THE WORLD

The U.S. military would love to send sure-footed robots to Afghanistan so that machines -- and not soldiers -- can hump bulky equipment straight up mountains. Boston Dynamics has worked since 2004 on what it calls its "Big Dog cargo 'bot," yet the robot is still too big, too noisy and too expensive to run. And the Marines are working on driverless all-terrain vehicles, reports wired.com, but those machines haven't proved tough enough to survive in a war zone. There is a perfectly fine alternative already available: Pack mules. Mules, born of a female horse and a male donkey, are dependable animals that proved their worth back in the 19th century; that means we don't have to spend millions of dollars on research and development. Now the military says it's considering the restoration of an Animal Corps, which would bring back not only mules but also veterinarians and animal handlers to keep the "combat mules" battle-ready. Meanwhile, some troops in mountainous Afghanistan have begun renting mules and donkeys, though on missions in areas with roads, "they use John Deere ATVs -- the regular kind, not the driverless models."

WASHINGTON

Billboards portray supermodels wearing next to nothing, but the signs still have to watch their language -- even if the object is saving lives. A board of health in Kennewick, Wash., suddenly reversed itself and voted against endorsing a colon-cancer awareness campaign, reports the Tri-City Herald, after some people complained that the billboard's bluntly worded question "What's up your butt?" was in poor taste.

THE WEST

We may be intelligent, but we're hardly in the same league as the Clark's nutcracker, a member of the keen Corvidae family. They cache "up to 100,000 nuts in dozens of different spots at the end of spring, and can find them all again up to nine months later," says scienceblogs.com. And the birds dig up those nuts when snow covers their hiding places. Given birds this clever, wildlife biologist John Marzluff wondered whether crows, also corvids, could be taught to work for the U.S. military, distinguishing between human faces and searching for -- you guessed it -- Osama bin Laden himself, at that time still at large. Marzluff won some military funding to test his theory and discovered that, yes, the crows he studied could learn who's who, and remember it. If you were the mean guy wearing a caveman mask who trapped the birds once, those birds would recognize you in the same mask several months later. What's more, the crows also passed down that knowledge to their young, so that anybody wearing the caveman mask -- even if it was worn upside down -- would be scolded and mobbed. Readers were amused and horrified at the notion of birdbrains put to military use; one said, "None of my crow friends would ever participate in such nonsense; they just cawed their heads off." Yet animals have been shanghaied for military purposes before: Bats were studied for their bomb-delivery smarts during World War II, and pigeons were trained to steer guided missiles.

MONTANA

Alumni magazines can sometimes knock your socks off. In the recent issue of the University of Montana's Montanan, Chad Dundas profiles Megan Fisher, a 2006 graduate who says modestly that she's really just a "five-foot-nothing, one-legged girl." More accurately she's a super-athlete who's turned herself into a more-or-less "four-legged girl." It's all due to her steely resolve to come back stronger than ever after a horrific car accident maimed her left foot, leading to an amputation. Afterward, Fisher could walk only a short distance before experiencing excruciating pain, so she opted for a second amputation just below the knee "because that's where the (prosthetic) technology is." Now, her left leg sports one of four specialized prosthetics that allow her to walk, bicycle, rollerblade or run, all of which she can do fast: The first time she tried running with her elegant new racing leg, she clocked a mile in six minutes, 30 seconds. Since then, Fisher has won several world paratriathlon championships sponsored by the international Triathlon Union and hopes to compete in the Paralympic Games. "I think I'm a positive person because I'm stubborn," she says. "I refused to let this beat me; being sad stinks ... I mean, it stinks to be disabled. Shoot, it stinks to be abled. We all get happy and we all get sad. I choose to be happy."

THE WEST

Ranchers and farmers be warned: Thieves have begun making off with copper parts from center-pivot irrigation systems, reports Dairy Herd Management. The California Farm Bureau Federation recommends parking the rolling pivot systems away from roads and making sure they're locked, because the price of copper, like that of gold, has gone sky-high.  

Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and often shared in this column. Write betsym@hcn.org.

