What is street jargon?

A Jeopardy! contestant proved that it sometimes takes more than book smarts to win the popular television quiz show. Responding to a prompt asking what a mash-up between 1990s rapper Coolio and 17th-century author John Milton might be called, contestant Nick Spicher answered, “Gangster’s Paradise Lost.” However, Jeopardy! judges ruled that Spicher didn’t use the correct mispronunciation in the Coolio song title. “You said ‘gangster’s’ instead of ‘gangsta’s’ on that song by Coolio, so we take $3,200 away from you,” host Alex Trebek told Spicher during the Jan. 1 telecast. “You are now in second place.”

Churning out art

What do you do with 1,000 pounds of waste scrap butter not fit for humans to eat? If you’re the American Dairy Association North East, you create a sculpture depicting the agricultural industry for the 102nd Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg, Pa. The sculpture depicts a dairy cow, a dairy farmer, an agronomist, a milk processor, and a dairy consumer. The farm show, an annual event, has included butter sculptures since 1991.

Bird watchers

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will keep mail carriers from their rounds in Rocky River, Ohio, but wild turkeys are another matter. Postal carriers in the Cleveland suburb have been unable to deliver mail to about two dozen homes in the Cleveland suburb because wild turkeys reportedly attack and peck at them when they try. The city has asked residents to stop putting out bird feed, hoping that will cause the turkeys to leave. In the meantime, affected residents have to go to the post office to get their mail.

Capital confusion

On Dec. 23, the Transportation Security Administration sent a memo to employees confirming that, yes, the District of Columbia really is in the United States. The memo was in response to a formal complaint issued by D.C. Congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who said many of her constituents had encountered problems boarding aircraft with a D.C. driver’s license. The District of Columbia is the site of the nation’s capital, Washington. That fact, however, has allegedly eluded some TSA agents at Newark, N.J.’s Liberty International Airport and other venues around the country where D.C. residents have complained that agents accused them of having fake or foreign identifications.

Return trip

Thanks to a short delay, Hawaiian Airlines flight 446 took off in 2018 and landed in 2017. After a 10-minute delay, the flight from Auckland, New Zealand, lifted off at 12:05 a.m. Jan. 1, just minutes after locals welcomed the new year. But the local time in Honolulu when the aircraft landed was 10:16 a.m. Dec. 31, 2017. Flights that begin in New Zealand and end in Hawaii cross the International Date Line, resulting in a 23-hour time difference.

Panic at the pump

On Jan. 1, the modern world finally reached parts of Oregon, where residents of several rural counties were finally allowed to pump their own gasoline. Prior to a state law that passed in May and took effect at the beginning of 2018, the state required that gas station attendants dispense gasoline. The change has unsettled some Oregonians, who appeared panicked or despondent in the comment section of a story about the change posted to a Medford, Ore., television station’s Facebook page. “I’ve lived in this state all my life and I REFUSE to pump my own gas,” a user named Mike Perrone commented. “I had to do it once in California while visiting my brother and almost died doing it.” New Jersey law still prohibits residents of the Garden State from pumping their own gasoline.

One man’s trash …

A thief in Copenhagen, Denmark, successfully stole loot worth more than $1 million—and then apparently threw it away like an empty beer can. A security camera at Café 33 caught the theft, in which a masked man on Jan. 2 broke into a locked area of the café where owner Brian Ingberg stores a collection of 1,200 bottles. The thief then stole the Dartz and Russo-Baltique vodka bottle—a bottle worth $1.3 million and made of 6 pounds of gold and 6 pounds of silver with a diamond-encrusted cap shaped like the front of a vintage car—and fled. Police later found the bottle, emptied of vodka and dented, at a construction site. Latvian car manufacturer Dartz Motorz owns the bottle and had loaned it to Ingberg.

Chocolate science

Scientists from the University of California have good news for worried chocoholics: They might be close to saving the cacao tree from extinction. For years, worries about devastating fungal diseases and climate change have led many scientists to predict the eventual demise of the cacao. Now, UC Berkeley plant genomics director Myeong-Je Cho is leading a group of scientists and candy-makers who are reinventing the cacao through gene editing. Scientists hope to make the cacao plant less susceptible to the witch’s broom disease as well as alter its genome to make it grow in more places in the world. In September, candy company Mars announced it would spend $1 billion to make its business more sustainable—and part of that commitment is funding Cho’s work.

One for the road

More than 3,300 Pennsylvanians applied for roadkill permits in the Keystone State in 2017, the state’s Game Commission reported at the end of December. State law requires residents to file for a permit if they wish to eat a deer hit and killed on a roadway. And Pennsylvanians seem to know a good deal when they see one alongside the road. “Those [roadkill] are valuable food sources,” Game Commission spokesman Travis Lau told WESA. State Farm reports that Pennsylvania drivers have a 1-in-63 chance of hitting a deer while driving.