Every so often someone finds a bunch of rats whose tails are knotted together. It’s called a rat king. (This one, with 32 rats, was found in a German miller’s fireplace in 1828.)

The rats are usually dead when they’re discovered, and no one has suggested a natural cause, so presumably humans are involved somehow.

Typically the rats are fully grown adults, so they’re not born this way, and their tails are often broken and callused, which means they’ve survived in this state for some time, fed by humans or by other rats.

Why would anyone do this? Who knows?

The Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic is decorated with 40,000 human skeletons.

“If life must not be taken too seriously,” wrote Samuel Butler, “then so neither must death.”

In October 2003, a couple hiking in the mountains of northern Sweden came upon 70 pairs of shoes, all filled with butter.

No one knows who put them there, or why.

“Twenty young men chase a cheese off a cliff and tumble 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to hospital.”

That’s a typical description of the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake, held each May at Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester, England. The participants run downhill after a Double Gloucester cheese, which the winner gets to keep. Theoretically they’re trying to catch the cheese, but it rapidly gets up to 70 mph (knocking over a spectator in 1997) and this rarely happens.

The racers themselves get sprained ankles, broken bones and concussions, and the first-aid services are getting stretched as the race grows in popularity. Last year they ran out of ambulances.

Winnipeg resident Jim Sulkers lay dead in his apartment for two years before his body was discovered.

Sulkers was estranged from his family, and automated banking processed his disability checks and paid his bills.

When police finally climbed through the window in August 2004, they found his mummified body in the bed, spoiled food in the refrigerator, and a wall calendar that was two years out of date. Everything else was in perfect order.