The best of the tabloids in 2013

last updated 8 January 2015

A Michigan man has taken revenge on his ex-wife and her new lover by buying the house next door and erecting a giant yard sculpture of a hand flipping the bird. Detroit strip club owner Alan Markovitz spent $7,000 on the 12-foot-tall bronze statue, which is illuminated by a spotlight at night. But Markovitz says the middle-finger salute is aimed not at his ex-wife, but at her new partner—whom she allegedly started seeing while she and Markovitz were still married. “I’m so over her. This is about him,” he said. “He broke the man code.”

A tiger briefly escaped from a Kansas circus and gave a patron quite a scare when it wandered into the ladies’ room. Jenna Krehbiel had just finished watching the big cat show and went into the bathroom, not knowing one of the cats had gotten away from its handlers. “You don’t expect to go in a bathroom door, have it shut behind you, and see a tiger walking toward you,” Krehbiel said. She quickly turned and left, and the tiger was returned to its cage. Krehbiel said that when she told her 3-year-old daughter that she’d encountered a tiger in the bathroom, the girl asked if the tiger “had washed its hands.”

A Polish man impaled his head on a screwdriver, but only realized it when he saw himself in his rearview mirror. “I don’t remember what happened that day,” said the 25-year-old, who doesn’t want to be named. “At some point when I was working in my garden I slipped and fell down.” Only later did the man notice he had a screwdriver in his forehead. Surgeons removed the tool, which went in 2 inches deep but somehow missed his brain.