The Weekly Spread #1: The Shark That Won't Leave, a €5M Wine Heist & the First Green Star

A shark that moved into a city canal and refused to leave. Thirty thousand bottles of wine stolen in one night. And astronomers just found the first green star.

Welcome to The Weekly Spread. I'm Mustard. Every week, I go through the biggest, weirdest and most interesting stories, and explain what's actually going on.

This is the week of October 12th to the 18th. Let's get into it.

The Shark That Won't Leave

We'll start in Busan, South Korea. On September 18th, people at a waterfront park spotted something swimming in a narrow city canal. A shark.

It's about three meters long, a dusky shark, and somehow it swam in from the sea and just stayed.

Officials tried twice to guide it back out. They sprayed water to push it, and they stretched a big net across the canal. Both times, the shark swam right back in.

Now it's a celebrity. People nicknamed it Bukangi, after the area. And more than a million and a half visits have been made to the park since it showed up.

The city now sends about a hundred and five people every day to watch over it, from the coast guard and fire service to fisheries scientists. A standby team can reach the shark within three minutes if it looks unwell.

And nearby restaurants and coffee shops are reportedly enjoying an unexpected boom from all the visitors.

As of this weekend, it has been there for a full month. Scientists noticed a little damage on the tip of one fin, probably from rubbing on the canal wall, but they say it's not serious.

The plan now is to wait. As autumn cools the canal, officials hope the shark will head back to the warmer open sea on its own.

My take? This shark found a quiet canal, free attention, and a million fans. Honestly, I'd stay too.

One Year Since the Louvre Heist

This weekend marks one year since the Louvre heist. On October 19th last year, thieves used a furniture lift to reach a window, and took eight pieces of the French crown jewels in under eight minutes.

Several suspects were arrested. But as far as has been reported, the jewels themselves still haven't been found.

The jewels were valued at around eighty-eight million euros. The thieves even dropped a crown that belonged to Empress Eugénie as they escaped. And afterward, reports said the password for the museum's video surveillance system had once been, simply, Louvre.

And it turned out to be just the beginning. Reporters have been calling it the year of the heist.

Just two weeks ago, thieves broke into an art center in Issoire, in central France, by forcing open a gate. They stole the bronze cover of a book designed by Salvador Dalí.

It weighs around a hundred and fifty kilograms, and it's decorated with gold, precious stones, pearls and seashells. Back in the sixties, it was called the biggest, heaviest and most expensive book in the world.

In September, two Renoir paintings worth about nine million euros were stolen from the Renoir Museum near Nice. Those were later found, and suspects were arrested.

And in Vienna, thieves took a 1939 necklace with six hundred and seventy-three diamonds from the Museum of Applied Arts.

My take? Museums are full of priceless things, and a lot of them were never built to be fortresses. One year after the Louvre, a lot of places are learning that the hard way.

The Great Wine Heist

Speaking of heists. On October 2nd, Italy may have had its biggest wine heist ever.

It happened at a cellar near Cortona belonging to Marchesi Antinori, a wine family that has been making wine since 1385.

At least seven masked thieves switched off the alarm and the cameras. Then they spent about three hours loading the bottles, using the winery's own forklifts.

They took around thirty thousand bottles, worth about five million euros. It was all wine waiting to be shipped for export.

The company said its insurance will only cover about a tenth of the price. And so far, no arrests have been announced.

The company's CEO suggested it might be the same group that has hit other Italian wineries recently. So this might not be the last wine heist we hear about.

My take? Using the winery's own forklifts is the part that gets me. They didn't just steal the wine. They borrowed the equipment to do it.

The Brewers Are Going to the World Series

In sports, the Milwaukee Brewers are going to the World Series for the first time since 1982.

On October 15th, they finished a four-game sweep of the Dodgers, the two-time defending champions. In the final game, they came back from four runs down to win six to four.

