Thousands flocked to the annual Roadkill Cooking Festival in Marlinton, W.V., in September. It featured an array of “tasting” dishes — black bear, possum, elk, snapping turtle. Judges deducted points if the “chef” had not managed to remove all gravel or asphalt from the dish.
Fine Points of Canadian Law
— Jamie Richardson of Whitehorse, Yukon, thought she was lucky she had medical insurance for her 7-year-old, Akita, who had torn a ligament in a hind leg. But it turned out that the policy, written by Canada’s largest pet insurer, Petsecure, didn’t cover dog injuries from “jumping, running, slipping, tripping or playing” — in other words, Richardson concluded, injuries caused by “being a dog.” After Richardson protested, Petsecure relented. But it did so, it said, only because Richardson was a longtime customer.
— An Ontario mother provided beer to her underage son, who then went out with a pal; gulped down a bottle of vodka; and stole a car from a dealer’s lot. The son then crashed the car into a building, leaving the pal with a catastrophic brain injury. In October, the Ontario Court of Appeal assigned the most fault in the case to the victim of the 2006 car theft (Rankin’s Garage of Paisley, Ontario) on the grounds that Rankin left the key in the car overnight, thus making it “irresistible” to “teenage car thieves.”
The Job of the Researcher
Charles Foster, recent recipient of the “Ig Nobel” prize in biology (and a fellow at Oxford University), has recently lived as if he were a badger (inside a hole in Wales), an otter playing in rivers, and an “urban fox” rummaging through garbage bins in London. He has also lived as a red deer and (“ridiculously,” he admits) a migratory bird mapping treetop air currents. He has done all this in an effort to experience those creatures’ lives. “We have five glorious senses,” he told the Ig Nobel audience, and need to “escape the tyranny” of the visual. “Drop onto all fours,” he recommended. “Sniff the ground. Lick a leaf.”
Leading Economic Indicators
In every October since the 13th century, a British official has arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice in London and paid rent to the queen for the use of two properties for the sum of “a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes and 61 nails.” This information is reported by Atlas Obscura. “No one knows exactly where these two pieces of land are,” the website reported, but one is in Shropshire County and the other near the Royal Courts.
Perspective
A recent Better Business Bureau study in Canada found that, contrary to popular belief, it is the millennial generation and those aged 25 to 55, rather than seniors, who are most likely now to fall victim to scammers. Their gullibility is fueled by users’ lax skepticism about new technology. If accurate, the study would account for a Virginia Tech student in September falling for a telephone call from “the IRS” threatening her over “back taxes.” She complied with instructions from the “agent” to send $1,762 in four iTunes gift cards.
Redneck Chronicles
In a dispute between two brothers at their recycling plant in Bow, N.H., Peter Emanuel used his front-end loader to tip over the crane being operated by Stanley Emanuel, who managed to jump out just in time. Peter was arrested.
True Florida
— In October, sheriff’s deputies in Pinellas County detained the 350-pound Columbus Henderson when they discovered a glass “crack pipe” stuffed with steel wool in one of his orifices. A week earlier, Henderson had shoplifted two 40-inch TV sets from a Wal-Mart in Fort Lauderdale. After he fled, he was identified when his loosely worn pants, containing his ID, fell off as he tried to run through the parking lot.
— Police said Taccara Nauden, 28, had no contraband, but was using an orifice to carry her ID card. During a traffic stop in Hollywood, it became clear she did not want police to know she was Taccara Nauden. It turned out there was an arrest warrant on her.
Tennessee’s Super Breeders
As of June, 2012, Desmond Hatchett, of Knoxville, fathered at least 24 children by at least 11 women. But he is hardly Tennessee’s most prolific. A June, 2012, story by WMC-TV and WREG-TV in Memphis revealed that Richard Colbert had 25 children with 18 women. Various child support court orders have been ignored.
Can’t Possibly Be True
Kids as young as 6 who live on a cliff top in China’s Atule’er village in Sichuan province will no longer have to use ladders made of vines to climb down and up the 2,600-foot descent from their homes to school. Beijing News disclosed in October, in a report carried by CNN, that a sturdy steel ladder was being built to aid the 400 villagers after breathtaking photographs of their treacherous commute surfaced on the internet earlier this year.
