Jockstrip: The world as we know it

THINGS WE DON'T UNDERSTAND

Police say 24-year-old Chad Dillon somehow ended up snoozing inside a trash bin early Friday and is lucky to be alive to talk about it.

The Fort Wayne, Ind., Journal Gazette reports while Dillon apparently fell asleep in the back of a Waste Management garbage truck, the load of garbage was compacted not once, but twice.

The paper reports witnesses told police they heard screaming from the back of the truck as the driver was making his way through the DeKalb County Fairgrounds, picking up garbage from other trash bins. The driver told police he didn't hear Dillon and twice crushed the trash down to make room for more.

Dillon eventually was pulled from the garbage and taken to a local hospital, where he was treated for head, chest and arm injuries and released.

NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS

The big cats are back in Michigan's northwoods after nearly 100 years.

Eric Sharp, of the Detroit Free Press, reports wild cougars, "supposedly wiped out in the state in 1906, now are blamed for a series of attacks on horses and other animals at two Kalkaska County farms."

Sharp writs DNA tests also link cougars to five other Michigan counties and the state Department of Natural Resources has given one farmer a permit to trap or kill one -- even though cougars are on Michigan's endangered species list.

The report says while officials are cautious about calling the cats cougars, 17-year-old Allen Strouse has no doubt.

"They were mountain lions," said Strouse. "I've seen them twice pretty close, and a lot of other people have seen them, too. There are two of them, and if the big one is 4 to 5 feet long, then the smaller one is 3 1/2 to 4 feet."

TODAY'S SIGN THE WORLD IS ENDING

As newspaper columnist Curt McKeever put it: "Welcome to the Dark Age."

In Nebraska, where the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers football team is treated like an NFL dynasty, the world as fans knew it came to an end Sunday. Saturday's loss to Iowa State dropped the team out of both college football polls -- for the first time in more than two decades.

The loss continued a sudden and dramatic decline of a program that ended last season with lopsided losses to Colorado and Miami. The Cornhuskers were routed by Penn State two weeks ago and are out of the national rankings for the first time since October 1981.

After the 1990s, a decade in which Nebraska dominated college football with three national championship titles, this is a tremendous letdown.

Nebraska Coach Frank Solich told the Lincoln Journal Star, "We'll either splinter apart or we'll come together. There's probably no middle ground on that end of it."

AND FINALLY, TODAY'S UPLIFTING STORY

It took eight men and a lot of non-stick cooking spray. They started early Friday sifting flour, making it in five batches because no one mixing bowl was big enough. Grown men, digging their hands into sticky dough, lifting it and tossing it into a pan.

The Daily Press out of Hampton Roads, Va., reports they kneaded it for two hours. The put it in to bake at 5:30 p.m. and by 8 a.m. Saturday, a peek through the oven's window revealed a golden biscuit.

An eager crowd gathered to watch the slicing -- that took 80 minutes. The top buckled a little and looked close to crumbling but held and was removed. It was ham time. Trays of thinly sliced meat were piled on the base. The top of the biscuit was again put in place.

They hope for a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's largest ham biscuit -- 8 feet in diameter and 14 inches high -- all in celebration of the 250th birthday of Smithfield, Va. Smithfield is, of course, home of the Smithfield Ham company.