe, and Asia,” he said. “All cultures, ethnicities and sexual orientations.”
- Read the full Patch Exclusive: California’s Newest ‘Mile High Club’
(Photo courtesy of Denni Barrett/Magical Balloon Tours)
How Law Helped ‘Serial Squatter’
A woman has been using California’s tenant-friendly rental laws to take advantage of — and terrorize — residents of Malibu. California, according to a report by Vanity Fair.
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The magazine took in-depth look into “serial squatter” Ellie Mae McNulty, who in the fall of 2021 moved in with Alden Marin, an artist and cancer patient living in the Point Dume area.
McNulty originally said she would only stay a few days while her home was being completed, but days turned into a month, and the polite and kind guest Marin had welcomed turned rude and demanding, eventually contributing to a psychiatric emergency Marin suffered in early 2022.
McNulty also used Marin’s credit cards, changed the locks on the home while he was hospitalized, and flushed cloth napkins in the toilet, clogging the pipes, the outlet reported, adding she asked for as much as $20,000 to leave. McNulty has said Marin had the locks changed with her possessions inside the residence, according to the article.
McNulty had been involved in at least 10 legal cases going back nearly two decades, according to research conducted by Marin’s sister.
- Read the full story: ‘Serial Squatter’ Got By With It Under CA Law
Waffle House Waffles On Prices
You might think the cakes with a grid pattern would be the No. 1 item on Waffle House’s menu. Nope. It’s eggs — just an interesting side note in this story about how restaurants are, ahem, scrambling their menus to cope with “egg-flation.”
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The popular national chain is waffling a bit on the costs of its egg breakfasts to offset price surges attributed to bird flu. For now, a 50-cent surcharge is being added to every egg sold in the chain’s restaurants.
Waffle House sells about 270 million eggs a year, compared to 153 million hash brown orders and 124 million waffles.
- Read the full story: ‘Egg-Flation’ Hits Waffle House
Cops Hope To Crack Egg Theft
Speaking of egg-flation, state police in Pennsylvania are trying to crack this case that may be related to high egg prices: the theft of 100,000 eggs worth $40,000.
The eggs were stolen on Feb. 1 from a transport trailer at Pete and Gerry’s Organics in Greencastle.
So far, there have been no breaks in the case.
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- Read more: 100K Eggs Worth $40K Stolen
Doomsday Clock Is Ticking
So, back to 2025 being off to a weird start. It’s a little weird that someone adjusts the big hand on the Doomsday Clock a couple of times a year, isn’t it? It may even be darkly weird.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists said in late January it was moving the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has even come to global catastrophe.
The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, based in Hyde Park, Illinois, meets at least twice a year to deliberate the Doomsday Clock. In January 2020, the minute hand was moved 30 seconds forward from two minutes to 100 seconds before midnight. In 2023, the minute hand was moved ten seconds closer to midnight from 100 to 90 seconds.
The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 as a visual indicator of global apocalypse by the Bulletin, which was founded two years earlier by scientists Albert Einstein, J Robert Oppenheimer and Eugene Rabinowitch, along with other University of Chicago scholars.
- Read the full story: We’re Closer Than Ever To Doomsday
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