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 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 [http://cnn.it/2f2PCon] [CNN, 10-26-2016].

Sentenced to six years in prison for sex with teenage girls (September): former Youth Pastor David Hayman, 38 (Hackensack, New Jersey). Sentenced to six months in jail for sending inappropriate texts to teenage boys (August): former Youth Pastor Brian Burchfield (Shawnee, Oklahoma). Charged and awaiting trial for impregnating a 15-year-old girl (October): Youth Pastor Wesley Blackburn, 35 (New Paris, Pennsylvania). Sentenced to 10 years in prison for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl (September): former Youth Pastor Brian Mitchell, 31 (North Olmsted, Ohio). Charged and awaiting trial for luring teenagers into prostitution (October): 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 (September): former Youth Pastor Christopher Hutchinson, 37 (Parker, Colorado). [The Record (Hackensack), 9-23-2016] [KFOR-TV (Oklahoma City), 8-24-2016] [Associated Press via Washington Post, 10-15-2016] [Cleveland.com, 9-8-2016] [WFOR-TV (Miami), 10-19-2016] [KMGH-TV (Denver), 9-30-2016]

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. [Science Daily (8-30-2016) via WeirdUniverse.net (9-16-2016)]

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. [MLive.com, 10-13-2016]

Arrested in October and charged with kidnapping a 4-year-old girl in Lakeland: a truck driver, Mr. Wild West Hogs. Arrested in West Palm Beach in August and charged with trespassing at a Publix supermarket (and screaming at employees), Mr. Vladimir Putin. And in August, at the dedication of a new unit at Tampa General Hospital's pediatric center, longtime satisfied patients attended, including Maria Luva, who told guests her son, now 8 years old, was born there: Ywlyox Luva. [Associated Press via TampaBay.com, 10-12-2016] [WPEC-TV (West Palm Beach), 8- 30-2016] [Tampa Bay Times, 8-12-2016]

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. [Washington Post, 7-21-2016] [Audubon.org, 1-30-2013]

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.) [The Vindicator (Youngstown), 10-20-2016]

-- 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. [Virgin Islands Daily News, 8-22-2016]

-- "Emotional Support" Animals: Daniel, age 4 -- 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. [Citizen-Times (Asheville), 10-17-2016]

-- 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. [Washington Post, 9-21-2016]

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. [Australian Broadcasting Corp. News, 10-11-2016]

Tiny Thrills: (1) The town of Warley, England, announced it has applied to the Guinness people for the honor of having the world's smallest museum. The Warley Community Association's museum, with photos and mementoes of its past, is housed in an old phone booth. (So far, there are no "hours"; visitors just show up and open the door.) (2) The recent 100th anniversary of America's National Park Service drew attention to the park in Guthrie, Oklahoma -- 10 feet by 10 feet, behind the post office and dating from the original Land Office on the spot in 1889. (According to legend, the city clerk, instead of asking the government for land "100 foot square (100 feet by 100 feet)," mistakenly asked for "100 square feet.") [Conde Nast Traveler, 10-17-2016] [KFOR-TV (Oklahoma City), 4-8-2016]

A network of freelance Buddhist priests in Japan last year began offering in-home, a la carte services (for those adherents who shun temples) through Amazon in Japan, quoting fixed fees and bypassing the usual awkward deliberation over "donations." And in September, Pastor David Taylor of Joshua Media Ministries International (St. Louis, Missouri) announced, to great fanfare, that he had "resurrected" a diabetic woman, 40 minutes after her death, by sending the lady a text message -- through Facebook (though, of course, neither she nor any family member was available for an interview). [New York Times, 9-23-2016] [Christian Post, 8-29-2016]

(1) As a dispute escalated between two brothers at their recycling plant in Bow, New Hampshire, in October, 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. (2) Thousands flocked to the annual Roadkill Cooking Festival in Marlinton, West Virginia, in September, featuring an array of "tasting" dishes (e.g., black bear, possum, elk, snapping turtle) with a competition in which judges deducted points if the "chef" had not managed to remove all gravel or asphalt. [New Hampshire Union Leader, 10-6-2016] [BBC News, 10-3-2016]