IDAHO

Whiny, weak and what you might call wussy are adjectives that characterize too many people in Idaho today, complains the Idaho Mountain Express, and even some elected officials admit they're living in fear. What fills folks with such anxiety? Wolves -- which, according to one legislator, are loitering at the mailbox, holding innocent women hostage, and hovering near school bus stops, ready to gobble up children. So "with lightning speed," the state Legislature "rammed through" a bill that allows the governor to declare war on wolves whenever he feels they're threatening people, livestock, outfitters or wildlife. This trembling at the thought of the Big Bad Wolf is downright embarrassing, says the state's largest weekly paper: "The chance that someone will ride on a commercial airliner whose top will peel off or develop a hole is higher today than being attacked by a wolf."

ARIZONA

Ho-hum: Life on the U.S.-Mexico border has become such a bore that Border Patrol agents find themselves nodding off on the job. They hate to snooze on the midnight shift, reports The New York Times, so they down energy drinks and walk briskly around their vehicles to stay alert. But the silence gets to them and before they know it, it's dreamtime. The trouble is that they have so little to do; illegal crossings have dipped to record low levels because of the dismal economy this side of the border, and without the "wild foot chases and dust-swirling car pursuits" to jack up adrenaline, border agents in the 126-mile Yuma sector complain they're on the job merely to watch the "fence rust." During the boom times years ago, recalled border agent Jeff Bourne, he helped run down 180 illegal immigrants in one day. Halfway into a recent shift, it was a far different story: "His crime-stopping efforts consisted of stopping a young man from dropping a soda can in the park."

ARIZONA

Growth may be slow in resort towns like Aspen, but the entire state of Arizona, whose motto is "God enriches," is burdened by more than 463,000 vacant housing units -- about one vacancy for every six homes. "That's enough housing to accommodate an entire decade's worth of population growth -- if the population were growing," says economist Marshall Vest at the University of Arizona. Azstarnet.com, the website of the Arizona Daily Star, predicts that stagnation is bound to continue as long as people abandon their houses when mortgages start costing more than their places are worth, and as long as illegal immigrants get chased away by punitive laws. Meanwhile, liberals in southern Arizona want to break away from the Republican dominance of Phoenix and form the nation's 51st state -- Baja Arizona. Unfortunately for the idea's supporters, "all the stars would have to align for this to happen," admits Paul Eckerstrom, the former Democratic county chairman who launched the campaign.

NEVADA

Hank Vogler is a rancher who says he can't afford $500-an-hour lawyers to go head-to-head against the powerful Southern Nevada Water Authority. This is the regional agency that for decades has worked its way through bureaucratic hoops to get permission to pipe groundwater from eastern Nevada to Las Vegas, where it would supply as many as 400,000 homes. So the 62-year-old rancher has adopted the most outrageous strategy he can imagine: He's asking for a month's time at the next hearing on the issue to call 9,213 witnesses -- "all of them of the four-legged variety," reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In other words, he wants people to hear from his cattle, sheep and horses "because they will be affected first if the Southern Nevada Water Authority sucks their valley dry." The authority needs clearance from the state to dewater 16 rural counties at an estimated cost of $2 billion; this fall's hearing involves 25 groundwater applications that were originally filed in 1990. No word yet on whether the hoofed group gets equal time.  

Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and often shared in this column. Write betsym@hcn.org.

NEVADA

What helps someone survive an ordeal that would most likely kill anyone else? Rita Chretien, 56, should know. She and her husband, Albert, 59, who own an excavating company, were on their way from British Columbia to a trade show in Las Vegas when they lost their way in the mountains of northeastern Nevada and got stuck in snow. Two days later, during a calm spell in mid-March, Albert left to look for help. But another storm moved in and he has still not been found, reports The Globe and Mail. For 49 days, his wife was stranded with nothing but the car, a few books, city clothes, some trail mix and candy, and most important, her faith and "the mindset of survival," said Dr. James Westberry, who saw her after she was rescued in early May. "She didn't give up." When she was finally discovered by two hunters on all-terrain vehicles, Chretien was living on melted snow and drinking freezing water from a stream. She'd felt certain that her ordeal would end that day, she later told her son in the hospital. Her fate was either "go home to be with her savior or ... be rescued, and it was to be rescued."

