A truck driver, hauling a load of frozen chicken, called his employers at Dixie River Freight and demanded a ransom for the cargo. The company declined to pay, so the driver uncoupled the trailer and left it at a truck stop in Missoula, Montana. The truck cab was reported stolen, but the trailer identification was never entered into a national database of stolen vehicles. Three weeks later, the abandoned trailer was reported to Missoula County sheriff’s department. The thawed chicken carcasses were dripping from the trailer and attracting flies.

Now the health department has to figure out a way to get the rotten meat to the landfill. They're working with Dixie River Freight's insurance company. It looks like the best plan now is to wrap and plug up the trailer and take the chicken to the dump in its original casing.

"You want to get rid of that potential for there to be pests flying around, disease vectors, the flies, but in and of itself it's not a hazardous material," explained Shannon Therriault, the environmental health supervisor for the Missoula City-County Health Department.

Crews would rather not unload the chicken, but the trucking company would like to have its trailer back. Whether the truck will be destroyed or unloaded will be up to the insurance company. -via Arbroath
 
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Update: The chicken has been buried in a landfill, and the driver was arrested for parole violation on Friday. -Thanks, rcxb!

Henry is a 7-year-old border terrier who lives in Prestbury, UK. Earlier this week, he went down a rabbit hole and became stuck, unknown to his owner, Beverley Leonard. When she couldn’t find the dog, Leonard called the local fire department, but after looking for Henry for three days, the animal rescue unit had to abandon the search.

A crew member said that if Henry would just bark they would have much more chance. A distraught Beverley remembered that the one thing Henry did bark at was her doorbell. She raced home, ripped the door bell off her front door, grabbed the amplifier, raced back to the fields and played it into every rabbit hole they could find.

“It must have been just about the last hole in the last field, and we were about to give up, when we heard him,” said Beverley.

The rescuers sawed through a bush and then dug down about five feet to reach Henry. Despite four days wedged in a rabbit hole underground, Henry is now doing fine. -via Arbroath

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Two bizarre New Zealand species are on the brink of extinction. Can they save each other?

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When it comes to parasites, few are as diabolically elegant as the Hades flower. The rootless, leafless plant lurks beneath the thick undergrowth of New Zealand forests, attaching itself to trees and pilfering nutrients. As it drains its host, the Hades leaves beautiful scars—fluted burls that remain in the wood. It’s these so-called flowers that give the plant its nickname, the wood rose.

Collectors used to bag the once ubiquitous bark roses, varnishing them for home decoration. But environmental threats such as deforestation and invasive species have landed the Hades flower on the endangered-species list. By the end of the last decade, the plant’s span had shrunk to four percent of its original range. Scientists guessed that just a few thousand plants remained, but they couldn’t be sure. And while the flowers do sprout shoots and bloom for two months a year, possums and pigs make such quick snacks of the buds that the underground Hades plant is impossible to track.

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Unsure of how many Hades flowers are left, the New Zealand Department of Conservation has been desperate to protect the species. As part of a recovery plan in the 1990s, it considered transplanting populations of the plant but couldn’t find an area with enough bats or other creatures to pollinate it. Of course, protecting the Hades flower isn’t the only conservation issue on the island.

New Zealand is a hotbed of endangered species. Because the archipelago’s flora and fauna were isolated for so much of human history, its native species were ill equipped to protect themselves when settlers arrived. In the last few years, conservationists have been stumped about how to save the Hades flower. Then, in a lucky coincidence, they hit upon a possible solution. What if they recruited another endangered species—the hapless kakapo bird—to help?

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The kakapo is unquestionably cute—the bird looks like a parakeet crossed with an owl crossed with a Muppet—but it’s impossible to underscore how useless it is.