-- Luckily, thought Jamie Richardson of Whitehorse, Yukon, 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, did not cover dog injuries from "jumping, running, slipping, tripping or playing" -- that is, Richardson concluded, injuries caused by "being a dog." (After Richardson protested, Petsecure relented but, it said, only because Richardson had been a longtime customer.) [Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News, 10-3-2016]

-- The Way the World Works: Who is the most at fault when (a) a mother provides beer to her underage son, (b) who then, with a pal, gulps down a bottle of vodka and steals a car from a dealer's lot, and (c) drunkenly crashes, leaving the pal with a catastrophic brain injury? In October, the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld a jury verdict that parceled out "fault," but assigned more to the victim of the 2006 car theft (Rankin's Garage of Paisley, Ontario) than to the mother or the driver (because Rankin's having left the key in the car overnight made it irresistible to "teenage car thieves"). [Toronto Sun, 10-13-2016]

Charles Foster, recent recipient of the "Ig Nobel" prize in biology (and a fellow at Oxford University), has recently lived as a badger (inside a hole in Wales), an otter playing in rivers, and an "urban fox" rummaging through garbage bins in London, in addition to a red deer and ("ridiculously," he admits) a migratory bird mapping treetop air currents -- all in order to authentically experience those creatures' lives apart from their physical appearance, which is generally all that humans know. "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." [The Conversation via Slate.com, 10-3-2016]

(1) Charles Diggs, facing child pornography charges, was found with supposedly a record haul for New Jersey -- 325,000 child-porn images and files at his Roselle home in October. (2) The Justice Department revealed in an October court filing that former National Security Agency contractor Harold Martin III, 51, had stolen at least 500 million pages of "sensitive government files," bit by bit over two decades. (Bonus questions: How does no one notice, for years, and anyway, how many total pages of "sensitive government files" are there?) [WPVI-TV (Philadelphia), 10-15-2016] [Wall Street Journal, 10-20-2016]

In October (as in supposedly every previous October since the 13th century), some British official arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice in London and paid rent to the queen for use of two properties -- for the sum of "a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes and 61 nails," according to reporting 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. [Atlas Obscura, 10-17-2016]

-- New York City sculptor Bryan Zanisnik, operating on a grant from an emerging-artist program of Socrates Sculpture Park in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens, recently created a 10-piece "garden" of concrete Christopher Walken heads to honor the actor, who grew up in Astoria. Said Zanisnik, "Perhaps the project suggests that Walken's DNA was imbued into the soil of Astoria, and now Walken mushrooms are growing everywhere." [New York Post, 10-8-2016]

-- "To be honest," wrote New York Times art critic Holland Cotter in his lead sentence on Oct. 7, "I wonder what a lot of people see in abstract painting." Then, nevertheless, Carter began praising the current Guggenheim Museum collection by abstract artist Agnes Martin, highlighted by her "Untitled No. 5," which consists of a pinkish horizontal space, on top of a yellowish horizontal space, on top of a bluish horizontal space, exactly repeated underneath except the pinkish and bluish spaces are shortened near the edges of the canvas, but not the yellowish space. Asked Carter, "How do you approach an art empty of ... evident narratives" and "make it your own?" His unrestrained 1,600-word rave did not quite answer that, except to quote Martin's suggestion that the visitor just "sit and look." [New York Times, 10-7-2016]

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 more likely now to fall victim to scammers, fueled by users' lax skepticism about new technology. If accurate, the study would account for how a Virginia Tech student in September fell 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. [Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News, 10-20-2016] [Detroit Free Press via USA Today, 9-25-2016]

-- Most old-time liquor restrictions have fallen in America, but Utah continues to hold out. The new Eccles Theater in downtown Salt Lake City, opened in October, has an elegant lobby with several floors of balconies overlooking it, but its liquor license was delayed briefly when it was realized that visitors on the upper floors could peer down at the lobby and witness beer and wine actually being poured from beer and wine bottles -- a violation of state law, which allows serving only in ordinary glassware. (At lobby level, there was a "Zion Curtain" to shield drink preparation, but the theater realized it would also need a "Zion Ceiling.") [Fox13now, 9-27-2016]