MONTANA

Accompanied as always by his border collie, Jag, Gov. Brian Schweitzer was crossing the campus of Montana State University, when out of the blue a "big red boxer" jumped on Jag and bit him, reports the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Never at a loss for a quip, Schweitzer -- a Democrat -- questioned whether the bad dog was a Republican or member of the Tea Party. Fortunately, Jag was unhurt. He's "resilient, like his owner," Schweitzer said. "I've been bit pretty hard by Republicans, but I always get back up."

COLORADO

Will mega-mansions become passé in Aspen? Someday, says columnist Paul Andersen in the Aspen Times, who imagines "geriatrics in wheelchairs staring out the windows of (Saudi Arabian) Prince Bandar's Starwood castle awaiting their breakfast of whole-grain pabulum." He thinks it's possible, "given the unlikelihood that Bandar's palace will sell for the $135 million asking price." Andersen cites Jim Westkott of the Colorado demographer's office, who predicts a new Aspen featuring glitzless second homes. The economic downturn hit the super-rich hard, Westkott says, and now super-sized houses in Aspen are a dime a dozen, so to speak. Westkott says that all the growth is now taking place about an hour's drive downvalley from Aspen, particularly in New Castle on the way to Rifle. The area's been discovered by two radically different sets of home buyers: oil-and-gas workers and retirees. As for Andersen, he's looking forward to hanging out with his "decrepit peers" in Bandar's old digs, happily skiing to the "ghost town of Aspen" or riding the seniors' van to New Castle "for a tour of the 200-story EnCana Energy Tower, where, on a clear day, you'll be able to see all the way to tomorrow."

Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and often shared in this column. Write betsym@hcn.org.

MONTANA

So far in the West, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer is the only one who kills bad bills by whipping out his custom branding iron, which spells out VETO. The latest Tea Party proposals that have flamed out include a bill making it harder for people to register to vote, another to permit the use of cyanide by large gold-mining companies, a bill to give sheriffs authority over the federal government in terror investigations, and a bill to overturn a voter-approved initiative to allow seriously ill patients to use marijuana legally. Videos and photos of the governor wielding his VETO iron on the steps of the Montana Capitol are on mtcowgirl.com, among other websites.

NEVADA 1, NEW YORK 0

When you make a booboo, sometimes it's smarter to embrace it. Not always, though. The U.S. Postal Service chose to embrace its error after learning that it used a photo of a fake Statue of Liberty -- the half-size one in Las Vegas that stands in front of the New York New York Casino -- as the model for the new Lady Liberty "forever" stamp. Linn's Stamp News broke the story about the snafu, which led Post Office spokesman Roy Betts to assure The New York Times that while the error was regrettable, "We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway." Other reactions: A Las Vegas casino operator said he was thrilled by the stamp, while former New York mayor Ed Koch commented that the post office was being "stupid." We think it's fine, only we'd like to rename the Las Vegas version the Statue of Libertines.

IDAHO

A truck driver near Bear Lake, Idaho, was tooling along at 65 miles an hour when something smashed into his windshield, the glass exploded, "and this thing was screaming just like a child." The "thing" turned out to be a bald eagle, and its wing was stuck in the broken glass. When Fish and Game staffers got to the scene, the bird was in bad shape, bleeding through her mouth and nostrils. But thanks to the Teton Raptor Center in Wilson, Wyo., the eagle rapidly gained weight on a diet of quail stuffed with antibiotics, reports This American Land. Just one month after the accident, the "miracle" bird, as everybody called her, was released back into the wild.

