Quick Takes

Sea lion’s choice

It isn’t unusual for hungry visitors to enter the Marine Room, a San Diego seafood restaurant, and take a seat in a booth. But they are usually humans. On Feb. 4, a young and malnourished sea lion wandered into the restaurant and curled up to sleep in a prominent booth several hours before the restaurant opened. Executive chef Bernard Guillas took pictures of the sea lion peering out the seaside restaurant’s window before animal control workers took him away and delivered him to San Diego’s SeaWorld for rescue. “He was a little bit early for his high tide breakfast reservation,” Guillas quipped on Facebook.

Like mothers, like daughters

Twin sisters Stephanie Edginton and Nicole Montgomery were born minutes apart—and so were their daughters. The sisters both went into labor on Feb. 8 and delivered daughters Cora and Louisa six minutes apart at Virtua Hospital in Voorhees, N.J. Stephanie told the local ABC affiliate that her baby wasn’t due until Feb. 12: “We actually had a doctor’s appointment today because we were due on Friday, so we got there and they were like ‘you have to go to the hospital’ and we get a call that Nicole and Rich are on their way, too.” Stephanie and Nicole were born three minutes apart.

Wheels of fortune

With no bank willing to lend it more money, an Italian dairy cooperative has secured about $6.7 million in bonds using a massive stockpile of Parmesan cheese as collateral. Seeking to expand its market presence in the United States, the Modena-based dairy collective discovered it was already too leveraged with banks to get more loans. Thankfully for the 4 Madonne cooperative, enough creditors were willing to purchase bonds backed by massive aging Parmesan wheels.

Powerful touch

Thousands of Tulsa, Okla., residents lost power Feb. 5 when a squirrel touched the wrong wires at a local electrical substation. More than 5,000 customers, including three schools, lost power in the outage. According to a utility spokesman with the Public Service Company of Oklahoma, the unfortunate squirrel likely felt little pain when it tripped the outage. “I’m sure the squirrel probably didn’t know what hit it,” spokesman Ed Bettinger told the Tulsa World. “We put all kinds of animal guards on our equipment that occasionally these critters find a way to circumvent.”

Built to last

It would be difficult for manufacturers today to build a better mousetrap than the 155-year-old antique on display at a British museum. The vintage 1861 mousetrap there managed to snare a new victim—and it didn’t even use any cheese. According to the blog of the University of Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life, an assistant curator at the museum discovered a dead mouse caught in the trap on Feb. 3. “The trap itself was not baited, but this did not stop our mouse from wriggling inside and, finding itself trapped, [meeting] its demise,” a staffer with the museum blogged. A label on the 1861 mousetrap bragged the trap “will last a lifetime.”

All flash, no flavor

One San Francisco vendor decided to celebrate Super Bowl 50 by selling hot dogs covered in gold flakes. Levi’s Stadium concessionaire Centerplate named the beef and pork sausage the “Big 5-0 Sausage” and served it with sautéed peppers and edible gold flakes. San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Bill Disbrow tried the $12 hot dog during the Feb. 7 game and reported the gold flakes added little to the flavor: “The flakes were completely overpowered, thanks largely to a completely unanticipated cheese eruption from the dog itself.”

Chore challenge

She doesn’t cook, and she doesn’t clean. And for that, one 42-year-old Italian woman may face six years of jail time. An unidentified husband from Sonnino, a village south of Rome, made a formal complaint to Italian police claiming his wife had violated article 572 of the Italian penal code, which “punishes whoever mistreats a person in their family.” According to the complaint, the man’s wife, besides refusing to cook or clean, also kicks him out of the bedroom occasionally. Rather than dismiss the charges, Italian police referred the case to a judge who set an Oct. 12 trial date.

Kidding around

Hopeful of a Denver Broncos Super Bowl victory, a Colorado rancher spent the weeks leading up to the Feb. 7 Super Bowl knitting 150 Broncos-themed sweaters—for a bunch of baby goats. Rebecca Herberg, who runs a 400-acre goat ranch in Montrose, Colo., said she expects her baby goats to be born this spring. “When they’re born, typically they weigh 8, 9 pounds; and they’re cold, it’s April,” she told KCNC. According to Herberg, the male kids will wear blue sweaters while the female kids will don orange sweaters. Until the goats are born, the rancher has been putting the sweaters on her 15 dogs. “They look like a bunch of little Broncos fans running around down there,” she said.

Photo trap

A thief in Batavia, Ill., chose his target poorly during a recent robbery. On Nov. 25, a man pried open the cash drawer of a Funway Amusements photo booth and took $75 in cash. Unbeknownst to the robber, the photo booth’s security system automatically began snapping pictures of the perpetrator as he committed the robbery. It took months for the owner of the photo booth to repair the damage and access the photographs. But on Feb. 4, Batavia police released the pictures, hoping the public could identify the thief. Suspect Chancellor Terrell turned himself in a few days later.