The Limestone County (Alabama) Sheriff's Office is on the lookout for Mickey Paulk, 35, after executing a search warrant at an Athens apartment where he was believed to be living on June 17. While Paulk was not at the apartment at the time, officers did find meth, drug paraphernalia, ammunition and body armor, along with DeezNutz, Paulk's "attack squirrel," in a cage in the apartment. Sheriff's deputy Stephen Young told The News Courier officers were told Paulk feeds the squirrel meth to keep it aggressive, which Paulk denied in a Facebook video. Officers released the squirrel into the wild, but Paulk (still on the run) later told news outlets he went back to the apartment and whistled, and DeezNutz returned to him. A GoFundMe page established to help Paulk pay his legal fees includes a post saying the squirrel has been "safely gotten ... out of Alabama and it is being boarded until his owner's legal issues can be settled." The Limestone sheriff's office took to Twitter to warn locals to be wary of Paulk: "Mickey Paulk is a fleeing felon with felony warrants unrelated to his squirrel." (UPDATE: Shortly before press time, the Limestone County Sheriff's Office announced on Twitter that Paulk had been arrested Thursday night, June 27.) [News Courier, 6/21/2019]

The Continuing Crisis

Early-bird travelers at Detroit Metropolitan Airport got a rude awakening on June 21 when an unnamed man tried to pass through a TSA checkpoint entirely naked. According to WXYZ, the man approached the checkpoint and removed all his clothing, then removed a barrier and approached a metal detector. Officers didn't allow him through the metal detector, so he ran around it, where he was caught and covered with plastic trash bags. A bystander said he was calm and compliant while being detained. Law enforcement determined he was not a threat and took him to a local hospital. [WXYZ, 6/21/2019]

Hitchcockian

Roy and Brenda Pickard of Knotts End, Lancashire, England, lived in a 1960s horror film for a week in June as a pair of nesting herring gulls terrorized them each time they emerged from their home. "If I try to go out of the door, the two adult birds are right there, and I've got no chance," Roy told the Mirror. At one point, Roy was attacked so viciously on the back of the head that he had to go to the hospital for treatment. Roy contacted animal organizations, but they offered no remedies for the violent birds: It's breeding season, and herring gulls are protected when nesting. "The whole thing has been terrible," Roy lamented. [Mirror, 6/21/2019]

News You Can Use

Equality got a boost in Argentina in June when that country's National Appeal Court ordered a man to pay his ex-wife 8 million pesos (about $178,000) for 27 years of housework. Newsweek reported Judge Victoria Fama reasoned that the wife, who holds a degree in economics, put her career aside for the entirety of their marriage to keep house and raise children, and by the time her husband left her in 2009, she was too old to compete in the job market. "The economic dependence of wives on their husbands is one of the central mechanisms through which women are subordinated in society," the judge stated. Meanwhile, the husband was living "a good life." [Newsweek, 6/11/2019]

Awesome!

A 26-year-old man identified only as Chang from Guangdong, China, went out for a Friday night of drinking with friends on June 7 and returned home to find that his keys were missing. Someone inside let him in, and he went to bed to sleep it off. The next morning, the Chinese news site Sohu reported, Chang awoke with a sharp pain in his chest and went to Dongguan Hospital, where an X-ray revealed the missing house keys lodged deep in his esophagus. Doctors first thought emergency surgery would be necessary to retrieve the keys, but with the help of a muscle-relaxing drug, a gastroenterologist was able to pull them out through his mouth. [OddityCentral, 6/13/2019]

Compelling Explanation

The Behney House Hotel in Myerstown, Pennsylvania, was evacuated after police responded to a reported bomb threat there on June 23, reported WPMT. When officers arrived, they found David Oxenreider, 28, who lives at the hotel, and the homemade bomb he claimed to have made next to a dumpster outside the building. Oxenreider told police he made the bomb to get their attention because he was frustrated that his attempts to warn officials about aliens hadn't been taken seriously. According to the criminal complaint, Oxenreider said he encountered a UFO and aliens in 2014, who told him "humans need to start being good people, or else they were going to destroy the Earth with a nuclear laser beam." Police disarmed the device and arrested Oxenreider. [WPMT, 6/24/2019]

