The Telegraph reports one of those natural history curiosity stories, in this case featuring a literary twist.

A giant rat with one-inch-long teeth has been caught in the southern Chinese province of Fujian.

The rat, which weighed six pounds and had a 12-inch tail, was caught at the weekend in a residential area of Fuzhou, a city of six million people on China’s south coast.

The ratcatcher, who was only named as Mr Xian, said he swooped for the rodent after seeing a big crowd of people surrounding it on the street.

He told local Chinese newspapers that he thought the rat might be a valuable specimen, or a rare species, and had to muster up his courage before grabbing its tail and picking it up by the scruff of its neck.

“I did it, I caught a rat the size of a cat!” he shouted out afterwards, according to the reports. Mr Xian is believed to still be in possession of the animal, after stuffing into a bag and departing the scene.

The local forestry unit in the city identified the nightmarish creature as a bamboo rat from initial photographs, but said that it would need to examine the rat more closely before making a final identification.

Chinese bamboo rats rarely grow beyond ten inches and are found throughout southern China, northern Burma and Vietnam.

However, the Sumatra bamboo rat, usually found in the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan and in the Malay Peninsula can grow up to 30 inches long, including tail, and can weigh up to eight pounds.

A “Giant Rat of Sumatra” is mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes tale: The Adventure of a Sussex Vampire.

Vail Daily:

While no one is exactly sure how it happened, officials near Eagle say there is a cow elk wandering around with a bar stool stuck on its head.

The elk was first seen on a conservation easement property south of the Eagle Ice Rink.

Resident Bill Johnson told the newspaper that he saw the elk with the metal bar stool stuck on her head from his house. The legs were pointed up and the elk’s head was pushed through the metal rig that holds the legs together, he said.

Johnson said the stool didn’t seem to prevent the elk from grazing or moving around.

“Apparently she is fully mobile,” Colorado Division of Wildlife officer Craig Wescoatt told the Daily. Wescoatt said he has been receiving reports about the animal for several days.

Efforts to get near the animal have not been successful. When approached, the elk scampers away.

“She’s very active. The bar stool doesn’t seem to be impairing her to any great degree,” he observed. “She just looks kind of goofy.”

Vilija Lobačiuvienė

Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

[A] Lithuanian debt collector is offering an unconventional service to retrieve arrears: witchcraft. The Vilnius-based Skolu Isieskojimo Biuras (debt collecting bureau), has hired Vilija LobačiuvienÄ—, the Baltic nation’s most famous self-styled witch, to hunt down companies and individuals who are failing to pay up. Lobaciuviene, 53, who claims to use hypnosis, herbal medicines and “the bio-energy field,” promised Thursday to “do whatever I can to help people.”

Australian Daily Telegraph reports PETA’s latest atrocity.

Radical international animal rights group PETA has launched its most bizarre campaign yet, demanding fish be renamed “sea kittens”.

PETA – People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals – believes calling fish sea kittens will make sea food less appealing.

It wants to change the image of fish as slimy and slithery creatures by claiming they are similar to cuter, more popular animals. “Would people think twice about ordering fish sticks if they were called sea kitten sticks?” PETA asked on its website.

Humorist Dave Barry lists strange occurrences in 2008.

O.J. actually got convicted of something.

Gasoline hit $4 a gallon — and those were the good times. …

The surprise winner is Barack Obama, who is running for president on a long and impressive record of running for president. A mesmerizing speaker, Obama electrifies voters with his exciting new ideas for change, although people have trouble remembering exactly what these ideas are because they are so darned mesmerized. Some people become so excited that they actually pass out. These are members of the press corps.

He merely needs a thorough scrubbing

TCPalm:

It looks like a rare albino alligator.

In early December, residents of Vista Plantation began seeing an unusually large white-colored alligator in the community’s lakes west of the Indian River Mall, said subdivision manager Charles Smith.

“It was pure white,” he said.