NORTHERN ROCKIES

There are some photos you really don't want to take. One is an extreme close-up of a quiescent Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park -- the kind of photo you'd get by standing as close as possible and pointing your camera down at its small pool of water -- just before the geyser spews superheated steam up to 185 feet high in the air. But that's exactly what 30 tourists with cameras tried to do recently, hovering around Old Faithful and oohing and ahhing just minutes before the geyser erupted, reports the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Park officials said they'd never seen anything like this act of folly. Fortunately, and surprisingly, nobody got scalded or blasted into the air. That was largely due to webcam enthusiast Craig Skelly of Golden, Colo., who happened to spot the unlikely crowd. He quickly alerted park officials, who sent a ranger out to shoo the visitors back to the boardwalk and out of harm's way. The tourists, who spoke English and reportedly did not come from a foreign country, arrived by bus and spent some 11 minutes milling around the geyser before getting yanked back. All of them told rangers that they never noticed the many signs warning visitors to stay on the boardwalk -- an assertion, said park spokesman Al Nash, that was hard to swallow. The tour guide, the bus driver and a man who urged everybody to crowd around Old Faithful were all cited with $125 fines.

NEBRASKA

In the legislative rush to introduce irrational and/or peculiar bills, Nebraska's unicameral body may have secured a lofty ranking. Though faced with daily shootings in Omaha and a major budget crunch, Omaha state Sen. Pete Pirsch introduced a constitutional amendment to guarantee Nebraskans the "right to hunt, fish and harvest wildlife," to which Lincoln state Sen. Amanda McGill responded with a tongue-in-cheek amendment granting residents the right to "swim, farm, ranch, drive, boat, tube, golf, nap, parent, learn, camp, pioneer, innovate and watch Husker football." Writer Pete Letheby tells us, though, that state Sen. Mark Christensen of Imperial owns the lead when it comes to proposals that might charitably be characterized as "different." They include a bill authorizing teachers to carry handguns in schools, another removing ethanol labels from gas station pumps so consumers wouldn't know what they're buying, a bill classifying the murder of abortion providers by a third party as "justifiable homicide," and last but not least, a bill requiring candidates in Nebraska's presidential primary to prove not only that their parents were born in the United States, but that both of their parents' parents were born here as well. All of Christensen's measures died early deaths. Letheby reminds us that we shouldn't harp on Nebraska; state legislatures in Kansas, Oklahoma and South Dakota sport equally farfetched initiatives.

CALIFORNIA

Never at a loss for novel ideas, the animal rights folks at PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, want the mayor of San Francisco and other city leaders to change the name of the city’s Tenderloin District to the “Tempeh District.” Tempeh, for those who prefer hamburgers and are unfamiliar with it, is a “cruelty-free” meat substitute made from fermented and firmed-up soybeans. Other suggestions from PETA, according to the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, were “Granola Flats” or “Seitan’s Lair,” the latter a wheat product. PETA spokeswoman Ashley Gonzalez argued that a vegan name would better reflect the philosophies of locals, but while that might be the case, there’s a historical problem, reports The New York Times. The Tenderloin doesn’t allude to an expensive cut of meat or even the sleek muscle on the leg of a lady of the evening; it refers instead to the bribes given to unscrupulous cops by the operators of bordellos and other illicit businesses. “It wasn’t like they were giving them steaks,” said Randy Shaw, who hopes to open a museum in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. “They were giving (the police) cash.” So PETA unveiled another initiative, promising to pay for any man’s vasectomy if he would also agree to neuter his cat or dog.

COLORADO

It’s always a treat to read a newspaper columnist when she or he comes unglued, and if you were reading the Telluride Watch lately, you had the pleasure of either sympathizing with Rob Schultheis’s outrage or chortling at his discomfort. What sent Schultheis over the edge? Mentally lazy Americans “who don’t bother to read, write or think.” His first example: Over half of Princeton students polled recently believed that the quote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” came from the Communist Manifesto. And one student at a different college hilariously thought that the civil rights movement got a big boost from Martin Luther King’s speech, “If I had a hammer.” This is exactly the kind of ignorance, he says, that led to the election of “fanatics and sleazoids” to Congress, and now these congressional representatives are busily cutting school lunches for poor kids, among other destructive acts, all of which led the columnist — using all caps, though he apologizes for the indulgence — to demand of Tea Party adherents: “JUST HOW STUPID ARE YOU PEOPLE?”