According to the Associated Press, they're the first team to sweep a best-of-seven playoff series after trailing in every single game. They also had the best record in baseball this year, with a hundred and three wins.

The Brewers have never won a World Series. Not once, in fifty-seven seasons.

Their opponent will be either the Cleveland Guardians or the Tampa Bay Rays. As of Sunday night, Tampa Bay leads that series three games to two, with game six on Monday.

Here's why it matters. Cleveland hasn't won since 1948, the longest active drought in baseball. Tampa Bay has never won at all. So this World Series makes history no matter who wins.

I made a whole video about baseball's longest droughts this week. It's linked in the description. Game one is October 23rd, in Milwaukee.

The Man Who Walked Home

This next one is incredible. In November 1998, a former British paratrooper named Karl Bushby set off from the southern tip of Chile, with a simple goal. Walk home to England.

Twenty-eight years later, he's almost there. He has walked more than thirty thousand miles, through twenty-nine countries.

He started with just a few hundred dollars, and a rule that he'd walk the whole way, and not go home until it was done.

Along the way, he walked across the frozen Bering Strait, from Alaska into Russia. And when Russia denied his visa in 2012, the trip was stuck. In protest, he walked the other way, all the way to the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. Eventually the ban was lifted, and he kept going.

And to get into England, he didn't take a boat. Earlier this month, he swam across the English Channel, from France to Dover.

Now he's on the last stretch, a few hundred miles to his mother's home in Hull, which he hopes to reach by the end of October.

His words? The world is an incredible place.

My take? Most of us can't finish a step challenge on our phones. This man walked around the planet.

The Candidate Who Barely Wanted to Win

Now a story that made me laugh. In Kelowna, British Columbia, there was a city council election on Saturday, with thirty-seven candidates.

One of them, a thirty-three-year-old engineer named Brady Rogers, went viral for his campaign signs. One said, under sixty. Another said, I barely want to do this.

He played up the image of a guy who really didn't want to be there. But his videos about local issues, like housing, transit and a closed waterfront walkway, were well researched, and people watched them.

And on Saturday night, he won. He finished fourth, with more than twelve thousand six hundred votes.

His victory post? A low-key selfie, thanking voters, saying, I guess I'm on council now.

My take? Honesty is a pretty good campaign strategy. A lot of people barely want to go to meetings either.

The Oldest Home in the Americas

Now some science. In Interior Alaska, about fifty-five kilometers southeast of Fairbanks, archaeologists have found what may be the oldest known home in the Western Hemisphere.

The site is about thirteen thousand eight hundred years old. It's called Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ, which means They Were There, in the local Alaska Native Athabascan language.

They found a hearth, and a stain in the dirt where a wooden post once stood. Possibly from a lean-to or an early tent.

They also found an earth oven full of charcoal and bones, eight bone needle fragments, which are the oldest eyed needles ever found in the Western Hemisphere, and a pendant carved from antler.

There were even remains of more than a dozen wolf-like animals, which might have been some of the earliest dogs.

The stone tools point to links with Siberia, and the needles and pendant point to links with people farther south. The study was published this week in the journal Science Advances.

My take? Thirteen thousand eight hundred years ago, someone sat by a fire, sewing clothes, with a dog nearby. Some things never change.

A Pharaoh in a Farm Field

In Egypt, a man named Khaled el-Shahat was working on his land in the village of Behbeit El Hagar, in the north of the country, when he found something huge.

Pieces of two giant statues of Ramesses the Second, one of the most famous pharaohs in history.

The bigger one would have stood around eight and a half meters tall when it was whole. Its head alone is about one point six meters, and it's wearing the double crown, the symbol of Upper and Lower Egypt.

The second statue is about two point four meters tall, and wears the striped headdress you've probably seen on pictures of pharaohs.

He reported it to Egypt's antiquities ministry, which sent a team to dig and study the site. It's near the ruins of an ancient temple to the goddess Isis, and experts say growing towns are putting sites like this at risk, so finds like this matter.

