There was talk of burying it, burning it, or cutting it up, but ultimately, a far more respectful and elegant solution was offered: shoving dynamite in the corpse’s mouth and blowing it to kingdom come. Engineers figured, “Pieces of blubber [would] scatter into the water, [and] what was left would be cleaned up by seagulls and crabs.” And you know it’s a good plan when you’re counting on crabs to do all the heavy lifting for you.

Of course, because the city would be using live explosives on public ground, the event attracted a lot of onlookers. Watching a whale explode was a lot more entertaining than wearing jeans and listening to Led Zeppelin, or whatever it was ’70s folk did for fun. For safety’s sake, bystanders were told to stay at least a quarter of a mile away from the blast zone. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a drastic underestimation, and everyone and everything within a half mile or so got showered with rank whale.

Discovery ChannelWere not taking harmless little flecks of whale, either.

However, a jealous rival fruit company decided that all this beneficial waste management was standing in the way of something much more important: greed. Ticofrut filed a lawsuit, alleging that the peels had not only “defiled a national park,” but also created an unfair market advantage for one of its competitors. After a successful smear campaign, the Supreme Court ordered the project to be shut down. The ecologists were forced off the land, and Del Oro had to go back to dumping their waste elsewhere. But the orange peels remained, and nature became unstoppable.

Tim TreuerThats the orange-treated side on the right. You know, the part with all the plants.

In 2013, after 15 years of obscurity, a grad student from Princeton stumbled upon the lost orange peel dump as a possible research venue. When researchers finally arrived at the site, they found it unrecognizable. Compared to untreated control fields, they found the orange peel areas had “Richer soil, more tree biomass, greater tree-species richness, and greater forest canopy closure.” Given the “stunning” difference between the fertilized and unfertilized areas, they are hoping their findings will convince other nations to accept this more “appealing” (sorry) method of recycling.

They figured they could fix their beaver imbalance by relocating 76 beavers to remote, underpopulated areas, but they hit a bit of a snag. The underpopulated areas in question were so rural that they were simply inaccessible by road. They tried getting the beavers there by horse and mule, but it turned out that neither animal was willing to travel the wild with a bunch of bucktoothed maniacs strapped to their backs.

Idaho Fish and Game Department They may look like an animal designed by Walt Disney, but dont be fooled. Beavers dont play.

But Idaho Fish and Game had two things no other governmental departments had: a lack of common sense and a surplus of parachutes from World War II. A very smart man named Elmo Heter designed a special wooden box that would hold a beaver while it was sailing through the air and then open when it hit the ground.

Idaho Fish and Game DepartmentOtherwise, they’d just be making a bunch of tiny coffins.

In Bangalore, India, traffic is so notoriously bad that it’s not unusual for people to up and drive the wrong way. Realizing that no good will come of this, police now have fake cops posted at three busy intersections. As the police commissioner states: “The tendency among road users is that whenever they see there is no traffic policemen at any stretch of the road, they try to violate traffic rules.” So now, these cardboard prints of mustachioed Bangalore cops take the beats no one else will, staring angrily into traffic and signaling that any wrong-way driver should turn the hell around.

Meanwhile, in Fife, Scotland, their first Scottish-Arborean police officer has already become a bit of a celebrity. “Pop-up Bob” patrols streets with his radar gun in an attempt to deter speeding. He moves to a new location every hour, because even cardboard people need a change of scenery every now and then.

The ScotsmanThough it seems like the bigger story is a small town that would rather prevent speeding than ticket it.

How did they do it? Some smartypants realized that while they had no telephone wire, they had plenty of barbed wire to go around — around their fields, to be specific. Turns out, all metal wire is pretty much the same for these purposes, and the stuff used to keep people at a distance could also keep them connected. To join these networks, all you had to do was buy a phone from Sears Roebuck and clip it to your fence, as long as you didn’t mind having all your cows listening in on your conversations.

The Daily Herald“Unlimited texting if you add a mailbox.”

The one major difference between the official networks and their barbed wire counterparts was that these pirate networks had no switchboard, so all the phones used the same line. So when these rural communities got connected, they did so with nothing but a prickling conscience to stop someone from listening in on a neighbor’s calls. Ironic, really, given that barbed wire tends to be used to get rid of snoopers, not make it easier for them.