Least Competent Criminal

An unnamed woman arrested earlier was released from the St. Louis Justice Center on the morning of June 5 -- sort of. Jail staff gave her clear instructions about how to get out of the building, according to corrections commissioner Dale Glass, but instead she got on the elevator, pushed all the buttons, and got off at the fifth floor, where she exited through a fire door into a stairwell, locking herself in, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Two and a half days later, staff finally saw her peering through a window in one of the doors. The woman had made noise during her confinement, but Glass explained that the jail is a noisy place, and the staff couldn't figure out where the noise was coming from as she moved from floor to floor. Paramedics were called and the woman was offered hospital care, but she declined, saying, "No, I just want to go home." [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 6/19/2019]

Oops!

Holmes Beach (Florida) police posted a query on their Facebook page on June 15 regarding an unusual item that had washed up on the shore and was turned in by a local resident: a prosthetic ear. Social media did its magic, and the ear and its owner were reunited five days later. The Associated Press reported that a Beaufort, South Carolina, couple had been vacationing in the Tampa Bay area, and the man was putting the rubber ear in his pocket for safekeeping when a wave knocked it out of his hand. Police Sgt. Brian Hall said he would mail the ear back to its owner, as prosthetic ears can be very pricey. [Associated Press, 6/20/2019]

Inexplicable

Do you ever wish you hadn't invested in a Ring doorbell? On June 22, while Wilton Thomas of North Lauderdale, Florida, was at work, his doorbell camera captured a man in a green car pull into his driveway, exit the car, remove his shirt and crouch down to relieve himself. He used the shirt to clean himself up, then left the mess behind and drove away. Thomas told WPLG he would have understood if the man had knocked and said, "Man, you know what, I had an emergency. I had nowhere to go, and this is where I had to do what I had to do." The Broward County Sheriff's Office is investigating. [WPLG, 6/24/2019]

Say you have a new baby. Say you're overwhelmed with love and sleep deprivation, and say you've been auditioning names for months, to no avail. Future Perfect, a web startup, will happily accept your $350 fee to "email you a customized list of names" to choose from, plus 15 minutes of phone time with one of its consultants. "Working your way through thousands of alphabetized names can be a useful exercise for some," the website explains, "but the lists we provide are personalized, hyper-curated and unique to each client's specific criteria." They'll even help you name your pets! WABC reports that Future Perfect offers less-expensive packages as well, such as a $100 "namestorming session." [WABC, 6/11/2019]

Oops!

As members of New Life Baptist Church in Advance, North Carolina, prepared to merge with a nearby congregation, they removed the handmade steeple from their building, intending to return it to church member Mike Brewer, who made it. But a passerby who saw the steeple at the curb on June 5 thought it was intended for garbage pickup and took it home, sparking a different kind of steeplechase, according to the Winston-Salem Journal. Church pastor Matthew Pope called it a clear misunderstanding: "The person assumed we were throwing it out. She ... didn't want it to go to the dump." The unwitting steeple thief saw a post about the missing structure on Facebook from Pope's wife and returned the steeple five days after its disappearance. [Winston-Salem Journal, 6/15/2019]

Awesome!