The 300-pound, 10-foot-long adult alligator is seen resting on the shores of one of the man-made retention lakes along the golf course fairways winding through the subdivision’s condominiums. That lake is north of State Road 60 and west of 66th Avenue.

But when park officials called in a wildlife official to verify the alligator is albino, they learned the coloring is instead a coating of white minerals from untreated water pouring out of an artesian well emptying into the lake.

Bruce Dangerfield, Vero Beach Police animal control officer, humorously offered to pull the animal out to prove his point.

“I offered to catch it and use a scrub brush,” Dangerfield said to prove it, to which subdivision officials declined.

Yet, the alligator could continue to get fresh coats of white minerals as long as it stays around the artesian well. The coating is on the animal’s thick skin and isn’t a threat to its health, officials said.

TopNews reports on the latest struggle for the rights of man in the City of Light.

A huge number of models in Paris, who pose in the buff and perform as muses for artists, took to the streets in a nude march on December 15 to protest the fact that they are not respected or paid enough.

The models went on strike and posed naked in freezing temperatures in front of Paris city hall”s culture department to shame the state, and their demand was a pay increase, proper contracts and, most of all, respect for their craft.

A shivering male model was heard shouting out through a megaphone that the disrespect shown to the models was “proof that something is badly wrong with French society”, while artists, students and art teachers sat sketching them in support.

The protest had started after Paris city hall, which runs an array of life-drawing classes, banned the tradition of the “cornet”, which is a piece of art paper rolled into a cone and passed round for tips as a model gets dressed after class.

The models, who have to survive on a minimum wage with no fixed contracts, holiday pay, security cover or job security, said the tips allowed them to survive.

In France life modelling is widely seen as a serious career choice, and the models wanted to quash the misconception that it was merely something students and retired people did for pocket money.

“This is a craft that should be respected, not just anyone can take their clothes off and hold a pose,” the Guardian quoted Deborah, 28, one of the strike organisers, who has worked as a full-time life model for four years, as saying.

“It is artistic and physically demanding work,” she stated.

Who would have imagined? Al Sharpton opposing a major trade union legislative initiative. Al Sharpton defending the secret ballot. Al Sharpton actually having principles!

Discussing the Employee Free Choice Act with National Action Network’s Charlie King on his own radio show yesterday, the Reverend Al Sharpton said:

Yeah, well, what I don’t understand about it which is why I’m in the campaign is why wouldn’t those of us who support workers being protected, why would we not want their privacy protected. I mean why would we want them opened up to this kind of possible coercion?

Hat tip to Ed Morrissey.

Built in 1901, and currently in considerable disrepair, this walkway, called El Caminito del Rey, serves as an entrance to Makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro in Spanish Andalusia.

Wikipedia:

The walkway has now gone many years without maintenance, and is in a highly deteriorated and dangerous state. It is one meter (3 feet and 3 inches) in width, and is over 200 meters (700 feet) above the river. Nearly all of the path has no handrail. Some parts of the concrete walkway have completely collapsed and all that is remaining is the steel beam originally in place to hold it up and the wire that follows most of the path. One can latch onto a safety-wire to keep from falling. Several people have lost their lives on the walkway in recent years; after four people died in two accidents in 1999 and 2000, the local government closed the entrances. However, adventurous tourists still find their way onto the walkway to explore it.

The regional government of Andalusia budgeted in 2006 for a restoration plan estimated at € 7 million.

6:26 video.

Duck!

If I were to follow the examples of Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, or Barack Obama, and invent my own religion, could I demand that the nearest municipality boasting a Ten Commandments monument allow me to erect another monument listing my own teachings on the courthouse lawn? Should the city fathers fail to oblige would a federal circuit court of appeals (that isn’t the 9th Circuit) rule in my favor? Is it possible to imagine that the United States Supreme Court could wind up ruling on my petition?

The Wall Street Journal reports that it has all worked out just that way for Corky Ra.

