Mayonnaise coats Japanese expressway
KIKUGAWA, Japan, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- A truck turned a Japanese highway into a sandwich when it rammed another truck and spread a slick of mayonnaise on the Tomei Expressway.
About half of the more than 900 boxes on the truck spilled onto the highway, leaving damage and a 300-foot mayonnaise slick at Kikugawa, Shizuoka, that took five hours to clean up, Mainichi Shimbun reported.
The truck collided with another truck that was stopped in one lane of the Tomei Expressway with engine trouble Tuesday night, authorities said. Both drivers suffered head and foot injuries.
Kangaroo spotted in snowy Wisconsin
DODGEVILLE, Wis., Jan. 5 (UPI) -- What's reddish, about 5 feet tall with a big curved tail -- the sheriff of Iowa County, Wis., thinks it's a roaming kangaroo or smaller cousin, a wallaby.
"Well, at least we are treating it as being the real thing," Sheriff Steve Michek told the Wisconsin State Journal. Michek said his officers received several reports of sightings from "reliable" people of a kangaroo hopping along Highways 18 and 151 near Dodgeville Monday.
No one has reported a kangaroo missing in icy Wisconsin.
Kangaroos are native to Australia and are not cold weather animals but one could maneuver through snowdrifts by hopping up to 30 feet in a single bound. The marsupials are nocturnal and generally don't like humans.
Zoo experts warn the animal could die of exposure in the frigid January winter weather. Last month, an exotic emu, a large ostrich-like bird, was captured west of Dodgeville.
A sheriff's advisory said the kangaroo should not be approached and is considered dangerous.
Texas snowball melts eBay wallets
SUGAR LAND, Texas, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Although they could find an abundance in the Midwest Wednesday, people bid fast and furiously for Texas snowballs being auctioned off on eBay.
One auction, for a snowball made Christmas Eve in Laguna Vista, Texas, was up to $1,225 with 44 bids as of midday Wednesday. Another, hawked as "the purest south Texas snow" from McAllen, was up to $997.
Patricia Lucas, 18, of Sugar Land was among the Texans trying to turn the white into green, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The sale is "probably weird for people who live up north and see snow all the time," Lucas said. But it had been decades since Houston had snow for Christmas and more than 100 years since snow fell in the Rio Grande Valley.
Lucas said she selling only one snowball and keeping others "maybe forever."
"People sell crazy stuff on eBay, and I figured someone would buy a snowball," Lucas said.
Court to Knievel: 'Pimp' is compliment
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- A caption on ESPN's Web site that called Evel Knievel a "pimp" most likely was intended as a light-hearted compliment, a federal appeals court ruled.
The 66-year-old daredevil and his wife sued the TV network for an April 2001 caption that said, "Evel Knievel proves that you're never too old to be a pimp," with a picture of Knievel. The stuntman was on his motorcycle with his arms around his wife, Krystal, and another woman, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The Knievels said they were libeled by the caption and Knievel lost work after the caption appeared. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, on a 2-1 vote Tuesday, upheld a federal judge's dismissal of the suit.
In context, the caption "was most likely intended as a compliment," Judge A. Wallace Tashima said in citing one definition of pimp as being someone who is "cool." Any reasonable reader would have considered the word "an attempt at humor," the judge said of the court's ruling.
