Weekly Fun: A Fox That Stole a Smartphone, Squirrels Taking Over Parks, and The Simpsons Social Distancing Into

Every week, our editorial team dugs up the funniest and the most ridiculous bits of news and prepares a compilation of life stories and situations, chucklesome videos, amusing texts, memes, and a variety of jokes and wisecracks to make you grin from ear to ear. Reading our selection of Weekly Fun stuff without a doubt equals having a whale of a time.

A fox stole a smartphone with the camera turned on and accidentally shot an exciting chase

Mikayla, an owner of a fox shelter in Minnesota, USA, shared a video that became viral in a matter of minutes. One of Mikayla’s pets, a red fox named Dixie, stole a smartphone and put on a real pursuit and chase around the shelter. Mikayla said that she was going to do yoga in the garden and shoot the process on a video with her smartphone, but it seems that the fox running by had her own plans. As soon as Mikayla walked a few steps away, Dixie grabbed the smartphone in her mouth and began rushing with it throughout the territory.

Eventually, the girl still managed to get her gadget back, although Dixie, who was already tired of sprinting, decided to bury her new toy. We recommend watching the video with the sound turned on.

The Indian police made tourists write the word “sorry” 500 times

The Indian city of Rishikesh is famous for the fact that once the Beatles studied meditation techniques there. From now on, the city will also be known for its police officers who possess remarkable pedagogical skills.

The police carried out socially educational work with ten foreign tourists who violated quarantine rules and forced them to apologize on paper 500 times.

Among the violators, there were citizens of the United States, Israel, Mexico, and Australia. They were found aimlessly walking along the Ganges river. To make the tourists learn the lesson, they were forced to repeat the phrase, “I didn't follow lockdown rules, I am sorry.” At first, the group did not agree to do so, but then they were offered an alternative in the form of a ban on entering India. As a result, all five thousand apologies were made.

A developer created a neural network that can talk to people instead of him in Zoom

Because of the temporary self-isolation that has led to the unprecedented popularity of video conferencing services, savvy employees are eager to beat the system. We already wrote about workers who imitate their presence at meetings in the article below.

The developer, Matt Reed, decided to go big and created an AI-powered digital twin that can communicate with others instead of him. Matt revealed that his Zoombot started with a bunch of selfie screenshots that he made in Quicktime, sitting at his desk in various poses and with different facial expressions as if he were speaking. Then, these materials were used as source material for the Reed app based on an open-source tool Artyom.js that can trigger automatic synthesized responses using voice recognition.

Squirrels took over a public park in California

This is a real hostile takeover! Now, every fifth piece of news about COVID-19 quarantine begins with “The Earth cleaned itself and [insert any animal name here] returned to [cities or waters] amid coronavirus lockdown. We wrote about it here and here.

And now we could write, “A park in California cleaned itself of tourists and people, and squirrels returned there.” A local resident shot a city park in Santa Monica on a video. Hundreds of squirrels are jumping, running, lying in the sun, and generally behave as if this park will belong to them from now on and forever and ever. It seems that it was agreed to hold an international squirrel summit here.

The Simpsons social distancing intro

How to keep your children busy in quarantine in order not to let them go crazy with boredom? And how not to blow your own mind because your children don’t know what to occupy themselves with? These questions are the concern of parents all over the world.

The Sutherland family from Canada solved this problem in quite a creative way and became the heroes of the Internet. Cleaning up stuff in the garage, the family came across The Simpsons Halloween costumes and came up with a spontaneous idea. The Sutherlands re-shot the intro of the animated series, adding a bit of relevance to it. So, in the beginning, Bart writes “I will social distance” on the board, and at the end of the video, the whole family reunites on front of the TV, so everything is according to the canons. And if the quarantine frags on, the Sutherlands will have something to do – they will retake all of The Simpsons episodes!

Sheldon the bulldog delivers cookies to his neighbors so as not to feel lonely

Nope, this is not a typo. Sheldon the bulldog really does it because he doesn’t want to feel lonely. In April this year, the doggo turned two years old, and like all Aries, he had to celebrate his birthday alone. Sheldon is used to constant communication with people: his owner has a small beauty salon where all locals go, so Sheldon is literally bathing in attention. No wonder that after the start of the quarantine order and the end of hanging out with people, the dog became downhearted.

Fortunately for Sheldon, though, his owner came up with a sophisticated way to cheer the pet up with attention. During a morning walk, Kate puts a backpack on Sheldon, in which she puts freshly baked homemade cookies. Sheldon runs up to the neighbors’ doors while Kate stays at a safe distance.

The neighbors take the treats out of the dog’s backpack, scratch him, and communicate with him. This is how he gets his daily norm of human warmth.

On her Instagram, Kate says that she wipes her hands with an antiseptic, and Sheldon’s backpack with antibacterial wipes after the delivery every day. So, the delivery is absolutely safe.

The fan-made remake of “Back to the Future”: stock up on popcorn and sit back, the film is available online

Three hundred fans from ten countries worked on this project. The result was a science-fan movie. There’s such a tern as “eclecticism,” and it is used when various forms of art are combined in one building. So, this one is not an eclectic word enough to describe this masterpiece.

Project 88 was divided into 88 episodes, each of which was assigned to a separate team, and the movie turned out to be a set of funny short films. Some pieces are close to the original, some are made of LEGO bricks, some look like black and white arthouse, and others hit some funny animation.

It may look silly, but the work has been done with love and reverence. If you look carefully, you can catch the actors of the original Back to the Future movie that appear in the video. Some of them agreed to participate in the project voluntarily!