On a mild April night some years ago, I walked past a college dorm in New Haven and smelled something I couldn’t place. It reminded me vaguely of swimming pools. Was it chlorine? I sniffed again, more deeply than before. Suddenly I knew exactly what it was and hurried away, internally berating an unseen teenage boy. A few evenings later, in the same spot, I smelled it again. Filled with a sense of moral outrage I looked around, I looked up, and identified the culprit: A tree.

More precisely, a Callery Pear, or Pyrus calleryana, a deciduous tree that’s common throughout North America. It blossoms in early spring and produces [...]

"It is also not known why the semen is taken forcibly from strangers."

So, yes, there is this:

According to a recent study, certain men appear to be allergic to their own semen…. The condition is called POIS or post-orgasmic illness syndrome. After first thinking POIS was psycho-somatic, researchers say they concluded it was an allergy after noting that the symptoms only appeared when semen came in contact with the skin; men who masturbated without ejaculating were void of symptoms. The LA Times says a therapy is in the works, which involved injecting men with concentrated doses of their own semen in an attempt to build up immunity.

Okay, so obviously it's a terrible thing, and we feel incredibly sympathetic toward [...]

"It has appeared, most notably, in 'There's Something About Mary,' and made a disconcerting cameo in Todd Solondz's 'Happiness.')" —Can you guess what "it" is? You probably can. Still, fun to think of the career arc.

"The incident began when the driver of a Greyhound bus carrying the freight alerted the fire department he had lost a part of his load while negotiating the ramp on a highway near Nashville. 'We didn't know what it was, but we were told (the canisters) were non-toxic,' said Maggie Lawrence, a fire department spokeswoman. When firefighters arrived on the ramp, they saw 'four small propane-sized canisters (that) began to emit a light vapor,' Lawrence said. In addition to the vapor, the canisters also let off an unpleasant odor and the ramp was closed while emergency personnel tried to determine what was in the containers." —Spoiler: It was bull [...]