-- In Saint Petersburg, Russia, motor enthusiast Konstantin Zarutskiy unveiled his newest creation in early May: a Bentley Continental GT sedan refitted with heavy-duty rubber tank treads instead of regular tires. He calls the resulting vehicle "Ultratank" and is hoping to get permission from the local government to drive the car on city streets. Zarutskiy tells EuroNews his Ultratank is very easy to drive, although creating it took him seven months as he faced a number of technical challenges. We'd like to see him parallel park it. [United Press International, 6/13/2019]

-- Hundreds of divers set a Guinness World Record on June 15 at Deerfield Beach, Florida, where they met to perform an underwater cleanup. Fox35 reported that 633 divers collected 9,000 pieces of debris on the ocean floor during the event, which was organized by Dixie Divers. The previous record, 615 divers, was set in the Red Sea of Egypt in 2015. [Fox35, 6/16/2019]

Bold

Francesco Galdelli, 58, and Vanya Goffi, 45 -- otherwise known as the Italian Bonnie and Clyde -- were arrested on June 15 at a luxury villa in Pattaya, Thailand, after years of avoiding Italian authorities for various scams and frauds. The Telegraph reported that Galdelli had confessed to posing as George Clooney and opening an online clothing business "to trick people into sending money." The two would also sell fake Rolex watches online, sometimes sending packets of salt to their customers instead of wristwatches. Clooney testified against the couple in 2010, but they fled Italy before being arrested there. Galdelli was arrested in Thailand in 2014, but soon escaped after bribing prison guards. The pair will be returned to Italy for trial. [The Telegraph, 6/16/2019]

Last Wishes

Laurence Pilgeram, who died in 2015 in California, paid Alcor Life Extension Foundation $120,000 to preserve his body indefinitely at minus 196 degrees Celsius in the hope of being brought back to life in the future. But a month after his death, his son, Kurt Pilgeram of Dutton, Montana, received a box containing his father's ashes. The company sent all but the elder Pilgeram's head, which is stored in liquid nitrogen at its facility in Arizona. "They chopped his head off, burned his body, put it in a box and sent it to my house," Kurt told the Great Falls Tribune. He is suing Alcor for $1 million in damages and an apology -- plus the return of his father's head. "I want people to know what's going on," he said. For its part, Alcor says its contract was with Laurence Pilgeram and that it met that agreement. The company contends Kurt is trying to get the life insurance money that paid for Alcor's services. The trial is expected to begin in 2020 in California. [Great Falls Tribune, 6/7/2019]

Chutzpah

German Instagram "influencers" Catalin Onc and Elena Engelhardt have faced a digital dressing-down after they set up a GoFundMe page requesting donations for a bike trip to Africa. They want to raise about 10,000 euros for the jaunt, but some people aren't on board. Onc and Engelhardt live with Onc's mother, who supports them by working at two jobs, the Independent reported. They posted on their Instagram page: "Some will just tell us to get jobs, like everyone else and stop begging. But when you have the impact we do on others' life (sic), getting a job is not an option. A normal job at this point would be detrimental." Commenters let loose on the couple: "Get a job and treat your mum, she shouldn't be funding her grown son to wander the world like a lost boy." And, "You're not impacting anyone's life, you are just a couple of freeloaders trying to get holidays paid for by mugs." [The Independent, 6/17/2019]

Bright Ideas

-- A Domino's pizza delivery driver in London was the unwitting victim of a prank on June 6 when he tried to deliver four large cheeseburger pizzas to Buckingham Palace, for "Elizabeth." At the security gate, he was stopped by two armed police officers, who checked to make sure the queen had not, indeed, ordered the pies. "The next thing the copper said was, 'Sorry, sir, Elizabeth is the name of the queen -- and she lives at Buckingham Palace. I think someone is winding you up," a source told The Sun. The original phone order had promised cash payment at delivery. Store manager Zsuzsanna Queiser said the "pizzas seemed to go down pretty well with the police officers on duty. Next time, Your Majesty." [The Sun, 6/10/2019]

-- In the Colombian city of Buenaventura, violence and corruption are on the rise, and after the shocking June 1 murder of a 10-year-old girl, the local bishop devised a plan to purge the city of evil. Monsignor Ruben Dario Jaramillo Montoya will perform a mass exorcism, and to help him, he has enlisted the National Navy, which will fly a helicopter over the city to distribute holy water on its inhabitants. The ritual is scheduled in mid-July during annual patron saints festivities. "We want to ... see if we can exorcise, drive out these demons that are destroying the port," the bishop told Caracol Radio. [Caracol Radio, 6/10/2019]

