The News Of Tomorrow, Today

Subscribe

The 10 Weirdest Things People Are Doing In Coronavirus Quarantine

Leah Williams Avatar
Leah Williams
The 10 Weirdest Things People Are Doing In Coronavirus Quarantine

The world is going through a weird phase right now. The only solution is for us to get weirder ” and the internet is delivering in spades.

Coronavirus quarantines around the world have led to a blossoming of personal arts and culture. People are posting on dance app TikTok more frequently, cute videos of socks eating cars are going viral. People are singing from balconies and just trying to do their best.

From the heart-warming to the highly confusing, these are the strangest things that people in quarantine are getting up to.

Selling Fast Food On eBay

Some countries are currently living through a national shutdown of all stores and services, including the UK. As our pals over at Gizmodo UK discovered, this has led to a rather unfortunate trade: the sale of McDonald’s Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets on eBay.

While one auction of a Big Mac did reach $260 (£130), the listing has since been removed, indicating that somebody came to their senses or was told to take it down. At the time, the proceeds had been pledged to the UK National Health Service. A $4,998 (£2,500) bid for a sharebox of 20 Chicken McNuggets appears to have been completed successfully. Whether the final value was paid is unclear.

For everybody’s sake, we hope it wasn’t.

Finding Crafty Uses For Umbrellas

This is not a Universal Monster, but it might as well be. This hairdresser from Bella Rosa Salon in the Netherlands has found a creative way of ensuring safety between herself and her clients. Five holes have been cut in this umbrella to reduce the likelihood of bodily transference of coronavirus, including two for arms, two for eyes and a fifth for eyebrow threading.

While it’s not exactly a tried-and-true method for preventing coronavirus spread, it sure shows some initiative. Whether it’s mad genius or totally bonkers is untested, so don’t try this at home.

Educating Cats

Now, cats may not have the capacity to understand the coronavirus epidemic and how it affects them, but that didn’t stop Twitter user @sofiarudyy‘s dad from giving it a red hot go. In this now-viral clip, four cats can be seen recieving a rigorous education in all things ‘rona’.

While some of the cats aren’t as happy to be taught as others, for the most part, they’re patient and attentive. We hope they learned something from this excellent and thoughtful lesson.

Getting Magnets Stuck Up Their Noses

[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2020/03/astrophysicist-gets-magnets-stuck-in-his-nose-while-trying-to-invent-face-touching-alarm/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/trl29owlu1obmrjdhesd.png” title=”Astrophysicist Gets Magnets Stuck In His Nose While Trying To Invent Face-Touching Alarm” excerpt=”Men on the forefront of scientific discovery do not fear risking life and limb, be it drinking the vomit of a sick man or dosing themselves with LSD. One astrophysicist followed in their footsteps in the name of covid-19 health research and ended up with magnets up his nose, at risk of a horrifying and violent death. He is ok.”]

God bless Daniel Reardon. He had only the best intentions when he set about making a necklace to warn of imminent face-touching. But even the greatest intentions have a habit of going astray, and this science project ended with rogue magnets lodged up Reardon’s nose holes.

Daniel, we salute you and your wonderfully ambitious efforts.

Becoming Potatoes

Everyone is living in an unfamiliar world these days and navigating new work-from-home tools like Microsoft teams can be difficult. For one boss, this change meant spending an entire team meeting ressembling a large potato.

As Twitter user @PettyClegg details, this transformation ended up being fairly permanent after the new settings escaped her boss. While we’re not sure what went on here, it sure is comedy gold.

If you also want to become a vegetable (literally, not figuratively), Microsoft Teams is now free for businesses.

Flipping Off Their Pets

To be fair to this cat, it probably deserved this.

‘Flipping off animals that lose at tic-tac-toe’ has become a competitive sport over on TikTok. First, we have this unfortunate cat recieving the treatment, then a whole bunch of fish. Not even turtles can escape the savagery.

Bunnies have the right idea though.

Inventing the Sport of Roomba Races

Sport is over, at least for a little while. Health reccomendations have completely shut down many contact sports, leaving people scrambling for any kind of sports-related entertainment.

Enter: Roomba Races.

In this frantic floor-mopping activity, players are required to clean the floor before the Roomba can, thus taking away its primary function and denying its true purpose.

Take that, nasty machine. There’s no way this sport could backfire on us in the future.

Playing High-Stakes Tennis

Oh, did we say sports are cancelled? Well, not all sports.

Italy is currently under strict lockdown, but that didn’t stop these two men making the most of quarantine by initiative a very hairy game of tennis. They start off an impressive volley in this video posted by Twitter user @GsaLegrand, but it all ends in tragedy when the ball is fumbled and falls several stories to the sadly quarantined ground floor.

Shakespeare couldn’t write a sonnet so sad.

Finding Wally

Argentinian artist and Tennessee cartoonist Clay Bennett have used this isolation period to develop a brand new, easy-to-learn version of classic hide-and-seek book Where’s Wally.

View this post on Instagram

Wally Corona Virus edition

A post shared by Pedro Mezzini (@pedrola__) on

The best news is that even a baby can find Wally now ” social distancing measures mean that he’s all alone.

So alone.

Whether Wally’s globe-trotting adventures classify as ‘essential’ travels is… decidedly unclear.

Perhaps he’s just going out to buy some essential jigsaw puzzles.

Summoning Batman

At 4:30am Tuesday, March 31, Twitter user @Leonsjogren spotted a rather familiar figure haunting the desolate streets of Melbourne. Yes, that’s right, the coronavirus epidemic has summoned Batman himself.

The caped crusader appeared to nestle beneath a highway doing nothing much but look menacing. Is this a safe, essential use of this superhero’s time? Absolutely. Batman founded Melbourne and he’ll guard it as he pleases.

But then again, what’s he going to do, punch the virus? Back to Gotham with you.

It’s good to know that even amongst all the chaos, we can still squeeze a good laugh out of these incredibly strange times. To all you crazy kids, keep on creating.

The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.