News of the Weird: Pothole antic does the trick

James Coxall, 42, of Cambridgeshire, England, was sick of driving around — and sometimes driving into — an 8-foot-long, 4-inch-deep pothole that had been in the road for more than a year, the Washington Post reported. So Coxall took a pair of his daughter’s old jeans, filled the legs with wood and old shirts and attached some shoes at the hems. Then he fashioned an anchor to hold the contraption upright — or upside down, as it were — and put it in the pothole so that it looked like someone was head-down in the hole. He thought it might spur some action on the hole, and indeed, on Feb. 27, it happened. “They fixed the hole,” Coxall said. “They just have another several million to do in Cambridgeshire.”

Looking for love? Dodauer Forest in northern Germany, may hold the answer. The Associated Press reported on March 4 about the Bridegroom’s Oak, a 500-year-old tree that has served as a mailbox for the lovelorn for over a century. Here’s how it works: People send a letter (address: Brautigamseiche, Dodauer Forest, 23701 Eutin, Germany), and the postmaster delivers it to the tree. Visitors can leaf through the letters and choose a pen pal. “The resulting pen pal relationships have even led to a few marriages,” noted the postal service.

A stunt landed a man and his brother-in-law in court over medical bills of more than $2,000, Newsweek reported March 5. While a man was napping in a hammock with his shirt off, his BIL filled his navel with Super Glue. When he awoke, the glue was dry, and he was hesitant to aggressively remove it because of scars from a gall bladder surgery. The BIL “thought it was funny right up until we left for the emergency room,” the man said. When the BIL refused to pay the bill, the victim filed suit and won — sort of. “My wife is upset, and her family thinks I overreacted,” he admitted.

Li Zhang, a professor of physiology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has conducted a study showing that laboratory mice will try to help their companions that are incapacitated, NPR reported on March 2. Their behavior included licking its eyes and “eventually pulling the tongue out of the mouth of this unconscious one” to clear its airway, Zhang said. The response was much stronger for mice that had been caged together for a long time, he said.

When performance artist Marco Evaristti put three piglets in a cage as an art installation in Copenhagen, he was hoping to raise awareness of the suffering caused by mass meat production, Sky News reported on March 6. The piglets were being denied food and water and were intended to starve to death in the show, called And Now You Care. But animal rights activists stole the pigs. At first Evaristti was disappointed, “but then I thought about it for a few hours and realized that at least this way, the piglets would have a happy life.” He said he’ll revive the exhibition but will get dead piglets from meat processing plants. “I want to display them in a a ktransparent refrigerator,” he said. “I’m willing to pay a high price.”

At the Goldin auction house in Runnemede, N.J., a Cheeto shaped like the Pokemon Charizard sold on March 2 for $72,000, the Associated Press reported. The “3-inch-long Flamin’ Hot Cheeto ... affixed to a customized Pokemon card and encapsulated in a clear card storage box” drew 60 bids.

Send your weird news items with subject line Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@amuniversal.com.