The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Career

SEA CLIFF MAYOR: Robert Ehrlich, the founder of Pirate’s Booty cheese puffs, declared himself winner of the Sea Cliff mayoral election on Long Island despite only receiving 62 votes and losing to the village’s incumbent with 1,064 votes.

AQUATIC DOORMAN: A Dutch city is broadcasting an underwater livestream of fish swimming through a lock system, and people watching can click a virtual doorbell that tells workers the fish need to be let through a hatch. Since the livestream was set up five years ago, millions of viewers all around the world have worked together to help these fish finish their springtime migration to get busy.

Personal

FUN RUN: There were no finishers in this year’s Barkley Marathons, an extremely perilous and peculiar race that consists of five 20+ mile loops in Frozen Head State Park, TN. The ultra-ultramarathon often has no finishers and offers no bragadocious car decals once completed.

CHANGING LANES: LA Dodgers star Mookie Betts bought a team in the World Bowling League, a professional bowling startup. It’s always the last person you expect who’s going to whip out a perfect game and ruin your birthday party.

For sale

LOOSE CORN: Please, it’s all over the road. A semi-truck crash spilled enough kernels to cover all lanes of a Georgia highway.

THRIFT FLIP: A woman from Ohio bought a painting she thought was kind of ugly at a local Goodwill for $2.99. It ended up selling for $2,875 at auction after it was discovered to be a piece by famed impressionist Johann Berthelsen. This is why you can’t give up on all those little horse figurines.—MM

The sea creature routinely referred to as “ugly” by people who objectify animals is getting the last laugh on those beautiful fish that get all the breaks in underwater society: The blobfish was named New Zealand’s fish of the year this week by an environmental nonprofit group, more than a decade after it was dubbed the “Ugliest Animal Alive” in a public vote.

New Zealand handing out awards to fish is a yearly tradition organized by the Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust to raise awareness about marine and freshwater life in the area. The blobfish secured 1,300 votes, edging out the orange roughy by about 300 votes.—DL

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even find out if it’ll be sunny tomorrow (more efficiently).

Iguanas seemingly crossed the Pacific millions of years ago. Wiiiiiilson: New research suggests that a group of ancient iguanas hitched a 5,000-mile ride on a floating bungle of trees and plants from North America to Fiji, answering the longtime question of how the lizards ended up in such a remote archipelago when most of today’s iguanas live in North America. Genetic tests of 14 species of iguana in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Fiji showed that Fijian iguanas are most closely related to desert iguanas, which are found in the southern US and northern Mexico, with a common ancestor that existed 31 million years ago. The iguanas likely survived the monthslong voyage because they could get by on minimal water and munch on their vegetation-based raft.

The universe may stop expanding. The Beatles may have been wrong—a new cosmological discovery could absolutely change the world. Dark energy, the strange force that’s believed to drive the universe’s accelerating expansion, is weakening, according to a new study of three years of data from 15 million galaxies. The findings support a theory among astronomers that instead of infinite expansion, everything that started with the Big Bang could eventually end with a “big crunch,” meaning the universe could eventually collapse into itself if dark energy keeps diminishing in force. Don’t worry, a cosmos-ending event wouldn’t happen for another 20+ billion years. In the meantime, “we will have to stop, sit down and rethink our model of the universe,” the research group’s co-chair told NPR.

Weather prediction AI could fast-track forecasts. A breakthrough type of AI-based weather forecasting uses thousands of times less computing power and predicts five days worth of outfit guidelines tens of times faster than typical models, according to research published last week by Cambridge, Microsoft, the Alan Turing Institute, and Europe’s weather service. The new model—trained on data from weather stations, satellites, ships, and planes—can go toe to toe with the US Weather Service using just a tenth of the amount of data needed by conventional forecasting systems, the researchers said. Down the line, it could be used to improve natural disaster preparations and forecast hyper-local climate conditions like regional wind speeds or heat at a much faster rate than existing custom models, which can take years for researchers to build.—ML

Volkswagen’s bestselling product isn’t one you whip down the Autobahn at 160km/h. The automaker recently revealed that it sold a record number of its in-house-produced sausages last year. Sausage sales were up 2% over the year, outnumbering shipments of VM-branded vehicles, which declined from 2023.

The automaker sold 8.5 million sausages in 2024—and shipped 5.2 million VW vehicles.