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The Crew is an a cappella group from, believe it or not, Canada. They describe themselves as a “certified organic all-Canadian hypoallergenic contemporary folky-pop acapolka comedy band-group/team.” To celebrate their 25th anniversary as a group, they visited 25 American landmarks to sing "The Star Spangled Banner." The banzai trip of 10,000 miles took only 12 days in a van. There are three different edits of this song (you can see them at their site), but they aren’t all that much different. How many of these places have you been to? I counted 13. I’ve got to start working on the other 12. -via Daily of the Day

Did you get an iPhone 6 yet? I hear the Plus model is bigger than previous iPhones -in fact, too big to fit in a skinny jeans pocket. Which is a good thing, because they’re kind of fragile, too. At least that’s what I’ve heard. But the biggest complaint so far is that a phone that size makes the keyboard harder to reach than a smartphone user is used to. Well, create a need and someone, somewhere, will jump in to fill that need. The Japanese company Thanko offers thumb extenders that make your thumbs long enough to use the bigger touch screen keyboard on an iPhone 6 Plus or a Galaxy Note. Order yours here, if you can read Japanese. Who knows? These may be as fashionable as those winter gloves with touch-screen-sensitive pads on the fingertips. -via Laughing Squid

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The ZOOperstars is a group of characters in inflatable costumes that entertain at sports events. Their character Mackerel Jordan showed up at a Rochester Honkers baseball game in Rochester, Minnesota, where he ate a baseball player. Something tells me that guy wasn’t a Honker. Tonika Lloyd caught the silliness on video.  -via Daily Picks and Flicks

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The AMC TV show The Walking Dead returns for season five on October 12th. Fans of the show have been trying to forget how long the wait is, but as the new season nears, we get more and more reminders.

The folks at Bad Lip Reading have trod these waters before, but the show about a zombie apocalypse gives them so much fodder for new material that they’ve graced us with another reinterpretation of the show, with dialogue that fits those lips, but not the script. There’s even a musical interlude from Coral. This video is labeled “part one,” so you can look forward to more bad lip reading from season four. -via Tastefully Offensive

In America, high school seniors get to go to a prom, maybe a class trip, or participate in an informal “skip day,” which is often punished. In Norway, the passage from childhood to adulthood is a month-long spring break party! The Russ celebration, or Russefeiring, runs from April 11 to May 17. School continues, but otherwise, 18-year-olds are living in in chauffeured busses and vans, roaming the country attending concerts and parties, and drinking. They wear brightly colored overalls and perform stunts to win tokens for their caps.

Read more about Russ, and see more pictures and videos, at Buzzfeed.

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Okay, is it sprinkling outside, or is it raining? A little boy tries to argue about the weather with a little girl. She’s got a sister for backup, and although the sister makes an attempt to moderate the disagreement, you know the poor little boy feels totally outnumbered. And she poked his heart! There will be a lot more of that in this young man’s life to come. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

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Just horsin’ around the stable, this young lady has some jams going and can’t help but dance. The horse studies a bit and then joins in. But the horse doesn’t want to dance with her, he wants a dance battle-type handoff, so he can watch her anytime she dances. This horse has rhythm! -via Buzzfeed

There’s something romantic about living off the land, earning your keep by the sweat of your brow, and providing the community with good food. But people who dream of becoming farmers, unless they grew up doing it, often have no clue about the amount of work it entails, nor the amount of investment required. An overview of how to get into farming tells us about the risks and rewards, and ways to get started. Highly recommended is the internship: working on someone else’s farm as a hired hand in order to see if it’s really for you. Jesse Hirsch talks about his internship.

During my stint at Hill Hollow, I often wanted to throw in the towel, when farm work seemed like sheer drudgery, tedious tasks stretching out to infinity. I shocked myself multiple times on electric fencing. My sunburnt skin took the shade of a country ham. Everything hurt. I spent one long day on my knees in the mud, mounding up long rows of soil. That night I lay awake on a foam mattress, miles of dirt streaming behind my eyelids. Another day, I had to muck out the deep crust of piss and shit from a sweltering pig barn. Sheer force of will kept my breakfast down.

And yet — I felt great. There were moments of transcendence: watching piglets frolic in a pasture for the first time, or quietly weeding while honeybees buzzed about. But even beyond that, there was something purifying and warm about all the hard work, something that washed away the static in my head.

You’ll also read about farmers who made it despite hardships, those who threw in the towel, and more to think about before making your mind up, at Modern Farmer. -via Metafilter

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Copper heiress Huguette Clark died in 2011 at the age of 104 after half a century of living as a recluse, the last twenty years in a hospital by choice. The possessions she left behind give us a glimpse into her privileged, private, and mysterious life. She enjoyed painting and photography, and was an avid doll collector. She also had a fascination with Japanese artifacts. After Clark’s enormous estate was sorted out, which involved lawsuits between distant relatives, the executors who drew up her last two wills, and Clark’s personal nurse, many of her possessions went to auction. Meryl Gordon, who wrote the biography The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark, talked to Collectors Weekly about the Huguette Clark collections.

