The following are excerpted from the current Harper’s Weekly Review.

• in Ramsey, New Jersey, a flock of turkeys was spotted waiting for a New York-bound train.
• a college student in Portland, Oregon, was expelled after questioning a classmate’s belief in leprechauns
• Chinese scientists revealed that showing pornography to pandas has helped increase the captive panda population, and said that they had successfully mated robot fish.
• Israeli military officials decided that Miss Israel, in order to prevent bruises on her legs, should not have to carry a rifle
• police in the Mpumalanga region of South Africa were looking for the owner of an unclaimed penis
• the Yellow River turned red for the second time in a month
• Indian officials announced that they would establish seven vulture havens in order to relieve shortages at the Towers of Silence, where Zoroastrians leave their dead to be eaten.

And then this from Harper’s as well. The very very opposite of whimsy:

Researchers in Navajo territories suggested
that abandoned, rain-filled uranium-mining pits had led to
eyeless sheep and disabled Native-American children.
Meanwhile, back to whimsy on the mountain, where this afternoon I watched a doe and her two offspring foraging right outside the kitchen window as the various birds took turns picking at the suet pack. It was like a scene from a Disney movie. At one point, one of the deer looked into the window and directly into my eyes, but I stood perfectly still so after a second or two, it went back to its munching. I didn’t dare move to get my camera.
And even as this magical moment happens, there is an email waiting for me from one of my close women friends telling me that her career Army son (with three small children) has been told he’ll be going to Iraq in February.
Magic and mayhem. I guess it’s always been like that.