CALIFORNIA

If pot growers in the Southern California town of Hemet thought their “watchgator” would foil a police raid, they were sadly mistaken. The 4-foot alligator stayed quietly in his water-filled tub while narcotic-control cops confiscated 2,300 marijuana plants valued at $1.5 million, reports the Press-Enterprise. One man was arrested but the docile alligator got to go to a desert sanctuary.

WYOMING

To say that former Sen. Alan Simpson, 79, of Wyoming doesn’t mince words is putting it tepidly. On MSNBC’s Hardball TV show recently, he blasted presidential hopefuls from his own Republican Party because of their positions on social issues: “Who the hell is for abortion?” he asked. “I don’t know anybody running around with a sign that says, ‘Have an abortion, they’re wonderful.’ They’re hideous. But they’re a deeply intimate and personal decision, and I don’t think men legislators should even vote on the issue.” Simpson didn’t stop there, attacking potential presidential candidates from his party who oppose gay rights and declaring that he won’t stick with Republican “homophobes” who hypocritically indulge in affairs while giving speeches about moral values. You can find a small cache of Simpson’s quotes through the years on the Web; here’s a pithy example: “An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts in speech or on paper, some style.” And here’s a more recent quote from during the time Simpson was working on reforming the federal budget: “The country is gonna go to the bow-wows unless we deal with entitlements, Social Security and Medicare.”

MONTANA

Another straight shooter when it comes to controversial issues is Montana State Rep. Alan Hale, a Republican who hails from the tiny town of Basin. Hale unabashedly backs drinking while driving and opposes efforts by some of his fellow legislators to put teeth in the state’s notoriously permissive DUI laws. Passing sterner driving-under-the-influence laws became big news this year after several “high-profile drunken driving deaths,” reports the Missoulian, but Hale, citing the needs of far-flung taverns that bring locals together, calls reform a mistake: “These DUI laws are not doing our small businesses in our state any good at all. They are destroying them.” Unfortunately, reform took a hit earlier this year when it was revealed that one of the leaders, Republican State Sen. Jim Shockley, was arrested in January for drinking while driving. As if to illustrate how lightly the law now treats drinking drivers, Shockley’s fine for getting caught with an open beer was a paltry $51.

IDAHO

When the real estate market went bananas in the middle of the last decade, Teton County, Idaho, couldn't approve new subdivisions fast enough. In fact, the Idaho valley, which is located just over the pass from pricey Jackson, Wyo., was named one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States. But when the housing market plummeted in 2008, the boom's extravagance became painfully apparent, reports NewWest.net: The number of vacant lots in Teton County -- 7,791 -- was almost equal to the county's population of 8,800. In a recent talk at a Denver land-use conference, Anna Trentadue, an attorney in Teton County for Valley Advocates for Responsible Development, recalled that the rush to develop land was so reckless that "thousands of lots were platted in the far nether regions of the valley with no real long-term vision for how the county would be able to provide basic services to these areas." Trentadue was initially surprised when the audience began to laugh during her presentation; then she realized that "they were just incredulous."

NEVADA and CHINA

In Nevada, of course, developers didn't just plat far-flung suburban subdivisions and Las Vegas condos; they actually built them during the real estate bubble, and did so at a rapid clip. Last year, the number of empty homes in Nevada rose to 167,564, according to U.S. Census data. That's the equivalent of one out of every seven houses, which helps explain why, this past January, Nevada enjoyed the dubious distinction of having the highest foreclosure rate in the nation. On the up side, if you can call it that, bargains galore can be found throughout the Silver State because prices of many houses and apartments have dropped by more than half. "Save over $460,000" on a new house on the Strip is now a typical headline on the Top Ten Las Vegas Home Deals website. But the West's housing boom and bust can't compare to the spectacular scale of nonstop overbuilding in China. To keep its economy humming, China has built and continues to build entire cities, though few of its citizens can afford to live in the high-rise apartments or shop in the sprawling new malls, reports the television show Dateline Australia. The startling 99 percent vacancy rate for one mega-city built for 22 million people in the Pearl Delta is typical; what's even more appalling is the country's total number of empty apartments -- 64 million.