News of the Weird: South Koreans are about to get younger

In June 2023, most of the people in South Korea will suddenly become younger, the BBC reported. On Dec. 8, the South Korean parliament voted to switch from a traditional method of counting age to the more widely recognized international method for official documents. Currently, many Koreans are 1 year old at birth and then gain another year on Jan. 1 of the following year. So someone born in December would become 2 less than a month later. One member of parliament said the change would reduce "unnecessary socioeconomic costs, because legal and social disputes as well as confusion persist due to the different ways of calculating age."

A live nativity scene in Carolina Beach, an island community about 140 miles southeast of Raleigh, N.C., was missing its cows on the morning of Dec. 4, the News & Observer reported. The cows escaped their pen at Seaside Chapel during the night, police explained, and eventually were discovered wading in a river in a nearby park. Police were joined by state park rangers and a K-9 with special herding skills as they hauled the soggy bovines back to shore.

Moonlighting

Like many police officers, Phoenix cop Christian Goggans was looking for a side job. But not only did his second job rub his bosses the wrong way, he allegedly was doing it while on the clock. Assigned to work at home, Goggans decided to work on his porn career, KOLD-TV reported. He supposedly traveled back and forth to Las Vegas while on duty to produce and star in pornographic videos. He posted the films to a public Twitter page using his stage name, Rico Blaze (which has since been made private). A Phoenix PD public information officer said Goggans' work-from-home assignment required only that he call in once daily. His activities are now under investigation.

A homeowner in East Grand Forks, Minn., was puzzled when he discovered five bullet holes in the siding of his house, along with another in his son's bedroom window, the Grand Forks Herald reported. Police questioned a next-door neighbor, Michael James Powers, 76, who readily admitted that he'd been shooting at a squirrel that was on his bird feeder; as he put it, "Well, that's war." Powers was aiming from his own bedroom window, and said it wasn't the first time he'd shot at squirrels. Officers charged him with reckless discharge of a firearm. When Powers told his wife he was being arrested, she responded, "Well, I told you."

Anthony Thomas Tarduno, 48, saved the Hernando County (Florida) Sheriff's Office the trouble of investigating after one of their patrol cars was set on fire on Dec. 7 in Spring Hill, Fla., WTSP-TV reported. As officers looked over the scene, Tarduno walked up and confessed to being the arsonist, saying he "had been drinking at a bar ... and decided he'd like to set it on fire." Tarduno placed a bag of garbage under the patrol vehicle and used a lighter to set it ablaze, police said. Tarduno admitted to detectives that when he gets drunk, he does "stupid things."