Do you think Huguette got the collecting bug from her parents?

It’s true that Huguette’s parents wanted the best of everything, and that her father toured Europe buying vast quantities of artwork. His collection is pretty fascinating, because plenty of his paintings turned out to be forgeries, while other pieces of art were nearly priceless—one of his oriental rugs just sold for $30 million at Christie’s. The senator was pretty stubborn and defensive about his taste. Meanwhile, her mother collected antique fans and, as a talented harpist, was responsible for an impressive musical instrument collection. But I think Huguette was more influenced by her father’s perfectionism than his collecting. The 121-room mansion he completed for his family in 1911 was micromanaged down to the very last tile. He imported an entire sitting room from Japan, furniture and all, and bought up granite and bronze foundries in Maine and upstate New York to source his materials. When you look at Huguette’s own collection of miniature Japanese castles and dollhouses depicting scenes from fairy tales, it’s clear that she’d taken her father’s perfectionism and enacted it on a miniature scale. She grew up watching her father demand nothing but the best, and she took enormous pleasure from commissioning these dollhouses and making every single design decision down to the last inch.

So you don’t trace her strange behavior back to childhood trauma, or some sort of stunting in her development?

Going into this project, I definitely wondered if Huguette might have been troubled in some way. But when I got to go through her documents and read the letters she wrote to her father as a child, I could really see her sense of humor. I think she had a very outgoing life until the early 1940s, when things became more difficult for her. She managed to avoid the tabloids after her messy divorce, and the last public photograph of her was actually snapped by the Associated Press on her honeymoon in Hawaii. The picture is unflattering. She looks old and uncomfortable in her furs and jewels. But throughout the ’30s she continued to go out, often with Styka, to plays and concerts. Oddly, her breakdown in 1942 was very much connected to one of her collections. She was in love with Japanese culture, and suddenly, Japan was the enemy. She bounced back eventually, but I think she was always a more vulnerable person after Pearl Harbor.

Read about Huguette Clark’s life and the fabulous things she left behind, at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: the estate of Huguette Clark)

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In this week’s mental_floss video, John Green tells us about how sports have changed over time by giving us the rules that were in effect early in their histories. In fact, there are 29 real rules and one lie in this video. I know which is the lie because I read the YouTube comments, which is always risky. Otherwise, I would have never known, because I know doodly-squat about sports.

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The video series Smarter Every Day visits a tattoo parlor to find how it’s done. We get an explanation of how two kinds of tattoo machines work, and then see a closeup of the process in slow motion. Our host Destin even gets a taste of the process, without ink, just to see what it feels like. This is pretty interesting, but I still don’t think I’ll ever get one. -via Digg

If a community abandons a town and leaves no written records behind, it can’t help but be a mystery to us. And the older the community, the less likely we’ll find any documents telling us about it. That doesn’t mean we can’t figure out a lot of things, but there are quite a few ancient abandoned cities that leave us with more questions than answers. Çatalhöyük, Turkey, is one of the oldest.

In 7,500 BCE, this city in the Mesopotamian region (now Turkey) held thousands of people and is believed by many to be one of the world's earliest urban settlements. But the culture of the people here was unlike anything we know today. First of all, they built the city like a honeycomb, with houses sharing walls. Homes and buildings were accessed by doors cut into the roofs. People would stroll on the streets across these roofs, and climb down ladders to get to their living quarters. Doorways were often marked with bulls' horns, and dead family members were buried in the floor of each home. It's not clear what happened to the culture of the people who lived in this city. Their architectural style seems to be unique, though archaeologists have found many fertility goddess figurines in the city that resemble others found in the region. So it's likely that when the city was abandoned, its culture radiated outward into other cities in the Mesopotamian region.

My guess would be that these folks realized there’s a better way to build a city, and did so elsewhere. But what do I know? They didn’t leave a note when they left. It’s the same for the other seven cities in this article from io9. -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Franck Goddio)