Wood Tick Racing

Milwaukee’s WITI-TV, in an on-the-scene report from Loretta, Wis., described the town’s baffling fascination with “Wood Tick Racing.” The race is held annually in May, provided someone finds enough wood ticks to place in a circle so that townspeople can wager on which one hops out first. The races began 37 years ago, and this year Howard was declared the winner. According to the organizers, at the end of the day, all contestants, except Howard, were to be smashed with a mallet.

Getting Fannies In The Seats

The Bunyadi opened in London in June for a three-month run as the world’s newest nude-dining experience. It now has a waiting list of 40,000. Bunyadi said the experience creates “true liberation” by serving only food “from nature,” cooked over fire using no electricity. Waiters are nude. Tokyo’s Amrita nude eatery, opening in July, is a bit more playful, with best-body male waiters and an optional floorshow — and no overweight patrons allowed. Both restaurants provide some sort of derriere-cover for sitting, and require diners to check their cellphones at the door.

News From North Korea

In March, a South Korean ecology organization reported that the traditional winter migration of vultures from China was, unusually, skipping over North Korea, headed directly for the South. Apparently because of the paucity of animal corpses, according to reports, a major food source for millions of North Koreans. And in June, the Global Nutrition Report, which criticized the U.S. and 13 other countries for alarming obesity rates, praised North Korea for its progress in having fewer adults with body mass index over 30.

Awesome

— For the last 17 months, Stan Larkin, of Ypsilanti, Mich., has gone about his business, even playing pickup basketball, without a functional heart in his body. He is carrying around the “organ” that pumps his blood in a backpack. Larkin, 25, was born with a dangerous heart arrhythmia, and was kept alive for a while with a defibrillator and then by hooking him up to a washing-machine-sized heart pump, leaving him barely mobile. Then came the miraculous SynCardia Freedom Total Artificial Heart, weighing 13 pounds and improving Larkin’s quality of life as he endured the almost-interminable wait for a heart transplant, which he finally received in May. An average of 22 people a day die awaiting organ transplants in the U.S.

— An ordinary green tree frog recently injured in a lawn-mowing accident in Australia’s Outback was flown about 600 miles from Mount Isa to the Cairns Frog Hospital. CFH president Deborah Pergolotti spoke despairingly to Australian Broadcasting Corp. News in June about how society under regards the poor frogs when it comes to rescue and rehab, suggesting that “there’s almost a glass ceiling” between them and the cuter animals.

Government In Action

— The Department of Veterans Affairs revealed in May that, between 2007 and last year, nearly 25,000 vets examined for traumatic brain injury at 40 VA facilities were not seen by medical personnel qualified to render the diagnosis. This may account for the result that, according to veterans’ activists, very few of them were ever referred for treatment.

— The Illinois secretary of state stopped mailing reminders about license-plate renewal deadlines in October because his office said the state could no longer afford the $450,000-a-month mailing cost. They have saved taxpayers $3.6 million so far. The Belleville, Ill., News-Democrat and The Associated Press reported in June that the state has collected $5.24 million more in the resultant “late fees” people had to pay on their license-plate renewals than it had collected the year before the reminders stopped. A proposal for a 30-day grace period for expired plates failed in the legislative session.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Basking in its record high in venture capital funding, the Chinese Jiedaibao website put its business model into practice, facilitating offers of jumbo personal loans — two to five times the normal limit — to female students who submit nude photos. The student agrees that if the loan is not repaid on time at exorbitant interest rates, the lender can release the photos online. The business has been heavily criticized, but the company’s headquarters said the privately negotiated contracts are beyond its control.

Recurring Themes

The super-painful “Ilizarov procedure” enables petite women to make themselves taller. A surgeon breaks bones in the shins or thighs, then adjusts special leg braces four times daily that pull the bones slightly apart, awaiting them to slowly grow back and fuse together, usually taking at least six months. As News of the Weird reported in 2002, a 5-foot-tall woman, aiming for 5-4, gushed about “a better job, a better boyfriend … a better husband. It’s a long-term investment.” Now, India’s “medical tourism” industry offers Ilizarovs cut-rate but unregulated and, so far, not yet even taught in India’s medical schools. Leading practitioner Dr. Amar Sarin of Delhi admits there’s madness to patients’ dissatisfactions with the way they look.

Least Competent Criminals

— Damian Shaw, 43, was sentenced in England’s Chester Crown Court in June after an April raid revealed he had established a “sophisticated” cannabis-growing operation of 160 plants in a building about 50 yards from the front door of the Cheshire Police headquarters.

— Northern Ireland’s Belfast Telegraph reported in April that a man was hospitalized after throwing bricks at the front windows of a PIPS office (Public Initiative for Prevention of Suicide and Self Harm). He was injured by brick bounce-back, off the shatterproof glass. Armed And Clumsy More people who accidentally shot themselves recently:

— Age 37, Augusta, Kan., a man adjusting his “sock gun” at a high school graduation.

— Age 28, Panama City, Fla., a jail guard “preparing” for a job interview (May).

— An unidentified man in Union, S.C., who, emerging from a shower, sat on his gun (December).

— The sheriff of Des Moines County, Iowa, who shot his hand while cleaning his gun (December).

— A moviegoer adjusting in his seat in Salina, Kan., shot himself during the feature three months after acquiring a no-test-required concealed-carry permit (October). — Age 43, Miami, a man demonstrating to a relative how to clean a gun (December).

— A teenager, Overland, Mo., trying to take a selfie holding a gun (June). The last two people are no longer with us.

News Of The Weird Classic

— Collections of comically poor translations are legion, but the Beijing Municipal government, in sympathy with English-speaking restaurant-goers, published a helpful guidebook in 2012 of what the restaurateurs were trying to say. In an interview with the authors, NBC News learned the actual contents of “Hand Shredded A$$ Meat” was merely donkey meat. Other baffling dishes, all taken from actual menus, included “Cowboy Leg,” “Red-Burned Lion Head,” “Blow-up Flatfish with No Result,” and the very unhelpful “Strange Flavor Noodles” and “Tofu Made By Woman With Freckles.”

— In testimony at an extortion trial in New York City in June (2012), Anthony Russo, alleged Colombo family associate, told prosecutors that a bloody mob war was narrowly averted. The Colombo family had learned that a new Staten Island pizza parlor, run by an alleged Bonanno family associate, was featuring pies that suspiciously resembled those of the top-rated, Colombo-promoted L and B Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn, and thus, representatives of both families had to have one of those classic “sit-downs” at a neutral site to smooth things over. The sit-down took place, Russo said, at a Panera Bread cafe.

Fine Points Of The Law

— To their great surprise, Sophie Scafidi and friends, on an outing in Hampton Beach, N.H., in June, learned that a man spying on and photographing them through a camera lens hidden in a Gatorade bottle painted black was not violating any law. Although the lens was rigged to the man’s phone, which contained beach photos, including some of children, police informed Scafidi that even surreptitious photography in sleazy circumstances, as long as done on public property, was legal and that the only law broken in the incident was by the person who snatched the “camera” to show police.

— In June, a federal appeals court revived Adrian King’s lawsuit against the Huttonsville Correctional Center in West Virginia for emotional distress and invasion of privacy in forcing him into surgery to remove the marbles he had implanted in his penis before going behind bars in 2008. King did not allege that he misses the marbles but only that he had chosen body-modification and that the surgery was against his will, causing pain upon touch. Prison officials initially ordered the surgery because it was unclear that the objects were not contraband.