The new phone costs more than a used car

🔥 Most Enraging

A brown bear forced its way into an occupied hotel room in Tibet

A brown bear walked down a hotel hallway in Tibet, picked a room with two people already in it, and forced the door open. Not an empty room. An occupied one. I put the little chain on the door at home like it does anything, and now I find out even that is optional if the guest is a bear.

😩 Most Exhausting

A loose bull charged players and got a cricket match called off in England

A bull got loose onto a cricket pitch in England, charged the players, and refused to leave until the match was called off. Someone actually brought a cow out to calm it down, which did not work, because it was a bull with plans. I have never once in my life been that sure of what I wanted.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

A British gardener set a world record with a 3-pound, 13.7-ounce head of garlic

A man in Britain grew a head of garlic that weighs nearly four pounds and set a world record with it. Four pounds. That is not a garlic, that is a small dog. I grew three tomatoes this whole summer and a squirrel I've been feuding with since May took two of them.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

A dog spooked by fireworks was rescued from a 15-foot well in Kansas

A dog in Kansas got so spooked by the fireworks that it bolted and fell down a fifteen-foot well, and crews had to haul it back out. I understand the dog completely. Given a loud enough holiday and a deep enough hole, I would also consider it. The dog is fine. Shaken, but fine. Same.

▸ Streetlights are trapping thousands of woodlice in circular 'death spirals' — Scientists found streetlights are trapping thousands of woodlice in slow circles they can't break out of, going round and round the light until they drop. Nature gave them one job and a lamppost undid it. I know the feeling. I circled the same parking garage for twenty minutes on Tuesday.

▸ Record ocean drilling shows why the 2011 Japan tsunami was so deadly: a thin, slippery clay layer — They drilled miles into the ocean floor and found the reason the 2011 Japan tsunami was so bad was a thin layer of slippery clay that let the whole fault slide. The seafloor moved almost two hundred feet. A little slick clay under everything, and the ground gives out. I think about that every time I get out of the shower.

▸ Hubble marked the country's 250th with a red-white-and-blue view of a 500,000-star cluster — For the country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, NASA pointed the Hubble at an ancient cluster of five hundred thousand stars and got a photo that came out red, white, and blue. Half a million stars, older than the planet, drafted into a holiday card. Even the telescope had to do something festive. I couldn't get out of it either.

Fine. A seventy-nine-year-old man in Florida fixes up old computers nobody wanted and gives them away to people who can't afford one, and he's up to seven hundred of them. A man my age, who could be doing nothing, decided to spend his time handing strangers a way to get online. Seven hundred times. I was going to make a joke here. I've got nothing.