Compelling Explanation

You think you hate your job? Last year, in April, Eli Aldinger, now 23, told police officers in Bothell, Washington, he intentionally drove his Toyota Camry into two different groups of pedestrians in order to "get out of going to work." Aldinger, who worked in food service at McMenamins Anderson School, first hit a woman who was crossing the street with her husband, admitting to police that he sped up to 35 or 40 mph so he could "hit her before she made it across the road," reported the Bothell-Kenmore Reporter. A bit farther on, he swerved to hit another pedestrian -- but declined to strike a third, believing that would have been "a bit excessive." He stopped when he spotted a police car and told the officers he was looking forward to "spending a few years in a room." On May 31, he got his wish: Aldinger will spend 14 years in prison for assault. [Bothell-Kenmore Reporter, 6/14/2019]

Let the Buyer Beware

Kerville Holness of Tamarac, Florida, thought he'd scored big when his $9,100 bid for a $177,000 villa in South Florida was accepted. The home was part of an online auction in March of properties that had been foreclosed on. Only later did he find out he paid thousands of dollars for a 1-foot-wide, 10-foot-long stretch of grass between two driveways. Now the first-time bidder wants Broward County to void the deal and return his money. "It's deception," Holness told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. "There was no demarcation to show you that it's just a line going through (the villa duplex), even though they have the tools to show that." Officials aren't sure why the strip of land was put up for auction separately from the properties on either side of it, but they say they can't refund Holness' money. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 6/15/2019]

The Philly Voice reported on June 5 that a resident of White Haven, Pennsylvania, has solved the mystery of why that state has experienced more tornadoes than usual this year. The unnamed amateur meteorologist called WNEP's "Talkback 16," which allows locals to opine on the issues of the day, and left a voicemail on May 31. In his own words: "We didn't have tornadoes here until we started putting in traffic circles. ... When people go round and round in circles, it causes disturbances in the atmosphere, and causes tornadoes." So there you have it. [Philly Voice, 6/5/2019]

New Weapons

A 47-year-old resident of southern Israel approached a teller at a Postal Bank branch in mid-May, handing her a note that read, "Hand over the money in the drawer" (misspelling the Hebrew word for "drawer"), The Times of Israel reported. As the teller hesitated, he said, "Put the money in the bag quickly or I'll throw this grenade," referring to a black object in his right hand. The teller gave him $4,450 in cash, and he left. Five days later, he repeated his method at another branch, where he netted $3,300. Police tracked him through mobile phone records and other clues, eventually discovering the "grenade" he wielded was an avocado he had painted black. No word on whether he whipped up some guacamole while in custody. [Times of Israel, 6/6/2019]

When Ya Gotta Go ...

A 16-year-old driver was pulled over by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Manitoba, Canada, on June 6 after being clocked driving 105 mph, according to Fox News. The teenager was driving a Chevrolet Camaro, but it wasn't the muscle car that made him go so fast, he said. He told police he had just eaten hot chicken wings and really needed to use the bathroom. Officers were unmoved, however, tweeting, "Absolutely #noexcuses for that kind of speed." The teen was fined and is likely to have his license suspended. [Fox News, 6/9/2019]

Bright Ideas

-- On June 5, firefighters arrived at an apartment complex in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles, to find a 14-year-old girl trapped feet-first in a chimney. By removing some bricks, they were able to free her after about 20 minutes, and she was taken to a hospital to be evaluated. "A lot of people think it's plausible to go ahead and get into your house or break into a house (through a chimney)," Brian Stevens, an inspector for the fire department, told the Los Angeles Times. "I can tell you that doesn't seem to work out for most people. It's very narrow." Good to know. [Los Angeles Times, 6/5/2019]

