On Oct. 26, 1984, Northwestern student Michael Cole attended a basketball game alone, having been unable to find a friend to use the extra ticket he had purchased for $8.50. Thirty-eight years later, on Feb. 27, Cole, now 55, watched that spare ticket, which he had held onto as a keepsake, sell for $468,000 at an auction of sports collectibles. What was so special about the ticket? It happens to be the only known intact ticket from Michael Jordan's debut game with the Chicago Bulls. Cole, whose 2012 Kia Sorento died just a week before the auction, said he plans to use some of his earnings to replace it with "a sensible used car."

Dirty work

Omni, a plant-based pet food company in Britain, is offering a lucky(?) few dog owners more than $6,000 to "record their experience of introducing their dog to a plant-based diet" by monitoring their bowel movements and stool odor, as well as their health, energy levels, behavior, sleep pattern and physical attributes, such as weight, skin and fur condition over a period of two months, according to the company's website. Omni will provide a free supply of its pet food for the gig and will cover the cost of visits to a pet nutritionist, who will oversee the pets' transition to plant-based food. Those dog owners who successfully complete the poop-monitoring period will earn the aforementioned cash for their work, while their dogs will receive a supply of dog toys and vegan treats.

Hope he left a nice tip

Michael Spressler, 58, of Brick, N.J., thought he had broken a tooth when he bit into a raw clam and felt something hard in his mouth during a Presidents Day weekend visit to his favorite Jersey Shore seafood restaurant, the Lobster House. "I thought one of my molars cracked," Spressler told NJ Advance Media. But instead of one of his own pearly whites, Spressler found a perfectly round white pearl. "I've been eating clams all my life. This is the first time this ever happened to me," Spressler said. The Pearl Source website says the little gem, which Spressler's wife, Maria, would like to have set in a piece of jewelry, could be worth as much as $100,000.

Hanging tough

Looking to add something different to your workout routine? You could always take your inspiration from Roman Sahradyan's latest Guinness World Record. All you need is excellent pull-up technique, 60 seconds ... and a helicopter. As reported by India Today, Sahradyan posted a video in which he performed 23 pull-ups in one minute while hanging from the landing skid of a helicopter hovering several feet off the ground. The achievement earned Sahradyan an official Guinness World Record for the "most pull-ups from a helicopter in one minute" — yes, there really is such a category, which might be the weirdest part of this story — and the Instagram video posted by Guinness World Records has tallied more than 125,000 likes. One commenter gave a shout-out to the unsung hero of the video: "The real record is for the pilot for not crashing the helicopter."

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