Isn’t that the wrong kind of cylinder? Sausages became a vital input in Volkswagen’s production in 1973, when the auto giant began serving currywurst to workers at its Wolfsburg HQ. The seasoned weiners even have their own official part number, 199 398 500 A, but we’re pretty sure motor oil isn’t part of the recipe.

They’ve long graduated from worker treat to mass market fare:

• Only a fraction of the record number of sausages Volkswagen sold last year were hoovered up by its employees.
• Meatlovers across 12 countries can buy the Volkswagen Original sausages in places like football stadiums, corporate cafeterias, and supermarkets.
• Volkswagen’s culinary offerings don’t end with sausage: It also sold 654,000 bottles of its signature spiced ketchup bottles last year.

Sure, automobiles-to-sausages is not an apples-to-apples comparison. And the 9 million cars sold by all of Volkswagen’s brands, including Audi and Porsche, did eclipse sausage sales. But the VW sausage’s success is striking a chord this year as the car business takes a turn for the wurst.

Sausage symbolism

Volkswagen’s car and sausage sales trending in opposite directions was recently highlighted by the IG Metall Union, the labor organization representing VW employees, months after acrimonious negotiations resulted in the union and the company agreeing to up to 35,000 future job cuts.

Management says the workforce reductions are necessitated by a gloomy business outlook.

• Volkswagen’s net profit dropped 30% last year from 2023, amid a slowdown of sales in China, where it’s getting lapped by local carmakers that produce cheaper EVs with increasingly impressive bells and whistles.
• The company plans to halve its auto production capacity in Germany by 2030.

Volkswagen’s status as Germany’s top private employer, flagship exporter, national symbol, and engine of the European economy, has meant that this isn’t the first year its sausages are as closely watched as the hotdogs scarfed down by Joey Chestnut.

The company got blowback in 2021 when it announced plans to phase out the pork sausages in favor of veggie versions at one of its Wolfsburg canteens. Even Germany’s ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder weighed in, calling the sausages the “power bar of the skilled factory worker,” and saying the change would’ve never happened when he was a Volkswagen board member. The company ended up reversing the decision.

Perhaps it’s about how the sausage is made. Produced by a team of 30 including a butcher on Volkswagen’s payroll, its in-house fabrication is a sentimental vestige of the post-war economic miracle era when the company grew food on its Wolfsburg campus to sustain employees.

Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage

While it's unusual for an automaker to get into the meatpacking biz, Volkswagen isn’t the only brand that offers something started as an internal product to the masses.

• Slack traces its roots to an internal messaging tool for failed gaming company Tiny Speck before it became a way for startups to signal that they’re too hip for Outlook.
• And in the mid-2000s, Amazon created an internal tool to manage the data from their sprawling e-commerce operation, now known to the world as Amazon Web Services.

But sausages aren’t software when it comes to profit potential. Even if Volkswagen’s currywurst achieves the international icon status of the Beetle, proceeds from the edible business would barely budge the company’s bottom line, given that its revenue was over $350 billion last year.

It's not just sausage…that Volkswagen might be cooking up in addition to cars. The company recently said that it's considering converting two of its shuttered auto plants into arms manufacturing facilities, as a way to capitalize on Germany’s new defense spending push.—SK

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

The storied Frick Collection on the Upper East Side of Manhattan closed during the pandemic to undergo a $330 million renovation and expansion that is finally nearing its completion. The museum housed inside a mansion will reopen its doors to an anxiously waiting public on April 17.

What? The Frick? Yes, that’s what they call it. It’s fun to say and fun to attend. Named for coke-and-steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, it houses art from the Renaissance through the late 19th century. Frick served as chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, when making steel was a big thing for America, and his art collection serves as the foundation of the museum.

Here’s what you can expect in terms of what’s new and what’s gone, per the New York Times:

• There’s a new marble staircase and airy auditorium that “approximates poetry,” according to the Times.
• As for the expansion, it required architect Annabelle Selldorf to demolish the Frick’s music room, a sacrifice that will allow for the museum to host new galleries for temporary exhibitions.

Another new facet is the opening of Frick’s living quarters, a suite of 10 upstairs rooms lined with art that would fetch a crazy nightly rate if they ever put them on Airbnb. The area pays tribute to Helen Clay Frick, who added to her father’s impressive collection after his death in 1919.—DL