My take? Most of us dig in the garden and find a rock. This man found a pharaoh. And then did the right thing and called it in.

A Dinosaur in a Drawer

Back in 1924, a fossil was dug up on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England. It went into the collection at the Natural History Museum in London, and it sat there for nearly a hundred years.

Now, using CT scans of its braincase, scientists say it's a brand new species of dinosaur. They named it Invictibellatrix amberina.

It was an early megaraptor, a two-legged predator related to the tyrannosaurs, around three to four meters long, and probably covered in feathers.

And it had huge arms, with claws up to twenty centimeters long, which it probably used for hunting.

My take? Scientists found a new dinosaur by opening a drawer. Go check your junk drawer. You never know.

A Record on Mars

Speaking of things that keep going. NASA's Perseverance rover just set a record on Mars.

It has now driven about forty-five point two kilometers since landing in 2021. That's farther than any vehicle has ever driven on any world besides Earth.

The old record belonged to its cousin, the Opportunity rover, which drove for fourteen years, until 2018.

Perseverance is exploring Jezero Crater, which scientists think held a lake billions of years ago. The big question is whether tiny life could ever have existed there.

And about ninety percent of Perseverance's drives are done on its own, with the rover mapping the ground and picking a safe path by itself.

My take? It's driving itself, on another planet, and it still has better parking than most people.

The First Green Star

And out in space, astronomers have found what's being called the first green star.

Stars come in red, orange, yellow, white and blue. But green? Normally, no. Our eyes just don't see stars that way.

This one is a white dwarf, the leftover core of a dead star, about two hundred and eighty light-years away. Its name is WD J1330 plus 6435.

Scientists think it ate rocky debris from old planets that got too close. That changed its atmosphere, which is now full of sodium.

Normally a star like this would look white or bluish. This one's atmosphere is so thick and so full of sodium that it changes the color of the light that escapes.

That thick sodium soaks up yellow, orange and red light. And what's left over makes it look green.

My take? A star ate a planet and turned green. That's the most relatable space story I've ever heard.

Quick Hits From History

A couple of quick history hits before we go.

At Great Zimbabwe, the stone capital of a medieval African empire, archaeologists found pieces of jade-green Chinese pottery called celadon. It shows the empire was trading with East Asia more than a thousand years ago.

And in Oklahoma, there's a buried meteor crater, about sixteen kilometers wide, called the Ames crater. It was only found in 1991, when oil drillers hit it by accident.

A new study says it's about a hundred million years younger than scientists thought, around three hundred and seventy million years old, which puts it right around the time of a major mass extinction.

What to Watch This Week

One thing to watch for this week. The Orionid meteor shower peaks around October 21st and 22nd.

These meteors are tiny bits of dust from Halley's Comet. They hit our atmosphere at about sixty-six kilometers per second, and burn up as shooting stars.

You might see up to fifteen or twenty an hour. The best time is after about two in the morning, once the moon sets, and especially right before dawn.

Get away from city lights, give your eyes time to adjust, and look toward the constellation Orion, near the reddish star Betelgeuse. And go early in the week, because the full moon arrives around October 25th and will wash out the sky.

This Week on Mustard Explains

And finally, here's what we put out on the channel this week.

In The Dumbest Criminals of All Time, a man robbed two banks with no mask, because he'd rubbed lemon juice on his face and thought it made him invisible to cameras.

In The Craziest Prison Escapes in History, a scholar escaped a Dutch castle in 1621 by hiding inside the chest the guards used to carry his books.

And in Crime World Records, the biggest bank robbery in history didn't need a tunnel or a mask. Just a handwritten note, and three trucks.

Every one of those has a lot more stories. They're all linked in the description.

Sign-off

That's the week. A shark with a million fans, a stolen Dalí, thirty thousand bottles of wine, a man who walked around the world, a reluctant new city councillor, a dinosaur in a drawer, and a green star.

Which story was the craziest? And I'll see you next week on The Weekly Spread.