Blog Posts by Nadine Kalinauskas

Five-year-old Anthony Smith really loves superheroes.

And because superheroes don't wear hearing aids, the little boy from Salem, New Hampshire, who is deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other, didn't want to wear one either.

"One morning he told me he didn't want to wear his hearing aid anymore because superheroes don't have blue ears," his mother, Christina D'Allesandro, told the Union Leader. "I told him that this just wasn't true."

Desperate to help her son, D'Allesandro sent an email to Marvel Comics, asking them if there were any hearing-impaired superheroes.

They created one.

A few weeks after D'Allesandro wrote the email, a comic book cover arrived, featuring Anthony as a hearing-impaired superhero named Blue Ear.

"When he first saw the comic book cover, he said, 'Oh, my God, it's me,'" she told CNN. "He was very excited."

"We decided to make him an honorary Avenger," a member of the Marvel Comics superhero crime-fighting team, said Marvel editor Bill Rosemann.

Marvel

Read More »from Marvel creates hearing-impaired Avenger for 5-year-old boy

Dashshund UN, an art instalment currently being staged by Toronto's Harbourfront Centre's World Stage festival, has critics' and audiences' tails wagging.

The 50-minute show, developed by Australian artist Bennett Miller, involves 36 dachshunds reenacting a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

"It gets the audience to consider human behaviour differently," Miller told CBC News.

"Shock, delight, cacophony! A meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights is staged with the help of specially recruited dachshunds in this wild performance installation. Joyful and chaotic, spectacular and fascinating, Dachshund UN questions our capacity to imagine and achieve a universal system of justice," Harbourfront Centre's website states.

"It's a simple concept. Some choral music with a martial tone and then the curtain rises on four tiers of dogs — apparently a replica of the UN office in Geneva — and then the audience watches the dogs, talks loudly and snaps photos

Read More »from Dachshund UN: Performance art is going to the dogs

Jim O'Neil said he is alive and he's not sure why people believe he's dead. Like Mark Twain, the report of his death "has been grossly exaggerated."

Amherst, Nova Scotia lawyer Jim O'Neil isn't sure why people think he's dead, but wants to make it clear that he's not.

"I don't know how it happened but last Friday I received a call from the local sheriff, a couple of calls, messages, urgent. I called back and she said, 'You're alive,' and she was happy and I said, 'great, I'm alive,'" O'Neil told CBC News.

"She explained to me that apparently someone had posted on Facebook that I was dead, that I died the night before. It went viral and it went through Tim Horton's and the whole town believed I was [dead]."

O'Neil sent out a mass email to his entire contact list to attempt to correct the rumour, but admitted to CTV News that it's hard to correct lies once they've gone viral.

"This couldn’t have occurred even five years ago to anybody, but with the Internet, things spread so quickly, just in no time at all," he said. "When something goes viral, that’s it, it’s

Read More »from Nova Scotia lawyer insist he isn’t dead, despite rumours to the contrary

A Kenyan teen's invention, "Lion Lights," helps protect his family's livestock from lions — and earned him an invitation to speak at this week's TED conference.

Richard Turere, 13, was raised on the edge of Nairobi National Park, Kenya. He first starting herding and safeguarding his family's cattle when he was nine years old. Often, he'd discover that lions had attacked in the middle of the night, feeding on the cattle his family needed to survive.

"I grew up hating lions very much," Turere told CNN. "They used to come at night and feed on our cattle when we were sleeping."

When Turere was 11, he had an epiphany that would help protect the cattle from late-night attacks.

"One day, when I was walking around," he said, "I discovered that the lions were scared of the moving light."

Lions appeared to be too scared to approach the cattle if someone was nearby with a moving flashlight.

Turere immediately began to invent what would be known as "Lion Lights."

"He fitted a series of flashing

Read More »from Kenyan teen saves family’s livestock from lions with simple invention

Pat Wesner was driving to work early Tuesday morning when a Brinks truck passed her on route 22, just north of Salem, New York. The truck went over a bump. Suddenly coins and bills were flying everywhere.

The truck had spilled $11,000 — without the driver noticing.

"If you saw how the change hit the ground and sprayed out like a halo with the sunshine, I just went, 'Oh my goodness. It's money.' And again with the dollar bills going all over. It was definitely something out of a movie," Wesner told Fox23 News.

With no one else on the road to notice the cash — "There was nothing, there was nobody, there were no houses, fields on either side of you," Wesner said — the mother of four could have easily pocketed a small fortune.

Instead she called 911. She had picked up all the cash before a trooper arrived.

Wesner, a director of a non-profit museum that struggles financially, told WNYT that the thought of pocketing the cash never crossed her mind.

"It's stealing if you take something

Read More »from Brinks truck spills $11,000, mom of four returns it all

James Humphries, 34, or Newquay, England, considers oysters "the perfect hangover cure."

"'I eat a couple of oysters every Saturday morning. They are the perfect hangover cure - refreshing, tasty, and much better than a can of Red Bull," he told the DailyMail.

Last Saturday morning, after a night of heavy drinking, Humphries bought two fresh oysters from local fishmongers for breakfast.

While he was eating his way to sobriety, he discovered a pearl in one of the mollusks.

"I thought a filling had fallen out. It was only when I spat it out that I discovered it was a pearl," he told the Mirror. "It's small, but perfectly formed and I absolutely love it."

The fishmonger who sold Humphries the oyster said that in the 80 years his family business has been operating, there's never been a pearl in one of their oysters.

"I've been here for 30 years and sold thousands of oysters — but I've never seen a pearl come out of one," fishmonger Gareth Horner said. "My dad has been in the business even

Read More »from Man discovers priceless pearl in his hangover breakfast

Last October, Al Packard purchased a record player from a flea market in Greenville, South Carolina.

WWII Purple Heart found at flea market, returned after 70 yearsA World War II Purple Heart awarded to Sgt. James Carithers, was found rattling around in a record player bought at the Anderson Jockey Lot, a flea market in Belton, South Carolina.

Inside was a WWII Purple Heart, awarded to Sergeant James Carithers.

Packard wanted to reunite the medal with the soldier's family. His online search led him to 17-year-old Andrew Staton, a researcher for Genealogytrails.com.

"I'm most amazed by him that he actually took the time to start researching and start trying to piece it together himself, and he contacted us at Genealogy Trails, and we kind of took it from there," Staton told FOX Carolina.

Staton found a 2000 post on a genealogy website that mentioned Carithers by Arrista Pottle, Carither's niece. Her email address was included.

Staton relayed the information to Packard who then contacted

Read More »from WWII medal discovered in flea market record player, returned to soldier’s family

Free Money With a CatchATMs have been setup for people to get free money, but they have to share the money.

In Spain, an ATM machine dispenses free cash to people willing to share it with others.

"El Cajero de la felicidad," or "The ATM of Happiness," is part of Coca-Cola's "Share Happiness" campaign.

Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz offered a little background information on the significance of free money in his home country:

"You probably have heard that it's suffering a terrible recession. The situation is terrible: six million people without a job, corrupt politicians everywhere, gangster banks repossessing homes after receiving bailouts funded by taxpayers, and inept bureaucrats running every institution of the country. People are fed up, disgusted and poor. But there's hope, as this video shows."

"Get 100 euros ($131). Without card," a sign above the machine, which has been placed in different Spanish cities, reads.

The only condition for the free cash? The receiver must share their

Read More »from Spanish ATM gives out free money to people willing to share it