John Weigel and Olaf Danielson are engaged in a frenzied battle of "extreme bird-watching," each hoping to close out 2016 as the new North American champ of the American Birding Association, and a September Smithsonian piece had Weigel ahead, 763 to 759. Danielson is perhaps better known for doing much of his birding in the nude. The old one-year record was 749, and the association attributes the larger numbers this year to El Niño, which has disrupted food supplies and driven birds into different locations.
Finer points of the law
• Senate Bill 1342, passed in the Idaho Legislature this year, authorizes schools to use the Bible as a reference in classrooms — despite the U.S. Supreme Court's having specifically condemned a previous version of the bill ever since 1964. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Sage Dixon, said he thought his law was nonetheless constitutional because, "The little Supreme Court in my head says this is OK." Even so, Gov. C.L. Otter vetoed the bill.
• Nebraska voters in November will be asked whether to keep the state's long-standing death penalty for murder — even though retaining it will require them to vote "repeal." The Legislature replaced death row last year with mandatory life sentences, and the referendum is to "repeal" or "retain" that legislation. Hence, to abolish the death penalty, voters must select "retain." The state attorney general, and election officials, declined to challenge the confusing arrangement, instead suggesting that Nebraskans are smart enough to figure the whole thing out.
A penny for their thoughts
• Robert Napolitan, 34, was arrested in Taylor, Pa., in September and charged with theft of a drum containing 300,000 pennies from his employer, Pyne Freight Lines. That steel drum weighs several tons and, of course, netted Napolitan only $3,000. By contrast, in New York City's Diamond District in September, a thief made off with a 5-gallon drum containing 86 pounds of gold flakes, valued at more than $1 million — and is still at large.
• According to a High Point, N.C., TV report, Larry Hall of Randolph County took seven-plus weeks out of his life recently and glued pennies to cover (except for windows and chrome) his 2000 Chevrolet Blazer — a total of 51,300 coins.
Heavy reading
The 1,496-page German novel "Bottom's Dream," translated into (broken) English and more than twice as long as "War and Peace," recently reached U.S. bookstores as a 13-pound behemoth, bound with a 14-inch spine that, based on a September Wall Street Journal description, will almost surely go unread. The story follows two translators and their teenage daughter over a single day as they try to interpret the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Bright ideas
• British farmer Pip Simpson, who lost nearly 300 sheep to rustlers in recent years, recently sprayed his remaining herd of almost 800 sheep a bright luminous orange (harmless, he said) to make them less attractive to thieves.
• Saudi Arabia switched to the 365-day Gregorian calendar on Oct. 2, in part to reduce government expenses. Bureaucrats had been using the Islamic lunar Hijri (354-day) calendar, but now must work a 3 percent longer year for the same salaries.
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