-- In Scotland, Zoe Archibald, 34, thought it would be fun to take a ride in a child's Little Tikes red and yellow car on June 7. When she couldn't get in the plastic car in the conventional way, she put it over her head, Fox News reported -- and then got stuck. "There was no way she could get herself out," her nephew, Matthew Shepherd-Bull, said. After being trapped for about an hour, her father finally cut her out of the toddler conveyance with a butter knife. "Everyone found it funny, even Zoe," Shepherd-Bull said. "She was a bit panicked but mainly found it funny." [Fox News, 6/12/2019]

Enterprising Thievery

In the Arctic region of Murmansk in Russia, an abandoned railway bridge was the quarry of ambitious metal thieves who removed the 75-foot-long center span, leaving only the support structures near either shore. Locals noticed the section was missing in May, reported the BBC. And while the span would have weighed about 62 tons, it was estimated to be worth only about $9,000. Russian law enforcement is looking into the theft, but locals are nonplussed: One mused that the remaining structures would be "eyesores" for a long time to come, then shrugged: "Ah, who cares -- this isn't Germany, and restoring order to the vandalized landscape is not high on the agenda." [BBC, 6/4/2019]

Ewwwww!

If you're a fan of bubble tea, you may want to add it to your "all things in moderation" list. On May 28, a 14-year-old girl in Zhejiang province in China went to the hospital after suffering from constipation and being unable to eat for five days. Through a CT scan, doctors found unusual spherical shadows in her abdomen, reported Asia One, which they suspected were undigested tapioca pearls from bubble tea. The girl reluctantly admitted to drinking only one cup of bubble tea five days before, but doctors said her condition indicated she had consumed much more and prescribed laxatives. One doctor warned that the bubbles, or "boba," are made of starch and are difficult to digest. [Asia One, 6/6/2019]

Yikes!

In Caddo Parish, Louisiana, sheriff's deputies responded to a call on June 10 about an alligator in the middle of Highway 1. As they waited for wildlife removal experts to arrive, the gator, which was about 8 feet long, bit off a section of bumper on one of the patrol cars, WBRZ reported, and moved into the grass with a rectangular piece of the car's front grill. It dropped its prize and escaped before the animal handlers got there. [WBRZ, 6/12/2019]

Wait, What?

At a Patriot Prayer rally in Portland, Oregon, last August, two protesters took a smoother, shinier approach to their opposition. Robert "Jonah" Majure, 28, and Tristan Romine-Mann, 29, were approached by officers at the rally because they were carrying four 5-gallon buckets and super-soaker water guns, The Oregonian reported. When told to empty the buckets, Majure and Romine-Mann did so, splashing the officers with horse lubricant (used in obstetric and rectal procedures on large animals) mixed with glitter. Majure and Romine-Mann were sentenced to serve five days in jail on June 7 for harassment. [Oregonian, 6/10/2019]

Wide World of Sports

Men looking for diversion in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, entered the Male Slapping Championships, part of the Siberian Power Show, in March, wherein contestants slap each other so hard that some of them sustain concussions. According to RT News, female Siberians now have their own contest: the Booty-Slapping Championships. For this event, which took place in mid-June, the women, all fitness enthusiasts, take turns whacking each other on the heinie until one is knocked off balance. Fitness blogger Anastasia Zolotaya, one of the contest's winners, features demonstrations of the serious workouts she uses to toughen her buns on her Instagram page, @sportnastya. [RT News, 6/11/2019]

Awesome!

A lock of Ludwig von Beethoven's hair sold at auction on June 11 for an unexpected 35,000 British pounds (about $45,000), "Inside Edition" reported. Sotheby's said the framed hair was given by Beethoven to a friend, pianist Anton Halm, as a gift for Halm's wife almost 200 years ago. Reportedly, when Halm asked for the gift, a servant snipped some hair from a goat and presented it to Halm. Beethoven was incensed, saying, "You've been tricked. This is not my hair. It's the hair of a goat." He then cut a lock of hair from the back of his own head, wrapped it in paper and turned it over to Halm. A Sotheby's expert confirmed that the auctioned hair was human. [Inside Edition, 6/12/2019]