We’ve got giant corms (look it up), brazen bats, sailing ice shanties, hard-headed hikers, and snakes and lizards quite possibly literally coming out the ying-yang in this week’s accounting of the weird and wacky.

TO EACH THEIR OWN

A man who tried to slither past US border agents in California had 52 lizards and snakes hidden in his clothing, authorities report. The man was driving a truck when he arrived at the San Ysidro border crossing with Mexico on Feb. 25 and was pulled out for additional inspection, at which point agents found 52 live reptiles tied up in small bags “which were concealed in the man’s jacket, pants pockets, and groin area.” Nine snakes and 43 horned lizards were seized – some of them endangered species. The man, a 30-year-old US citizen, was arrested.

FOR WHOM THE BELL ROLLS

A bronze bell cast in 1834 in Paul Revere’s Massachusetts foundry finally headed home – capping a nearly two-century, cross-country odyssey that saw it hauled by oxcart to churches in Ohio before languishing for decades in a California garage. After a weeklong journey across the US, the historic 453-kg bell was returned to the site where it was created 188 years ago by the Revolutionary War patriot’s son, Joseph Warren Revere.

In 1984, real estate agent Jeannene Shanks became the bell’s accidental owner after brokering the sale of a church in Ohio to a fitness centre, which didn’t want the bell, prompting Shanks to make a $1,000 donation to the church in exchange for the bell. The relic followed Shanks to California and became a family heirloom. After their parents’ their deaths, Shanks’ daughter moved the bell to her garage where it sat since 2009 before she figured out where it came from, and decided to donate it to a local museum.

“I don’t need a bell in my garage, and this bell has a story of its own,” she said. “I wanted it to go beyond us – to go back to where it started. We’re the keepers of our history.”

SOMEONE WOULD PAY FOR THIS

Three anglers are safe after a homemade ice-fishing shanty was blown about a 1.6 km across a bay in Michigan by winds that neared 80 kph. A person onshore called Huron County dispatchers after seeing it was being blown across the ice on Saginaw Bay. The shanty, which had been occupied by three men, was about 2.4 km. offshore when deputies in a fire department airboat arrived for a rescue. No one was hurt.

HAT FLAP

A leather helmet that Amelia Earhart wore on a flight across the Atlantic in 1928 and later lost in a crowd of fans in Cleveland has sold at auction for US$825,000. The helmet went to an anonymous bidder in an online-only sale. The seller was a 67-year-old Minnesotan who had tried for years to prove that the leather aviator’s helmet he inherited from his mother belonged to Earhart, who was just a passenger in June 1928 when she became the first woman on board a plane crossing the Atlantic. Photos shot before and after the flight show her wearing the jaunty leather helmet or flight cap. Earhart famously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.

AT LEAST IT WASN’T A PENGUIN

Moviegoers in Austin, Texas, got to see more than one type of bat during a screening of “The Batman” last weekend. An actual bat was spotted swooping around inside the theatre, putting the movie on pause while management called animal control and tried – unsuccessfully – to get the critter out. Guests were offered their money back, but most chose to stick it out and watch the film “bat and all.” The theatre says the bat was likely released as a prank and said they will be “adding additional security and checking all bags upon guest entry.”

PLEASE, PASS THE POI

A super-sized taro root has been harvested on Hawaii’s Big Island. The 23-kg. pound corm, which is the root of a taro plant, was grown on Aina ’Ahiu Farm and could possibly be the largest on record. Taro plants usually weigh .90 kg. This one – including corm, stalk and leaves – weighed close to 45 kg. and is estimated to be able to feed 180 people. The current Guinness record is a 3.2-kg. root grown in China in 2009.

FOOL ME TWICE

A New York City man who needed to be rescued twice on consecutive days while hiking in a northern Arizona mountain range is urging others to pay more attention to winter weather than he did. The 28-year-old Brooklyn man first called 911 last Wednesday at about 7 p.m. to say he got lost while hiking near Flagstaff. During the first rescue, tracked vehicles from a ski resort that travel on snow drove him off the mountain and he declined medical attention.

Despite being warned about an approaching winter storm and encouraged not to attempt the hike again the allegedly experienced hiker set out again the next day and at 5 p.m. called 911 again to say he needed help after injuring himself in a fall. A rescue helicopter was sent to pick him up and another hiker who had stopped to help him. The good Samaritan hiker said it was “very apparent that (the injured hiker) wasn’t prepared for the climate that he had gotten himself into.”