-- True "Florida": (1) In October, sheriff's deputies in Pinellas County, detaining the 350-pound Columbus Henderson, 45, discovered (in one of Henderson's "orifices") a glass "crack pipe" stuffed with steel wool. (A week earlier, Henderson had shoplifted two 40-inch TV sets from a Wal-Mart in Fort Lauderdale, and fled, though he was identified when his loosely worn pants, containing his ID, fell completely off as he "dashed" through the parking lot.) (2) Police said Ms. Taccara Nauden, 28, had no contraband, but was using an "orifice" for her ID card, during a traffic stop in Hollywood in October. She did not want police to know that she was Taccara Nauden, since there was an arrest warrant on her. [The Smoking Gun, 10-5-2016] [WKMG-TV (Orlando), 10-3-2016]

Tennessee's Super Breeders: Serial impregnator Desmond Hatchett, of Knoxville, has fathered (as of June 2012) at least 24 kids by at least 11 women, but he is hardly Tennessee's most prolific. A June (2012) story (citing reporting by WMC-TV and WREG-TV in Memphis) revealed that Terry Turnage of Memphis has 23 children by 17 women, and Richard Colbert (also from Memphis) has 25 with 18 women. Various child support court orders have been ignored, with one woman claiming the most she had ever seen from Turnage was $9. [Daily Mail (London), 6-14-2012]

As nine states next month ask voters to approve some form of legalization of marijuana, a "new customer base" for the product -- pets -- was highlighted in an October New York Times report. Dogs and cats are struck with maladies similar to those that humans report in cannabis success stories: seizures, inflammation, anxiety, arthritis and other pain and subsequent social withdrawals. The "high"-producing THC element cannot be used because it is notoriously toxic to dogs, but other elements in the drug seem to work well not only for dogs and cats but, by anecdotal evidence, pigs, horses and domesticated wild animals. [New York Times, 10-8-2016]

-- In September, Charles Lawrence III, 60, was sentenced to eight years in prison for attempted sexual assault despite his claim that it was just bad eyesight that caused the problem. He had arrived at a house in Fairfield, Connecticut, to have sex with a male he had met online, but the event turned out to be a "To Catch a Predator" sting. Lawrence, an accountant, claimed that, in text messages with the "boy," he had seen "18" as his age, when, according to police evidence, the text read "13." (Bonus: Lawrence knew "Predator" newsman Chris Hansen socially and commuted daily on the train with him, according to Lawrence's lawyer.) [Connecticut Post, 9-2- 2016]

-- A 23-year-old woman on a bus in Istanbul, Turkey, was attacked by Abdullah Cakiroglu, 35, in September because, as he told police, he had become "aroused" by her wearing shorts. (Initially, he was not arrested, but after a protest on social media, police came to get him -- though for "inciting," not assault.) He told police, "I lost myself" because the woman had "disregarded the values of our country," and "my spiritual side took over, and I kicked her in the face." [The Independent (London), 9-22-2016]

Kevin and Tammy Jones opened their guns-and-coffee store in an old bank building in Hamilton, Virginia, in August, but despite the controversies about the ease of gun acquisition in America, their Bullets and Beans shop has had a harder time pleasing government regulators over the coffee than over the firearms. Kevin told Washingtonian magazine that there were no problems in getting gun-shop and firearms-instruction permits from state and federal agencies, but several local-government roadblocks delayed the coffee-sales permit: the property being zoned for "retail" but not food or drinks; permission to open certain businesses near residences; and a coffee shop's need to have "parking." [Washingtonian, 9-28-2016]

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin declared Oct. 13 Oilfield Prayer Day to cap a statewide initiative of mass wishing for improved performance of the state's energy industry, which has been in the doldrums recently with the worldwide drop in oil prices. Though the initiative's founders, and the associated Oil Patch Chaplains, were largely Baptist church leaders, the governor emphasized that all religions should be praying for a more prosperous industry. [The Oklahoman, 10-1-2016]

-- In September, a court in Paris upheld France's government ban on people smiling for their passport and identity photos. One official had challenged the required straightforward pose ("neutral," "mouth closed"), lamenting that the French should be encouraged to smile to overcome the perpetual "national depression" that supposedly permeates the country's psyche. [The Guardian (London), 9-29-2016]

