Hazardous duty

Upon leaving office as governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie managed to accomplish something no Garden State governor has done since 1994: He didn’t break his leg while in office. Christie’s predecessor John Corzine broke his leg in a car accident, while Corzine’s predecessor Jim McGreevey fell down during a visit to the Jersey Shore and broke his leg in 2002. Previous Governor Christine Todd Whitman suffered a broken leg during a skiing accident in Switzerland in 1999. Former Obama administration official Eric Columbus, who brought attention to Christie’s accomplishment on Twitter, noted that Democratic governors broke their left legs while Whitman, a Republican, broke her right leg.

Out cold

On Jan. 13, a deep freeze in a Siberian village broke the official town thermometer. The electric thermometer in Oymyakon, Russia, gave up counting when temperatures in the 500-person village reached minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Some brave town residents willing to go outside and check reported they saw temperatures reach minus 88.6. Local media reports said a small group of Chinese tourists took the occasion to swim in a nearby hot spring. The far-flung village in Eastern Russia bills itself as the coldest place to live on Earth. In 1933, temperatures dropped to minus 89.9, the coldest temperature recorded outside of Antarctica.

In the holiday spirit

One suburban Los Angeles woman has pushed Costco’s return policy to its logical conclusion. According to several customers who published their accounts on social media, a Costco shopper at the Santa Clarita, Calif., store dragged in her old Christmas tree on Jan. 4 to demand a refund. According to witnesses, the woman claimed she was entitled to a refund because the tree was dead. After a bit of shaming from other customers, witnesses reported, the woman received her refund and left the store.

In the bag

At the end of the first year of experimentation, Israel’s law to curb single-use supermarket plastic bags has had a curious impact: the increasing use of plastic bags. After the tax on plastic bags went into effect in January 2017, the Israeli public seemed to be using fewer difficult-to-recycle plastic bags, as the Knesset intended. However, as the year wore on, a study by supermarket research firm StoreNext indicated that Israelis were now buying cheap plastic bags in bulk to use as garbage bin liners rather than reusing ones they previously got for free when shopping for groceries.

Throat clearing

If you feel like sneezing, doctors say you should probably let it out. According to one case revealed in the journal BMJ Case Reports, a 34-year-old man broke his throat by trying to hold in a sneeze. The man reportedly tried to stop the sneeze by “pinching the nose and holding his mouth closed.” After he sneezed, the patient experienced pain, a voice change, and swelling around the neck. A series of X-rays revealed the man had blown out a part of his trachea. The report’s authors wrote that holding in sneezes was a “dangerous maneuver and should be avoided.”

Ryan’s hope

Some airline passengers will do whatever it takes to avoid checking a bag. And then there’s Ryan Hawaii. Before attempting to board a British Airways flight from Iceland to London, Hawaii put on eight pairs of pants and 10 shirts that wouldn’t fit in his carry-on bag on Jan. 10. British Airways charges nearly $55 for economy passengers to take an extra bag on that route. The airline refused to issue the man a boarding pass on the grounds that he posed a security threat to the flight. Undeterred, Hawaii tried again the next day with EasyJet and was again denied. Hawaii finally made it back to London on a Norwegian airline.

Smell test

Diesel the police dog has never had so easy an assignment. Police in Saint John in New Brunswick, Canada, called in the tracking dog on Jan. 9 to hunt down a criminal accused of stealing steaks from a local store. Police say the dog picked up the scent almost immediately and enthusiastically led officers to a 29-year-old suspect carrying ill-gotten meat. The department, in a release the next day, said steak was “probably not the best thing to be carrying when a determined police service dog is tracking you down.”

Degraded currency

Attendees of the North American Bitcoin Conference were able to pay for their tickets with credit cards, debit cards, or cash. But one method of payment conference organizers would not accept ahead of the January meeting: bitcoin. A week before the cryptocurrency summit, event planners stopped accepting ticket payments in bitcoin because of slow transaction times and expensive trading fees. Conference organizer Moe Levin told Bitcoin.com that the event accepted bitcoin payments until 14 days before the conference began: “We wish this was easier.”

Not built to last

A Canadian man with time on his hands and a neighborhood full of snow managed to pull a fast one on local police. After a snowstorm blanketed Montreal on Jan. 15, 33-year-old Simon Laprise got busy collecting snow and molding it into the shape of a DeLorean DMC-12. The snow sculpture was good enough to attract the attention of a Montreal police officer who grabbed his ticket book believing he was seeing a car parked in a snow removal zone. After further investigation, the officer left a ticket that read, “You made our night hahahahaha.” The next morning snowplows destroyed Laprise’s sculpture.