A couple of decades after a visit from “beings Extraterrestrial” inspired him to found the Church of Summum in 1975, Summum Bonum Amen Ra, born Claude Nowell and known as Corky, had another epochal encounter. He saw a monolith depicting the Ten Commandments on the courthouse grounds in Salt Lake City, says Su Menu, the Summum religion’s current leader, and “felt it would be nice to have the Seven Aphorisms next to them.” The monument would be inscribed with the principles that, according to Summum doctrine, Moses initially intended to deliver to the Hebrews before deciding they weren’t ready to understand them.

Several Utah municipalities Mr. Ra approached declined the opportunity to display the Seven Aphorisms, provoking a legal battle that arrived at the Supreme Court Wednesday.

Daniel Henniger editorializes:

In 2007, the federal appeals court for the Tenth Circuit ruled in favor of Summum, giving the religion permission to put up its Seven Aphorisms monument in Pioneer Park. The Supreme Court will decide whether the Summums of America deserve their own patch of the public green.

Laughable though it looks, Pleasant Grove City v. Summum is a textbook example of tensions that have pulled our courts between noble readings of the Constitution — in this case, the First Amendment’s speech protections — and what the average person might call the common-sense requirements of running a civil society.

Henniger is perfectly correct. Modern liberalism’s abject inability to resist any appeal couched in idealistic rhetoric gives it a terminable case of philosophic round heels.

New York Times:

In the end, a contractor who found $182,000 in Depression-era currency hidden in bathroom walls received just a few thousand dollars and, he feels, some vindication.

The discovery amounted to little more than grief for the contractor, Bob Kitts, who could not agree on how to divide the money with the home’s owner, Amanda Reece.

It did not help Ms. Reece’s financial situation either. She testified in a deposition that she was considering bankruptcy, and a bank recently foreclosed on one of her properties.

As for the 21 descendants of Patrick Dunne — a wealthy businessman who stashed money that was minted in a time of bank collapses and joblessness, only to have it divvied up decades later in a somewhat similar economic climate — they will each get a small fraction of the find.

“I called it the greed case,” said Gid Marcinkevicius, a lawyer who represents the Dunne estate.

“If these two individuals had sat down and resolved their disputes and divided the money, the heirs would have had no knowledge of it,” Mr. Marcinkevicius said. “Because they were not able to sit down and divide it in a rational way, they both lost.”

Mr. Kitts, who called his discovery “the ultimate contractor fantasy,” was tearing out the bathroom walls of an 83-year-old home near Lake Erie on a spring day in 2006 when he discovered two green lockboxes suspended by a wire below the medicine chest. Inside were envelopes with the return address for the P. Dunne News Agency.

“I ripped the corner off of one,” Mr. Kitts said in a deposition in a lawsuit filed by Mr. Dunne’s estate. “I saw a 50 and got a little dizzy.”

Inside the envelopes was $157,000. And a cardboard box in another wall held about $25,000.

Mr. Kitts called Ms. Reece, who had hired him for a remodeling project, at work. She got there within 45 minutes.

They counted the cash, piled it on the dining room table and posed for photographs. Both grinned like lottery jackpot winners holding an oversize check.

But how to share? She offered 10 percent. He wanted 40 percent. From there things went sour.

Read the whole thing.

Pictures of a curious pin-fire six-shot revolver made to be worn as a ring.

There is no written description, but the cartridge looks to be the size of a .22 short, or smaller. The hammer and trigger are easy to recognize. My guess is that the side lever is used to rotate the cylinder, and that the gun is single action, requiring the wearer to cock the hammer before firing.

I would guess that the recoil and close range muzzle blast would be no fun for the user. There is also the unnerving problem that one is wearing it concealed, the muzzles of those six cylinders are pointed inward at one’s own hand. The rounds are most likely pretty marginally potent. Still any gun is better than no good in an emergency, and this ingenious contraption has good concealment potential.

It looks better made than most “suicide specials,” and it is certainly a desirable collector’s item.