-- The baseball-like "pesapallo" might be Finland's national game, reported The New York Times in September, despite its differences from the American pastime. The ball is pitched to the batter -- but vertically, by a pitcher standing next to the batter -- and the batter runs the bases after hitting it, though not counterclockwise but zigzag style, to a base on the left, then one on the right, then back to the left. The game was invented in Finland in 1920 and has achieved minor notoriety, with teams from Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia vying for a "world cup" that so far none has been able to wrest from Finland. (Reassuringly, however, "three strikes" is an out in Finland, too.) [New York Times, 9-27-2016]

-- Too Much Time on Their Hands: In an October profile of tech developer and startup savant Sam Altman, The New Yorker disclosed that "many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis" -- that "what we experience as reality" is just some dark force's computer simulation (as in the movie "The Matrix"). "Two tech billionaires," the magazine reported, are "secretly engag(ing) scientists" to break us out of this alternative universe we might be trapped in. (One prominent member of the tech elite remarked at a Vox Media conference in June on how the "simulation hypothesis" seems to dominate all conversation whenever the elites gather.) [Business Insider, 10-3-2016] [The New Yorker, 10-10-2016]

-- Scientists from England's Bath University, publishing in a September issue of Nature Communications, report success in creating enduring live mice without use of a fertilized egg. The researchers showed it possible that a sperm cell can "trick" an egg into becoming a full-featured embryo without a "fertilization" process (in which distinct genomes from sperm and egg were thought to be required, at least in mammals). The scientists were thus able to "challenge nearly two centuries of conventional wisdom." [Science Daily, 9-13-2016]

-- The War on Drugs: (1) In September, police in Thurmont, Maryland, announced the culmination of a two-month-long undercover drug operation at the Burger King with two arrests and a total seizure of 5 grams of marijuana and two morphine pills. (2) On Sept. 21, as part of a six-target raid using "military-type" helicopters by the Massachusetts State Police and the National Guard, drug warriors halted the criminal enterprise of Margaret Holcomb, 81, of Amherst, seizing the one and only marijuana plant in her yard that she had planned to harvest soon for relief of her arthritis and glaucoma. [Frederick News-Post, 9-28-2016] [Daily Hampshire Gazette, 9-30-2016]

-- Couldn't Stop Myself: (1) Joshua Hunt, 31, was arrested in October inside St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had gone to check on his 9-month-old son, who was being treated for an injury. Police said that while in the ward, he snatched another visitor's purse and took a cellphone and credit cards. (2) Brittany Carulli, 25, was arrested in Harrison Township, New Jersey, in October, charged with stealing a medic's wallet from inside an ambulance. The medic had allowed Carulli in the ambulance to grieve over her boyfriend's body after he was struck and killed by a car. [KJRH-TV (Tulsa), 10-6-2016] [WPVI-TV (Philadelphia), 10-3-2016]

(1) Jeffrey Osella, 50, was arrested in August in Westerly, Rhode Island, after allegedly firing corncobs at his neighbor's house, using a PVC "potato gun," as part of their long-running feud. When Osella answered the door, officers said he was shirtless, with corn kernels stuck to his chest. (2) On Oct. 1, Michael Daum, 55, began his year in residence as the town hermit of Solothurn, Switzerland, having been chosen from among 22 self-entertaining applicants. The hermit will be required to maintain the town's isolated hermitage, but also, paradoxically, be called on at times to engage with arriving tourists. [Associated Press via Newark Star-Ledger, 9-2-2016] [The Local (Geneva), 9-27-2016]

Eating Well on Death Row: (1) Condemned Ohio inmate Ronald Post, 53, asked a federal court in September (2012) to cancel his upcoming date with destiny on the ground that, after almost 30 years of prison food, he's too fat to execute. At 480 pounds, "vein access" and other issues would cause his lethal injection to be "torturous." (Update: He won the sentence-commutation, but he died in prison in 2013.) (2) British murderer-sadist Graham Fisher, 39, is locked up in a high security hospital in Berkshire, England, but he, too, has been eating well (at about 325 pounds). In August (2012), he was approved for gastric-band surgery paid for by Britain's National Health Service at an estimated cost, including a private room for post-op recovery, of the equivalent of about $25,000. [Associated Press via Google News, 9-17-2012] [Daily Mail (London), 8-19-2012]