The Usual Suspects: Youth Pastors
Sentenced to six years in prison for sex with teenage girls: former Youth Pastor David Hayman, 38 (Hackensack, N.J.). Sentenced to six months in jail for sending inappropriate texts to teenage boys: former Youth Pastor Brian Burchfield (Shawnee, Okla.). Charged with and awaiting trial for impregnating a 15-year-old girl: Youth Pastor Wesley Blackburn, 35 (New Paris, Penn.). Sentenced to 10 years in prison for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl: former Youth Pastor Brian Mitchell, 31 (North Olmsted, Ohio). Charged with and awaiting trial for luring teenagers into prostitution: Youth Pastor Ron Cooper, 52 (Miami). Sentenced to 90 days in jail as part of a sex assault case involving a 13-year-old girl: former Youth Pastor Christopher Hutchinson, 37 (Parker, Colo.).
Ant Hell
Researchers in Poland reported on the survival of a colony of ants that became trapped in an old nuclear weapon bunker. When researchers first noticed the ants in 2013, they assumed the ants would soon die — either freezing or starving to death. But when researchers returned in 2015 and 2016, they found the population stable. Their only guess is that new ants were falling into the bunker, replacing the dead ones. Thus, ants condemned to the bunker slowly starve, freezing, in total darkness, until newly condemned ants arrive and freeze and starve in total darkness — and so forth and so on.
Judicial Activism
Jackson County, Mich., judge John McBain briefly gained notoriety when a Michigan news site released courtroom video of a December, 2015, hearing in which McBain threw off his robe, leapt from the bench and tackled defendant Jacob Larson, who was resisting the one court officer on hand to restrain him. Yelling, “Tase his ass right now,” McBain is shown holding on until help arrived. Larson had earlier stated it was his girlfriend, not he, who was the aggressor in alleged stalking incidents.
Perspective
In 1921, researchers for the Calif. Dept. of Fish and Wildlife stated categorically that “the one predatory animal inspiring practically nothing good” is the mountain lion. But recent research in the journal Conservation Letters credits the animal for saving the lives of many motorists by killing deer, and thus reducing the current annual number of 20,000 driver-deer collisions.
Sovereigns
Facing foreclosure of her home by Firstbank Puerto Rico, the director of the Caribbean Cultural Center at the University of the Virgin Islands decided she was not really “Chenzira Davis-Kahina,” but actually “Royal Daughter Sat Yah” of the “Natural Sovereign Indigenous Nation of Smai Tawi Ta-Neter-Awe.” She and her husband, with his equally odd title and name, have sued the bank for $190 million in federal court. The couple says that in the law of the country they made up, attempts by federal marshals to seize their property double the amounts of damages to the couple.
Emotional Support Animals
Four-year old Daniel and a duck accompanied a woman in her 20s on a flight from Charlotte, N.C., to Asheville. The duck wore a Captain America diaper and red shoes to protect its feet. It occasionally gave the woman a peck on the mouth. Reporting the event was author Mark Essig, who’s written favorably about pigs. He admitted he’d never before been on a flight with “companion poultry.”
The Art of Smuggling
At press time, Leston Lawrence, 35, an employee of the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa, was awaiting a court decision on charges that he stole $140,000 worth of thick gold coins (“pucks”) that, over time, were taken from the mint in his rectum. The mint’s “highest security measures” never turned up a puck on or in Lawrence; he was arrested after the mint investigated a tip that he had sold an unusual number of them for someone of his pay grade.
Government In Action
Mayor Paul Antonio of Toowoomba, Australia (pop. 100,000), admitted he had picked an uphill fight. But he is still handing out cards to men on the street, asking them to help the city become completely free of pornography. The cards don’t specify how this is to be done. Though the city has several tax-paying sex businesses (including a strip club and a brothel), Antonio’s message is directed at the ease of getting images of male “dominance and power” over females on the internet.
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