by Scott Bestul

In what must be the season’s strangest buck fight, a Florida woman recently used her ex-boyfriend’s whitetail mount as a weapon--against him! According to this story in the Tampa Bay Times, Chelsea Harrison and her ex-boyfriend got into an argument that caused Harrison to lock her door in an attempt to keep her ex-beau out of the home they share.

When Terry Nowakowski busted down the door and entered anyway, Harrison grabbed the shoulder mount of a whitetail deer and attacked, using the tines to jab Nowakowski in the face and body. Harrison has been charged with domestic battery.

By Brandon Ray

Rut Reporter Brandon Ray is an expert on the region. Ray was born in Dallas and shot his first deer with a bow in Central Texas at the age of 15. The full-time freelance writer manages his family’s Texas Panhandle ranch, is a licensed New Mexico guide, and last year took a 184 gross P&Y non-typical trophy. States covered: TX, OK, NM.

Snow continues to fall in the Texas Panhandle. On Christmas Day, I got another four inches at my house. What that means for deer hunters in the region is simple: Deer are really keyed in on food sources now. At two of my bait sites, trails through the snow are like spokes on a wheel going back into canyons and thick brush. The deer need the extra calories to fend off the cold weather. If you hunt such a spot, there’s a good chance you’ll see lots of deer. Corn is the best attractant I’ve tried in the late season, but they also eat alfalfa hay.

--Chad Love

So you really want an ATV for your hunting spot, but just don't have the money to buy one. You could keep hoofing it, which would keep you healthy. You could steal one, which would probably land you in the klink, or you could do what this guy did and just make your own.

From this story (Lost in Translation Warning: The grammar in the linked story reads a bit like a cheap toy instruction manual.) on chinahush.com:

Chinese folks have always had the self-entertaining mindset to compare little things to big renowned things even just for the slightest resemblance. We had a post last year talking about a homemade knockoff Lamborghini by a 25 years old guy. Recently a chef from Zigong City, Sichuan Province became famous on the Internet for spending only about 4000 yuan in designing and handcrafting what netizens called a knockoff “Hummer."

by David Draper

When I was very young, all my mom’s family would gather at my grandparent’s house on New Year’s Eve for a big food-related feast. Each year would feature food from a different country, such as Chinese one year or Mexican the next. (Chinese and Mexican were about as foreign as you could get in western Nebraska in the mid-1970s.) I don’t remember much from those meals, other than gorging on fortune cookies, which I still love today.

The extended Richards clan isn’t alone in instituting some type of New Year’s food tradition. Many of the most popular ones are symbolic of peoples’ hopes for economic growth and progress in the coming year. Some folks eat only pork, because pigs root forward, versus poultry, which scratch backwards. Other foods are featured for their resemblance to money, such as greens and cabbage, or beans which are said to represent coins.