CAN’T POSSIBLY BE TRUE

Kids as young as six who live on a cliff top in China’s Atule’er village in Sichuan province will no longer have to use flexible vine-based ladders 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 them making the treacherous commute surfaced on the internet earlier this year.

AN ‘ANT’ VERSION OF HELL

Researchers in Poland reported in August the “survival” of a colony of ants that wandered unsuspectingly into an old nuclear weapon bunker and became trapped. When researchers first noticed in 2013, they assumed the ants would soon die, either freezing or starving to death, but, returning in 2015 and 2016, they found the population stable. Their only guess: 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 on and on.

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM

Jackson County, Michigan, judge John McBain briefly gained notoriety in October when a Michigan news site released courtroom video of a December 2015 hearing in which McBain felt the need to throw off his robe, leap from the bench and tackle 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–with Larson perhaps undermining his earlier courtroom statements claiming it was his girlfriend, and not he, who was the aggressor in alleged stalking incidents.

PERSPECTIVE

In 1921, researchers for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife stated categorically in a journal 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, thus tempering the current annual number (20,000) of driver-deer collisions. Even killing deer, mountain lions still trail pussycats as predators; researchers in Nature Communications in 2013 estimated that “free-ranging (U.S.) domestic cats” kill at least 1.4 billion birds and 6.9 billion small mammals annually.

LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS

On the way to the police station in Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 19, after being arrested for, among other things, being a felon in possession of a gun, Raymond Brooks, 25, asked an officer (apparently in all seriousness) whether, after he got booked at the station, he could have his gun back. (The police report did not specify whether the officer said yes or no.)

SOVEREIGNS!

The director of the Caribbean Cultural Center at the University of the Virgin Islands, facing foreclosure of her home by Firstbank Puerto Rico, 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,” and she and her equally befuddlingly named husband have sued the bank for $190 million in federal court (and begun the flood of incomprehensible paperwork). The couple’s law of “Maat” conveniently holds that attempts by federal marshals to seize their property would double the damages to $380 million.

‘EMOTIONAL SUPPORT’ ANIMALS

Daniel, age four–and a duck–accompanied a woman in her 20s in October on a flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Asheville, outfitted in a Captain America diaper and red shoes to protect its feet, occasionally (if inadvisedly) giving the woman a peck on the mouth. Reporting the event was author Mark Essig, who has written favorably about pigs but admitted he’d never before been on a flight with “companion poultry” and mused whether Daniel, gazing out a window, experienced an “ancestral” yearning to fly.

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 still has recently been handing out cards to men on the street asking them to help the city (in unspecified ways) become completely free of pornography. Though the city has several tax-paying sex businesses (even a strip club and a brothel), Antonio’s message (augmented by public confessions of men burdened by their porn habits) is directed at the internet’s ease of access to images of male “dominance and power” over females.

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