Friday, November 20, 2009

My kind of town, Sheboygan is...

November 20, 2009
Sheboygan ranked among cities with weirdest news

Sheboygan Press staff

Sheboygan's news ranks among the weirdest in the country, according to a recent analysis.

The city ranks 17th in the nation for the number of strange news reports, the highest for a city of its size, according to Tableseed.com. The company based its list on an analysis of 2,000 Associated Press "strange news" stories published over the last year.

Sheboygan is one of three Wisconsin cities in the top 25, joining No. 3 Madison and No. 21 Milwaukee. The ranking puts Wisconsin sixth among the 50 states.

Unusual Sheboygan Press stories picked up by the AP in recent months include the Sheboygan man, Calvin Gosz, who successfully sold his naming rights on eBay to a Finnish electronics Web site; a woman who stripped in an attempt to avoid arrest; a woman who ate marijuana during a traffic stop, and two inmates who fought over an episode of "The Office."

And, of course, there's the YouTube video of Mayor Bob Ryan making a sexually explicit remark about his sister-in-law. That yielded two mentions on the Jay Leno Show and a YouTube video with 59,000 hits.

Strange local stories not distributed by AP include a man who called his girlfriend 279 times from jail, a man who blamed a Jack Daniels steak for a failed breath test, a text message about a drug deal sent inadvertently to a cop, and a parishioner and pastor cited for using a bow and arrow in church, which was among the stories linked on weird news repository Fark.com.

According to the ranking, New York had the weirdest news, with Lincoln, Neb., Madison, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, Boston, Detroit, Dallas and Pittsburgh rounding out the Top 10. Florida tops the list of strangest states, followed by New Hampshire, Alaska, Wyoming, Maine, Wisconsin, Vermont, Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Ohio.

Top Florida stories listed by the site included: "Man calls 911 after eatery runs out of lemonade," "Florida lotto winner seeks to open a nude dude ranch," and "Man wearing sleeping bag as cape attempts robbery."

Tableseed.com is a new Web site that says it helps restaurants get more customers through e-mail birthday clubs.



0 comments: