Making lemonade out of lemons, and more

Good week for:

Making lemonade out of lemons, after a British woman started a popular blog recommending that fellow gardeners get rid of their garden snails by eating them. “They’re perfectly good meat,” says Oriole Parker-Rhodes, 59, who recommends baking the snails with wild sorrel, watercress, and butter.

Going on a diet, after United Airlines began demanding that overweight passengers whose buttocks spill out of their seats buy a second seat.

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Artyom Sidorkin of Russia, who went into surgery this week for what doctors believed was a large, malignant lung tumor. Doctors found and removed a 3-inch-tall fir tree growing in his lung. “I thought I was hallucinating,” said the surgeon, who thinks Sidorkin must have inhaled a seed.

Bad week for:

Toxic assets, after the bankrupt Lehman Brothers bank was reported to be stuck with about 500,000 pounds of yellowcake uranium—enough to make a nuclear bomb. The company made a bad gamble on the commodities market and will wait “to realize the best prices,” says Lehman CEO Bryan Marsal.

The squirrel population of Spokane, after the city’s parks and recreation department purchased the Rodenator, a device that pumps flammable gas into rodent holes and then ignites it with a spark. The agency called the method humane, since squirrels are instantly killed by the explosion.

Ninio, an elephant recently acquired by a Polish zoo, after a conservative politician denounced him for being uninterested in mating with the zoo’s females. “We didn’t pay 37 million zlotys to have a gay elephant,” said Michal Grzes.