Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Sled dogs inherit elephant treadmill BIG LAKE, Alaska, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- An Alaskan dog sled racer says he obtained an elephant treadmill from the Alaska Zoo to help train his team for the Iditarod race. Advertisement Martin Buser, a four-time winner of the 1,150-mile Iditarod, said the 22-foot-long treadmill at his Happy Trails Kennels in Big Lake formerly belonged to Maggie, an 8,000-pound African elephant that left the Alaska Zoo in 2007 for a new home in California, AlaskaDispatch.com reported. Buser said the treadmill may not be up and running until after the upcoming Iditarod race, which begins March 6, but it will be a valuable tool for future training. He said the indoor training area will allow him to do health and fitness tests on his dogs with monitors that could not be used out on a trail. "All that stuff is really hard to do when the dogs are running up and down the trails, but really easy to do when the dogs are on the treadmill," he said. Advertisement -0- Police: Drunk 'ninja' impaled self SEATTLE, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- Police in Seattle said an intoxicated man overestimated his own ninja skills and impaled himself on a fence post. Investigators said an officer heard screams at about 11:15 p.m. PST Monday and found the man impaled on a spike atop a 4- to 5-foot-tall fence, Seattlepi.com reported. Fire Department responders freed the man from the spike and he was taken to Harborview Medical Center for treatment. "The male claimed he was not being chased, but rather he thought he was a ninja and would be able to successfully leap over the 4 to 5-foot fence," a police spokesman said. "Clearly he was overconfident in his abilities, no doubt bolstered by alcohol." -0- Trump building gets bump in height CHICAGO, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- The Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago has been promoted to the world's sixth-tallest building, an international arbiter of building heights says. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in Chicago changed its criteria for measuring skyscrapers from the distance between the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the structural top to measuring from "the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance" to the top, the Chicago Tribune reported. Advertisement The new calculation adds 27 feet to the just-completed Trump building, moving it up one spot to No. 6 on the world's tallest buildings list. The boost brought the building's official height to 1,388 feet, 6 inches, ahead of the Jin Mao Building in Shanghai, which stands 1,381 feet tall. -0- Political party cops to penis stickers COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- A Danish political party named partially after a male sex organ has claimed responsibility for covering other parties' campaign posters in penis stickers. The P.I.K. party -- an acronym for Penge i kommunekassen, or Money in the Council Coffer, which also spells out "pik," a crude form of the Danish word for penis -- took responsibility for covering posters in yellow stickers shaped like penises, The Copenhagen Post reported. "We admit we did it," party Vice President Niels Andreasen said. "But we've tried to distribute them equally among all parties' posters." Andreasen said the strategy has created a lot of publicity for the party. "At first we figured we'd get around 200 votes. But now we've had 10,000 visitors to our Web site and we have 500 new Facebook friends," he said.
